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Mrs Hamilton always had a sparkle and a smile in her eye. With her three sons she required no instruction on the need for discipline; looking back now I wonder how she preserved her sanity and her lively sense of the ridiculous. I think the cook and two housemaids used to keep her well informed of our wilder excursions. Otherwise I could not explain how she appeared on the roof just as we were about to test our essay in aeronautics.
We had built an aeroplane. The venture was surrounded by the utmost secrecy chiefly because unlike mine, Dudley's ideas about his mother had been developing in a quite different direction; he considered her to be losing her capacity for fun; in his view she was losing her nerve. Indeed her attitude to the cooking and eating of the sparrow lacked warmth. Furthermore, her appreciation of me, which was unmistakable, appeared to be based almost entirely on my least admirable qualities.
There was the incident of the rubber for catapults. Dudley and I had been given our pocket money – sixpence a week it was then – and both were stoney broke by the end of the day. Called upon to explain this circumstance Dudley pointed out that the catapult rubber had cost that amount. Mrs Hamilton said it was ridiculous to waste money in such a profligate manner, and added in an unfortunate moment, “I am sure Wilfred would never spend his money on anything so silly.”
“But he has!” whooped Dudley in unconcealed triumph.
Blushing hotly I had to admit that I was in fact just that kind of ass. Mrs Hamilton's revelation of her opinion of me served to formulate Dudley's suspicions that I was really ‘wet’ – as his mother and everyone knew – and that his mother likewise suffered from some kind of
kink that deflected her judgement in the direction of fundamentally ‘wet’ people. I had lost caste both ways.
Then there was the episode of the Toy Soldier War. We both had a small number of tin soldiers which we regarded as so idiotic that we did not consider them worthy of the