XV

MY HOME AND SCHOOL[3]

A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I

MY HOME

What is one to say of home?  It is difficult to know.  I find that biographers are particular about the date of birth, the exact address of the babe, the social position and ancestry of the parent.  I suppose that it is all that they can learn.  But as an autobiographer I want to do something better; to give a picture of the home where, as I can now see, ideals, tastes, prejudices and habits were formed which have persisted through all the internal revolutions that have since upheaved my being.

[Footnote 3:  “A Student” left a great deal of manuscript, among which this fragment of autobiography is not the least interesting.]

I try to form the picture in my mind, and a crowd of detail rushes in which completely destroys its simplicity and harmony.  How hard it is to judge, even at this distance, what are the salient features.  I must try, but I know that from the point of view of psychological development I may easily miss out the very factors which were really most important.

I remember a big house, in a row of other big houses, in a side street leading from the East Cliff at Brighton right up to the edge of the bare rolling downs.  It was exactly like almost every other house in that part of Brighton—­stucco fronted, with four stories and a basement, three windows in front on each of the upper stories, and two windows and a door on the ground floor and basement.  At the back was a small garden, with flower beds surrounding a square of gravel, and a tricycle house in one corner.  There was a back door in this garden, which gave on to a street of cottages.  This back door was a point of strategic importance.

But I need not describe the house in detail.  It was exactly like thousands of other houses built in the beginning of the nineteenth century.  High, respectable, ugly and rather inconvenient, with many stairs, two or three big rooms, a lot of small ones and no bathroom.  It was essentially a family house, intended for people of moderate means and large families.  Nowadays they build houses which are prettier, and have bathrooms; but they are not meant for large families.

We were a large family, and a fairly noisy one.  Moreover, we were singularly self-sufficing.  We hadn’t many friends, we didn’t entertain much, we had dinner in the middle of the day, and supper in the evening.

There was my father who was a recluse, my mother who was essentially our mother, the two girls and four boys.  I was an afterthought, being seven years younger than my next brother, who for seven years had been called B. (for baby), and couldn’t escape from it even after my appearance.