The House at Sunset by Norah Lofts

Author:Norah Lofts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752465012
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

II

If you’re strictly brought up and your father is a saint it cuts both ways when you do wrong. You get more fun out of the doing – just as that apple Adam and Eve ate tasted better I bet, than any of the ones they’d been made welcome to; but for a time, at least, you have to deal with your conscience. I took naturally to being bad, just as Father took to being good, but all the same there were times when I’d look at him and know he was right really, and wonder how he ever came to have a son like me. Then I’d stiffen up and tell myself that it was because he was as he was that he had a son like me.

For one thing, he should have let me go to the Grammar. Some old man, dead two hundred years or more, had left some money for scholarships, so that poor boys could go to the Grammar School. Webster his name was, and the scholarships were always called Websters. When I was at the Board School our headmaster one morning took six of us and gave us some paper and turned over a board with a lot of questions on it, mixed-up questions on every subject, and told us to write the answers. He didn’t say what for or why. We did what he said, and about three weeks later he said that a boy called Barrowby and I had won Websters. I went home and told Father and he said he was glad to know that I’d minded my book and learned all I could, but about the scholarship he’d just have to see. I don’t know what he saw … at least I do; he saw I’d be still going to school and able to help him only mornings and evenings, and not even Saturdays, because the Grammar had lessons on Saturday till midday; and he saw that the scholarship, though it paid the fees, didn’t cover the short black gowns or the mortar-boards the Grammar boys wore, or the books they used. The long and the short of it was that he couldn’t afford to let me take up the scholarship, and he needed me in the shop.

‘But, Davie, don’t think that what you have learned is wasted. Far from it. The chapel is going to arrange Bible readings for the poor old crippled people in the workhouse, and Mr Phipps’ll be glad of your help.’

So the boy who came third in the examination went off to the Grammar and had his mortar-board and gown and bag of books; and I went in the shop.

That was one thing. Then there was money. Father never could see why I needed any money. A boy with a good home, what did he heed money for? Food, clothes, everything provided. It wasn’t that he was mean, far from it. Once, when I asked him for two shillings to buy myself some fishing tackle, he said, ‘We’ll see,’ and went off and bought me the best rod Pearson had in his shop.

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