Letters to My Son: A mother's words of warmth, wit and wisdom from 100 years ago

by Ursula Bloom

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  ETIQUETTE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  June 1919.

  MY DEAR BOY,

  Etiquette is always rather a muddling thing in a young man’s life, and sometimes it is useful to know what to do under certain circumstances. You probably need something written down so that you may refer to it, and so I am starting to tell you all I know.

  Politeness is thinking for your fellows. The truly polite man never embarrasses other people, but thinks for them in the small matters of life. Never hurt anybody deliberately. Be considerate. Be kind. Be polite.

  Treat age with deference. It may strike you as being slightly dotty, but it has experience and has become infirm in the living of life. Treat it with respect. A little old-world courtesy is very charming in a young man, and although you may think it all a pack of nonsense, I can assure you that it is nothing of the sort. It will take you a long way.

  The first problem that will come into your life will be visiting-cards. You will have fifty or a hundred, and you will not know what to do with them. When you order these don’t go in for fancy styles or peculiar lettering. There is a rigorous fashion in copper-plates from which you cannot afford to swerve. Stick to it. Don’t, whatever you do, have the cards printed. That is tabu.

  You keep some always on you, because they are often wanted. If you call on a married couple, you leave two cards: one on each. It is the same for two single ladies, or a mother who has a daughter in her middle years. But for a mother with a daughter under thirty-five, one card only.

  When you are married, your wife leaves one of her cards on every lady in the house (not including young unmarried girls), and one of yours on husband and wife individually.

  When you are leaving the neighbourhood, you leave cards with ‘P.P.C.’ written across the corner: ‘Pour prendre congé’ or ‘paid parting call’. In other words, ‘I’m getting out’.

  When you leave your college, and start in life, you will send these cards to the people who have entertained you and to everybody you know in the neighbourhood.

  You return a call within ten days. After dining with a family, you call on the hostess and leave a card a little later in the week. You call within a week of a wedding, and within three of a funeral.

  When someone you know is ill, you send flowers and a card with ‘to enquire’ written across the top corner.

  If he is seriously ill and ringing the doorbell might be disturbing, it is quite all right to push a card in the letter-box with ‘kind enquiries’, or ‘to enquire’, across the corner, just to show that you are taking an interest. You attach a card to a wedding gift and write some little personal message on it. Wedding gifts are sent to the bride’s household, as the reception is usually held there, and then they can show all the presents together.

  If you are not in the position to return hospitality, because you are in digs or at college or something of that kind, send your hostess flowers. Take the trouble to send ones which she likes, and enclose your card with them. Nothing is more maddening than to receive flowers from a florist and have no idea who has sent them to you.

  So much for cards.

  It is a good plan to address older men as ‘sir’, and I do beg you not to forgo this. Too many young men think it smart to omit it. Also try to be helpful to your hostess. Don’t sit there glumly expecting to be entertained, but do your best to give her a hand. Etiquette is only helpfulness to others, and after all you must expect to do your fair share of assisting to make the party go.

  When you go out to stay with people, don’t stick like glue to your host and hostess. Do occasionally make it easy for them to get rid of you. Charming as you may be, there can be moments when they could do without you. On the other hand, don’t use the house merely as a hotel, appearing in to meals, making your own arrangements and flying off again.

  Remember that it is bad manners to appropriate books and music, and special chairs; to go for long walks at inconvenient times, and to be late for meals. When you leave, enquire if the train you think of catching is a suitable one; if you go by taxi, be sure that you pay for it.

  Tip servants properly; it is vile manners to skimp here, and vulgar to over-pay.

  If the people you are staying with are not rich, and you all go out to the cinema or something of the kind, you can quite easily pay for it. Write the moment you get home, and thank your hostess for a very pleasant time (what is termed a ‘bread-and-butter letter’), and if she has really done a lot for you, later on in the week send her an offering of some of her favourite flowers along with your card.

  When you entertain yourself, it is wisest to do it at an hotel or restaurant. Book a table in advance. Be sure to ask people who have mutual interests and who are likely to get on well together, otherwise the party is stymied from the word go. The most important lady sits on your right. Have the whole thing cut and dried before you start, and don’t run the entertaining on the hope that you will have a bright idea what to do after dinner when the time comes. That is the crossroads to disaster.

  When you take people out to the theatre, see that they have chocolates and a programme and that they can see comfortably.

  As a bachelor you will have to tip. This may vary with the years, but at the moment I can give you a rough idea of how things stand. For the week-end at a friend’s house you would leave 2s. 6d. for the housemaid, 2s. 6d. for the cook, and something to the chauffeur. If it is the kind of week-end which entails a loader and a ghillie, then you tip more.

  When you go to a dinner-party, chat alternately with the ladies on either side of you, which may not be funny. You are a baby now, but I can laugh to think of you stuck between two old hags with ear-trumpets. Let us hope that strict dinner etiquette has died out when you grow up.

  Conversation is sometimes difficult to make. When I was a girl I was taught ‘to talk’. There are certain subjects on which most people can be ‘drawn’, and when you are absolutely stumped with somebody who can’t open her mouth, then have a shot for one of the safe topics. The psychic usually evokes interest. Travel abroad is another fairly safe subject. The play of the moment, or the book of the moment. Try to keep conversation along broad lines, because if you allow it to become too personal you may launch yourself into a labyrinth of unknown dangers. You may be commenting unfavourably upon relatives the other side of the table, without knowing it. Be careful. The world in general is always the safer topic for a young man to indulge in.

  I hope you will always offer a girl a seat in a bus or in the tube, or a share of your umbrella in the rain. Never embarrass a girl by forcing your conversation on her, so that she is made to feel that the whole thing is on the ‘pick-up acquaintance’ basis. But be willing to be friendly in a jolly, open sort of way. Standoffishness is always a mistake.

  You arrive early for a dinner-party and late for tea, which seems stupid, but is correct. If your present manners are to be taken as a criterion, I cannot see you ever being late for any meal.

  Be amiable and willing to help, but don’t be one of those frightful young men for ever pushing themselves forward: the kind of young men who wear loud clothes and use heavily embossed notepaper and can never cease talking. If you have got nothing to say, shut up. It is always a wiser procedure.

  Don’t be one of those people who borrow wildly and forget to pay back. Return books and music, and recollect that stamps cost money. The man who borrows things and keeps them six weeks or for ever won’t find his pal in such a hurry to lend them to him next time, so it only comes back on your own head.

  Finally there is the problem of dress.

  The difficulty with very young men is that they will over-dress, never realizing that they hallmark themselves ‘Juveniles’ in large letters. Now, when you get one of those confusing letters, ‘Do come to dinner Tuesday at eight’, remember that it probably means a black tie. Then, when you arrive, you may find everybody else in tweeds, which turns out to be a most emba
rrassing moment for you. It is always wiser, and quite allowable, to send a little postscript with your acceptance enquiring as to what manner of dress is indicated. ‘Black tie, unless I hear to the contrary?’ is safe.

  An informal dinner always means a dark suit. If in doubt, over-dress rather than under-dress, and now that I have written it down, it looks as if I suggested you might be inclined to sally forth in your bathing suit, which is not what I mean at all.

  Never restrict your entertaining because your purse will not rise above the simplest. You can always tell people that it is something quite humble, but if they would care to share a chop with you, you’d be awfully pleased. There is nothing humiliating in being hard up. Admit it frankly. Don’t use it as an assistance to groaning, deploring the fact that you cannot do what some other man does, but accept it cheerfully as part of the ordinary routine of life. Sorry, chaps, but the bank book is a bit piano.

  The whole art of entertaining satisfactorily is to make people like you for what you are, and not come to see you for what they can get. I would rather have a scrappy meal with a charming host, than a first-rate meal with a bore. So would most people. The bore is always difficult to cope with, and nothing that he can offer you can make up for himself.

  I hope this covers roughly the ground which is likely to present itself in the first few years of living life on your own. Bear in mind what I said at the beginning. Politeness is setting other people at their ease ‒ thinking for others. In a dilemma turn that up and pore over it.

  Always your

  Mother.

  MAKING A CHOICE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  December 1920.

  MY DEAR SON,

  Just at first this is a grand world, and you reach out to grab the attractions which catch your fancy, this and that, just as it pleases you. But, as you grow a little older, it suddenly dawns on you that after all you have only seventy odd years of life, and that it is not half long enough. There will not be time to dream all the dearest dreams, and to accomplish everything that you want to accomplish.

  You have to choose a certain road.

  You have got to learn how to make up your mind, how to select what you want, and to train yourself to know what you want when you see it. That is not so easy as you think it is. Most of us do not know what we want, and make frightful mistakes by thinking that we do.

  Because choice is such a difficult thing, I do ask you to give yourself a proper chance and to realize that it is a mistake to choose when you are too young. I am talking of the big choices in your life.

  It is quite true that you will have to decide on a career when you have little idea what you really want. And because you are young and green, do consult two or three outside older people and get them to help you in weighing up the pros and cons. You need not take their advice if it does not appeal to you, but for your own sake it is just as well to find out what they think. The outside opinion is always worth listening to.

  Because choice is something difficult to make, it is a mistake to cut your wings too young. Do not shoulder responsibility when you are as yet unable to realize how hard it binds.

  I believe in young marriages, but not in too-young ones. You will possibly fall in love several times before it is the real thing, but every time you will be quite convinced that it is the real thing, and all the talking in the world will not rid you of that delusion.

  If you marry very young indeed, you do handicap your future. You miss much that is your right, much that is carefree and gay and spontaneous, much that you ought to have. In life there is a time for everything, and if you let that time pass you by, believing that you will get the chance to live that particular phase a little later, you make a mistake. There will come for you, as there comes for every little boy, a set sequence of times and tides and choices. You will want to dig on the sands, you will want to fly a kite, you will come to the age when a box of caterpillars absorbs you, and on to the age when it is birds’ nesting that is the height of your ambition. You will want to go for interesting holidays, and as you grow older these themselves will change. You will want to go camping. You will want to be an explorer. You will want to be a hunter and trapper. You will think that you will die if you do not see the Rocky Mountains, and then you will pass into the aesthetic phase which desires the azaleas on the Road to Nikko, or the glory of old China.

  These are phases that we have all been through.

  Just as eventually you will fall in love, and believe that you are the only man who has ever felt it so intensely, and be tingling to get married.

  But if you rush things, you will be missing much that is too good to be missed. Don’t do it. Let every year bring its proper sequence of events, of desires, of phases, and build you up towards the man in the end.

  Don’t force your choice.

  The young man does better to hang back a little, and refuse to allow life to fluster him, than he does if he rushes at it and takes things willy-nilly here and there.

  Try to see with the broader outlook. Remember that when you are up against a choice, too often you are too close to it ‒ so near that you see things out of perspective. Maybe the man who is standing a little farther off can see more sanely and with a longer vision. Don’t think that I am thrusting this down your throat, or that I suppose that it must be so, but the chances are that lookers-on do see most of the game.

  It is not always wise to despise age. Age has become scarred in honourable warfare; it may have become disillusioned, it may have become a little tired, but it has earned its laurels. It is always quite wise to hear what age has to say before you make up your mind that you will do this or that.

  It is so easy to make mistakes.

  For their youthful mistakes some people have paid with their whole lives. And when they did this or that, they were so sure that they were doing the right thing. It is for that reason that I do urge you to think again. If you are contemplating a choice, and you find that older people seem disturbed about it, and keep bringing up all kinds of comments, don’t get angry and believe that they do not know how you feel about it.

  Because quite likely they do know. We have all felt much the same, you know. There is nothing new in the emotional line under the sun.

  Old people will caution you, because they have seen the results. Weigh their caution with your own hot-headedness, and do not be ashamed to say when you are wrong.

  I wish so much that I could see ahead for you, or be sure that I could be with you to guide you a little. Yet, if I were with you, I suppose I would seem to be a silly old woman who was trying to be tiresome. We do not realize how much our parents suffer for us, nor how great is their anxiety. Not until we are parents ourselves.

  Do learn to make wise choices. The great men of this world have become great because they knew how to make up their minds. It is the greatest lesson in life.

  Napoleon could arrive at a decision quickly. Until he actually made that decision he was prepared to listen to the two sides of the question. Great men realize that there are two sides to a question. It is only obstinate weaklings (because obstinacy is too often a sign of weakness) who simply can only see their own point of view, and who suffer for it later.

  Bear this in mind.

  Because, although life may seem to you to be an enormous span of time, and the end so far away that you need not trouble yourself about it, I would warn you that it is not long enough to do everything that you want to do, and that you must choose only the few things, and live them to their full, rather than try to grab a froth of everything.

  Be selective.

  But be careful what you select.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  SECRETS

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  December 1920.

  MY DEAR SON,

  Perhaps having secrets is one of the most disturbing things in life, and very likely to upset the apple-cart for you. We are all of us faced with the knowledge of certain things which lie behind
us and about which very few people know, and we find ourselves more particularly anxious about them when we marry and start life afresh with the ardent desire to make a clean breast of everything before we begin.

  At the time when you marry, you will be haunted by the idea of the fresh start! Most of us are. You will have memories of indiscretions in the past. There may be nothing very bad, but on the other hand even trivial events are large enough to stand as a barrier, something about which you might feel happier if you got them off your chest.

  Ought you to tell?

  Ought you to tell your future wife of the girls you kissed? Or not?

  And if matters have gone even further, ought you to admit it? Or hold your peace?

  Now, this is a very difficult question.

  I made up my mind before I married that I would tell your father everything, as I believed would be meet and proper. Not that there was very much to tell ‒ a few stolen kisses in the dark, a few furtive embraces ‒ but I thought that he might as well know what there was. So, one evening, I launched myself into the story of the young man who had kissed me so ardently at a dance.

  As I went on talking it struck me that the tale was going down very badly. Father was becoming quieter and quieter. Finally he burst out with, ‘What a damned silly story! There must have been more in it, or you wouldn’t be so keen to tell me about it’.

  Then I realized that he was terribly jealous, and that he was producing an argument which I, in my poor, shallow, short-sighted life, had not even thought of.

  The story of the young man who had kissed me at the dance was really such a trivial little incident, that quite naturally he thought that I had mentioned it because there was a great deal more behind it, and my conscience had insisted that I told him at least something about it. Immediately the affair loomed large in his mind. His jealousy tormented him, and exaggerated it out of all perspective.

  The whole episode had been quite innocent, but I was never able to make him see that ‒ nothing that I could say after would convince him that he had applied an entirely wrong meaning to the whole admittance.