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

by Ursula Bloom

  You see, the moment you rush into the confessional, you may disturb all manner of unknown emotions in the breast of the one who listens. It is not fair.

  The confessional is immensely satisfying to oneself. It is a delicious penalty having to tell what happened and to ask forgiveness, but it is most unfair. In the first place, have you the right to tell on another person? Very few secrets concern you alone. There is usually another in it. Yet people who are delighting in the confessional drag in the other person in the most unashamed manner, taking a delight in telling this and that. Afterwards, when the ecstasy of the moment has passed by, they may go cold with horror in remembering the confidence they have abused, and the horrid, sneaking little tale-teller that they have become. There is also the awkward position of all three of you meeting a little later on. Don’t say ‘Oh, that is impossible; so-and-so is the other side of the world by now; we shall never meet again’. It is a very small world, my son, when it comes to the people whom you don’t want to meet again ‒ a great deal too small. In this world there is only one man whom I never want to meet again, and although you would have thought the small matter of Europe big enough to keep the two of us apart, you would be shocked and surprised how we are always bobbing into one another. So don’t run away with the idea that it is a large world, because it is not big enough for that.

  The confessional tempts you into telling your story and getting great personal enjoyment out of it, but what you cannot see, and what is so dangerous, is the fact that the person who listens to the story does not understand it as you tell it. He is naturally disturbed by it. He is quite sure that there is more behind it. And once you have aroused this curious little worm of suspicion, it is not so easy to squash it again.

  Have you considered this possibility?

  If the suspicion does not start now, and it seems that the story has been accepted in the right spirit, and everything in the garden is lovely, there is always the horrid chance that after marriage you may indulge in a quite mild and harmless flirtation, and instantly the memory of your silly little confession will dart through your wife’s mind.

  She will then say to herself: ‘My goodness! Now he is starting it again’.

  I cannot see that is going to make life any easier to live for either of you.

  Unfortunately for my own peace of mind, I am one of those people who cannot keep a secret, and have to tell the world of what has happened to me. I am so indiscreet that I cannot draw down the blinds and shut out that part of my life. I have got to talk. You may have inherited this dangerous trait from me. If you are made like this, I am sorry for you, because it means that however disastrous confession may be, confess you will. It is a vice.

  Although you will be acutely aware of the fact that you are taking an enormous risk in telling your story, and it may ruin your life, it is certain that you will have to out with it. You cannot nail up the shutters and leave well alone.

  Now listen to me.

  I do not practise what I preach, but having so often got myself into tight corners through not following my own advice, I go on preaching it.

  The affair of yesterday is dead. Nothing is so utterly dead as dead love, though wives will never believe that. The more that you fall for a girl, and the more deeply you imagine yourself to be in love with her, the less likely you are to fall for her again when the first glamour has passed you by.

  But this is never the woman’s argument.

  She won’t believe it even though in her heart she must know that it is true.

  The past has little to do with the future. We believe, I think quite fatuously, that the past teaches us by bitter experience to live the future better. Yet in spite of this we go on making the same old mistakes. We go on burning our fingers at the same old fire, and are not one whit wiser for our follies.

  The future being an unwritten page, it seems to me to be folly to throw any shadow of the past across that page, I may be wrong, but I believe in cutting your losses in life: setting them adrift on the face of the waters, and starting again. However much you think you may lose by this, it is far better to desert the sinking ship, even though you start with only a bare raft and none of the necessities of life. Sinking ships don’t hold people up long enough. Let them go.

  Try not to repeat your mistakes, be they in wine, or women, or career, or any of the hundred and one difficulties which beset you in common with everybody else in this life.

  Try to learn by error.

  I don’t suppose you will, because precious few of us ever do. We always tell ourselves that ‘it is going to be different this time’, only to find afterwards that it is not different at all. It is the same silly old snare and delusion. That is the pity of it. By and by, when we get older, we hesitate more, because that fire of enthusiasm which is youth, and which is the strongest driving force in the world, dies down. Not because we have grown more sensible.

  Until then, we go on banging our heads against a brick wall, and getting hurt, not much, a little, very much … it all depends.

  But this dragging up of secrets into the light of day is hurting yourself quite deliberately. Parading your exploits and putting odd ideas about yourself into somebody else’s mind isn’t fair. It is all very well believing that you are going to be clever enough to explain the impulses which made you do such and such a thing. You cannot. You cannot even explain them to yourself. How can you ever recapture the magic of the moment? There are no words which will tell of the madness induced by moonlight, or the sudden insane desire to kiss a girl whom you did not really care for very much, or the reason why you did this or that, or said such exquisitely foolish things.

  The truth is that there was no actual reason; it was just life taking you along on its full high tide ‒ a thing that happens to everybody and which is quite impossible of explanation. The actions of last night, which seemed to be quite ordinary then, have a habit of looking particularly stupid in the cold and sober light of the morning. Often you will look back and ask yourself why you ever did such a foolish thing. If you cannot explain to yourself, how can you ever hope to explain to somebody else?

  Words are a poor medium in which to describe proceedings which are so unorthodox and emotional. Emotions lead where common sense too often fails, and leave you wallowing in a quagmire of your own making. You will never find out how poor things are these words until you start to enjoy your own confessional to the full, and tell the story which may have it in its power to worry your wife-to-be to death.

  Do not think that things are forgotten so easily.

  You are master of the unspoken word, but the spoken word is master of you. Ever heard that one before?

  You think that you want to get the ground clear and to make a clean breast before you start the new phase in life because it is for her sake, and not for your own. Don’t cheat yourself with such petty delusions.

  You are only confessing your own secrets because you enjoy doing it. It is a lovely and intimate part of becoming engaged, and the longer you can dwell on them and drag them out of hiding, the more you are going to enjoy doing it. This is for your own edification (I know that this is a nasty one from the shoulder), but it happens to be true.

  The girl you are engaged to does not want to hear about the other women in your life, because she likes to imagine that she is the first and only one that matters. Leave her to that fool’s Paradise. It will hurt neither of you, and is far better than trying to tell her all sorts of things which will only disturb her very considerably and ultimately undermine yourself in her eyes.

  Try to abandon all idea of a secret satisfaction of having admitted everything and having been forgiven. Get that idea right out of your life, and start with the wiser feeling of ‘That’s that, and I’ve done with it’.

  Be quite sure that you have done with it too.

  I admit that I have never done this.

  Maybe it is because I have not done it myself that I am so insistent that it is the right road to take.

&
nbsp; Always your loving

  Mother.

  SAVING OR SPENDING

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  February 1920.

  MY DEAR SON,

  This is really a very difficult letter to write, because as I begin it, I realize only too well that I am not sure that I know my own mind about it.

  Should one spend or save?

  Should one expend happiness in youth for the sake of security in age, or should one let the future lie in the lap of the gods, and have one’s fun while one is still young and gay enough to enjoy it?

  Most of us are afraid of the future. It is a grey bogey who peers out with cavernous eyes at you. It is a wolf on the threshold of to-morrow. Anything may happen. Poverty is something which is more unpleasant, and more humiliating, than most of the bogeys which life can offer you. Though poverty does not always undermine happiness. I can say with all sincerity that the happiest years of my life were the ones when I was often extremely hungry.

  But the idea of poverty in your old age is something horrible. And all of us believe that we are going to live to a ripe old age, whether we are or whether we are not.

  It is a reasonable conclusion to draw that we shall see seventy summers, and that the last five of those summers may be considerably handicapped with physical disabilities. We don’t all wear well. For that reason, I think it is a wise precaution to make it a rule to save a little every year towards the time when you may need to spend it in Thermogene for your rheumatics, and walking-sticks to support your doddering feet.

  A great many people carry this sort of thing to excess. Saving is a fetish. People either can or cannot do it. If they can, then they are for ever scrapping about and putting money aside, and taking an infinite delight in the fact that their investments are mounting up. If they can’t do it, then they just don’t bother. To-morrow can take care of itself. Why spoil to-day for the morrow which never comes? All the old tags are trotted out. They seem to supply such a good reason for putting off the saving (which is irksome) and for excusing themselves altogether about it,

  I have always tried to adopt the course in between, and it has been hard for me, because I am one of those people who can save pretty easily.

  Youth comes but once. It is a happy time. If you clip its wings financially, you deprive it of something which it can never get back. And I think that this is quite wrong. Yet, never to save a penny, and to live in a state of insecurity, does not spell content. Everybody should have a nest-egg tucked away, for life is uncertain, and you never know what may turn up from one day to another. The nest-egg can very often open a door for you which would otherwise have remained closed. It can give you a sense of contentment, whereas the fact that you have nothing behind you gives only a sense of peril which is not conducive to happy living.

  Do save a little.

  But don’t save too much.

  This sounds contradictory, but what I am trying to point out to you is the folly of shearing life of its fun, of cheating your spring for an autumn that may never be.

  Besides, there is the other view-point. In the old days everybody saved, and a great many of us are enjoying to-day things we should never have had, had it not been for the kindly thriftiness of our forefathers. To whom, praise be! But the modern politicians seem to think that they ought to put a ban on saving. They are doing their best to stop people doing it. I pay tax on every penny that I have, and if I invest it, I pay tax again on every farthing of income it renders to me.

  I suppose it is all for the good of the dear old country, but I am afraid I am not very patriotic in this way, and sometimes I could say, Damn the dear old country!

  The day has gone when one saved for the children who would follow in one’s footsteps. It doesn’t pay to save.

  Everybody is urging you to spend; the tendency is to live to-day only for to-day, and forget that to-morrow may render an account also.

  Moderation in this as in all things.

  You are a lucky child in that you have money coming to you, and I do urge you on one point strongly. An estate comes to you realizing so much value. There are death duties, there are taxes, and when you die there will be more death duties, before you hand that estate over to your successors. Make it a rule to save enough to cover those duties, so that the estate continues as it was when it came to you. This is only fair. It is a right that surely your children have to demand of you, and if everybody did it, there would be a good deal less of big estates crumbling into the dust, and people being worn to a frazzle fighting the taxes.

  Save a little for the future, but not to the deterioration of the present. Money invested in happiness is in a gilt-edged security.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  TRADITION

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  June 1920.

  MY DEAR SON,

  In life there is a very big factor which is called tradition. When I was a little girl it was something which you waved like a banner; it was something which urged you on to a courage that you would not have had normally; with it you were capable of conquering, and the knowledge that forebears had gone far with it sent you farther.

  To-day a lot of people laugh at it.

  The post-war world is not as nice as the pre-war world was. Perhaps this statement suggests that I am growing old, and yet I cannot believe that I really am old. It is a regrettable fact. Quite a lot of things have gone by the board which were useful and helpful to the living of life, and which made us better men and women.

  Tradition is one of them.

  I was once told a story which made a very big impression on me. A young man was extremely drunk. He was behaving very badly, and in the middle of an argument in a public restaurant, he got up and slapped a woman in the face. A man at an adjoining table arose from his own lunch, and went across to the young gentleman and shook him violently. He said, ‘I don’t mind your getting drunk. I don’t mind your behaving like a cad. But you can’t do it in that tie.’

  He was wearing the tie of a very famous public school.

  To-day we laugh at the old school tie.

  Tradition, we say, leads people to follow one another like a flock of silly sheep, going down a blind alley. It gets you nowhere.

  I am sorry to disagree, and that I should be talking about my youth as remote from the youth of the present day seems to be all wrong, but I still do think that tradition has got us definitely somewhere. It means the hoisting of principles, it means that you follow the gentleman’s code, and do the right thing under every circumstance. It means that you forget self in the service of others.

  Tradition sets an example. I know that quite a lot of people think that an example does not matter, and here I would disagree very vehemently. You never know whom you are influencing by your actions; weak people stumble through your mistakes, strong people become stronger when they see you behaving bravely.

  Not one of us can afford to set a poor example.

  The tendency to abolish the old principles and to treat them as something absurd, only worthy of the dust-bin, is a wrong one. I should like to think that you are following in the footprints set in the sands of time which your forebears have left to mark the way for you. I know it is easy to say that those footprints all led the same way, which was to nothing. But have we found a better path to follow?

  I doubt that very much.

  A gentleman’s word should still be his bond. He should not break faith. You should be able to trust him with your teaspoons and your wife at one and the same moment. The story that you have only one life to live, and why should not you enjoy it, is one which, I find, grates. It is possible to enjoy your life much more if you flaunt the banner of tradition and stick by the old rules.

  The ten commandments are still the finest set for the living of civilized life that you can find.

  And bound up in them you will meet all the old traditions.

  New ways come into being. It seems to me that in spite of the socialism which it preaches,
it is to-day a far more selfish world than ever it has been before. We are less tolerant of one another, although we make a great show of tolerance. We laugh at beauties and we exalt uglinesses, believing that we are being original.

  We preach freedom of the individual, but, all the same, when it comes to hard facts there is no such thing as freedom of the individual, when all our lives are bound up so much in one another.

  It is so ordained in this world that what you do, even though you try to do it only to affect yourself, is something which will affect everybody else in your vicinity. You cannot live alone. You cannot at the present moment do anything which does not affect the whole house. We live in a small seaside villa, and you are supposed to dwell in a corner of that villa, shut in by a little gate, and labelled nursery. But that little gate does not bar your way to the outside world really. Your freedom does not stay inside those four walls, it penetrates into my world. I am influenced by the fact that you are ill or well, a good boy or a bad boy. Even at this absurdly young age, you are affecting me by your behaviour.

  How much more will you affect people when you are older and have a wider sphere of action?

  You can preach liberty and freedom of the individual as widely as you like, but they are empty words. And I submit that it would not be a very happy world which could give that liberty. We have a duty to one another, a duty that it is pleasant to fulfil.

  In life the shouldering of responsibilities, and the right behaviour towards those responsibilities, only result in a contented individual. When you begin to shirk a duty, then you admit unhappiness.

  I do not think that the present world is a good one, and I think quite a lot could be done to improve its conditions, but the uprooting of traditions is not one of the things which will help it.

  You will be brought up along the scheduled lines, of the prep school, and the public school, and the University. You will start in life as an ordinary young man, and you will have formed your own opinions about the worth of education.