Memoirs of a Private Man Read Online Free PDF

more travel. So he worked for the firm for several years in England in what was, because of the collapse of the Indian and Chinese markets, to become a dead-end job. As it happened, the man who went out to Hong Kong in his place was murdered, so it was not altogether an ill decision.
    He soon wanted to marry, could not possibly afford to on his then salary, and my uncle had succeeded in introducing his two eldest sons into D. Mawdsley & Co.
    Cecil said he owed a great debt of gratitude to Uncle Tom for his jealousy, for otherwise he would probably never have come to live in Cornwall . Taking a holiday there with his fiancée in September 1924, at a place he chose at random out of the Great Western Railway Holiday Guide , he fell instantly in love with the county and the village of Perranporth. Having got there eighteen months later, he never wanted to move again, even after he had retired, and never did move again, for all the rest of his long life.
    When my father was fifty-four he took his bath one November Sunday morning, came down and sat in the drawing room to read the Sunday Chronicle . But after a few minutes he found he could not hold the paper; he was losing the use of his right hand and arm. Then he lost the use of his right leg. Then he lost his speech. Then he lost consciousness. Coming chattering in as a noisy schoolboy, I was stopped by the maid, who said: ‘Hush, your father’s ill!’ I stared at her and said: ‘D’you mean Mother?’
    My father in my eyes was never ill. He never had been. The apostle of fitness, he used to jump gates instead of opening them. He was never known to be tired. The year before this, taking one of his regular walks with his men friends, they found on reaching the station to go home that they had walked twenty-four miles. So while waiting for the train he ran up and down the platform so that he could say he had done twenty-five.
    It was a strange mixture – of this relentlessly energetic man and this delicate woman who was always tired and had no stamina at all. (Perhaps I am a fair mix of the two.) If he ever felt impatient with her he never for a second showed it. Nothing was too good for her, nothing too much trouble. If there was ever impatience in his heart it showed only with his sons – much more particularly towards me, whom his wife was bringing up as a mollycoddle. For, except with my mother, he was not really a sensitive man. When he took Cecil to an indoor swimming pool for the first time he told him to jump in at the deep end and he’d paddle his way easily back to safety. Instead Cecil was hauled out half-drowned, and as a result never learned to swim in his life.
    During my childhood and early youth I saw my father only at weekends and sometimes briefly in the evenings, and his attitude towards me always seemed to be one of abruptness and slight disparagement. When I was thirteen I went down with lobar pneumonia, and the doctor, finding me unable even to cough, warned my parents that I was not likely to live the night. In the bedroom, after he had gone, my father rounded on my mother, blaming her bitterly for allowing me to go back to school when I hadn’t properly recovered from influenza. I remember listening to this and thinking: ‘ Good Lord, he’s fond of me!’
    On that sad Sunday morning when he was taken ill they sent a maid hurrying for the doctor. Our own doctor was out, so another man came. He made a brief examination, lifted my father’s eyelid, and shook his head. He left a note at our own doctor’s, saying his patient would be dead before nightfall.
    But the patient did not die. Instead a bed was brought down to the drawing room and a day nurse and a night nurse were engaged. These women were stiff and starched and demanding. The night nurse’s first insistence was that our new drawing-room carpet must be washed with carbolic soap. For six months they ruled the house while my father climbed