The Children of Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

the library, the ivy creeping over its crumbling walls, a wilderness of grass and weeds obscuring the gravel, the tennis court, the formal garden; by the memory of that small back bedroom, unvisited and unchanged until the coverlet rots at last, the books turn to dust and the final picture drops from the wall.

4
    Thursday 21 January 2021
    My mother had artistic pretensions. No, that is arrogant and not even true. She had no pretensions to anything except a desperate respectability. But she did have some artistic talent, although I never saw her produce an original drawing. Her hobby was painting old prints, usually Victorian scenes taken from damaged bound volumes of the
Girls’ Own Paper
or the
Illustrated London News
. I don’t suppose it was difficult, but she did it with some skill, taking care, as she told me, to get the colours historically correct, although I don’t see how she could have been sure of that. I think the nearest she got to happiness was when she was sitting at the kitchen table with her paint box and two jam jars, the angled lamp precisely focused on the print spread out on a newspaper in front of her. I used to watch her working away, the delicacy with which she dipped the finer brush into the water, the swirl of coalescing blues, yellows and whites as she mixed them on the palette. The kitchen table was large enough, if not for me to spread out all my homework, at least for me to read or write my weekly essay. I liked to look up, my brief scrutiny unresented, and watch the bright colours edging across the print, the transformation of the drab grey of the microdots into a living scene; a crowded railway terminus with bonneted women seeing off their men to the Crimean War; a Victorian family, the women in furs and bustles, decorating the church for Christmas; Queen Victoria escorted by her consort, surrounded by crinolined children, opening the Great Exhibition; boating scenes on the Isis with long-defunct college barges in the background, the moustached men in their blazers, the full-bosomed, small-waisted girls in jackets and straw hats; villagechurches with a straggling procession of worshippers, the squire and his lady in the foreground entering for the Easter service against a background of graves made festive with spring flowers. Perhaps it was my early fascination with these scenes which came to direct my interest as a historian to the nineteenth century, that age which now, as when I first studied it, seems like a world seen through a telescope at once so close and yet infinitely remote, fascinating in its energy, its moral seriousness, its brilliance and squalor.
    My mother’s hobby was not unlucrative. She would frame the finished pictures with the help of Mr. Greenstreet, the vicar’s warden from the local church they both regularly, and I reluctantly, attended, and would sell them to antique shops. I shall never now know what part Mr. Greenstreet played in her life, apart from his neat-fingered facility with wood and glue, or might have played except for my ubiquitous presence, any more than I can know how much my mother was paid for the pictures and whether, as I now suspect, it was this extra income which provided me with the school trips, the cricket bats, the extra books which I was never grudged. I did my bit to contribute; it was I who found the prints. I would rummage through boxes in junk shops in Kingston and further afield on my way home from school or on Saturdays, sometimes cycling fifteen or twenty miles to a shop which yielded the best spoils. Most were cheap and I bought them from my pocket money. The best I stole, becoming adept at removing centrepieces from bound books without damage, extracting prints from their mounts and slipping them into my school atlas. I needed these acts of vandalism, as I suspect most young boys needed their minor delinquencies. I was never suspected, I the uniformed, respectful, grammar-school boy who took his lesser findings to the till and