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

by Ursula Bloom

  I hope not.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  LIVING LIFE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  September 1922.

  MY SON,

  I have just had a long talk with some friends, and they have come to the conclusion that the wicked always prosper and the good man comes a nasty cropper in life. They are very young friends. One day you may be feeling much the same, and I should hate to think that you came to this conclusion, and were embittered about the world you lived in and angry with it for not giving you a fair deal.

  Because I don’t think that the wicked prosper.

  I am convinced that you gain a tremendous comfort and a tremendous stimulation from the fact that you do the right thing under the right circumstances and that you are a sober, honest, sensible member of society. Conscience is something inside every one of us. You can say that a man has no conscience, but that is not true. He is born with one, and it goes on working until he dies; possibly after he dies it works at double speed, but one thing is certain, it is there.

  You may think that a man is quite deaf to the voice of conscience, but I am convinced that this is not so, because the voice goes on speaking all his life, and nothing in this world will silence it. If you go against it, you will never have inward peace.

  I sound awfully old and glum and gloomy, talking about inward peace, but it is something you cannot be happy without. If you persist in doing the wrong thing, you are going to be secretly agitated, and this is the mess that the wicked find themselves in.

  It is quite true that they thrive for a time. Outwardly they have made life all beer and skittles, but you cannot judge a man from outward appearances. Just as you cannot judge life by what happens here, when there is a hereafter which is going to occupy a great deal more of our time. Looking at this life, we are seeing but one side of a woven fabric; the other side may present an entirely different pattern. When you have seen both sides, then you can decide whether the wicked prosper.

  After all, your fellows also know if you are a good chap, or a bad. They search out your good points. I have known many wicked men who were living in enormous castles, keeping hordes of servants and having apparently the grand time of their lives. What have others said of them? ‘What a scoundrel old so-and-so is! I wouldn’t trust him to hold my umbrella for half a minute’.

  Your reputation goes before you. It is something that you yourself make, so don’t run away with the idea that you cannot help hearsay. Every day of your life adds bricks to your reputation, solid structure, or flimsy nonsense. It is for you to choose which it shall be.

  To suppose that to-day does not matter, or that this particular little trick which is going rather near to the knuckle will never count, is not wise. Things slip out. Rumour is a clever jade and she sets the echoes ringing.

  You cannot live life with impunity in this way, because it will come back on you. Putting it at its basest value, think a little of yourself.

  The standards of living have changed horribly since the war, and I am quite sure that although people are kinder in the main, they are far more unscrupulous. A lot of it is to do with the slang way of talking. This sounds as though I were narrow-minded, but you will see that it is not narrow-mindedness. You talk about a person stealing goods, and it sounds bare and crude and horrible. You talk about somebody having ‘a quiet pinch of this, that and the other’ and it becomes rather humorous. It is quite amusing. Yet they are one and the same thing.

  Anybody can lower standards into the dust and think it is rather funny; it takes real men and women to keep those standards flying bravely.

  You may think that you can do shady things with impunity and that you will not be caught. Youth always suffers from the belief that it is so clever that nobody can spot it, and quite often it comes in for a bad fall. People who have lived longer in the world must know a little more about that world. They realize the temptations and they know the mistakes that you will be likely to make. Give them credit for a little sense.

  If you want to be happy, choose the narrow path, because then and then only conscience will let you alone.

  Life isn’t amusing when your conscience gets at you. Take that from me.

  When I was a little girl I used to read an enlightening book called Agathos, or the Rocky Island. It is somewhere about the place still, and it would not do you much harm to read it. It is a collection of allegories, and what Agathos can tell you about conscience will make you amazed. The wicked prosper wildly in Agathos, for a time, but for a time only.

  You may laugh at all this, but if you study your newspaper reports, if you take the News of the World, you will see the wicked coming his purler every week of your life. You will say, ‘Yes, but I know of others who are going on grandly’. I daresay. Give them a rope long enough and they will hang themselves. Don’t run away with the belief that they are getting everything that they can from life, because they are not.

  The world is going to change quite a lot in the next twenty years or so, and it is going to be difficult to stay faithful to the ethics which are so easy to laugh at. But it is worth it every time.

  I am not sure that slang has not been to blame for quite a lot of the difficulties which have beset people. Slang words sound so preferable to the harsh, solid words of ordinary English. They mislead you.

  At some time in everybody’s life they come up against the debatable point of whether it is worth while to ‘play funny’, or to ‘go straight’. Playing funny is always the more attractive, and has far more to commend it on the face of things; but life is a serious business, and we may spoil too many chances, we may come too much of a cropper, if we take these risks.

  I am putting it from the lowest standpoint.

  I personally have always been an idealist, and therefore would prefer to go straight because I should feel happier about it. But you may not turn out to be an idealist, and those arguments therefore will not appeal to you.

  The old tag ‘If you want to be happy, be good’, has a lot to commend it. I’d print it in big letters and hang it over my bed if I were you.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  CHOOSING FRIENDS

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  October 1922.

  MY DEAR SON,

  A man is known by the company he keeps. Somebody once said that to me, when I was enjoying myself very much indeed with a party of mad young people of whom Mother would have disapproved very considerably, and I became furiously angry.

  Unfortunately it is true.

  More than that, a man behaves according to the company he keeps. Had you thought of that one?

  At the present moment you are a small boy of nearly five years old. You know several children of your own age. There are the vicar’s son and daughter, and the solicitor’s two children, and the doctor’s daughter. They are all children brought up to certain standards, and behaving according to certain criteria, and in their presence you are a normal little boy with pleasant manners, and with the usual ideas.

  But there is also Sandy. Sandy is the child of a local gardener, rather a rag-tag child, with the seat of his breeches torn, a sad need of a hairbrush, and oh, such ways!

  You are enchanted by Sandy, and with him you are an absolute little devil. Because Sandy is that sort of person. Sandy is a leader in society, he will always have a personality and he will always have the unpleasant knack of changing the personalities of the people whom he is with.

  I said to you yesterday, ‘We cannot have Sandy here, and you are not to play with him in the garden’.

  You said, ‘Why not?’

  I explained, because I could not think of anything better, that he wasn’t in our position in life. Instantly you rounded on me with the titanic argument, ‘Sandy cannot help being poor’, and I saw what you thought of me. Your eyes screamed ‘Snob’.

  But it isn’t snobbery.

  It is not because Sandy is the gardener’s child, it is because he is wha
t he is. There is a high art in choosing friends, because your friends do a great deal towards building up you yourself. They either raise you to their standards, or they drop you to their level. A man is known by the company he keeps, and it is true.

  I know in my own life that there are certain people I meet who make me a different person. There is Major Smith, who always brings out a devilish ragging instinct in me, so that I cannot talk two words of sense, and must fool all the time. It is all right for an afternoon, but I shiver to think what might happen, if fate threw me very often or for very long into his society. There is Mrs. Drew, who is highbrow, and who always brings out something in me which is quite different. I feel that with her I can accomplish much; I might almost be a successful writer if I saw more of Mrs. Drew.

  You will find in life that there are people who do this sort of thing to you: people who make you a different person; and that is the reason why you should choose friends carefully, and have an evenly-balanced selection to draw upon. Because they are building up the inner house of yourself.

  The friends who lead you astray may be very funny, but they are never very satisfying. The friends who make you high-brow may be too satisfying.

  And when I speak of friends, I think that I ought to qualify it. In life you will meet hundreds of acquaintances, but only perhaps one or two real friends. You will find yourself growing hungry for them. Man is a lonely soul, and there is the innate desire to draw on friendship to feed that hunger.

  Don’t strip your own soul to clothe your friends.

  We have all made this mistake some time or another. I make it again and again, I am always making it, for friendship is to me a very precious gift, it is something which I want to bestow generously, and in a big way, and so often the people on whom I pour it want only acquaintanceship.

  Then I get hurt.

  The whole tendency of the modern world is to fling aside any binding fetters whatsoever, and real friendship is one of the precious inheritances which it cannot do with. It has to go by the board with the rest. Everywhere there is much more of the acquaintance, and far less of the friend.

  It is a great pity.

  If you think that you can go through life, relying on the passing attentions of handfuls of acquaintances, you are making a big mistake, because every man needs the friend. David needed Jonathan.

  Friendship should grow up with you. It is quite likely that you and the vicar’s son will be undying friends to your life’s end, though, seeing the vicar’s son, now swinging on a bough of my best apple tree while you shriek disapproval, I hardly think that it is so likely! But I hope very much that you will make contacts at school and at college which will take you through into old age.

  Then we need the friends of our youth. My mother derived infinite joy through still knowing the girls she had gone to school with forty years before. They could discuss old times and old happinesses in a way which nobody else could. Don’t lose touch with people because letter-writing is a bother, and because anyway they will have forgotten you now. That is a poor argument, and does not hold water.

  The usual trend is to make a bad choice in friends, because bad friends are the more attractive. They assert themselves. The quiet friend keeps in the background and has the tendency to become overlooked, but the friend who is gay and bantering, the noisy, hail-fellow-well-met type of man, is one who pushes himself well to the fore, and you can’t miss seeing him.

  The wrong choice of friends pilots you into wrong channels, and it is tremendously important that if you feel a friend is harming you, if you are not happy in the contact, you should snap out of it straight away.

  There will be definite breaks in your life. School, standing on the threshold of so much. College days, again starting anew with infinite possibilities before you. Starting on your career, with a new world ready for you to grasp.

  Don’t spoil these chances by making the wrong sort of friends. It is so easy when you start a new life, when you are naturally a little lonely and shy, and when you are feeling your feet in no very certain fashion, to rush into the friendship which is hurriedly extended. Usually it is the wrong one.

  The good friends are the ones you are slow to make. The ones who come hurrying up, and are pleased to meet you from the word go, are too often other people’s discards, who have got to adopt this manner, if they are to know anybody at all. And all institutional life, school, college and the like, does judge a young man desperately by the ‘set’ he is mixing with.

  They damn you, not on your own qualities, or lack of qualities, but on the habits of your fellows. It doesn’t seem to be very fair, but it is life, and one of the difficulties against which it is just as well to protect yourself.

  Do choose the right friends, if you possibly can. Do not precipitate yourself into quite the wrong set because it happens to be the one which offers itself, and you take it in preference to nothing.

  Although that may seem to be the better way for the moment, it defeats its own object in the long run, because it cuts you off definitely from knowing the people who really matter and who are a little shy of coming forward at the outset.

  Make your own choice in your companions; do not let life thrust the choice upon you.

  That is the secret of the situation.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  LET’S GET DRUNK

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  November the sixth, 1922.

  MY SON,

  It is your birthday. You are five years old, and rather a grand fellow, and you have had a party which has been a success, I gather, as you wept from tiredness, as three friends fell down playing Musical Chairs, and a baby had to be taken away because she was given a white monkey, out of the fish-pond, and thought it was real, so had hysterics.

  The party is over.

  You are still a very little boy, in velvet knickers and silk shirt, but you are growing up, and there is the whole of life stretching out in a panorama before you.

  And the great question looms out of the distance. I see it facing me. What am I going to tell you about drink? How am I going to advise you?

  I don’t suppose you will listen to anybody’s advice, because that is the fault of youth. It tosses its head, goes its own way, and falls down repeatedly like the guests to-day playing Musical Chairs. One of them hurt herself badly. You may hurt yourself badly.

  It won’t be my fault, or your advisers’ fault, for, if advice is repudiated, then we can do no more. None so blind as he who won’t see.

  On this question of drink, like quite a lot of other young men, you have not got a fair start. There is bad blood behind you, and you cannot therefore take the risks that other people can dare with impunity. You may feel strong, and quite able to face up to those risks, but that won’t help you. The thing you are facing up to is stronger than you are. Don’t dare it.

  The question is whether you ought to be T.T. or not. Certainly you ought never to touch anything until you grow up, though I don’t suppose that is what you will think. At eighteen you will be putting down your pint along with the best of them. This drinking habit seems to vindicate a certain honour in colleges; it is a superstition, very much the right thing to do, and there is no breaking away from it.

  I shall deplore the fact if you do drink, because I know the danger, and have suffered so badly from it. The first time that I see you drunk, if I live to that day, I shall feel that is the end.

  But I do beg you to leave spirits out of the question. I would also beg you to remain on the water-wagon, and were I in your position, I don’t suppose I should ever touch drink in any shape or form. But men think so differently on these points.

  Personally I don’t believe that it is the actual drinking that tempts men; I don’t think that they have a bigger thirst than women, for the matter of that, but I feel that it is the spirit of bonne camaraderie which pursues them. I own there is a certain attraction about a cheery public-house, with its pint pots, its conversation, and the b
armaid and the darts-board and all the rest of it. It is something which does not exist in the lives of women, and I do think that men go into pubs more for the chatter and the friendship, than for the drink that they will get. Loneliness eggs them on.

  This is a very reasonable excuse.

  On the other hand, there are people who drink and drink seriously, because they know that once they have got a certain amount down, it will seem to be such a good world, it will offer so many more attractions, they will be no longer afraid of people, but will all be little heroes.

  This is dangerous drinking.

  There comes the time when the ordinary world, the sober world, becomes horrid by comparison. It becomes something not worth living in, and something which they refuse to tolerate. They hate it. They have to go on drinking to make it a better world. They have to go on drinking to make themselves stronger people. The drink has become a crutch which supports them, and they lean on it. They refuse to see that the crutch is made of flimsy material, and one of these days it will collapse beneath them, and let them crashing into the gutter.

  That, they maintain, may have happened to other people, but will never happen to them. They are too clever. They have the stamina to stop drinking when they want to. When you suggest to them that they should do so now, they laugh at you, and say they will in their own good time. There are interminable arguments that this sort of man trots out for you, and they are all equally rotten.

  Because he cannot stop when he wants to! In his heart he knows it. It would not be worth while stopping, he says, and by the time he has rotted his constitution, it isn’t worth while stopping.

  Drink has for all too long been associated with too many glamorous surroundings. There are delightful drinking-songs. The man who can take his whack is a ‘good sort’, a ‘great fellow’. The teetotaller too often is a weakling, and a weed. It is so much easier to ask another man in, and get ‘matey’ together over a pint pot, than to sit down to a glass of milk, or a nice cup of tea! One is laughable, the other is jolly. It is this subtle difference which, all along, has made drink such an insidious thing.