Free Time of Hope by C. P. Snow

course, a pension. The headmaster strongly advised me to take it. He had himself begun as an elementary schoolteacher in the town, had acquired a Dublin degree, and when our school had been promoted to secondary status he had had his one great piece of luck. He was a full-blooded and virile man, but he was hardened to his pupils having to scrape their way.
    I thanked him, and took the job. There seemed nothing else to do.
    When I told my mother her face on the instant was open with disappointment.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. Then she added, trying to make her voice come full and unconcerned: ‘Well, dear, it’s better than nothing.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ I said.
    ‘It’s better than nothing,’ said my mother. She was recovering herself. It was only another of her many disappointments. They had taught her to be stoical. And she still kept, which was part of her stoicism, her unquenched appetite for the future; for an appetite for the future was, with her, another name for hope.
    She inquired about the job, the work, where it would lead. She liked the phrase ‘local government’; she would use that to the doctor and the vicar, for it took the edge off the comedown, it made my doings seem much grander.
    ‘How do you feel about it, dear?’ she asked, after she had been imagining how I could turn it all to profit.
    ‘It’s better than nothing.’ With a sarcastic flick, I returned her phrase.
    ‘You know I only want the best for you,’ she said.
    ‘Of course I know.’
    ‘We can’t have everything. I haven’t had everything I should like, have I? You’ll manage as well as you can, won’t you?’
    ‘Of course.’
    She looked at me with trouble in her eyes, with guilt and with reproach.
    ‘There’s still time if you can see anything else to do, dear. Please to tell me. Please – if there’s any mortal person I can talk to for you–’
    ‘It’s all right, Mother,’ I said, and let it stop at that.
    My feelings were mixed. I was, in part, relieved and glad, absurd though it seemed only a few months later; but I was glad to be earning a living, and to know that next week I should have a little money in my pocket. I was nearly sixteen, it was irksome to be so often without a shilling, and that trivial relief lightened me more than I could believe.
    I disliked the sound of the job – I felt it was nothing like good enough. Yet I was interested, just as I was in any new prospect or change. I had spasms of rancour that I had been so helpless. If I had known more, if I had moved among different people, I could have looked after myself and this would never have happened. But that rancour was not going to cripple me. I was not a good son to my mother, but I was very much her son: I had the same surgent hope. Other disasters might wound me beyond repair, but not anything like this, not anything outside myself that I could learn to master, I knew, with the certainty that comes when one is in touch with a deep part of one’s nature, that this setback was not going to matter much. My hope was like my mother’s, but more stubborn and untiring. I believed I could find a way out.

 
     
7:   The Effect of a Feud
     
    Aunt Milly was violently opposed to my ‘white-collar job’. ‘That’s all it is,’ said Aunt Milly in her loudest voice to my mother. ‘He’s just going off to be a wretched little clerk in a white-collar job. I never did believe all that people told me about your son, but he seems to have more brains than some of them. Now he’s content to go off to the first white-collar job he sees. Don’t complain to me when he finds himself in the same office when he’s forty. No wonder they say that the present generation hasn’t got a scrap of enterprise.’
    My mother recounted the scene, and her own dignified retort, with the humorous haughty expression that she wore when she had been most upset. For, particularly as the months went on, and I had been catching the eight-forty tram for a year, for a year and a