Read Time of Hope for Free Online

wife of one of the local tradesmen.
    ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a bit of trouble,’ she said. ‘Never mind, my dear. Worse things happen at sea.’
    I knew that her voice was kind. Yet my mother’s mouth was working – she was, in fact, at once disarmed by kindness. She only managed to mutter a word or two of thanks.
    Another woman was coming our way. At the sight of her my mother’s neck stiffened. She called on all her will and pride, and her mouth became firm. Indeed, she put on a smile of greeting, a distinctly sarcastic smile.
    ‘Mrs Eliot, I was wondering whether you will be able to take your meeting this year.’
    ‘I hope I shall, Mrs Lewin,’ said my mother with condescension. ‘I shouldn’t like to upset your arrangements.’
    ‘I know you’re having your difficulties–’
    ‘I don’t see what that has to do with it, Mrs Lewin. I’ve promised to take a meeting as usual, I think. Please to tell Mrs Hughes’ (the vicar’s wife) ‘that you needn’t worry to find anyone else.’
    My mother’s eyes were bright and bold. Now she had got over the first round, she was keyed up by the ordeal. She walked about the churchyard, pointing her toes, pointing also her parasol; she took the initiative, and herself spoke to everyone she knew. She had specially elaborate manners for use on state occasions, and she used them now.
    Her hand was still quivering and had become very hot against mine, but she outfaced them all. No one dared to confront her with a direct reference to the bankruptcy, though one woman, apparently more in curiosity than malice, asked how my father was.
    ‘Mr Eliot has never had much wrong with his health, I’m glad to say,’ my mother replied.
    ‘Is he at home?’
    ‘Certainly,’ my mother said. ‘He’s spending a nice quiet morning with his books.’
    ‘What will he do now – in the way of work, Mrs Eliot?’
    My mother stared down at her questioner.
    ‘He’s considering,’ said my mother, with such authority that the other woman could not meet her glance. ‘He’s weighing up the pros and cons. He’s going to do the best for himself.’

 
     
4:   My Mother’s Hopes
     
    At home my mother could not rest until my father got a job. She pored with anxious concentration through the advertisement columns of the local papers; she humbled herself and went to ask the advice of the vicar and the doctor. But my father was out of work for several weeks. His acquaintances in the boot and shoe trade were drawing in their horns because of the war. The hours of that sunlit August were burning away; somehow my mother spared me sixpence on Saturdays to go to the county; the matches went on, the crowds sat there, though outside the ground flared great placards that often I did not understand. The one word MOBILIZATION stood blackly out, on a morning just after my father’s bankruptcy; it puzzled me as ‘petition’ had done, and carried a heavier threat than to my elders.
    It was not till the end of August that my father’s case was published. He had gone bankrupt to the tune of six hundred pounds; his chief creditors were various leather merchants and Aunt Milly’s husband; he was paying eight shillings in the pound. That news was tucked away in the local papers on a night when the British Army was still going back from Mons. For all her patriotism, my mother wished in an agony of pride and passion that a catastrophe might devour us all – her neighbours, the town, the whole country – so that in wreckage, ruin and disaster her disgrace would just be swept away.
    October came, the flag-pins on my mother’s newspaper map were ceasing to move much day by day, before my father got a job. He returned home one evening and whispered to my mother. He was looking subdued; and, for the first time, I saw her shed a tear. It was not in gratitude or relief; it was a tear so bitterly forced out that I was terrified of some new and paralysing danger. All this time I had had a fear, acute but