Myself, I was born among the working class. My father was a collier, and only a collier. He went down into the pit at twelve years old, and down the pit he went till he was nearly seventy. He could with great difficulty write a few words for a letter, and he could spell down the columns of the local newspaper. But though he always read some bit of the newspaper, he very rarely knew what it meant, the bit he had read. It never occurred to me that it was strange, that he should almost invariably say to my mother:“Lass, what’s meanin’ o’ this ’ere about Canada·” Even when it was explained, a little impatiently, he knew no more. Canada, to him, was somewhere in America, and America was merely somewhere where you went when you were discontented at home. It was all words, and “talk”. But he liked to appear to know something about it, because the colliers talked in the public-house, politics and newspaper-stuff, garbled into a sort of fairy-tale.
My father earned, I suppose, on an average, from thirty to thirty-five shillings a week. In summer, however, there were bad times, when the pits were not turning, and the wages would go down to twenty-five, twenty, even fifteen shillings. But though there was a family of children, my father always kept his own share. He never gave my mother more than thirty-shillings: in bad times, when he earned thirty shillings, he kept five for himself; out of twenty-five, he kept the same—or perhaps four shillings. He had to have money in his pocket, to go the public-house.
My mother belonged potentially to the middle-classes. She spoke Kings English, never could speak a sentence of the dialect correctly, wrote a fine Italian hand and an amusing, clever letter, and preferred the novels of the two discrepant Georges, George Eliot and George Meredith.
Nevertheless, ours was an absolutely working class home. My mother, in a shabby little black bonnet, was a working-man’s wife, in spite of her shrewd, “different” face. And we were brought up as working-class children, pure and simple.
Till I was twelve, when I got a County Council scholarship, and went to Nottingham High School. This richly endowed school is supposed to be one of the best day schools in England. It was then under, Dr Gow, later of Westminster.
