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could not forgive, he had lost nothing of his ardour – he had given her another child. She told me, much later, that it was done against her will. It rankled to the depth of her proud soul.
    ‘I married the wrong man,’ said my mother as we sat by the fire. She said it with naked intensity. She was nearly forty; and she could scarcely believe that all she longed for as a girl should have come to this.
    Her hopes had been brilliant. She had a romantic, surging, passionate imagination, even then, when a middle-aged woman beaten down by misfortune. As a girl she had expected – expected as of right – a husband who would give her love and luxury and state. She thought of herself in her girlhood, and as she spoke to me she magnified the past, enhanced all that she could glory in, cherished her life with her own family now that she looked back with an experienced and a disappointed heart.
    Her family had been different in a good many ways from my father’s. The Eliots, apart from my father, who was unlike the rest, were an intelligent, capable lot without much sensitivity or intuition, whose intelligence was usually higher than their worldly sense; they were a typical artisan, lower-middle-class family thrown up in their present form by the industrial revolution, who should, but for a certain obtuseness, have done much better for themselves. My grandfather Eliot, my father’s and Aunt Milly’s father, was a man of force and intellect, who had mastered the nineteenth-century artisan culture, who knew his ‘penny magazines’ backwards, read Bradlaugh and William Morris, picked up some mathematics at a mechanics’ institution. He had died early in the year of my father’s bankruptcy. He had never climbed farther than maintenance foreman at the local tram depot.
    He had quarrelled with my mother whenever they argued, for he was a serious nineteenth-century agnostic, she devout; he voted radical and she was a vehement Tory; and they were both strong characters. Their temperaments clashed, my mother had no more in common with him than with his daughter Milly; and my mother’s family, and all the background of her childhood, had roots quite different from theirs.
    Her family, unlike the Eliots, had never lived in the little industrial towns that proliferated in the nineteenth century, the Redditches and Walsalls where my grandfather had spent his early years. My mother’s family had had nothing to do with factories and machines; they were still living, those that were left, in an older, agricultural, more feudal England, in the market towns of Lincolnshire or, as gamekeepers and superior servants and the like, on the big estates. They were not more prosperous than the Eliots, as my mother admitted. She was entirely truthful and had a penetrating regard for fact, despite her nostalgia and imagination. She did not even allow herself to pretend, although she would have dearly loved to, that they were noticeably more genteel. No, she told me the truth, though she had a knack of making it shimmer a little at the edges. Her father’s name was Sercombe, and he had been employed, like his father and grandfather before him, in the grounds of Burghley Park: to my mother, for ever after, that mansion signified the height of all worldly ambition. The Sercombe men often ran true to a physical type. Like my mother, they were dark as gypsies; they were dashing, physically active, fond of the open air, naturally good at games but too careless to learn them properly, gay, completely unbookish – men who loved all the hours of young manhood and were lost when youth ended. Almost all were born with an air of command, and stood out in a crowd. They won much love from women, but had not as a rule the steadiness or warmth of nature to make them good friends to other men. Sometimes they used their boldness, dash, and charm to marry above themselves.
    It was these marriages that gave my mother her best chance to stick to the truth, and yet to