Free Unclouded Summer by Alec Waugh Page A

he’s happy. Then I was born. And Daddy so much preferred coming home and reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to sitting at the office over files. He’d been passed in the race before he realized that there was a race for him to enter.”
    â€œAnd then?”
    She shrugged again. “I should say that he had a very happy life. He had no idea that such a thing as the big world existed. He didn’t know that he’d missed anything. He was absorbed in my mother and in me. He loved watching my mind grow. He’d take me to plays; he’d read me poems and see how I’d react to them. I owe everything to Daddy.”
    Her voice softened and grew deeper: approximating to the tone that had come into it when she had talked at lunch of Lillian Russell and Aleck Moore. He noticed that while she spoke of “my mother” she called her father “Daddy.”
    â€œAre they both still alive?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “My mother died at the end of the war, during the flu epidemic.”
    â€œAnd what about your father? “
    â€œRetired. He’s got a cottage on the estate. He’s very happy there with his books and bulbs. He was never at home in London. He never knew what it was all about.”
    â€œHe must be very proud of you.”
    She laughed. “He thinks I’m so remarkable that there doesn’t seem to him to be anything extraordinary in my being where I am. He hasn’t the faintest idea that the betting against my landing here was ten thousand to one at least.”
    â€œAnd how did you land here?”
    â€œThat’s just what we’re coming to this minute.”
    She flicked over quickly seven or eight pages, then tapped her finger on a postcard showing a view of an urban pond, presumably on the summit of a hill with a flagstaff in the background. The pond was some eighty yards long and forty yards across. Dogs were barking round its edge, boys were sailing boats on it. On the pavement circling it a number of women with broad hats, padded shoulders, trim waists, coats cut long and almost to their knees and wide skirts sweeping the ground were walking in couples or beside male escorts with high stiff collars and low-crowned straw hats. More horsedrawn carriages than motor cars were on the street. “I bet you won’t know where that is,” she said.
    â€œIt might be a hundred places.”
    She smiled. “I suppose it might: nowadays at least. But before the last war, on Sunday mornings, when all the political malcontents came up there to air their grievances, Hyde Park wasn’t in it with the Whitestone Pond. It’s on the top of Hampstead. That’s Jack Straw’s Castle on the right. Dickens said you could get a red hot steak there. It’s there that Daddy used to bring me after church. We’d go to Christ Church, then walk up the hill. I’d get so impatient if the sermon was overlong. It was there that my life really started. But I suppose that you wouldn’t have the least idea who that was.”
    She had turned the page and was pointing to a photograph cut from a magazine of a young woman in the early twenties with dark eyes and a full mouth and thick dark hair; across her blouse was a broad sash bearing the words “Votes for Women.”
    â€œThat’s Sylvia Pankhurst. If you could have seen how her eyes shone, how her voice glowed when she was roused.”
    Into Judy’s voice too had come a glow, fond and reminiscent and valedictory. Behind them on the stonework of the verandah, came the soft pad of a rubber sandal. There was a smile on Sir Henry’s face as he leaned over the back of the seat.
    â€œAh, that album again, and Sylvia. I lunched at the Asquiths’ in the autumn of ‘13, just before going to the Balkans. I remember the P.M. saying that there was one person in the world that he really wanted out of it, no it wasn’t the German Emperor or Carson