Read The People on Privilege Hill for Free Online

should climb on his knee and stroke his white moustache. When they became really tiresome a teacher came blowing her whistle in short, sharp blasts to say, “That’ll do. Stop it. Don’t be unkind to Mr. Jones.”
    But he was the mildest of men and seemed unaware of anything the children did to him. He said little and drew back beneath his beetle brows, and stared across the Common at things the children had never seen and would never see.
    Mr. Jones was odd.
    He lived in the house where he had been born, and his mother before him, in a road of Victorian mansions in a beautiful London suburb on a hill. He had been the youngest of a big family, all now dead. He had been “educated at home” though the other Joneses had gone away to school. There were faded victorian photographs in family albums of all the children gathered round Mr. Jones in his pram, two uniformed nursemaids in attendance. Bonneted Mr. Jones had watched the others flinging sticks into the pond, pushing each other over, falling in, yelling, bursting into tears, spitting and being smacked, then everyone laughing again. The winter when Mr. Jones had taken his first tottery steps, bending with mittened hands to try to pick up snow, he still remembered. The setting sun balanced orange on the edge of the Common, sending immense shadows through the trunks of the pines had seemed to hesitate, trying to hold on to the last of the winter day.
    Orange, black and white, Mr. Jones remembered. Orange sun, the glossy blanket of snow and in the hollows at his feet in their little buttoned boots, black needles of grass pricking up through crisp rime. They were only glimpses now, but very vivid and the light of his life.
    Now, children wore jeans and hunkish white sand-shoes at all seasons, or they were in tracksuits and he could not tell if they were boys or girls. They were all very fat and always eating. Nobody was shy and they made fun of the elderly. Sometimes when they came crawling round him and the dogs, he felt like reprimanding them, but he’d never had the knack of command. He had been less than three months in the army—though this was not generally known—because he could not obey orders at any speed and his commanding officer had sent for him one day to say that they felt that he would be happier as a civilian. A courteous man. He had known Mr. Jones’s father. So Mr. Jones did only fire-watching duties through the Second War and helped his mother in the way that sisters had once been expected to do. Mr. Jones’s sisters had long left home to be New Women. They had cut off their hair. The eldest one had been a suffragette before he was born.
    Mr. Jones’s mother had adored her youngest child from the start. “My Baby Jones,” she said each time they brought him home from the Common. She lifted him from the pram and kissed him. “You aren’t quite like other people but you’re a beloved son all the same.” In the schoolroom, until he was a young man, she had read to him from the shelves of children’s books that had been in the family for generations. There was a first edition of Alice.
    The whole house was much the same now as then. His grandparents would have recognised it, as they almost would have recognised the whole road, although the road had had its ups and downs.
    There were, for example, no households now with five or six indoor servants, no tradesmen coming to take grocery orders twice a week. In 1940 the houses in the road had passed into the pallor of wartime and in 1941 two of them had been bombed to rubble. Then squatters had arrived. Then squatters were flung out. High rooms were partitioned with plywood into tenements. Then in the seventies one by one the houses began to be bought up and restored. Then more than restored, with every feature replaced at great expense. Cellars became underground garages with overhead doors that opened magically before their owners’ cars