FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38  
39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   >>   >|  
lboys of a similar age, with a view to comparing the sum of their knowledge with my own in those Putney days. And, curious though it seems, it does certainly appear to me that the comparison was never to the advantage of the modern boy; though I am assured he must enjoy the benefits of some kind of thought-out educational system. I certainly did not. These things partake of the nature of mysteries. I suppose the successive servant maids who chiefly controlled my early childhood must have been more ignorant than any member of their class in post-Board School days. Yet it seems beyond question clear to me that such beginnings of a mind as I possessed at the age of ten, such mental tendencies as I was beginning to show, were at all events more hopeful, more rational, better worth having, than those I have been able to discern in the twentieth-century London office boy, fresh from his palatial County Council School. I may be quite wrong, of course, but that is how it appears to me--despite all the uplifting influences of halfpenny newspapers, and picture theatres, and the forward march of democracy. Then there is that notable point, the question of speech; the vehicle of mental expression and thought transference. Between the ages of one year and nine years, society for me was confined almost exclusively to servant girls. From their lips it was that I acquired the faculty of speech. Yet I am certain that the boy who walked in Richmond Park with my father in the 'sixties spoke in his dialect, and not in that of Cockney nursemaids. Why was that? If my father ever corrected my speech it was upon very rare occasions. I remember them perfectly. They were not such corrections as would very materially affect a lad's accent or choice of words. Having read a good deal more than I had conversed, I was mentally familiar with certain words which I never had happened to have heard pronounced. One instance I recall. (It was toward the end of my Academy period.) I had occasion to read aloud some passage to my father, and it included the word 'inevitable,' which in my innocence I pronounced with the accent on the third syllable. Up went my father's eyebrows. 'Inev_it_able,' he mimicked, with playful scorn. And that was all. He offered no correction. I recall that I was covered in rosy confusion, and, guessing rightly, by some happy chance (or unconscious recollection) hit upon the conventional pronunciation, never to forget it. But,
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38  
39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
father
 

speech

 

thought

 
question
 

recall

 

servant

 
School
 

accent

 

pronounced

 
mental

choice

 

Having

 

materially

 
affect
 
corrected
 

Richmond

 

confined

 

sixties

 
walked
 

exclusively


acquired

 

faculty

 

dialect

 

Cockney

 

remember

 

occasions

 

perfectly

 

nursemaids

 

corrections

 

period


correction

 

covered

 
confusion
 

offered

 

mimicked

 
playful
 

guessing

 

rightly

 

conventional

 

pronunciation


forget

 

recollection

 
chance
 

unconscious

 

eyebrows

 
Academy
 

instance

 
mentally
 
familiar
 
happened