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

by Ursula Bloom

  I would suggest that you memorize the ‘pitfalls’, so that when you are buying along these lines, you can warn yourself when you are stepping into the difficult zone and ask yourself ‘Is that really necessary?’

  The answer to that question is usually, ‘Of course it is’. The way to arrive at the correct answer is to ask yourself, ‘Two years from to-day how necessary will this particular thing be to me?’ Then you will get at the truth.

  You will possibly get into dreadful difficulties every little while, and it is a wise though inconvenient habit to keep accounts. Accounts show you baldly just where the leakage came. But I don’t suppose for a moment that you will do this. Young men seldom do. The argument ‘The money has gone, and how does it help me finding out where it has gone to?’ is not a good one.

  It does help you, in that, by knowing where the leakage came, you can prevent other money following it.

  But I don’t expect you to see that.

  You will only just have got into the habit of managing your own money, when you will want to get married, and then you have to re-budget and start all over again. Somebody else will be dipping into it.

  Mrs. Pip will probably be very young, and very ignorant, because quite a lot of people bring up their girls so that they don’t know a thing about housekeeping and where to save and when to spend. You cannot expect her to launch out into running a house and doing it well all at once.

  But as you are supplying the money, it may be an advantage to be able to put your finger on the main points where leakages will occur.

  You get the house. It is pleasant to have a bigger house than your friends, but you’ll be an ass if you do this. I did it once. I got a house bigger than the Colonel’s, which was what your father wanted, and what the Colonel hated. I thought I was being so clever, but my goodness, what that place cost!

  Once you have launched out into rent, you cannot cut it down, and the idea of a move is only another extravagance. You then find yourself at an impasse. Houses can be the dickens; they can demand everything of you, and leave you stranded, so be wary when you approach them.

  At the same time, don’t be tempted into a country house at a very low rent, only to find that it is so isolated nobody can live there. This is not economy either. Carriage will be demanded on everything that you buy for it. You won’t be able to get twopenny worth of bones for stock without having to pay petrol for the car, so look out.

  And don’t get so small a house that when the babies come along you have to move when you can least afford it.

  Enquire about rates. Be quite sure you do not take a house on a repairing lease, but have the ‘fair-wear-and-tear’ clause. Stick out for this. And there is a grand old adage, ‘Fools build houses for wise men to live in them’.

  A large garden means an extra servant.

  You will have to supply the furniture, while the bride supplies linen and blankets. In furnishing, a good thing lasts for years, and a shoddy thing is an eternal eyesore. It is not economy to buy cheaply. At the same time if you choose ‘futurist’, then get the cheap thing. You’ll be dead sick of it anyway inside eighteen months.

  We are looking very far ahead, but there will come a time in your life when you will want to know all these things. And everybody will tell you something different. You can get an awful lot of fun going round to auctions and picking up bits of furniture that you fancy. A good old thing stays a good old thing for ages.

  And, if the money is going badly, let me warn you that the danger points in housekeeping are:‒

  The kitchen chimney ‒ the dickens of a lot goes up that.

  The bread book.

  Excessive laundry.

  Not keeping up wear and tear and replacing breakages when they happen, so that you have a stack of stuff to deal with later.

  Not shopping personally.

  Letting the tradesmen run books.

  That beast of a butcher.

  The beast of a butcher can save you pounds if he will, usually he won’t. It is to his advantage to sell you the more expensive cuts, and unless you make a friend of him, he will do you good and hearty.

  So look to your laurels.

  When you start launching out into a family, your expenses will be large, and the idea that a baby costs little the first year of its life is absolute nonsense. Before the child is ever born it will have cost you a little fortune. It is all very well thinking that because it is so small it cannot be a very expensive addition to the family; that does not go without saying.

  I can only tell you of the 1918 standards, which may be quite useless for you when you come to peruse this letter and try to tot up things by it. To-day a specialist costs in the region of fifty pounds, and the local doctor about thirty, because he will be pottering in and out for a long time before and after. A nurse is four or five guineas a week. There is a layette, which comes round about ten to fifteen pounds, and a pram, and a cot. There will be plenty of extras. And, when you have got everything, you will find that the nurse you engage will have her own ideas, and will produce reasons why you cannot use this or that, which will all sound very fluent, and leave you defeated.

  On this point, stay firm.

  Before you were six weeks old I had bought you three baths, in my ignorance. I supplied you with eighteen nightdresses before you came into the world, but not one suited the nurse. To-day I should have said quite firmly, ‘He wears those, or none’. And you could have gone unbathed for all the extra baths I would have got you. Do remember that nurses like to demand more and more; the only way of dealing with them satisfactorily is to put your foot down early on, and put it down heavily. Once you let them get the bit between their teeth, then you are for it.

  Babies have been bathed in pudding-basins before now. They have slept in the bottom drawer of chests of drawers (I did myself once), and have not suffered for it. It is only the nurse’s sense of pride that suffers.

  I don’t know why we have gone so far ahead, but somehow there seemed to be so many expenses mounting up, and I felt that I could not leave off just telling you about allotting an allowance.

  Money is the root of all evil, somebody once said; wasn’t it Shakespeare? It is a very desperate difficulty in life, and it brings more rows in its train, and more troubles, than anything else, and worldly and material though it may be, it can eat into the very heart of love. Try to get it cut and dried beforehand. By shirking the issues, by avoiding it, and cutting out the discussions, you only sharpen the razor wherewith to cut your own throat.

  Money difficulties are the only ones in this life which time does not alleviate and help; time merely complicates them more.

  Be ready to face up to them. Make yourself a list of assets and liabilities and leave yourself a large margin. You will find that there are always innumerable extras totting up, and this in spite of the most scrupulous care in allotting details beforehand. On paper expenses are always less than they are in real life. I know that this sounds nonsense, and that I have no possible means of proving it to you, but life will prove it, my son; it will probably prove it to you devastatingly.

  Before you launch out into any of the big adventures of life, reckon up the cost and decide as to whether you can or cannot do it. And do stick to your budget.

  Budgets were not made for the waste-paper basket. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  Good Heavens! You may be smoking a pipe one day. What a thought!

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  RELIGION

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  May 1919.

  MY DEAREST BOY,

  There will come a day into your life, as it comes into everybody’s life, if you have any brain at all and any desire to think for yourself, when you begin to wonder if religion is worth while, if you have got hold of the true faith, and how much lies behind it all.

  That is a bad moment, because doubt squirms into your heart, and you jump at the conclusion that there is nothing left to live for, and that it do
esn’t matter very much how you conduct yourself, or what you do, because in the end it will be all the same for everybody. Six foot by a couple, in some churchyard!

  It may be that at the particular time when this horrid feeling assails you, you have nobody to talk to, and although a good argument is the best way out of the dilemma, that will be precisely what you cannot get.

  Therefore this letter is for you to read, and to digest, and to form conclusions about.

  However you may feel, however uncertain of yourself you may be, let us cut out the trimmings, and come down to the hard facts. Let us try to take our minds back to the time when there was no world, but only space, and try to realize that something must have set that space in motion. The world could not get here alone. It required some spark to set it going, and whatever you may care to call that spark, it was God. Nature and God, evolution and progress, are all the same thing called by different names.

  As we cannot make worlds, and can only create life itself in the way that is natural, and not through any teaching of our own, then it is only reasonable to assume that the One Who made the world is higher than we are. He can do things which we cannot do, in spite of the fact that we think ourselves pretty clever. Whether His power is limited or not, I am not sure. I think that it must be. I believe that He is restricted much as we, when we are parents of our own children, are restricted. We could fill the child up with sweets and make it gloriously happy for the time being, with disastrous after-results; the after-results we could not hope to escape. I always feel that God is restricted in much the same way. Which, to my mind, explains the reason why prayer is often unanswered.

  Atheism is not any good.

  If you take your mind truly back to the time when air and light and space were not, and realize out of how much nothingness evolution began, you see the futility of the argument which denies a Deity.

  In triumph the Atheist laughs and says, ‘That is all very fine; how did God get there?’ and believes that he has got you stumped every time.

  My dear child, we are becoming involved, and it is difficult to be simple about a complicated subject. We think along finite lines. Our world begins with birth and ends with death. We have no conception of anything that has not a beginning and an end, because we think only in beginnings and ends. God is the circle. He has no beginning and no end. Because this world in which we live is a finite one, it is impossible for us to think along any but finite lines, and that is why we ask questions which are obviously absurd, such as How did God get born?

  God didn’t. He was.

  The worm is a two-dimensional animal. It has breadth and length, but no height. It is impossible for it to conceive a world in which there is height, and therefore it cannot think how life looks when you rear yourself erect. Just as we, being three-dimensional animals, have no idea how any world could look which had not got height. When you come to a four-dimensional world, then we are completely lost. But perhaps we are going a little far, perhaps we are grovelling into a sea in which we shall drown ourselves if we are not careful, and therefore it would be wiser to come back to the beach of hard fact. But this is just to show you how limited our sphere is, and therefore how little we must know when it actually comes to it.

  You have arrived at that nasty juncture in life when you cannot decide whether you go on to play a harp, or just stay under the earth to assist in the growing of potatoes. Personally, I think it is neither.

  Every heathen has an idea of an after-life. The theory of an eternal land to follow, where everybody is blissfully happy, is one which is inborn in the hearts of all people. It would be impossible that we could be born so sure of an afterwards, and that certainty be merely a snare and delusion, a giant piece of trickery. It is carrying things a little too far, to suppose that the Deity has a liking for jokes of so macabre a species.

  Nature is not wasteful. Flowers come up year after year, and die only to be born again with the new season. I admit that it is not the same flower, but it springs from the same root, and in that root is life. Maybe we appear, not in the same jacket, but with the same personality, product of that same root?

  Anyway I am convinced that life cannot end here. The gross unfairness of our existence in this world should alone be sufficient to prove that.

  Now we come face to face with Christianity, which I admit has got its weak points. But, then, so has Buddhism, so has the Moslem faith, so have all the other faiths which we know at the present time.

  Christianity is not a very old religion, though we try to believe that it is. It came as an excellent moral code at a time when a good, and a humane, moral code was badly needed. I know quite well all the arguments which hurriedly rise in your mind, and believe me when I tell you that those same arguments have presented themselves to innumerable young men and young women through the ages, and that they can be disposed of.

  The New Testament was written a very long while after Christ’s death. None of those gospels are the work of eye-witnesses. What proof is there that Christ died? What about contemporary evidence?

  Before you allow yourself to fly off at a tangent, I would urge you very strongly to remember the ‘down’ that the Romans had on Christianity. They gave short shrift. In that particular epoch it was death to the Christian. In spite of this, the little band flourished, and eventually stuck its banner high and sailed forth to tell the world. Surely a magnificent feat in the face of such very grave opposition.

  At the time of Christ’s death, the Christians were not a very large band. They were immediately persecuted and slaughtered, yet in spite of this that band grew. It would not have been possible to have published any one of those gospels earlier than they were published. Had St. Matthew sat down to write his gospel on the night of the Crucifixion, what good would it have done? It would have taken him nowhere and could only have been destroyed.

  Only do bear in mind that the Christians must have had some element of truth behind them to have come forward as they did. They used no force. They were a harmless, law-abiding people, yet they outwitted force.

  That is to my mind the one astounding point about them. They were an entirely peaceful community and they outwitted the most forceful government that has ever been.

  Far more clever and discerning brains than yours or mine have been satisfied by Christianity. Not all who have died for it have been inflamed by the hysteria of the martyr. If your faith is as faulty as you suppose it to be, do you think so many great people would have followed it and have been better for it? It has made a better world, a kinder world, a world more fit to live in.

  Christ lived. Of His existence we have contemporary proof. Of His death we have proof. Of His resurrection we may be sceptical. But, at the same time, we get those two men from Emmaus. Now these two men had no axe to grind, they were probably interested in the ‘case’, just as one is interested in anything of that kind, but they must have been very largely influenced by the attitude which Rome would take to it. At that moment the Christian faith was at its lowest ebb, it had died apparently on the Cross. Some few, mesmerized, so the inhabitants must have thought, by the personality of the Man Who had died, may have believed that He would return. The two walking that evening obviously were not expecting that He would return. Things being as they were at that particular moment, it is doubtful if they wanted to be mixed up in the affair at all, seeing that it could only lead them to disaster. Yet they saw Christ. They were so full of having seen Him, that they could not keep it to themselves, despite the fact that it probably meant death to them to disclose it.

  It has to be a very strong factor which drives harmless citizens to face death because of their faith, to declare to the world something which could quite well have been kept to themselves, and which might bring all manner of ugly consequences down on their luckless heads.

  Yet these men did it.

  And although I have heard people arguing that the disciples and Mary expected Christ to rise, and expected to see Him again, and therefore hypnot
ized themselves into believing that they had seen Him, you have got to remember that Mary thought He was the gardener when she did come face to face with Him.

  It is quite obvious to me that when she had seen His dead body she had given up hope, and that she did not expect ever to meet Him again.

  You may suggest that I have quoted from the New Testament in all this, and that the writers of the New Testament were obviously on the side of the faith. But I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it was their simplicity and not their art which mentioned that Mary ‘thought He was the gardener’. It would have been no feather in anybody’s cap to mention it; rather the reverse. The Bible is simply written, it has never lost dignity by trimmings. Read the book, and then tell me that it is not inspired. You cannot.

  It has something which other books have not got; it has a rare quality of beauty which you cannot disallow. It is true.

  When the Bible tells you a fact, you know that it is not lying to you; its sincerity is stupefying. Truth is something real and vital, and you have it on every page of the Bible.

  It is a very horrid time in your life when you go through the phase of disbelief. I suffered badly from it myself, and it comes usually in the late teens. If you want additional proof, test prayer. If you pray for something truly and earnestly, something which is not trivial and stupid, and which brings something worth having, not merely benefit to yourself of a material nature, then you will find that you will get it. Once I used to think that this was coincidence. It isn’t so. It’s God.

  There are many forms of Christianity, and the thing to do is to find the one which appeals to you individually the most. I cannot believe that the actual code which you follow, the ritual which you adopt, matter very much to God. It is You that matter.