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

by Ursula Bloom

  Probably a career is a finer mecca, or a more reliable mecca, than marriage. In the one you are relying on your own initiative, and in the other there are a great many outside forces which may go against you. Your life’s work depends a great deal on what you put into it. Its response is in relation to how much of yourself you give to it. The dividends that it pays out are usually fair ones. Marriage is not so steadfast, particularly nowadays. Marriage has a trick of going back on you, through no fault of your own, but just pure bad luck, and for that reason I hesitate to offer the advice that I would otherwise give you.

  But the career is a one-man job. It is something which you start and finish entirely by yourself, and for that reason it rests entirely on your shoulders, and any success or failure that you make of it is your own responsibility.

  Weigh the pros and cons properly before you start. Go into the details, instead of rushing off at a tangent with the main outline. You cannot be too careful in considering it from all points from the very word go.

  Be brave enough to take chances when they come. Opportunity is always worth grabbing on to and holding hard. I have only regretted the chances which I have allowed to slip by me because I had not the courage to put out a hand and snatch at them; a great many of us feel this way.

  Here is a quotation which I want you to underline, and to keep with you always, because it is something that has helped me so enormously in my life. Rabelais wrote it.

  Opportunity has all her hair on her forehead; but when she has passed you cannot hold her back. She has no tuft whereby you can lay hold on her, for she is bald on the back part of her head and never returns.

  Remember that. She never returns. There is something for you to think about. Hang on to the hair on her brow, and hang hard. When you see her coming round the corner, don’t delay, but put out a hand and catch on to that front hair of hers and pray for the best.

  Youth and inexperience, and that wild, sweet enthusiasm which is the property of the very young, will carry you far. While you have got these attributes, make the most of them, I beg you, for they are not enduring qualities, and fade too soon.

  Age is always afraid. Youth is always courageous. Because youth can bullock its way through, people are scared of it and do not stand up to it. Go on. Bullock your way through! Dare to be brave, and life will be so amazed that it will reward you.

  I want so much for you; I suppose all mothers feel this way, and yearn about their young and weave dreams for them; but I have woven such brave wild dreams for you. It will be quite dreadful if they don’t come true.

  As always,

  Ursula.

  WILD OATS

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  January 1919.

  MY DEAR BOY,

  Are wild oats worth it? I daresay the day will come when you ask yourself this question, and have nobody to guide you save the older and more cautious members of the community, who will shriek ‘No, no, no’, and the wilder and wholly unreliable members, who will shriek ‘Yes, yes, yes’, every time.

  There is a great deal of fun to be got from the sowing of wild oats, and if you miss them out altogether, you will feel for ever afterwards that there is something which you never had and which you ought to have had, which means that you go through life with a sense of disappointment.

  We have all of us sowed wild some oats, but in my life I kept on the border line: I did not sow tares, which makes a difference. Tares are never worth while, for there comes a day when the brutes spring through the earth and show a harvest. They crop up brightly and boldly, and, try as you will, you cannot mow them down again.

  But there are rules and regulations whereby you should abide, when you come to the sowing of this harvest. The wild oats which make other people miserable are unfair. As I have said before, be as miserable as you like yourself, but don’t ever do it for anybody else.

  What you reap for yourself is your own funeral.

  In this world there is an old tag, which sounds stupid and rather Lyceum, but at the same time has too much truth attached to it to be despised. It deals with the question that the woman always pays. Because you are a young man and rather a gay one, people will say brightly, ‘Oh, what a sporting fellow he is!’ But if a girl goes the same way, then they call her something very different. Once a girl gets that sort of name for herself, it is good-bye to the best things in life. Please do not be responsible for that sort of thing.

  You can have a great deal of fun without distressing people. It is quite possible to have all the best fun that there is, without old man Life handing you the bill with a nasty look in his eye.

  Take some wild oats.

  They are yours for the taking, and I feel that everybody needs a few before they settle down. If you miss them in the late teens and early twenties, ten to one when you marry you will feel that life has cheated you. Then you may turn back to sow them. If wild oats are a poor thing before marriage, they are horrible after it.

  But it is not easy to go in for this sort of thing carefully. You have got to be clever to know when you have had enough. To leave off when the fun is at its height. To know when to get out. The trouble is that when you are involved with a set of friends, or in an affair with a girl, or on the crest of any wave, you become particularly blind. Your sense of perspective is so dimmed that you have little idea of what is going to happen to you.

  Sitting by the seashore, it is easy to see by the lights where the deep water lies; but when you are swimming about in the sea it is quite a different matter. That is the whole point about the gay affairs of youth, and the sowing of wild oats.

  You will think that you are being brave and exciting, and that you are showing all sorts of signs of good sportsmanship, which of course you are not. Going gay is merely the expenditure of a youthful exuberance, which must be got rid of, before the more serious matter of living life comes along.

  Don’t I sound stodgy? But it’s true.

  When one of your somewhat disreputable party is found at 5 a.m. cooling his heated brow against a stone step, he will be pronounced by your little band as being one of the sportiest of you all. But he isn’t. He has only done what anybody can do if they but try. I could do exactly the same thing within the next half-hour, and very easily, because anything goes to my head. The most really sporting of you all was the man who knew when he had had enough, and who had the courage to say so at the risk of being called a funk. He did what only one in a thousand can do.

  It is not so hard to win a V.C. as to run the gauntlet of your friends’ opinions. The hardest job in the world is always the duty lying next to you.

  Re-reading this, I feel that I have not expressed myself very well, but what I mean to say is that the duty immediately next to you always assumes giant proportions. Don’t let it scare you. If you can learn to-day for to-day, the minute for the minute, then you will be a very fine man.

  If we all lived this moment as though it were our last, what a nation we should be! You are responsible for this moment only in time. One day you may have to account for it. Are you quite sure that you are giving it all your attention?

  Now I have strayed from the point again, and the point was that wild oats were worth while. The world is built up of stumbling-blocks, which even experience cannot avoid. Be gay, be adventurous, but never let your gaiety and adventures harm somebody else.

  And you may find this extraordinarily limiting, because you must take example into consideration, which is always a brake on one’s activities.

  As always,

  Mother.

  PAYING THE PENALTY

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  December 1920.

  MY DEAR SON,

  I have been thinking a lot about your future lately, and I realize that there are a great many very intimate, very near-to-you matters on which I have not written yet, and, although I do not want to tackle them, I ought to set to work and face up to them. If you have a child, you cannot shirk duty because it becomes uncomfortable. Surely I ought to
realize this?

  You will gather your rose-buds where you may ‒ that is obvious. You will have affairs of the heart, or what you call affairs of the heart, which are far more likely to prove themselves afterwards to be merely affairs of the body. You will go sailing along in the blissful belief that although the other fellow has been caught out (his own fault, you will declare, because he went out with such an awful-looking woman. Anybody could see, etc. etc.), you are much too clever. Then one day you may suddenly find that your own humanity is frail, that you are weak, and that you have made a bad mistake.

  We never appreciate the weakness of our own humanity until we tempt it too far. We go about glowing and believing that we are very strong-minded, and could so easily pull up if we wanted to. And we are nothing of the sort really.

  I hate to tell you that Nature cheats us all most abominably, but it does. Nature has a charming little trick of thinking of its own end only, and that end is to produce the next generation. Nature inflames your senses. It makes you fall head over heels in love with the very girl who is most unsuitable ‒ not that Nature cares a couple of hoots about that. The idea is to egg you on. It eggs you on, so that you cannot stop yourself, and you are blind and deaf and dumb to all else save the one woman. Later, when Nature has achieved its own ends, it has not even got the sportsmanship to keep up the masque. It lets you see one another as you really are.

  And nothing is so dead as dead passion.

  If you did make a bad mistake, go off with the wrong woman and pay for it, you would never tell me. I know that. No man tells his mother, and she, of all the women in the world, can help him most.

  So I am now looking ahead to a day that I hope will never come, and I am giving you the advice for which I know you will never ask.

  If you have made a bad mistake, don’t enlarge upon it by getting cold feet and refusing to admit it. Go to a doctor and tell the truth. It is a poor fellow who confesses and keeps half of it back. Don’t blame the woman. Women are blamed a great deal too much in this world, and the man expects to get off free every time. If you will risk this sort of thing, then you must be prepared to shoulder the trouble if trouble there is.

  But go to the people who can help you. Don’t delay. Tell the truth, and people will respect you for it. Lie about it, and nobody thinks very much of you for it.

  Going wrong does not make you happy, you know. In this I am not preaching. I am speaking as a girl of your own age. For a little while the stolen love affair makes you feel radiantly happy, but it has an aftermath, and that is very bitter.

  The moment that you have any doubts that anything can be wrong with you, don’t be content to let them stay as doubts. Make them certainties one way or the other by going to a doctor. The thing to do is to put your back to the wall and fight facts. You may have made a failure of things, but for Heaven’s sake remember that a man can be a splendid failure.

  Quite frankly I do not think that promiscuousness is worth the fees it may exact from you. You find after a time that you hate yourself for it, that it leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth, and you know that there is something cheap about it. You may pay for it with your whole life. Is it worth while taking this risk, for something which is not worth it?

  Half the attraction is that you think you are being a bit of a devil, that you are doing something secret and putting a thrill into ordinary everyday life. The difficulty is that you may be putting too much thrill into your life when to-morrow comes. If you undertake having the fun, then you must be prepared to face up to the responsibilities of that fun.

  And they may not be so funny.

  It is very difficult when you first grow up, because you are swayed this way and that by waves of passion, by chafing against restrictions, and by the feeling which is one of Nature’s most loaded dice, that after all you are young, and strong, and vigorous, and old people are a lot of old fogeys who seem to delight in shackling you with silly conventions. They want to rob you of their fun.

  That is what you think.

  Nobody with a grain of sense wants to rob you of a farthing’s-worth of the fun that is due to you. Get that into your head. But older people have sometimes bought their experience hard, and have suffered badly, and have paid ten times more than it is worth (Nature is the prize cheat when it comes to prices), and they don’t want you to suffer the same way.

  They want to help you.

  If I am in the world, I doubt if you will find me a mealy-mouthed old idiot who is dead against your enjoying yourself. I may want to help you to all the fun that is going. Please trust me a little.

  But I shall not want to help you to pay the exorbitant bill for that fun which Nature may present.

  You will probably be distressed by all the emotions which come to young men: all the yearnings and curiosities, all the aching to know more of life, to taste of its sweetness, and the poor blind ignorance which refuses to realise that its very sweetness may turn bitter.

  Sex is over-rated. It is not the prize experience, and you will be very disappointed in it. Ladies of easy virtue will irritate you by their vulgarity, and although you may think that you are being a Hell of a fellow, the next day will bring a disillusion which is not a happy one.

  Never run away from your mistakes. Stand by them. Running away is only a bigger mistake. It is never worth while. Facing up to the trouble means that you will conquer it.

  You have got to remember that if this ever happens to you, you are responsible not only for yourself, but for the generations which will follow in your footsteps. It is only a cad who gives the unborn a rough deal. For that very reason, if for no other, you ought to go straight to the person who can give you proper advice. Don’t worry how much it hurts you to confess to the truth. It will hurt you, and other people, a great deal more if you try to withhold that truth. A doctor is used to sickness. He does not think very much about the ethical side of that sort of episode. It is something he comes in contact with every day or so of his life, and you will be only another of his cases. His job is to help, not to censure. He is there to be of real aid to you, and believe me, you will need aid.

  There are your children, and their children, and their children’s children, to be considered. The thing has stepped outside the boundary, and you have got to face the fact that innumerable other people may be involved.

  For that reason swallow your pride and remember that only the fool delays. By this time to-morrow, you will have had your interview, and know the worst.

  By this time to-morrow, if you do the right thing to-day, you will be feeling much better about it.

  Love is the finest emotion in the world. Passion is not quite the same thing. And you have been suffering from passion.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  IN LOVE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  January 1922.

  MY DEAR SON,

  So many young people wonder about this. Being in love is an emotion that novelists have done their damnedest by. They have eulogized, they have written reams, and poets have extolled it. There is the tendency to look upon it as an exquisite emotion which will one day dazzle into your life, and then to wonder if you really are in love, or if it is the counterfeit coin of infatuation.

  Love is difficult to define, because it splits into two brands: the spiritual and the physical. In men the physical takes a very dominant place, with the result that it is inclined to influence them more than one would be prepared to admit.

  As you grow older you will find yourself torn between the women who stir you deeply, and who arouse in you admiration and a general feeling of rather disturbing attraction, and the other women who wake in you a sense of affection and a desire to protect and guard them against the unkindnesses of a world never too noticeable for its tenderness.

  Beware of the first type, for these may give you the idea that you are in love, when you are nothing of the sort. You cannot sleep. You cannot eat. You are, you believe, standing on the threshold of a
grand passion, which may be the most exquisite emotion that life has to offer you. But this is merely a delusion. The too-bright emotion which carries all before it is so often infatuation; and this will not endure in the way in which love does. It is a flame burning too fiercely, and about it your emotion will flutter like a moth, and in the end it will only singe its wings and drop badly hurt.

  The spiritual emotion, which is the highest form of love, and lasting, is a tender affection. Something which does not start with a bounce, but which gradually develops. It is a friendship opening out like a flower into a lovely rose. It is self-sacrificing, never hasty. Physically it affects you very little.

  You are almost bound to pass through a series of affairs, some dangerous, some merely foolish, in which you fall in and out of love with alarming rapidity. These will all be experiences which will show you the way to the all-important experience later on.

  But do try to avoid giving too much of yourself in these affairs. You may be one of those people who long to love (most of us are hungry for what we believe to be the most glorious emotion in the world), and who stretch out their hands in a wild effort to be loved. Directly the first affair glitters across their horizon, there they are, all ready to flop into it and give abundantly of themselves.

  This giving of yourself in a great emotional outburst is a mistake. It is one that I have made in my life, and therefore I know how much it is liable to hurt you. People do not appreciate this whole-hearted gift. They don’t want it. I have flung myself far too generously into friendships and love affairs, believing that the other people could only reciprocate because I was so liberal in my feelings for them. Instead they were bored by me. I sated them. They preferred somebody who was more discreet.

  So I would warn you of this bog into which many of us fall, and out of which it is difficult and painful to extricate yourself.

  Now, when you fall in love, I do ask you to try to see things reasonably. When you start having affairs, don’t be ready to jump to conclusions, and do recognize the fact that it is highly likely that you are out to make rather a fool of yourself, and that there will be lots of women in your life before the star of stars rises.