I think now that my mother blamed my father for claiming me, even before my birth, for a military life. She said he and his beloved army were like creditors in a magic tale, in which the first-born child is the debt payable upon its coming-of-age.

I remember her entreating me to lie snug against her in her bed where we slept entwined through my youth until well after I was twelve. I remember my mother’s scent, her silk night-dress cool in summer against my skin. My friend George Warde’s mother did not ask him to sleep with her like that. I know this because one hot day as we took shade in his own little room, I said how nice it was that he had a room to himself.

“Do you not?” he asked me. I told him I slept with my mother in her bedroom, and he said, “In her bed?” and looked so surprised that I answered of course I had my own bed, though I did not.

Now I think what my mother feared most was not distance between us, nor did she fear time—but she dreaded the day I found my own purpose. The thing she resented, and of which she was most jealous, besides Eliza Lawson, was my warrior’s sense of purpose and the value—meagre though I know it to be—that king and country assign to an army man. I believe she thought that as long as she kept me close I would be purposeless, as she was:

My dear James,

I lash sweet peas to their trellis…the dogs have all got catarrhal fever and Ball has had to be put down, while my evenings are devoted to feeding Caesar and Romp with spoonfuls of milk and cod liver oil…

I know you won’t understand this, but I sit at the open window all day, as long as the rain falls, looking at my drenched currant bushes. The rain does all the cultivating work, quenching leaf and stem and giving ant and robin a little drink at the same time. The rain (and not myself) brings life to the garden and to the countryside beyond. As long as it falls, no one will discern my uselessness. If only it could keep on raining.

But it won’t. I dread being exposed, a dried-up husk of an insect, fit only to be blown into the street by the first warm wind.

Help me, son…

What son can fulfill such a claim on him? How can he answer it except by crossing an ocean as soon as he possibly can? What can he do with a letter like this: