“Oh, I used to be a great fisherman,” I told her.

She was vaguely against it, as usual, but didn’t have many ideas one way or the other, except that if I went fishing she wasn’t coming with me to watch me put those nasty squashy things on the hook. Then suddenly she got on to the fact that if I was to go fishing the set-out that I’d need, rod and reel and so forth, would cost round about a quid. The rod alone would cost ten bob. Instantly she flew into a temper. You haven’t seen old Hilda when there’s talk of wasting ten bob. She burst out at me:

“The idea of wasting all that money on a thing like that! Absurd! And how they dare charge ten shillings for one of those silly little fishing-rods! It’s disgraceful. And fancy you going fishing at your age! A great big grown-up man like you. Don’t be such a baby, George.”

Then the kids got on to it. Lorna sidled up to me and asked in that silly pert way she has, “Are you a baby, Daddy?” and little Billy, who at that time didn’t speak quite plain, announced to the world in general, “Farver’s a baby.” Then suddenly they were both dancing round me, rattling their sand-buckets and chanting:

“Far-ver’s a baby! Far-ver’s a baby!”

Unnatural little bastards!

SIX

AND BESIDES fishing there was reading.

I’ve exaggerated if I’ve given the impression that fishing was the only thing I cared about. Fishing certainly came first, but reading was a good second. I must have been either ten or eleven when I started reading—reading voluntarily, I mean. At that age it’s like discovering a new world. I’m a considerable reader even now, in fact there aren’t many weeks in which I don’t get through a couple of novels. I’m what you might call the typical Boots Library subscriber, I always fall for the best-seller of the moment (The Good Companions, Bengal Lancer, Hatter’s Castle—I fell for every one of them), and I’ve been a member of the Left Book Club for a year or more. And in 1918, when I was twenty-five, I had a sort of debauch of reading that made a certain difference to my outlook. But nothing is ever like those first years when you suddenly discover that you can open a penny weekly paper and plunge straight into thieves’ kitchens and Chinese opium dens and Polynesian islands and the forests of Brazil.

It was from when I was eleven to when I was about sixteen that I got my biggest kick out of reading. At first it was always the boys’ penny weeklies—little thin papers with vile print and an illustration in three colours on the cover—and a bit later it was books. Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Nikola, The Iron Pirate, Dracula, Raffles. And Nat Gould and Ranger Gull and a chap whose name I forget who wrote boxing stories almost as rapidly as Nat Gould wrote racing ones. I suppose if my parents had been a little better educated I’d have had “good” books shoved down my throat, Dickens and Thackeray and so forth, and in fact they did drive us through Quentin Durward at school and Uncle Ezekiel sometimes tried to incite me to read Ruskin and Carlyle. But there were practically no books in our house. Father had never read a book in his life, except the Bible and Smiles’s Self Help, and I didn’t of my own accord read a “good” book till much later. I’m not sorry it happened that way. I read the things I wanted to read, and I got more out of them than I ever got out of the stuff they taught me at school.