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There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth,
I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.
worse drama when Linda, aged twelve, told the daughters of neighbours, who had come to tea, what she supposed to be the facts of life. Linda’s presentation of the “facts” had been so gruesome that the children left Alconleigh howling dismally, their nerves permanently impaired, their future chances of a sane and happy sex life much reduced.
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.
The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.
“It’s not as though she could be in love. She’s forty.”
His hair seemed to be slipping off backwards, like an eiderdown in the night,
(I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their hand looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.)
“Well, don’t pour any more rays until we have had the voltage altered. When the house is full of bloody Huns one wants to be able to see what the hell they’re up to.”
Davey always knew what you meant, it was one of the nice things about him.
Poor Linda, she has an intensely romantic character, which is fatal for a woman. Fortunately for them, and for all of us, most women are madly matter of fact, otherwise the world could hardly carry on.”
“Love,” he said, “is for grown-up people, as you will discover one day.
I THINK LINDA’S marriage was a failure almost from the beginning, but I really never knew much about it. Nobody did. She had married in the face of a good deal of opposition; the opposition proved to have been entirely well founded, and, Linda being what she was, maintained, for as long as possible, a perfect shopfront.
He had a habit of choosing a subject, and then droning round and round it like an inaccurate bomb-aimer round his target, ever unable to hit;
Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellowmen, and with it they warded off evil.
With this kindly scholarly man I have been perfectly happy ever since, finding in our home at Oxford that refuge from the storms and puzzles of life which I had always wanted.
Oh, the horror of important people—you are lucky not to know any.”
“That’s so like Linda,” said Davey. “She has to do things by extremes.”
The young man she had fallen in love with, handsome, gay, intellectual and domineering, melted away upon closer acquaintance, and proved to have been a chimera, never to have existed outside her imagination.
He never got cross, he was far too pompous.
War brings people together and opens their eyes, it must be avoided at all costs,
I always think it’s as well to see something of these Left-wing fellows. If people like us are nice to them they can be tamed wonderfully.”
Her craving was for love, personal and particular, centred upon herself;
“You know, being a Conservative is much more restful,” Linda said to me once in a moment of confidence, when she was being unusually frank about her life, “though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does take place within certain hours, and then finish, whereas Communism seems to eat up all one’s life and energy.
“Everybody is getting more serious, that’s the way things are going. But, whatever one may be in politics, right, left, Fascist, Communist, society people are the only possible ones for friends. You see, they have made a fine art of personal relationships and of all that pertains to them—manners, clothes, beautiful houses, good food, everything that makes life agreeable. It would be silly not to take advantage of that. Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art, nature does not enter into it. You should never despise social life—that of high
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The English are a drunken and an incontinent race, it is well known.”
Children are just the same—you must give them much more than their life if they are to be any good.
when I consider my life, day by day, hour by hour, it seems to be composed of a series of pinpricks.
“Oh no,” said Davey. “I never mind rich food, it’s poor food that does one such an infinity of harm.”
