Letters to My Son: A mother's words of warmth, wit and wisdom from 100 years ago

by Ursula Bloom

  Letters to My Son

  Ursula Bloom

  Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2019

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1939

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover image © Everett Collection (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  BLOOM’S WOMEN – CLASSIC FICTION COLLECTION

  Ursula Bloom wrote insightful, witty and entertaining novels about women’s lives which were bestsellers for most of the twentieth century. Her perceptive stories focus on the domestic, romantic and professional life experiences of women in the 1800s and 1900s. Bloom’s Women – Classic Fiction Collection reissues the very best of these titles in new ebook editions for today’s readers.

  Titles in this collection

  Wonder Cruise

  Three Sisters

  Dinah’s Husband

  Fruit on the Bough

  The Painted Lady

  Facade

  Spring in September

  Forty is Beginning

  The Hunter’s Moon

  Many more titles coming soon

  BLOOM’S SONS – CLASSIC FICTION COLLECTION

  Ursula Bloom wrote many sharply-observed and moving novels about the relationship between parents and sons in the 1800s and early to mid 1900s. Bloom’s Sons – Classic Fiction Collection reissues the very best of these titles in new ebook editions for today’s readers.

  Titles in this collection

  Lovely Shadow

  The Golden Flame

  Three Sons

  Many more titles coming soon

  www.ursulabloom.com

  Ursula Bloom: A Life in Words podcast

  Listen to the free, five-part podcast series based on the autobiographical writing of Ursula Bloom. The podcast covers Ursula's life as a young woman on the Home Front in the Great War, and her rise to success and fame in the publishing world of the 1920s to 1940s.

  www.ursulabloom.com/ursula-bloom-a-life-in-words-podcast

  Wyndham Books: Timeless bestsellers for today’s readers

  Wyndham Books publishes the first ebook editions of bestselling works by some of the most popular authors of the twentieth century, such as Lucilla Andrews, Ursula Bloom, Catherine Gaskin and Naomi Jacob. Enjoy our Historical, Family Saga, Regency, Romance and Medical fiction and non-fiction.

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  Contents

  PREFACE

  LETTER ONE: COURAGE

  LETTER TWO: MONEY

  LETTER THREE: RELIGION

  LETTER FOUR: ETIQUETTE

  LETTER FIVE: MAKING A CHOICE

  LETTER SIX: SECRETS

  LETTER SEVEN: SAVING OR SPENDING

  LETTER EIGHT: TRADITION

  LETTER NINE: SAFETY FIRST

  LETTER TEN: SNOBBERY

  LETTER ELEVEN: LIVING LIFE

  LETTER TWELVE: CHOOSING FRIENDS

  LETTER THIRTEEN: LET’S GET DRUNK

  LETTER FOURTEEN: EXPERIENCE

  LETTER FIFTEEN: CAREERS

  LETTER SIXTEEN: WILD OATS

  LETTER SEVENTEEN: PAYING THE PENALTY

  LETTER EIGHTEEN: IN LOVE

  LETTER NINETEEN: YOUR WIFE

  LETTER TWENTY: SEX

  LETTER TWENTY-ONE: YOUR WEDDING

  LETTER TWENTY-TWO: WHEN YOU ARE MARRIED

  LETTER TWENTY-THREE: BIRTH

  LETTER TWENTY-FOUR: FUSSY FATHER

  LETTER TWENTY-FIVE: DIVORCE

  LETTER TWENTY-SIX: WE ALL HAVE TO DIE

  Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Youth at the Gate by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Promises by Catherine Gaskin

  Preview: Victoria Four-thirty by Cecil Roberts

  Preview: Wind on the Heath by Naomi Jacob

  Preview: A Hospital Summer by Lucilla Andrews

  Preview: A Shaft of Light by John Finch

  PREFACE

  These letters were written some time before I came to Fleet Street, and they do not claim to be anything but what they are. They were never intended for the world to read, but to be handed to the little boy who was born in November 1917.

  I was left a widow in 1918, and was very alone. I had few relatives, and it was improbable that I should live to see my son grow up. I was distressed that he might suffer by falling into strangers’ hands, and that he might learn in the wrong way of the emotional side of life. I was very worried that he might suffer as I had suffered. Youth endures too much, and is so often afraid to ask the questions which lie nearest to its heart.

  I wrote a series of letters to a son who at that time was only an infant. I tried to forestall the questions which, in the late teens and early twenties, he might want to ask, and to set before him a few simple rules as to the living of a satisfactory life. I wanted him to get the best from his life and to give his best in fair exchange.

  I felt also that perhaps my letters might have an additional hold over him, coming as they did from a girl who was then at the age which he would be when he read them, and who could therefore see with young, unjaundiced eyes, and take the very angle that it is highly possible he himself would take.

  I have altered these letters very little. They are quite amateurish, and as they were written at different times, they repeat themselves. But I have changed none of this, because my son himself insisted that they should be published as they came into his hands.

  Probably he is right.

  URSULA BLOOM.

  COURAGE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  7th December, 1918.

  MY BOY,

  Unless you have become from a very ordinary little boy a very extraordinary man, you will find in life the dreadful moment when you stand face to face with the fact that you are a coward. One day you will be ‘up against it’. It will possibly occur at the very time when you want to be plucky, then suddenly your heart will quail, and you will be saying ‘I daren’t’.

  Of course I have no idea what it may be about. It may happen on your first ride, your first swim, climbing a mountain, firing a gun, or some small and ridiculous thing like facing a complete stranger, which in your heart you will know is absurd.

  What is even more maddening is the fact that you will find other people glibly and fearlessly doing the very thing that you are afraid to do, which will make you ashamed.

  Courage is a strange quality, and its parents are Doubt and Dismay. At this particular moment we have just finished blowing men to pieces on the other side of the Channel, and we have, I think, somewhat distorted ideas of bravery. It is peculiar, but I even wonder if, in a few years’ time, we shall be so proud of the white feathers that we have scattered, and of the longing to die in battle murmuring ‘God bless England’. I wonder if that is courage. I don’t
think it is.

  I doubt very much if bravery is a matter of standards; it is entirely individual.

  Therefore I would beg you to remember that it is not only the big affairs which will demand courage of you, and that, when those great moments come, ten to one you will be brave, because the whole atmosphere will inspire you with courage. The little moments are harder to fight. The bravest thing that any man can do is to face the sarcasm of his friends. Laughter hurts too much. It is the most forceful weapon against youth. Laughter is going to hurt you a great deal more than fists.

  You’ll find the truth of that one of these days.

  Eventually you will go to school, and you will set your standards by a whole lot of other silly little boys. But they won’t be silly to you; you will think of them as being fine fellows, all of which makes it more difficult for your advisers to advise you properly. Later, you will go to college, and think that the undergraduates know everything, and that nobody else has twopenny-worth of brains inside their heads; when, in reality, it is a fair world, and brains are more or less equally divided. At college a lot of young men sow the seeds of ultimate disaster. The University has been the cemetery of too many a man’s better self. There you have the tendency to hoist the wrong banners, and to set your courage by wrong examples.

  I do beg you to be reasonable.

  Before you launch out into courageous efforts, do be quite sure that you have got hold of the right idea, and that you are not flying off with the bit between your teeth in the wrong direction.

  It is always easy to start a campaign well; it is following that campaign up which breaks most of us. You can make high-flown resolutions, but it is damnably easy to break those resolutions later on when you find how inconvenient they may become. Once that has happened, there is the horrid tendency to lose heart. You feel that you cannot go through with it again. Picking up broken threads, starting once more when you have rubbed your nose in the mud, is not the spectacular effort that starting in the beginning was. It has lost its glamour. As things have apparently started slipping the wrong way, it is a bit late in the day to try again to put them right, you argue, and anyway what does it matter?

  But it does matter.

  Unfortunately courage is something which we have got to hold fast to. However weak we may feel, we have got to remember that there is somebody else, somebody who is even weaker, who looks to us for example. Example goes so much further than we suppose. It would not matter if you were only letting yourself down, but you are letting somebody else down too. It is unsporting to hit the other fellow below the belt, which is what it amounts to.

  You may say, ‘Yes, but nobody is looking to me’. That you don’t know.

  In 1915, your grandmother and I had grown very slack. The war was being difficult, and times were very hard. We had grown slovenly. We knew it, but she was ill and I was worried, and it did not seem worth while making the effort to get out of the rut. One day a Canadian Padre came to tea; we were talking about Canada, and he told us of a woman there who had gone out, and lived in a lonely hut, where nobody ever went and where she eked out a rather dismal existence. He said, ‘I did so admire that woman, for every night when the work of the day was over, she was not content to let things slip. She always put on a clean blouse’.

  Neither of us said anything, but that night both of us changed into a better frock. It had been the example of an unknown woman in Canada, whose name I shall never know, and who will never know of me. It may seem absurd to you, and ridiculous that this letter should be about clean blouses in Canada which have nothing whatever to do with courage, but at the same time it brings home my argument. Your example may affect hundreds of people whom you will never meet. You can help or hinder them. Therefore for their sake you have got to face issues with courage, and to make a supreme effort to face facts.

  I admit that it is hard, when resolutions have gone by the board, to abandon them to wreckage, and to start bravely on that fresh beginning.

  The second start has not half the impetus that the first one had; it is nothing like so bright. It is so easy to say to yourself, ‘I am not good at keeping resolutions, I won’t bind myself down to anything in particular, but I’ll just do my best and not worry’.

  Which is usually beginning to do your worst, and worrying no end.

  Whatever purpose we came into the world for, it was to have courage to face that world, and to attempt to make it a better place for our presence.

  Courage is something that we have to nail to the masthead of our endeavour. Nobody but ourselves will ever know the difficulties, and the horrors, and the hard hand-to-hand battles that we face with our own spirits. But face up to them.

  In a dilemma face up to the brave thing. Tackle people. Face situations. Don’t shirk them. It may look to you as though by ‘saying nuffin’ for the time being you will skulk round the difficult corner and get to your goal in the end. But, nine times out of ten, skulking round the corner is not the best way. I have never regretted one spark of my courage, but I have deplored my weakness a thousand times.

  It is better to plunge in life and make a mistake bravely, than to hang back because you ‘wondered what might happen’.

  Usually people who are tackled on an important issue appreciate the fact that you can tackle them. They appreciate the point that you have got the guts.

  Be a man. Make up your mind fairly and squarely and don’t let anybody swing you away from your ideals. If you have made a bad mistake, cut your losses. I am convinced that this is the best way. It is no good throwing good money after bad, no use trying to patch things up and hope for the best that everything will turn out all right. Nine times out of ten, it won’t. Be brave enough to say, ‘I’ve made a mistake, and that’s that’. Abandon the wreck and go on to something else.

  Remember that failure cannot nail you down for ever. You will fail in many things, because we do. Of such labour-pains is courage born. Although outside issues may let you down, never admit failure to yourself, but stick up the old broken standard of your pride, and try once more.

  Failure is quite often the stepping-stone to success. I once found myself looking at a crucifix and wondering why we had chosen as the symbol of our faith a picture of so much pain. Surely the Risen Christ would have been a far finer symbol? Then I knew. The victorious Christ could never have offered half the encouragement that the Christ Who had apparently failed could give. The greatest failure was the greatest victory. The courage of the Crucifixion is an example to us all, and that is the kind of courage which nothing can defeat.

  You need strength of purpose to fight life. You need common sense, and the power to stick to your guns. Don’t desert those guns because you have doubts of them. And never let your failures leave you bitter and jaundiced. Go on fighting. Life cannot be beastly for ever.

  You’ll win in the end, if you work it out this way, and I shall be mighty proud of you.

  Ursula.

  MONEY

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  December 1918.

  DEAR BOY,

  They say that money is the root of all evil, and I daresay that is so. I have seen such heart-breaking haggles over money that it makes me quite sick. But anyway there will come the time when you have to know something about it, and you are faced with the difficulties of budgeting. Nobody ever teaches a young man much about this, it is such a pity. Money sense is something which does not come to you by luck. You have got to learn it. Anybody can throw money down and get exactly nothing for it. It’s a silly trick.

  In budgeting money, always budget ahead.

  When you start on an allowance, go slowly. There are certain expenses which are cut and dried; things you cannot cut down on, such as living in digs. Official expenses for your fees for training. Sports clubs and that kind of thing. Budget these properly. You must leave yourself a margin. Work that margin out, and see what you have left per week. I say per week, because if you budget it per quarter or per month, you may be into financial di
fficulties before you know where you are. You cannot go very far wrong in a week. Now, it is madness to employ the whole week’s allowance, the only thing to do is to keep a reserve fund, and I myself work this by having two banking accounts, one is my reserve, and one is my ‘in circulation’. I am one of those people who can save money, so therefore perhaps I can preach a little.

  There is an art in managing an income. You will find that your dividends will be paid in a large sum at one time of the year and less at another. Because you have a big sum paid in, do not lose your head and spend fiercely. Budget it to last. Life is going to offer you heavy expenses at different times, and it is as well to set aside, so that you may deal with those expenses when they come.

  The tendency is to go gay because you have a good bank balance, and never to realise some of the horrid but vital points of finance. Bills are never less than you anticipated; they are always more. Unexpected expenses are for ever cropping up. Shares have a knack of going down.

  Other people’s shares go up. Income tax may save the face of the nation, but it plays the devil with your purse.

  I think, until you have ‘found your feet’ financially, you should not get things on tick. Pay in hard cash. By using hard cash every week, you find how quickly it goes, and this is an admirable lesson to learn. You can also pull in your horns before you have dashed wildly into a mêlée from which it is not too easy to extricate yourself.

  Shops like to let you have goods on tick, for the very obvious reason that you spend more this way, and that they can ensure your custom because you dare not leave them. Those two reasons should be enough to impress upon you the common-sense method of using cash and not getting yourself into a hole.

  Divide your living into necessities. Necessities are expenses for food and board. Medical fees. Dental fees. Educational fees. Clothes. Sports. The latter two items you can cut down to suit your purse, of course. Now we come to the living which is not necessary but on which most young men go wild. These are the items which will dip wildly into your income and leave you stranded if you are not careful. Gramophone records, and music. Entertainments. Fripperies and gadgets. Crazes for new hobbies which are discarded as soon as ever you have purchased all the necessary paraphernalia for them. Photographic efforts. The more peculiar sides of literature and magazines. Indiscriminate entertaining.