Time to Be in Earnest by P. D. James

But from time to time, perhaps to impress, perhaps to buy popularity, he would invite colleagues from the office to come and plunder, and they would move among the beanstalks and the peas happily filling their baskets while my mother watched with understandable resentment from the kitchen window.
    I can understand my father’s insecurity because, for most of my early life, I shared it. When I was a child I couldn’t settle to sleep until I had entered into my private world. My imaginings were always the same: I am in a low, large, single-storey building in the Bull Ring in Ludlow. It is composed of innumerable bedrooms, each containing an immense bed. There are hundreds of us sleeping there and in the middle of one of the beds I am anonymously huddled. Outside the building, guards parade, perpetually on watch. No one knows where I am and I couldn’t be safer. Thus protected securely, I am able to get to sleep. I can’t remember at what age I let go of this nightly ritual.
    After we moved from Ludlow to Cambridge, we ate as a family only occasionally on Sunday. We three children and my mother ate in the kitchen and my father had his lunch and dinner brought to him on a tray in the dining-room. I can remember Mother placing it down before him with an expression compounded of resentment and slight apprehension; being brought up in a boys’ boarding school was no training for a good cook. Even when she was in hospital and I took over the cooking, Father would still eat on his own. I now realize that, like me, he needed at least one period of absolute solitude during the day and perhaps this was his way of ensuring that he got it.
    My father was a great deal more affectionate to his grandchildren than to his children, as often happens, and when he was old and living alone in a small house at Southwold, I grew to admire the qualities he had always possessed: independence, courage and his own brand of sardonic humour. Unfortunately these are not the qualities which are most important to small children. But his own life wasn’t easy. He began work at fifteen, fought in the First World War as a sergeant in the Machine-gun Corps, and spent all his working life in a job which gave him small satisfaction. I like to think that his last years were happy. In his old age I began to realize how much I loved him. But then, I think I always had.
    We had dinner at the local restaurant and then went home to bed. Edward gave me a copy of an Australian publication about the history of the 215th Battalion in 1940–45 which made mention of our father’s youngest brother, Padre Jimmy James, who served with the Battalion and won the Military Cross for going unaccompanied in a jeep to the German lines to recover the bodies of dead comrades. He was, apparently, the only padre to receive the MC. I met him and his wife on one of my publicity visits to Australia and have an earlier memory of him when he came to London to march in the victory celebrations following the end of the war.
    Edward, now seventy-four, is almost blind in one eye and has impaired sight in the second. Apparently the near-blindness is due to deterioration which can’t be corrected, so that he has to face the certainty of blindness. He bears it all with his usual stoicism and now listens to audiotapes instead of reading. He is still able to garden and to see most of his shrubs.
    Returning this morning I was met at Victoria by Frances Fyfield, who took me in a taxi to Camden Passage, where we spent an agreeable half-hour trying on jewellery (but not buying) before having an excellent lunch at Frederick’s.

SUNDAY, 31ST AUGUST
    On Thursday to Southwold for a long weekend with Françoise Manvell. I first met Françoise when I was invited, and went to, Boston University for three months to teach the detective story or, as they say in the United States, the mystery. She is now a widow but was then married to Roger Manvell, who was teaching film at Boston. They were both kind and