“How can you have continued to believe that?”

“Oh, you people who are so fortunately born, so well placed, so sure the policeman is your friend! Do you remember my home, Ramsay?”

“Very well.”

“An abode of love, was it?”

“Your mother loved you very much.”

“My mother was a madwoman. Why? Ramsay has very fine theories about her; he had a special touch with her. But to me she was a perpetual reproach because I knew that her madness was my fault. My father told me that she had gone mad at the time of my birth, and because of it. I was born in 1908, when all sorts of extraordinary things were still believed about childbirth, especially in places like Deptford. Those were the sunset days of the great legend of motherhood. When your mother bore you, she went down in her anguish to the very gates of Death, in order that you might have life. Nothing that you could do subsequently would work off your birth-debt to her. No degree of obedience, no unfailing love, could put the account straight. Your guilt toward her was a burden you carried all your life. Christ, I can hear Charlie now, standing on the stage of a thousand rotten little vaude houses, giving out that message in a tremulous voice, while the pianist played ‘In a Monastery Garden’—

M is for the million smiles she gave me;

O means only that she’s growing old;

T is for the times she prayed to save me;

H is for her heart, of purest gold;

E is every wrong that she forgave me;

R is right—and Right she’ll always be!

Put them all together, they spell MOTHER—

A word that means the world to me!

That was the accepted attitude toward mothers, at that time, in the world I belonged to. Well? Imagine what it was like to grow up with a mother who had to be tied up every morning before my father could go off to his work as an accountant at the planing-mill; he was a parson no longer because her disgrace had made it impossible for him to continue his ministry. What was her disgrace? Something that made my schoolmates shout ‘Hoor!’ when they passed our house. Something that made them call out filthy jokes about hoors when they saw me. So there you have it. A disgraced and ruined home, and for what reason? Because I was born into it. That was the reason.

“That wasn’t all. I said that when Willard used me he whimpered. Sometimes he spoke in his whimpering, and what he said then was, ‘You goddam little hoor!’ And when it was over, more than once he slapped me mercilessly around the head, saying, ‘Hoor! You’re nothing but a hoor!’ It wasn’t really condemnation; it seemed to be part of his fulfilment, his ecstasy. Don’t you understand? ‘Hoor’ was what my mother was, and what had brought our family down because of my birth. ‘Hoor’ was what I was. I was the filthiest thing alive. And I was Nobody. Now do you ask me why I didn’t complain to someone about ill usage? What rights had I? I hadn’t even a conception of what ‘rights’ were.”