Souls in the Twilight by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Bill

MY FATHER WAS LOCAL MANAGER of an insurance firm, my mother a part-time secretary. I was an only child, and the three of us led a quiet middle-class life in a Tudorbethan villa south of Croydon. The houses in our street contained no books, other than those issued by the Reader’s Digest. Nobody played the piano, although most households had inherited a piano from the days before the gramophone. The walls were embellished with woodland scenes in plain frames of fumed oak; and the furnishings consisted of mock-Jacobean leftovers interspersed with the latest Swedish suites in pine, chrome steel and leatherette. In short, it was a street cut off from culture, in which blameless people led more or less guilt-free lives.

In those days, when Edward Heath and Harold Wilson took it in turns to manage our political decline, our dormitory town was bounded by farms, and most of those who worked commuted to the southern suburbs of London. Our neighbours shared our routine: office, television, and Sunday outings in the car. There was a golf club, a Women’s Institute, a never-ending chess tournament, and a philately circle. Occasionally someone would steal another’s spouse. But such adventures, designed to render their protagonists interesting, were usually over in a month or two, when the new partner was found to be as boring as the old. There was an Anglican church, but few people attended it. Only the Catholic minority, whose church was five miles away, had much time for God, since only they believed that God had time for them. The rest of us, brought up in a vague idea that God had once checked up on the English and found them satisfactory, assumed that the relationship was best carried on at a distance. God remembered Christmas and funerals, but otherwise, like the rest of us, he kept his head down.

I attended the local grammar school and was a diligent student of the sciences, my parents having hit on science as the avenue to success in an age of technology. I had no firm view in this or any other matter, and was content to go along with their opinion. Thanks to differential calculus, I got through puberty with neither dishonour nor distinction. My days in school were spent in a cocoon of solitude, among boys from the rougher parts of town whose interests—girls and football—were impassably remote from mine.

Of course, there were other teenagers in our suburb. But breeding was not high on the local agenda, and the few children were modelled on their parents. The boys were designed for the city, the girls for marriage. And the fact that both designs had been made obsolete by the Sixties would be discovered only later, when the children had left the assembly line and disappeared into the metropolitan chaos. When they returned, it was in pieces. The process had already begun in my sixth-form days, and one of our local wrecks, who was awaiting re-assembly in a Tudorbethan house ten down from ours, is the subject of this tale.

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