A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing for the Liberal revival of 1906.  Coercion was unpopular, parents had exalted notions of giving their offspring a good time.  They spoiled their rods, spared their children, and anticipated the results with enthusiasm.  In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely.  What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father’s adoration of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his father’s heart:  What he played in his mother’s heart he knew not yet.  As for “Auntie” June, his half-sister (but so old that she had grown out of the relationship) she loved him, of course, but was too sudden.  His devoted “Da,” too, had a Spartan touch.  His bath was cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged to be sorry for himself.  As to the vexed question of his education, little Jon shared the theory of those who considered that children should not be forced.  He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came for two hours every morning to teach him her language, together with history, geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave him disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune, never making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that he remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers.  Under his father he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals.  He was not a highly educated little boy.  Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed in his mouth without spoiling it, though “Da” sometimes said that other children would do him a “world of good.”

It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which she did not approve.  This first interference with the free individualism of a Forsyte drove him almost frantic.  There was something appalling in the utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to whether it would ever come to an end.  Suppose she never let him get up any more!  He suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds.  Worse than anything was his perception that “Da” had taken all that time to realise the agony of fear he was enduring.  Thus, dreadfully, was revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.

When he was let up he remained convinced that “Da” had done a dreadful thing.  Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had been compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say:  “Mum, don’t let ‘Da’ hold me down on my back again.”

His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of hair—­“couleur de feuille morte,” as little Jon had not yet learned to call it—­had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown velvet tunic, and answered: