A Little, Aloud

by Angela Macmillan

  He half-expected that this would be shock enough, and that Eppie would begin to cry. But instead of that, she began to shake herself on his knee, as if the proposition opened a pleasing novelty. Seeing that he must proceed to extremities, he put her into the coal-hole, and held the door closed, with a trembling sense that he was using a strong measure. For a moment there was silence, but then came a little cry, ‘Opy, opy!’ and Silas let her out again, saying, ‘Now Eppie ’ull never be naughty again, else she must go in the coal-hole – a black naughty place.’

  The weaving must stand still a long while this morning, for now Eppie must be washed, and have clean clothes on; but it was to be hoped that this punishment would have a lasting effect, and save time in future – though, perhaps, it would have been better if Eppie had cried more.

  In half an hour she was clean again, and Silas having turned his back to see what he could do with the linen band, threw it down again, with the reflection that Eppie would be good without fastening for the rest of the morning. He turned round again, and was going to place her in her little chair near the loom, when she peeped out at him with black face and hands again, and said, ‘Eppie in de toal-hole!’

  This total failure of the coal-hole discipline shook Silas’s belief in the efficacy of punishment. ‘She’d take it all for fun,’ he observed to Dolly, ‘if I didn’t hurt her, and that I can’t do, Mrs Winthrop. If she makes me a bit o’ trouble, I can bear it. And she’s got no tricks but what she’ll grow out of.’

  ‘Well, that’s partly true, Master Marner,’ said Dolly, sympathetically; ‘and if you can’t bring your mind to frighten her off touching things, you must do what you can to keep ’em out of her way. That’s what I do wi’ the pups as the lads are allays a-rearing.’

  So Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds being borne vicariously by father Silas. The stone hut was made a soft nest for her, lined with downy patience: and also in the world that lay beyond the stone hut she knew nothing of frowns and denials.

  Notwithstanding the difficulty of carrying her and his yarn or lined at the same time, Silas took her with him in most of his journeys to the farmhouses. Everywhere he must sit a little and talk about the child, and words of interest were always ready for him. No child was afraid of approaching Silas when Eppie was near him: there was no repulsion around him now, either for young or old; for the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world.

  Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie: she must have everything that was a good in Raveloe; and he listened docilely, that he might come to understand better what this life was, from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof as from a strange thing, with which he could have no communion. The disposition to hoard had been utterly crushed at the very first by the loss of his long-stored gold. And now something had come to replace his hoard which gave a growing purpose to the earnings, drawing his hope and joy continually onward beyond the money.

  In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

  A PARENTAL ODE TO MY SON AGED 3 YEARS AND 5 MONTHS

  Thomas Hood

  Thou happy, happy elf!

  (But stop, – first let me kiss away that tear) –

  Thou tiny image of myself!

  (My love, he’s poking peas into his ear!)

  Thou merry, laughing sprite!

  With spirits feather-light,

  Untouched by sorrow, and unsoiled by sin –

  (Good Heavens! the child is swallowing a pin!)

  Thou little tricksy Puck!

  With antic toys so funnily bestuck,

  Light as the singing bird that wings the air –

  (The door! the door! he’ll tumble down the stair!)

  Thou darling of thy sire!

  (Why, Jane, he’ll set his pinafore a-fire!)

  Thou imp of mirth and joy!

  In Love’s dear chain, so strong and bright a link,

  Thou idol of thy parents – (Drat the boy!

  There goes my ink!)

  Thou cherub – but of earth;

  Fit playfellow for Fays, by moonlight pale,

  In harmless sport and mirth,

  (That dog will bite him if he pulls its tail!)

  Thou human humming-bee, extracting honey

  From every blossom in the world that blows,

  Singing in Youth’s Elysium ever sunny,

  (Another tumble! – that’s his precious nose!)

  Thy father’s pride and hope!

  (He’ll break the mirror with that skipping-rope!)

  With pure heart newly stamped from Nature’s mint –

  (Where did he learn that squint!)

  Thou young domestic dove!

  (He’ll have that jug off with another shove!)

  Dear nurseling of the Hymeneal nest!

  (Are those torn clothes his best?)

  Little epitome of man!

  (He’ll climb upon the table, that’s his plan!)

  Touch’d with the beauteous tints of dawning life –

  (He’s got a knife!)

  Thou enviable being!

  No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing,

  Play on, play on,

  My elfin John!

  Toss the light ball – bestride the stick –

  (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!)

  With fancies, buoyant as the thistle-down,

  Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk,

  With many a lamb-like frisk,

  (He’s got the scissors, snipping at your gown!)

  Thou pretty opening rose!

  (Go to your mother, child, and wipe your nose!)

  Balmy and breathing music like the South,

  (He really brings my heart into my mouth!)

  Fresh as the morn, and brilliant as its star –

  (I wish that window had an iron bar!)

  Bold as the hawk, yet gentle as the dove, –

  (I’ll tell you what, my love,

  I cannot write, unless he’s sent above!)

  READING NOTES

  After reading Chapter 12 in which the baby comes to Silas Marner, the young mothers group badly wanted to know if they stayed together. They wanted to read on and find out. They enjoyed the descriptions of Silas’s cluelessness about babies – ‘Just like my partner’ said one. There was much amicable disagreement about whether it is necessary to smack children. Then one mum told how terrifying it had been when she had once lost her toddler on a busy beach. They discussed modern forms of discipline and enjoyed remembering being put in the corner or made to sit on the naughty chair at infant school. Some time was spent on the meaning of the final paragraph.

  The poem could almost be about Eppie, even down to the scissors. Everyone told of ways their children got into mischief and someone commented that she found it oddly comforting to think that years ago, parents had the same sort of trouble with naughty children as she experienced with hers today.

  Shame On Me

  THE SNOB

  Morley Callaghan

  (approximate reading time 12 minutes)

  It was at the book counter in the department store that John Harcourt, the student, caught a glimpse of his father. At first he could not be sure in the crowd that pushed along the aisle, but there was something about the colour of the back of the elderly man’s neck, something about the faded felt hat, that he knew very well. Harcourt was standing with the girl he loved, buying a book for her. All afternoon he had been talking to her, eagerly, but with an anxious diffidence, as if there still remained in him an innocent wonder that she should be delighted to be with him. From underneath her wide-brimmed straw hat, her face, so fair and beautifully stron
g with its expression of cool independence, kept turning up to him and sometimes smiled at what he said. That was the way they always talked, never daring to show much full, strong feeling. Harcourt had just bought the book, and had reached into his pocket for the money with a free, ready gesture to make it appear that he was accustomed to buying books for young ladies, when the white-haired man in the faded felt hat, at the other end of the counter, turned half toward him, and Harcourt knew he was standing only a few feet away from his father.

  The young man’s easy words trailed away and his voice became little more than a whisper, as if he were afraid that everyone in the store might recognize it. There was rising in him a dreadful uneasiness; something very precious that he wanted to hold seemed close to destruction. His father, standing at the end of the bargain counter, was planted squarely on his two feet, turning a book over thoughtfully in his hands. Then he took out his glasses from an old, worn leather case and adjusted them on the end of his nose, looking down over them at the book. His coat was thrown open, two buttons on his vest were undone, his gray hair was too long, and in his rather shabby clothes he looked very much like a workingman, a carpenter perhaps. Such resentment rose in young Harcourt that he wanted to cry out bitterly, ‘Why does he dress as if he never owned a decent suit in his life? He doesn’t care what the whole world thinks of him. He never did. I’ve told him a hundred times he ought to wear his good clothes when he goes out. Mother’s told him the same thing. He just laughs. And now Grace may see him. Grace will meet him.’

  So young Harcourt stood still, with his head down, feeling that something very painful was impending. Once he looked anxiously at Grace, who had turned to the bargain counter. Among those people drifting aimlessly by with hot red faces, getting in each other’s way, using their elbows but keeping their faces detached and wooden, she looked tall and splendidly alone. She was so sure of herself, her relation to the people in the aisles, the clerks behind the counter, the books on the shelves, and everything around her. Still keeping his head down and moving close, he whispered uneasily, ‘Let’s go and have tea somewhere, Grace.’

  ‘In a minute, dear,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go now.’

  ‘In just a minute, dear,’ she repeated absently.

  ‘There’s not a breath of air in here. Let’s go now.’

  ‘What makes you so impatient?’

  ‘There’s nothing but old books on that counter.’

  ‘There may be something here I’ve wanted all my life,’ she said, smiling at him brightly and not noticing the uneasiness in his face.

  So Harcourt had to move slowly behind her, getting closer to his father all the time. He could feel the space that separated them narrowing. Once he looked up with a vague, side-long glance. But his father, red-faced and happy, was still reading the book, only now there was a meditative expression on his face, as if something in the book had stirred him and he intended to stay there reading for some time.

  Old Harcourt had lots of time to amuse himself, because he was on a pension after working hard all his life. He had sent John to the university and he was eager to have him distinguish himself. Every night when John came home, whether it was early or late, he used to go into his father’s and mother’s bedroom and turn on the light and talk to them about the interesting things that had happened to him during the day. They listened and shared this new world with him. They both sat up in their night-clothes and, while his mother asked all the questions, his father listened attentively with his head cocked on one side and a smile or a frown on his face. The memory of all this was in John now, and there was also a desperate longing and a pain within him growing harder to bear as he glanced fearfully at his father, but he thought stubbornly, ‘I can’t introduce him. It’ll be easier for everybody if he doesn’t see us. I’m not ashamed. But it will be easier. It’ll be more sensible. It’ll only embarrass him to see Grace.’ By this time he knew he was ashamed, but he felt that his shame was justified, for Grace’s father had the smooth, confident manner of a man who had lived all his life among people who were rich and sure of themselves. Often when he had been in Grace’s home talking politely to her mother, John had kept on thinking of the plainness of his own home and of his parents’ laughing, good-natured untidiness, and he resolved desperately that he must make Grace’s people admire him.

  He looked up cautiously, for they were about eight feet away from his father, but at that moment his father, too, looked up and John’s glance shifted swiftly far over the aisle, over the counters, seeing nothing. As his father’s blue, calm eyes stared steadily over the glasses, there was an instant when their glances might have met. Neither one could have been certain, yet John, as he turned away and began to talk to Grace hurriedly, knew surely that his father had seen him. He knew it by the steady calmness in his father’s blue eyes. John’s shame grew, and then humiliation sickened him as he waited and did nothing.

  His father turned away, going down the aisle, walking erectly in his shabby clothes, his shoulders very straight, never once looking back. His father would walk slowly along the street, he knew, with that meditative expression deepening and becoming grave.

  Young Harcourt stood beside Grace, brushing against her soft shoulder, and made faintly aware again of the delicate scent she used. There, so close beside him, she was holding within her everything he wanted to reach out for, only now he felt a sharp hostility that made him sullen and silent.

  ‘You were right, John,’ she was drawling in her soft voice. ‘It does get unbearable in here on a hot day. Do let’s go now. Have you ever noticed that department stores after a time can make you really hate people?’ But she smiled when she spoke, so he might see that she really hated no one.

  ‘You don’t like people, do you?’ he said sharply.

  ‘People? What people? What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ he went on irritably, ‘you don’t like the kind of people you bump into here, for example.’

  ‘Not especially. Who does? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Anybody could see you don’t,’ he said recklessly, full of a savage eagerness to hurt her. ‘I say you don’t like simple, honest people, the kind of people you meet all over the city.’ He blurted the words out as if he wanted to shake her, but he was longing to say, ‘You wouldn’t like my family. Why couldn’t I take you home to have dinner with them? You’d turn up your nose at them, because they’ve no pretensions. As soon as my father saw you, he knew you wouldn’t want to meet him. I could tell by the way he turned.’

  His father was on his way home now, he knew, and that evening at dinner they would meet. His mother and sister would talk rapidly, but his father would say nothing to him, or to anyone. There would only be Harcourt’s memory of the level look in the blue eyes, and the knowledge of his father’s pain as he walked away.

  Grace watched John’s gloomy face as they walked through the store, and she knew he was nursing some private rage, and so her own resentment and exasperation kept growing, and she said crisply, ‘You’re entitled to your moods on a hot afternoon, I suppose, but if I feel I don’t like it here, then I don’t like it. You wanted to go yourself. Who likes to spend very much time in a department store on a hot afternoon? I begin to hate every stupid person that bangs into me, everybody near me. What does that make me?’

  ‘It makes you a snob.’

  ‘So I’m a snob now?’ she said angrily.

  ‘Certainly you’re a snob,’ he said. They were at the door and going out to the street. As they walked in the sunlight, in the crowd moving slowly down the street, he was groping for words to describe the secret thoughts he had always had about her. ‘I’ve always known how you’d feel about people I like who didn’t fit into your private world,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a very stupid person,’ she said. Her face was flushed now, and it was hard for her to express her indignation, so she stared straight ahead as she walked along.

  They had never talked in this way, and n
ow they were both quickly eager to hurt each other. With a flow of words, she started to argue with him, then she checked herself and said calmly, ‘Listen, John, I imagine you’re tired of my company. There’s no sense in having tea together. I think I’d better leave you right here.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  She started to go, she had gone two paces, but he reached out desperately and held her arm, and he was frightened, and pleading. ‘Please don’t go, Grace.’

  All the anger and irritation had left him; there was just a desperate anxiety in his voice as he pleaded, ‘Please forgive me. I’ve no right to talk to you like that. I don’t know why I’m so rude or what’s the matter. I’m ridiculous. I’m very, very ridiculous. Please, you must forgive me. Don’t leave me.’

  He had never talked to her so brokenly, and his sincerity, the depth of his feeling, began to stir her. While she listened, feeling all the yearning in him, they seemed to have been brought closer together, by opposing each other, than ever before, and she began to feel almost shy. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter. I suppose we’re both irritable. It must be the weather,’ she said. ‘But I’m not angry, John.’

  He nodded his head miserably. He longed to tell her that he was sure she would have been charming to his father, but he had never felt so wretched in his life. He held her arm tight, as if he must hold it or what he wanted most in the world would slip away from him, yet he kept thinking, as he would ever think, of his father walking away quietly with his head never turning.

  ‘WHAT DOES YOUR FATHER DO?’

  Roger McGough

  At university, how that artful question embarrassed me.

  In the common-room, coffee cup balancing on cavalry twills

  Some bright spark (usually Sociology) would want an answer.

  Shame on me, as feigning lofty disinterest, I would hesitate.