Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Smith Alexander Mccall

Author:Smith, Alexander Mccall [Smith, Alexander Mccall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307476746
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

51. Prodigious Fibs

The day on which Bertie was due to go to his first meeting of the First Morningside Cub Scout Pack was, for him, a day of extraordinary excitement. He knew that the issue of his membership had divided his parents; he had heard the arguments between them – often intense – and he had picked up from his mother’s manner that she had, on this question at least, been defeated. It was unlike his father to stand up to his mother – he knew that from long experience – but on this point at least he had done so. This new determination, however, had not carried through on the question of the Swiss Army knife, which had somehow been shelved. But Bertie had decided that one victory was enough, especially in a campaign in which one side had, until now, been consistently defeated. So nothing more was said of the knife lest it disturb the apparently settled matter of cub scout membership.

Of course there was another respect in which the membership of the cub scouts seemed an uncertain matter, and not one to be counted upon. This was the issue of age. In the literature on the matter that Bertie had perused, it stated quite clearly that the age at which one might join the cub scout movement was eight. Before that, it appeared that there was another organisation, the Beavers, which one might join at the age of six before progressing, in the fullness of time, to the dizzy heights of the cub scout section itself. Bertie was six, and had been six for some time, and although there were occasions on which he had used the fact of being six as a defence, this was not one. When Irene had insisted, for instance, that he join the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra, Bertie had pleaded that he was seven years too young for that; to no avail. Chronological age had never put Irene off – she had once talked about the possibility of Bertie’s being admitted to university on the grounds that he was sufficiently advanced intellectually to hold his own there, and this had led to an acrimonious exchange with an admissions tutor at the University of Edinburgh who had, for some strange reason, taken a contrary view.

“And at what age did David Hume start at the University of Edinburgh?” Irene had shouted down the telephone. “Would you care to inform me of that?”

“I have no idea,” said the tutor. “But that is not the point, I’m afraid. There are now rules …”

“Eleven,” interjected Irene. “Hume was eleven when he enrolled at your university.”

The tutor sighed. “Things were very different in the eighteenth century. One can hardly …”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.