Young Phillip Maddison Read Online Free PDF Page B

book’s under my bed. If I’m discovered, I shall have to run away to sea. What shall we do with the Valentine? I know, let’s give it to Mother! After all, she deserves a little consideration. Will you write out another envelope, and drop it in the hall, as though it’s comethrough the letter-box? It will be a nice surprise for her, won’t it? So long, Polly, you are a good sport, you know.”
    He crept upstairs; and a minute later was on his way to the Free Library. He did not want Polly with him, as he had a secret meeting at the Library every Friday night with Cranmer, with whom Father had forbidden him, on pain of a caning, to associate.
    Cranmer was a poor, ragged boy, living in slum-like dwellings in Skerritt’s Road, near the Library.

Chapter 3
NEW LEAF
    W ITHIN the past few years the Free Library had been built along the High Road, where now the wayside elms were but a memory to Phillip. Electric trams droned up and down the smooth and regularised way, to the Crystal Palace and beyond. Usually on Friday nights Phillip entered the swing doors between seven and half past, passing the scarcely-noticed bronze plaque of Andrew Carnegie upon the wall, and with the subdued air of a diffident small boy when grown-ups were about, approached the desk where books were returned.
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    He was one of several hundred boys in the neighbourhood who came, more or less regularly, to the Free Library. The subdued expression on his face was characteristic of many children of the district in the first decade of the twentieth century: a remote look in the eyes, as though the living scene were generally being evaded; a pallor upon cheek and brow, due to long hours of sunlessness in school, and to existence in a smoky, often foggy atmosphere during half the year; and on a diet the main food of which was bread whose composition lacked the beneficial germ, or “sharp”, of the wheat berry, being made of the interior filling whose whiteness had been enhanced by chemical bleaching.
    Some of Phillip’s secondary or final teeth were already decayed in several places, though visits to the dentist had, supposedly, arrested the decay; while frequent exhortations by his Father, that he clean his teeth without fail before going to bed, andagain when in the bathroom of an early morning, were generally ignored by the boy, who had come to regard all monitive and didactic utterances of grown-up people—except those whom he liked—to be avoided in so far as this could be done without punishment. The avoidance of all matters of what was insisted upon as his duty was not—except with his mother—accompanied by defiance; on the contrary, he was both timid and fearful, with only the least resistance to pain, or its threat, whether mental or physical. He cried as easily and as frequently as he was disobedient; truth in his life was subordinate to fear. Indeed, lying was, as his father Richard Maddison had often declared, second nature to him. That second-nature—to use the term of the period—was accompanied by occasional boasting and bullying, and an enhanced idealism centred upon an eleven-year-old girl, daughter of a near neighbour in Hillside Road.
    While not, perhaps, a typical product of a lesser London suburb of the Edwardian age, Phillip Maddison bore certain characteristics of those who were being brought up in a district where the living soil had been partly suppressed by an industrial civilisation. His chaotic inner living, direct reflection from his environment, was apparent upon his features, in the melancholy cast of the countenance in repose, particularly in the drooping corners of the wide mouth, and the sad expression of the eyes.
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    At the moment of approaching the assistant librarian’s desk, to await his turn with the fair-haired young woman wearing pince-nez eye-glasses which added to the lifeless expression of her prim face, a more immediate fear was in Phillip’s eyes. His feelings were verging upon panic, arising out of