They had a little gang of women with them in the market-place, waving red flags and laughing loudly and using occasional bad language. There was one, the decent wife of the post-man. I had known her and played with her as a girl. But she was waving her red flag, and cheering as the motor-bus rolled up.
The two culprits got up, hilariously, into the bus.
“Good luck, old girl! Let ‘em have it! Give it the blue-bottles in the neck! Tell me what for! Three cheers for Bestwood! Strike while the iron’s hot, girls!”
“So long! So long, girls! See you soon! Merry home-coming, what, eh·”
“Have a good time, now! Have a good time! Stick a pin in their fat backsides, if you can’t move ‘em any other road. We s’ll be thinking of you!”
“So long! So long! See you soon! Who says Walker!”
“E-eh! E-eh!—”
The bus rolled heavily off, with the shouting women, amid the strange hoarse cheering of the women in the little market-place. The draughty little market-place where my mother shopped on Friday evenings, in her rusty little black bonnet, and where now a group of decent women waved little red flags and hoarsely cheered two women going to court!
O mamma mia!—as the Italians say. My dear mother, your little black bonnet would fly off your head in horrified astonishment, if you saw it now. You were so keen on progress: a decent working man, and a good wage! you paid my father’s union pay for him, for so many years! you believed so firmly in the Co-op! you were at your Women’s Guild when they brought you word your father, the old tyrannus, was dead! At the same time, you believed so absolutely in the ultimate benevolence of all the masters, of all the upper classes. One had to be grateful to them, after all!
Grateful! You can have your cake and eat it, while the cake lasts. When the cake comes to an end, you can hand on your indigestion. Oh my dear and virtuous mother, who believed in a Utopia of goodness, so that your own people were never quite good enough for you—not even the spoiled delicate boy, myself!—oh my dear and virtuous mother, behold the indigestion we have inherited, from the cake of perfect goodness you baked too often! Nothing was good enough! We must all rise into the upper classes! Upper! Upper! Upper!
Till at last the boots are all uppers, the sole is worn out, and we yell as we walk on stones.
My dear, dear mother, you were so tragic, because you had nothing to be tragic about! We, on the other side, having a moral and social indigestion that would raise the wind for a thousand explosive tragedies, let off a mild crepitus ventris and shout: Have a good time, old girl! Enjoy yourself, old lass!
Never-the-less, we have all of us “got on”. The reward of goodness, in my mother’s far-off days, less than twenty years ago, was that you should “get on”. Be good, and you’ll get on in life.
