Free Unclouded Summer by Alec Waugh

fencing. “That looks like Hamlet.”
    â€œThat’s exactly what it is.”
    â€œIs that your brother?”
    â€œNo, it’s me.”
    â€œYou?”
    â€œI knew Hamlet by heart when I was six. I always took men’s roles at school.”
    â€œBut you aren’t in the least masculine.”
    â€œNo, but I liked bossing things. Look at me then.”
    â€œThen” was a picture taken several years later of a girls’ hockey team. Judy sat in the center, holding a hockey stick in one hand, in the other a silver cup. All the girls wore the same school uniform, pigtails, a tunic with a badge on the left hand side, black stockings and stout shoes.
    There were several school groups in succession, then there was a picture of a two-storied semi-detached house with a bow window, and a roughcast gable, standing back behind a privet hedge some ten yards from a main road. “That was my home. The next picture’s of it too.”
    The next picture was taken from the other side. It showed a narrow garden, a short strip of lawn flanked by flower beds and screened from the next door by a row of poplars.
    â€œAs you observe it was a very humble home,” she said.
    He smiled. “I wouldn’t know enough about English life to be able to tell that,” he said.
    â€œWouldn’t you? I suppose you wouldn’t. But that’s what it is: or rather that’s how I see it now. I didn’t think of it as humble then. I loved it. It was in Hampstead. It was the kind of house that in 1906 was occupied by a civil servant earning seven to eight hundred pounds a year.”
    â€œAnd that’s your father, is it?”
    A garden seat had been posed in the center of the lawn. In one corner of it was Judy. She must have been about eleven at the time. At the other end of the seat was a woman with a high whale-boned collar, and blouse that was ornate with frills. Her waist was very slim and a broad belt with a heavy clasp encircled it. Her hair was worn on the forefront of her forehead in a high puffed roll. Behind the chair was standing a tallish man, in a high-buttoned coat; he looked very stiff and formal in a tall turnover collar halfway down whose length was knotted a narrow thin-ended tie.
    â€œYes,” she said, “that’s Daddy. It’s a period piece all right.”
    He looked at it carefully. Her father’s clothes and the posing of the garden seat dated the picture far more than her mother’s high collar and tight lacing. One was used to seeing women’s clothes looking dated within two seasons. The photograph was only twenty years old, but it belonged to another world.
    â€œTell me about your father,” Francis said.
    She shrugged. “He was the younger son of a younger son. He belonged to what we used to call the gentry. His grandfather was a country squire in Devonshire. His father was a country parson. His uncle had the gift of the living, and gave it to his elder brother. My father was the brains of the family. He went to the local grammar school. There was very little money in the family, but he got a scholarship at Oxford. He got a first in mods. He passed into the Home Civil, if you know what that means. Everyone prophesied big things for him. I don’t know quite what went wrong. I daresay it was having to work in London; he was a countryman; he had no links with London; he had no influential friends; he was very lonely; he fell in love with the first girl he met, one of the junior secretaries in his department. It was a very happy marriage. But my mother came from a very ordinary small suburban family. She had no ambitions except to marry someone like her father. She considered that in marrying Daddy she had got further than she could have ever hoped to get. She adored him. She was immensely proud of him. But she had never heard of such a thing as a careerist. And it’s very easy for a man to cease to be ambitious, when