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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘We don’t get on well together’, may not be entirely her fault, and the fact that you are not happy is quite a lot to do with yourself. No man is happy if he is making chaos of his marriage and carrying on with another woman. He is between two stools.

  You will think that I am taking your wife’s side, and being most unfair to you; but I am trying to show you that the arguments you produce are not new ones: they have occurred to every man since Adam, and the misunderstood husband is too often a great deal too well understood by his family.

  Before you take any drastic steps, do review the situation properly. Try to see what will happen if you have a divorce, and how much unhappiness will attend it. Don’t rush at it because you feel that you simply cannot live without the new love, and ‘Oh, how different life with her will be!’ Because it won’t be.

  All marriage entails a certain number of duties which, try as you will, you cannot sweep aside. The running of a home is always difficult, and, if servants go on being the bother that they are to-day, is likely to be more difficult when you grow up. It is tedious. Being in contact with your beloved morning, noon, and night, and in close intimacy, does wear off the rosiness. You can be frantically in love with a woman whom you only meet when you are feeling like it, but when you are seeing that woman in all her moods, every day and all day, the glamour goes.

  Marriage is much the same whoever sits at the head of your breakfast-table. It is eggs and bacon and toast and marmalade. It is the every-dayness which will ultimately make your second marriage much similar to your first.

  If you are rushing into this because you believe that it will be such a different affair, you are wrong. Come away before you are further misled.

  But if your marriage is going really badly, don’t hesitate. If you are both desperately unhappy, and if there is a child to be considered, then you must do something definite.

  Too many people hesitate to divorce because of the children. Only yesterday a woman friend came to see me; she has a little boy of four. Her husband is notoriously unfaithful, but she will not divorce him because of the child. She says that this child needs a man to bring him up, and it would be wholly wrong to remove the influence of his father. I argued that it was quite wrong that he should be under the influence of such a father. The Jesuits say, ‘Give me a child for the first seven years and I shall have made him’.

  Early impressions stand for a great deal. Those early impressions have got to be right and proper ones. The ideal upbringing is where there is the influence of both parents, a normal balance of male and female, but you exaggerate the importance of this if you argue that the wrong influence of an unscrupulous parent is better than no male influence at all.

  That obviously is not so.

  Children who live in a house where the parents quarrel are very quick to observe that quarrelsomeness. Don’t be misled by the belief that they will not notice. The little child is a new personality in a new world. He has nothing to do, nothing to occupy himself with and no responsibilities. He plays through his day. He would find that day insufferably long, if it were not for the fact that he spends most of his time copying grown-up people. You can see for yourself how closely your small son copies you, and you may rest assured that he has been noticing you very carefully to be able to effect such a faithful imitation of you.

  He knows at once if there is a quarrel afoot.

  Children are also very sensitive to atmosphere. They feel things ‘in the air’. They know what is going on and they react to it. You can keep very little from children, and even if they are too small to understand the details, they are influenced by the broad effect of what is going on.

  You must remove them from any danger of contamination by this sort of thing. Nothing that is unhappy should come into the life of a little child. Others’ actions should never be permitted to throw a shadow on their paths; the only unhappiness that they should ever experience is the lesson of cause and effect as it occurs through their own misdeeds in their own small lives.

  If wrong influences are creeping in, then do not try to eke out your marriage. Make a break of it. Snap it quickly.

  Don’t, for the sake of sentimental ties which are really non-existent (though I admit that they tie you closer than anything else in the world), drag things out. If you are to end anything, end it shortly and sharply. The clean surgical knife-wound is quick, it is sure, and it hurts far less than the self-inflicted wound, about which you demur.

  A break, and have done with it.

  ‘I shall marry so-and-so the moment the decree is through’, you say.

  Take my advice, don’t.

  The decree will have given you both a bad shock. You may declare that you are modern, and that I’m a dear old lady who doesn’t understand. I wish you could see me at the moment. I’d give you ‘dear old lady’! I’ve been writing this in the hut on the beach with three young men who would not leave me alone.

  Divorce is a mental blow. I have discovered that the physical body can accept blows and get over them far better than the mind can. And we never know when the mind has been badly hurt. It gets out of gear. We find that we make abnormalities of normalities, we do not see things in the proper perspective, we make further mistakes, all of which are part of the initial mistake, though we do not know it.

  To marry again immediately is an error.

  Take a holiday. Go away somewhere for a time, where you can be quiet and if possible happy. If you have children, take them with you and have a good kid’s holiday. A farm, a cottage on a moor ‒ somewhere where you can be quite tranquil and content, and win back your own self-respect. You have got to reform your idea, you have got to see life as it really is, not as something which is dreamy and shadowy, and not real. Standards which have been lowered have to be set up again. You may feel reckless, and think that it is being rather a devil to throw your cap over the windmill. It sounds a good phrase. It is rather an uncomfortable thing to do in real life, because your cap has to come down again, and you may not find it is in quite such good repair as it was when you flung it up.

  It always sounds so clever to go against conventions, to fight for freedom and to go gay. In everyday life it may be fun for a time, but it is no longer fun when you have passed your teens and early twenties, when you feel emotions deeply, when you affect other people by your actions, and when you hurt yourself badly, believing that you do not care.

  Conventions may be old-fashioned things, but they have lasted a great many centuries, and they have gained their prestige because they had backbone. Many of the modern attempts to uproot them will fail. For the conventions had a reason for being where they are, and that reason is a good one.

  Never rush into re-marriage within a few months. Never try drowning your sorrows, believing that Dutch courage is a substitute for real bravery. You are on the high road for a crash if you do that sort of thing.

  Yet I suppose you won’t believe me.

  I suppose you will fling this aside, and say ‘Poor old lady! (Old lady, again!) She meant well’, which is the unkindest barb of all.

  In return for that sally, I reply that you cannot offer that excuse for yourself. When you gave your wife cause for a divorce, you didn’t mean well. You were thinking only of your own fun. When you got her consent to a divorce, because you had made a fiasco of your marriage, you didn’t mean well either.

  It is better to be a well-meaning old lady, than a young man who is living life only for himself.

  Oh, dear, we shall get nowhere if we get heated!

  I am coming back to brass tacks.

  Be quite sure that you want divorce, before you plunge into it. Be quite sure that you will not be regretting the harm that you are doing somebody else when you start proceedings. Love is an exquisite emotion, but it is not meant to be used to hurt people. That is what divorce means.

  ‘Behaving like a gentleman’ (that is the delightful phrase which one employs when a man allows his wife to divorce him) is not behaving like a gen
tleman at all.

  Let a divorce be a mutual understanding. Try not to let it make you bitter and hard, try to realize that it is useless bearing malice about it, that the brave thing to do is to pick up the pieces with a smile, and go on.

  It is the going on that counts.

  There is always a to-morrow, for which I thank God every night of my life. Be brave about that.

  I do so hope that you are not going to be one of those men who allow things to rankle, and who are their own worst enemies because of this.

  I do so hope, my dear, that sometimes you will try to see matters from the other person’s angle, because that is the one which should count even more than your own.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  WE ALL HAVE TO DIE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  November 1919.

  MY LITTLE MAN,

  One day you and I, and everybody else in the world, will lie cold and dead, and be put away with the rest of the dead folk in the silent city of the churchyard.

  I wonder if you are afraid?

  Sometimes I am. Dreadfully afraid.

  When I was a very little girl, not so many months older than you are now, I used to convince myself very pleasantly that I should never die because something would happen to prevent it. I used to think that God would be very merciful to me, and Judgment Day, or some such thing, would occur, entirely to save me from the horrid adventure of passing over.

  Then came the awful day when I realized (as I am afraid you must realize in time) that I must go on that long journey, and that when the time came I should be alone.

  It is the loneliness of death which hurts so much.

  There is only one other person in Heaven or earth Who can come down that road with you, and that is God. It rests with you, and the way that you have lived life, if your companion on that journey is a stranger to you, or a very dear friend. If you have not learnt to know God in life, one thing is certain, and that is that you will never know Him in death.

  Death is such a big, yawning, terrible adventure. We remember the sinking sensation of chloroform, or some severe illness, the dazed, bewildering chaos that we know here, and how infinitely much more there may be when we tread the unknown heights and walk in the valley of the shadow. Or isn’t it so?

  I shudder sometimes to think of a hole dug in the earth and of these hands being buried therein, all that is so utterly me being thrust into a leaking, faulty box, and put away for ever. Tons of soil tumbled over me, the dreadful weight of it, the crudity, the horridness of death as we know it here. And I feel that I cannot bear it all.

  But listen.

  If you were to have an operation, and a leg, or an arm, were to be amputated, you would not worry about what they did with the limb that they had taken from you. That would have ceased to be you, in fact it would have become something to which you took a considerable dislike and would rather not see again.

  All that to-day is utterly me will not be me in death.

  All this will be a jacket which I have cast aside, and the real me will go on. Personality must survive the grave. If it does not, then what is there to fear, since you will know nothing? Oblivion, the thing that all living men and women resent, has never yet hurt anyone.

  Why hate it so?

  The body becomes matterless after death, and it has never been in life as important as we supposed; it is only the outward garb of the soul. It is the soul that is eternal.

  If you think again of the leg that is amputated, while it was part of the body it could hurt you. Through that body it was attached in some way by the silver cord to your soul. It could do what you asked of it; it responded to your demands, and it was so much part of yourself that you could not imagine an existence without it. But the moment it became disconnected from its relationship with the soul, then it did not matter any more. You do not care whether it is popped into an incinerator, or buried, or what people do with it. It is no longer a vital part of your being, although it once was very important to you. The body will be in the same predicament after death.

  You never go into the grave.

  Something that has worn itself out, and has become merely a useless appurtenance, is pushed into the grave. It is only when you yourself no longer want it.

  And what of the soul?

  I have often sat down and wondered just what does happen at death, and what the ordinary man might expect to find on the other side. Excluding all religious faiths, and all the fairy stories that one hears, I have tried to consider the more feasible events which would take place immediately after death. If we go on ‒ and I believe that we do go on ‒ what will happen?

  I believe that it will not be the strange awakening that we suppose, but rather a continuation of living here, with a wider experience, a greater knowledge, and a broader outlook. It is so obvious to me that the whole point of this world, and the only justification for its hardships and unfairnesses, is that it is a school for something to follow. And if it is a school, then it must be a preparation for a similar form of life on another plane.

  I think that it is quite possible that many of us will, for a while, have no idea that we have died, but will only realize that we feel better than we did, that our vision is clearer, and that we are staying ‘with a lot of kind friends’. I am convinced that the awakening to life on the other side is not in the least like what we here suppose it will be, and that as when we were born we were met by kind people ready to receive us and to love us, people who had known of our coming for some time, so it will be at death. When we were born we found love at once. Love is the enduring force. Love is the only thing that can make birth and death beautiful, and in both cases love must be there.

  Death is the shedding of a tired body which has served its purpose and is no longer of any use to its owner. It is the casting off of a worn-out jacket.

  It may be that without it you are young again, you live once more in a new body in the same world, or you start afresh primed with the knowledge of this life, to live with greater understanding.

  It may be oblivion, but it seems to me that everything points to it not being this. If we had been meant to know we should have been told, and although messiahs have come, and prophets and people who declared that they knew, we are still befogged as to the issue of life after death, and we still know very little about it.

  I have myself experimented with spiritualistic efforts, and this does give very definite proof of survival. At the same time it is not the best way of getting your proof. Although you will probably believe that I have been foolish and over-credulous in this matter, do not run away too easily with those ideas. I have tried to remain on the hedge and to treat the matter fairly, for spiritualism is usually treated with complete scorn and incredulity, or the most absurd welcome and faith in it.

  There is no other explanation for the truths that you can discover that way, save the right one, which is that there is survival. But there is such a gap between ourselves on this plane, and those who have passed on on their plane, that it makes the bridging of the chasm difficult and faulty, and at no time is it really desirable for us to try to cross that chasm. I know that foolish, footling messages come through, but the machine which receives those messages is still of this world, and we ourselves have such small brains with which to grasp the purport; besides, as I have said before, when we are living lives along straight lines, with beginnings and ends, it is almost impossible to grasp the life which is the complete circle and infinite, I am sure that death will be made as easy for you as birth was. After all, you have already survived one of the two great adventures of this world, which was your entrance into it. Death is something which is part of human development, and it has to be faced. All life shows the signs of progression and not of retrogression; we are proceeding upwards not downwards. We are reaching some end.

  When we are fit to understand that end, then, we shall approach it, but not before. Please do try not to be too fearful, as I have always been, for
this is such a horrid companion to take with you through life. Mine must have been some ghoulish complex induced by the sight of village funerals, something which I ought never to have seen or to have known. And it has been with me too long.

  But for you I do pray that you may understand a little better, and see a little farther, and therefore relieve yourself of fear.

  As ever,

  Your Mother.

  Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  Thirtysomething Ann Clements takes a Mediterranean cruise which opens her eyes to the wider world, and to herself.

  London, 1934. Ann Clements is thirty-five and single, and believes nothing exciting will ever happen to her. Then, she wins a large sum of money in a sweepstake and suddenly can dare to dream of a more adventurous life. She buys a ticket for a Mediterranean cruise, against the wishes of her stern brother, the Rev. Cuthbert, who has other ideas about how she should spend her windfall.

  Ann steps out of the shadows of her mundane life into the heat of the Mediterranean sun. Travelling to Gibraltar, Marseilles, Naples, Malta and Venice, Ann’s eyes are opened to people and experiences far removed from her sheltered existence. As Ann blossoms, discovering love and passion for the very first time, the biggest question is, can there be any going back?

  An engaging and witty story about an unforgettable 1930s woman; Ann Clements will stay with you long after the last page.

  ‘Ursula Bloom writes in a delightful way, with a deep understanding of human nature and a quick eye for the humorous things in life. Wonder Cruise … is one of the most entertaining novels we have read for a long time.’ Cambridge Daily News

  ‘Vividly entrancing.’ Scotsman

  ‘… with every book she adds something to her reputation … related with all Miss Bloom’s liveliness and easy skill.’ Daily Telegraph

  Read Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom now from Amazon UK

  Read Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom now from Amazon.com