It was Miriam who gave me my first incentive to write—when I was about eighteen or nineteen. She was a poor girl on a little farm. Her people were poorer even than we. But it was they who roused me to consciousness. And it was for her, Miriam, I wrote scraps of poems and bits of a novel. I wrote them furtively, at home, pretending it was study: writing in the kitchen where all the household affairs were going on. My father hated study and books—he hated to see us poring. My mother liked to see us submissively studying, to“get on”. She wanted to be proud of us. And of course, I know she twigged when I was writing poems or bits of a novel. She was so shrewd. I wrote in a college exercise book, and pushed the book in the shelf among the others. But she knew, and she read the things when I wasn’t there. Never did she say anything to me. Nor did I say anything to her. She knew also I always took the scraps of writing to Miriam. Poor Miriam, she always thought them wonderful: otherwise I should never have gone on. But for her, I should probably never have written—I never thought of myself as a writer, or of anything special at all. I thought myself rather clever, after I had passed examinations, but because I was not strong, I thought myself of rather less account than most people: the weakling in health! And if I had never written, I probably should have died soon. The being able to express one’s soul keeps one alive.
At last, when I was twenty-two, and going to college in Nottingham, one sunny warm day, half-day at college, when my mother loved me to come home and we were two together and alone, she took the exercise-book in which I had re-written the scene in The White Peacock where the bride runs up the church path. She put on her spectacles, and read with an amused look on her face.
“But my boy, ” she said, amused and a bit mocking, as she put down the book and took off her spectacles, “how do you know it was like that·”
How did I know· My heart stood still. She treated it as if it were a school essay and she were the teacher: kindly and sceptical. And then I saw in her the slight contempt she had for me: nay, even more, the slight hostility to my presumptuousness. I might“get on” in the ordinary rut, and even become a school-master at three pounds a week. Which would be a great rise above my father. But that I should presume to “know” things off my own bat!—things I had not learned at school!—well, it was presumption in me.
