So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it vaguely wicked—sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic—to keep later hours. Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals—boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog and jam roly-poly—with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was “good for you,” or “answered back.” In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from the start. He was always “going to” give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories, which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing anything with him.