I ought to have made a better thing of life.

"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my

leg. They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only

began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,

if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest…

"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's

a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU

be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any

one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you

make one. Get education, get agood education. Fight your way to

the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no

good at digging and propertyminding. There isn't a neighbour in

Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I

are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those

blithering houses come to you-don't have 'em. Give them away!

Dynamite 'em-and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if

I can, Dick, butremember what I say."…

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,

yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,

with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and

flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of

Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon hehated

Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He had no illusions

about Bromstead orhimself. I have the clearest impression of him

in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of

his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and

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