Free Time of Hope by C. P. Snow Page A

half, she wondered painfully if we had made a mistake. She was a little better off, since I paid her ten shillings a week for my keep – but she could not see any sign of the dramatic transformation scene she had always longed for, always in her heart expected, as I came to manhood. She would have been content with the slightest tangible sign for her indomitable spirit to fasten on. If, for example, I had been working for a university scholarship, she would have foreseen fantastic, visible, miraculous success at the university, herself joining me there, all her expectations realized at a stroke. She did not mind how many years ahead the transformation scene took place, so long as there was just one real sign for her imagination to refresh itself upon. As she saw me go to the office, day following day, the months lengthening into a year, she could not find that one real sign.
    She had to come to earth now and again, if her excursions into the future were to keep her going. In her fashion, she was both shrewd and realistic, though with a minimum of encouragement she could draw wonderful pictures of how her life might yet be changed. She was too shrewd and realistic to derive any encouragement from my days at the office. She took to filling in more of her competition coupons. Her health became worse, and one heart attack made her spend a whole spring as an invalid, lying all day on a sofa. She stood it all, hope deferred, illness, pride once more wounded, with the fierce steady endurance that did not seem in any way affected by her own quivering nerves.
    I used to work through the long, tedious hours in a room which overlooked the tramlines. The trams ran past the office windows in Bowling Green Street; our room, three storeys up, looked down on the tram tops and the solicitors’ and insurance offices on the other side of the street. I shared the room with six other clerks and one more senior man, Mr Vesey, who was called a departmental head and paid two hundred and fifty pounds a year. The work was one long monotony for me, interspersed by Mr Vesey’s slowly growing enmity. He was in charge of the branch, which was part of the secondary school department; I made lists of the children from elementary schools who won ‘free places’, and passed the names on to the accountant’s room. I also made lists of pupils at each secondary school who left before taking the General Schools or Senior Oxford examinations. I compiled a good deal of miscellaneous statistical information of that kind, which Mr Vesey signed and sent up to the director. Our room did little but accumulate such facts, pass records of names to other departments, and occasionally draw up a chart. Very few decisions were ever taken there. The most onerous decision with which Mr Vesey was faced was whether to allow a child to leave school before the age of fifteen without paying a penalty of five pounds. He was allowed the responsibility of omitting the penalty; if he wished it imposed, the case had to go before the director.
    That suited Mr Vesey very well. He had no desire to take decisions, but an insatiable passion for attracting the notice of his superiors. When I first went into the office, I rather liked the look of him. He was a spruce, small man of about forty, who must have spent a large fraction of his income on clothes. His shirts were always spotless, he had a great variety of ties, all quiet and carefully selected. His eyes, which were full and exophthalmic, were magnified still further because of the convex lenses that he wore, so that one’s first impression, after seeing his trim suit, was of enormous and somewhat baffled and sorrowful eyes. He told me my duties in a manner that was friendly, if a little fussed, and I was young enough, and enough of a stranger, to be grateful for any kindness and not overcritical of its origin.
    It took me some time to realize that Mr Vesey spent fifty-nine minutes in the hour tormenting himself about his prospects