A Song of Sixpence (40 page)

All this, of course, still lay in the future and meanwhile Mother and I were struggling along on shillings and pence. It is sad how little I then thought of her heroic self-sacrifice, and how often our relationship turned strained and difficult. As a student of comparative anatomy I was not now devotionally minded, while her religious fervour had become intense. On other matters too our ideas were in conflict and we had periods of estrangement when to me her withdrawn, tight-lipped silences had the semblance of martyrdom.

I am sure I was to blame. Yet amiability and good temper do not come easily when one is hungry, ill clad—for years I remained garbed in Shapiro's camouflaged effort—isolated by an obvious poverty, and worried to death by the constant threat of failure. Although in my first two terms the record shows that I took honours in botany and zoology, every succeeding examination loomed as a terror from the knowledge that if I did not pass I was finished. The lush state assistance of later years did not then exist for impoverished students and my bursary, barely adequate, could never have afforded me a second chance. I can still see myself with my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands poring over Quain's
Anatomy
while Mother went out just before the shops closed on Saturday night to bargain in the cheapest market for a miserable scrag of meat, or on her return suffered the insults of some brute who had called for our overdue rent.

But at last, slowly and wearily, like a storm-beaten ship staggering towards the shore, we came in sight of the promised land. I passed my final examinations, the graduation day arrived, and Pin came from Ardencaple to join my mother at the ceremony. As I pushed my way out of the Bute Hall to meet them at the Union where, to avoid the crowd, I had told them to wait, I drew a long, deep, triumphant breath, conscious of my new personality: strong, reliant, and successful, equal henceforth to any emergency. Now I knew that the ingenuous softness of my youth was gone. Never again would I permit myself to be imposed upon. Never, never would my heart get the better of my head. The Greek ideal of my boyhood had been achieved at last.

At that moment when I had almost reached the doorway, I felt a touch on my arm. Despite the grey hair, which aged her markedly, I knew her at once. Miss O'Riordan. She had seen my name amongst the list of successful candidates and had wanted to see me capped. When we had talked for some minutes—she would not come with me to the Union—she placed a small, religious-looking leather case in my reluctant palm. Impossible not to know what it contained.

‘I'm sure you've broken the one I gave you. Or lost it. So here's another. So you don't forget.'

After she had gone I glanced at the case with mixed sensations, mindful of my soulful performance at the Presbytery so long ago, and only too well aware that when I got home I would drop the beads in a drawer and never give them another thought. Suddenly, under the pressure of my fingers on the soft leather, I felt a faint crackle. I opened the case. Yes, the rosary was there. But Miss O'Riordan had tucked in beside it a neatly folded Bank of Scotland five-pound note.

Oblivious of the press around me, I stood there, quite motionless, so overcome by this opportune kindness which would enable me to get the few instruments I needed to apply for an assistantship, that slowly, inexorably, against all my efforts my throat tightened, my vision was blurred with moisture.

No, it was no use—I had not changed, and never would. There was a soft spot in my nature, a strain of weakness, a sensitivity that would never harden. All that I longed, and had striven, to be—cool and stoical detached and aloof, a true Spartan—was beyond me. Marked ineradicably by my singular childhood, by an upbringing in which too many women had participated, I was, and always would be, the victim of every sentient mood, the unwilling slave of my own emotions.

First published in 1964 by Heinemann

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Copyright © A. J. Cronin, 1964

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