ything except that it seemed very suitable, and that annoyed my mother.
I remember that she and I and Rosalind argued round and round it for an
hour one hot evening in the drawing-room at Queen's Gate. Finally my
mother said, 'Oh, very well. If Rosalind wants a lot of fat Yid babies
with hooked noses and oily hair, all lending money on usury instead of
getting into debt like Christians, let her have them. I wash my hands of
the lot of you. I don't know what I've done to deserve two Sheenies for
children.'

That made Rosalind giggle, and eased the acrimony of the discussion. My
mother was a little fair woman, sharp-tongued and quick-tempered, but
with a sense of fun.

My father had no sense of fun. I think it had been crushed out of him in
his cradle. He was a silent man (though he could, like all Jews, be
eloquent), with a thin face and melancholy dark eyes. I am supposed to
look like him, I believe. He, too, spoke to me that evening about
Rosalind's engagement. I remember how he walked up and down the
dining-room, with his hands behind him and his head bent forward, and his
quick, nervous, jerky movements.

'I don't like it, Arthur. I feel as if we had all climbed up out of a
very horrible pit into a place of safety and prosperity and honour, and
as if the child was preparing to leap down into the pit again. She
doesn't know what it's like to be a Jew. I do, and I've saved you both
from it, and you both seem bent on returning to the pit whence you were
digged. We're an outcast people, my dear; an outcast people....'

His black eyes were haunted by memories of old fears; the fears his
ancestors had had in them, listening behind frail locked doors for the
howl 'Down with the Jews!' The fears that had been branded by savages
into his own infant consciousness half a century ago; the fears seared
later into the soul of a boy by boyish savages at an English school; the
fears of the grown man, always hiding something, always pretending,
always afraid....

I discovered then--and this is why I am recording this family incident
here, why it connects with the rest of my life at this time--that
Potterism has, for one of its surest bases, fear. The other bases are
ignorance, vulgarity, mental laziness, sentimentality, and greed. The
ignorance which does not know facts; the vulgarity which cannot
appreciate values; the laziness which will not try to learn either of
these things; the sentimentality which, knowing neither, is sti