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

by Ursula Bloom

  It will be very easy to laugh at the old school tie, but what are you going to put in its place?

  And you cannot destroy unless you mean to replace.

  Once when I was very young I wanted to marry a young man who had had a very ordinary education, and whose people were dear people, living in a very humble way. I flung myself in the face of convention and believed that I could destroy the silly tradition which stood between us, and could be happy.

  I tackled something that was bigger than I was.

  Tradition had set certain standards in my life, certain points which I had not even recognized as being points until I heard other people laughing at them. We grated on one another all the time. We jarred. Love was not strong enough to destroy our upbringings and to start us again on the path which leads to content.

  When you are twenty, there will lie behind you standards and curricula by which you have lived. The tree will have been bent in a certain direction, and the bough will have grown along those lines.

  The older you grow the nearer you will come to that early training, even though you have tried to destroy much of it in between.

  And it matters.

  Keep faith with the fundamental laws which make a man true to his faith and true to himself. Be brave enough to plod along, tolerant of others, and bearing a standard by which you are prepared to abide. I sound sentimental and you will think me old-fashioned. I think that there is something to be said for old-fashionedness. It stood the test of time.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  SAFETY FIRST

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  March 1922.

  DEAR PIP,

  There are really two ways of living life. I have been sitting here thinking about them, and wondering which you will choose, and which I ought to advise you to choose.

  There is safety first, the routine, the good old rut, the life which you know will give you back a certain sure interest on the capital which you invest in it ‒ in other words, the gilt-edged security. Or there is living dangerously, the gamble, the thrill and the fun of doing something which is perhaps crazy but which may get away with its craziness.

  Which are you going in for?

  Standing on the threshold of living, it is difficult to make up your mind. Youth is impulsive. It loves the chance. The safety-first craze is too steady.

  Before you ever launch out, it is a good thing to sit down and review life as it lies ahead of you, and study yourself in perspective to that life.

  There is an art in living, you know. The thing to do is to analyse yourself, and come to the conclusion what kind of man you are, and be sure of the emotions which you find satisfying, and the ones which fail you, before you start working them into your life.

  There are a great many people who are afraid of the future. Ahead they see poverty, sickness, misfortune ‒ all manner of evil bogeys lurking and ready to snap them up. They torment themselves with these haunting shadows, they allow themselves to become terrified by mere ghosts; but the terror is very real, even if the ghosts are not.

  If you are a panicker ‒ and some of us are born that way ‒ then you cannot take the risk of living dangerously, because if you do, you will only make yourself additionally terrified. You must choose a career which is safe and secure, and which will yield you an interest on your efforts. You must choose something which is cut to pattern, so that you set your own mind at ease.

  But if you are the gambler, this kind of reasoning won’t suit you at all.

  Life is strangely amused by the gambler, and it hails him with glee, and rewards him for his daring. But when I say gambler I do not mean the crazy individual who goes down to the Riviera and blows his capital on one glorious bust in the gaming-rooms. That isn’t gambling, it is idiocy.

  There is a great difference between that and the man who sees ahead of him chance. The door to that chance is ajar, but if only he can through his own efforts force it open, he will have achieved something great. Attempting to force this door gives him fresh interest in life; it gives him confidence, it makes him sure. The courage will very often get you along a particular path, and I am quite sure that you have only to want a thing badly enough to be certain of getting it.

  The good old plodder, the man who ambles along in a particular sphere of life, labelled safety first, never rouses much envy in the hearts of other men. We have all of us a sneaking regard for the man who dares to grab hard at a chance and make something of it. Chance will not escape you if you hold hard enough, and long enough, and fast enough.

  I’ve taken hundreds of chances. I believe that I would never be happy unless I had the courage to kick life good and hard and wrest from it something that it had no intention of giving me, because for the time being I have taken it by surprise. That’s the tip. Take life by surprise.

  Nothing is impossible.

  Do you realize that it is quite a short time since a very inferior corporal in the French army became an Emperor before whom the whole world shuddered? You think that it was easy for him because he was talented to a high degree, because he had the ‘king’ spirit, and the fighting complex. But I don’t suppose Napoleon found it very easy, and there were times when he must have been sorely tempted to give up.

  Do you realize that a boy from Stratford-on-Avon, who had got into very serious trouble down there, wandered to London as a player, and became the greatest poet we have ever known? Genius, says you? Not only genius!

  Dozens of would-be writers, who may have infinite talent for all you know, wander up and down Fleet Street to-day. And get nowhere. It was not any easier in the Elizabethan era, and Shakespeare suffered a great many defeats, you may be sure ‒ more dreadful defeats, because in those days if you made yourself conspicuous and started dropping bricks, somebody upped with a sword, and off came your head. You got short shrift then.

  But Shakespeare was one of those men who lived dangerously. He had that spirit which is the spirit of all great men; he took a chance, he did not listen to the words ‘Safety First’ which were perhaps printed on the back of the coach. And he got there because of it.

  I don’t suppose he ever gave a second thought to Anne at home with the children; they had not introduced affiliation orders in those days, so that must have eased his situation considerably. He played for the big stakes.

  I would rather play for the big stakes, and even if I missed them, I would feel happier than if I had lived a comfortable and secure life. I don’t mean by this that I would like to sit on the extreme end of a precipice, and I would not let you do this either. It is quite unfair not to shoulder your responsibilities properly, and it is wrong to allow other people to pay the insurance premium on the risk that you take in life. For that reason I am living smugly here, in a dreadful little villa with a dining-room and drawing-room fore and aft, and with an income flowing in on quarter days, instead of plunging into Fleet Street (probably to sink) to take my chance.

  I must be sure that you are secure. I dare not let you pay my premium on that risk.

  You will be launched with the basic teaching of scheduled ideas, and with a certain amount of security behind you, but when you grow up and read these letters, I hope very much that you will be prepared to make a wise choice of what lies ahead of you. Life is given you to make something of it, not to spend it comfortably, and surely, and securely.

  Every morning quite a lot of men go past this house to catch the morning train to London; they come back on the 7.3 armed with the fish, or those small commissions that their wives have given them to execute. They are very charming people (some of them not quite so charming), and they are hopelessly in a rut. I wonder if they are happy; anyway, now there is no chance for them to change and climb out of that rut. They are saddled with domestic responsibilities, and it would be most unfair to try to jump out of routine, while they have wife and children dependent upon them.

  They have played for safety first.

  But there are ways whereby they could h
old hard on to chance. Opportunity knocks on everybody’s door, the thing to do is to recognize it as being opportunity. ‘Nothing ever happens to me’, is the cry.

  Something happens to everybody, if only they would realize it, and that is why I am suggesting that you should keep your eyes open, and be ready to take a gamble when life offers it to you. I cannot believe that you will have so little of me in you, that you will be phlegmatic and dull, content with the 8.10 in the morning, and the 7.3 at night.

  The age of adventure is not done with. You are a very pugilistic little boy at the moment, playing Red Indians in the far end of the garden, with two other little boys who seem to be rather afraid of you. Adventure is yours for the taking. And to-day you take it. Why not do the same thing to-morrow? Stand up to life. Go for it, and it will knuckle under to you, just as the two other little boys ‒ and they are both of them older than you are ‒ are knuckling under to you at the moment, because you are determined to get your own way.

  Determination will get you there. If life knocks you down, get up and try again. Knock it back a blow that will stagger it. It can be done.

  I have been in the dust a good many times, because life and I are always having tussles, which is the penalty it exacts from those who want to live dangerously. But I am not ashamed of being bowled over. People need never be ashamed if they still have the courage to get up and start again.

  The shame lies in taking the count.

  Personally I think that I should be dreadfully ashamed if I found you developed into a nice little 8.10 and 7.3 man. I’d be desperately proud of a son who hit out at life and took his chance and abided by that chance.

  From the far end of the garden there is the sound of howling. One of the little boys, who is the son of a suffragan Bishop, is marooned up the apple tree, and daren’t come down because you are prancing round with a tomahawk. And the Bishop’s son is nine!

  You’ll take your chance in life, my lad. You are not in the safety-first category.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  SNOBBERY

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  March 1922.

  MY DEAR SON,

  Snobbery. It looks such a hateful word written down, and yet curiously enough it is not something born of the modern world, it is something which I am convinced always was. I have an idea that Eve said to Adam, ‘We can’t know the people next door, they are not in our class’.

  As long as there are people there will be classes, and that again is a horrid word, and one which is quite misleading. But if you took the world and muddled it all up into one big class and labelled us all with the same labels, within twenty-four hours we should have sorted ourselves out again, and there would be differences. Democratic as you may be, there will always be high-ups and low-downs. They are the inescapable part of living.

  You are born into a certain niche. It is no honour and glory to you that your people are in the Peerage, and that you have what is called good blood in your veins. Just as good blood may be in the veins of the dustman if it comes to the qualities that matter ‒ honesty, faithfulness, idealism; but at the same time you would not find it very congenial company to have to hobnob with the dustman for the rest of your life. You would not have much in common. You would find after a while, unless he were a most extraordinary dustman, that he could talk only of people. That when you had exhausted his little fund of knowledge, you were at a loss. Your interests would lie so far from his interests that it would be difficult for you to keep interested.

  A great deal of nonsense has been written about snobbery, and this has carried weight. In the war a lot of the old traditions went to the wall, and tinkers and tailors became temporary gentlemen, and mustered swords and gave orders, and it was a new world. But now, when the war is over, and we are all sifting and sorting ourselves back into our own niches, I find that very few of the tinkers and tailors sustained their position very long. They could not hold the place which they had assumed.

  It seems very hard that the accident of birth should influence a man or a woman to this degree, and that they should be definitely niched. But it is not only the accident of birth, it is the force of heredity.

  Heredity is something which you cannot gloss over so easily; it is something which we all have to consider, and it divides the ‘classes’ more than anything else.

  People rise in life, and assume command. Some of us are born to command. Generations before us have learnt to rule, and have handed on some fragment of that learning to those who came after them.

  You have heard that old adage ‘You may set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride to his ruin’, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this is true. Command and authority are something which cannot be assumed on the moment; position is something more than making money, buying a great house, and ordering your servants about.

  It takes three generations to make a gentleman, the old folks used to say. The snob sneers and says, What is a gentleman? This is difficult to define, but a gentleman never hurts anybody else; he thinks for people, he behaves discreetly, and he does not break the rules of living, which are the laws of civilization. He is able to command and has been taught to control himself in all things.

  I remember once being very struck by a remark which an old lady made to me when we were standing in a crowd watching the Guards march by. Their officers were magnificent young men. I mentioned it, and she smiled. She said it wasn’t the training of the army which had made them what they were, it wasn’t the fact that they had gone to Eton, and that Mamma and Papa had seen after them diligently. It was the old-fashioned Nannies who marched behind them.

  And then I knew that perhaps she was right, dead right. It was that training in the very, very early weeks of their lives. That gallant band of stout old parties whom you could almost visualize coming along behind the Guardees, with that peculiarly round figure which comes from years of perambulator-pushing, and the grey coat and skirt and the black hat on top.

  But those old-fashioned Nannies instilled the laws of right living and right thinking into those strapping young men. And behind them was another generation of Nannies, who had done the same thing for their fathers, and yet another for their grandfathers.

  If you want a first-class snob, look to Nanny.

  Since the war people have settled down into their niches again, in the way that people always will do, I imagine. For snobbishness is something which thrives however much we rebel against it. It is dreadful to want to know people for who they are, rather than for what they are, but this often happens.

  You will live in an age when things will alter very much. I imagine that you will see a revolution in England. When I say revolution, I do not mean a carnage like the French Revolution, because English people are not made that way, and do not think along those lines. But you will see that great change, which I see coming out of the distance already.

  The lower classes are altering so much. I have all my life loved what people call the lower class. I loved them for their honesty of purpose, for their sincerity and for the fact that they had no veneer upon their hearts. You knew what they were thinking, and what they liked and disliked, without having to cut through a lot of cheap varnish. But the new generation is different. I think that wholesale education is a dangerous thing, and that we ought to have been more careful. My village at home has altered, and the girls and boys of to-day have none of the sincerity of their parents. They have opinions instilled into them, rather dangerous opinions, and they no longer make you glad to talk to them.

  The girls are ‘young ladies’, whatever that may be ‒ I was never one, thank goodness ‒ and they have to be treated as ‘young ladies’. Refinement has taken the place of a very admirable old-time manner. The generation of to-morrow will have lost that beauty, that rude simplicity which was their most admirable trait.

  It was hereditary. It was born in them, the training of their fathers and forefathers on the same soil, in the same village. People say, �
�But the new generation will go further and do more, and be happier’. That remains to be seen. I doubt very much indeed whether they will be happier, or whether they will go further. They are copying a shoddiness which they will not find satisfactory; their attempt to better themselves is snobbishness in the worst degree, though people will not realize this. And that is what is happening to the world of to-day.

  The old shibboleths are being trampled into the dust. This is your world fit for heroes to live in, and somehow I am disappointed with it. Perhaps because I know no heroes, and perhaps because I am embittered about it.

  As you grow up, I beg you not to confuse your standards, but to appreciate the fact that keeping your flag flying, and tradition, are not snobbishness.

  It is so easy to become involved.

  You may think that it is snobbish to live in a certain style, and to have things done grandly or in accordance with that style. But it is not snobbish really. The fact that you are employing labour means that you are helping to keep people who need to earn.

  Be good to your servants. Be kind to dependants. That is a duty which is expected of you. Never be a ‘lion-hunter’ out to know somebody because you think that he may give you a little prestige. Prestige won’t come that way, but something far less desirable will.

  There seems so much to learn in life, so much, and so short a time to learn it in. Already I begin to feel desperately old, and you yourself have just told me that you find living difficult, because the wheel has come off your new motorcar, and how to mend it, goodness only knows.

  If it had been a doll’s frock, I could have coped. But I am helpless with a tin motor-car.

  And seeing that this has happened, I feel unable to go on writing to you about your grown-up days when you are in danger of becoming a snob, and when you may be finding life a good deal more difficult than it is to-day.