Good Behaviour

Yes, we'll have to put a stop to this bookworming. No future in that.

Certainty fell away from me as though a loved person dropped my hand in indifference.

Good behaviour’ at the start means keeping oneself upright and benign in the face of adversity. By the end it has become a byword for enacting cruelty and revenge on your nearest relatives, all, of course, with the utmost subtlety and discretion.

his mother and I aren’t too happy about Richard. Frankly, he’s getting a bit, er, well … first reading poetry when he ought to be getting his pony ready for the Bath and County next Thursday, then lying to his mother – took his beating in a very, well, cowardly way, then, am I right? howling on your, in your, in the schoolroom,’ the Captain finished desperately.

Now, shut up, old boy,’ the Captain said kindly, as he put down his leather-covered malacca stick.

Reading? Well, stop it. Come and dry the dogs with me … did

for a ring which Lady Grizel had lost – her engagement ring – star sapphire and diamonds.

When Lady Grizel gave Mrs Brock not one, but two grey flannel suits,

Another thing those kind nuns had done was to teach him to say ‘the toilet’ when he meant the po or the lavatory, which was a vulgarity no one seemed able to straighten out.

he lay on a chaise longue under the cedar tree with lemonade constantly at his elbow. In those

He picked poor Hubert out of his cot and took off his sleeping suit before he wrapped him up in a hot bath towel from the airing

During the months of that legendary summer weather, bathwater was too often the problem, for every house was dependent on its own wells, springs, or streams. In the country there was no main supply of water. This was not a problem to defeat people who looked on the bath before dinner as part of the structure of life. There existed, too, an austerity which forbade complaint. It went with loofahs and Brown Windsor soap and large natural sponges draining out the last of the soft water in netted holders hooked to the rim of the bath.

Dinnertime was a formal, nearly a sacred, hour – usually more like two hours. At half past seven they went upstairs to bathe and change into dinner jacket and teagown.

In the winter months he was shooting or hunting, and in the spring there was salmon fishing – all undertaken and excelled in more as a career and a duty than as the pleasures of a leisured life. In the summer months there was a horse, sometimes horses, to be got ready for the Dublin Show, often evening fishing, and always the supervision of haymaking and harvest with their attendant ghastly weather to worry him. So luncheon

Exhausted, bored, and disgusted by nannies, she engaged a governess who would begin my education and at the same time keep an eye on the nursery maid who was to be in charge of Hubert’s more menial four-year-old necessities.

The nursery maid is pouring paraffin on a sulky nursery fire.

When we were children the food in the nursery was quite poisonously disgusting. None of the fruit juice and vitamins of today for us – oranges only at Christmastime and porridge every morning, variable porridge slung together by the kitchen maid, followed by white bread and butter and Golden Syrup. Boiled eggs were for Sundays and sausages for birthdays.

Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about. It was his escape from the land agent

she did go to a race-meeting, in Papa’s riding days, she would shut her eyes during his race, and once when he was to ride a bad jumper she

A pity for herself that she was so withdrawn a character. Recluse would be a truer word to describe her.