workThe lot of the housewife is one assiduously covered in the contempory Englishnovel. Yet often, in such accounts, ‘plot’ demands often mask the housewife’s actualwork situation and the blank patches are filled with action or profitable and read-able meditations. The writer of the article that follows does not have to encountersuch exigencies and presents the role of the housewife as it largely is, a ritualof tedium, subjugation, drudgery and boredom—a ritual the majority of womenmust encounter.

The Housewife

Perhaps there are far more wives than I imagine who take it for grantedthat housework is neither satisfying nor even important once the basicdemands of hygiene and feeding have been met. But home and familyis the one realm in which it is really difficult to shake free of one’s up-bringing and create new values. My parents’ house was impeccablykept; cleanliness was a moral and social virtue and personal untidiness,visibly old clothes or long male hair provoked biting jocularity. Ifthat had been all maybe I could have adapted myself to housework onan easy-going, utiliterian basis, refusing the moral overtones but stillbelieving in it as something constructive because it is part of creatinga home. But at the same time my mother used to resent doing it, calledit drudgery, and convinced me that it wasn’t a fit activity for an in-telligent being.

I was an only child, and once I was at school, there was no reason whyshe should have continued against her will to remain housebound, un-less, as I suspect, my father would not hear of her having a job of herown. I can now begin to understand why a woman in a small suburbanhouse, with no infants to look after, who does not enjoy reading becauseshe has not had much of an education, and who is intelligent enough tofind neighbourly chit-chat boring, should carry the pursuit of micro-scopic specks of dust to the point of fanaticism in an attempt to fillthe hours and salvage her self-respect. My parents had not even thestatus-seeking impetus to send me to university that Joe’s had; mymother wanted me to be ‘a nice quiet person who wouldn’t be noticedin a crowd’, and it was feared that university education results in in-gratitude (independence).

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I married as soon as I graduated, explicitly anti-domestic, and bent onproving to myself that it was possible to combine marriage (an intensepersonal relationship mainly, but also a family much later) with un-prejudiced exploration of literary values often remote from healthy-mindedness, hygiene and a stable society focused on the family. Wewent to Strasbourg for a year, Joe as lecteur britannique, me as a researchstudent. We rented a tiny attic above a bombed house in the Alsatianquarter, and since there was no hot water, no cooker and virtually nofloor space, housework was almost non-existent. The rent was so cheapthat we could afford to send everything to the laundry, and we ate instudent restaurants. We made love through the screams of a communityof ecstatic cats who ran a brothel in the adjoining attic.

In England the next year we had a flat which accumulated fluffy dustballs ankle-deep till a parental invasion was expected. Then we spent afew hours together making it respectable in order to avoid intrusivecriticisms.

Carl was conceived unexpectedly that year, and the summer beforehe was born we moved to another flat. This was a great, rambling oldplace which we shared with an eccentric poetical colleague. He used toempty his pipe into my buckets of soaking nappies, and leave his partof the flat open to mating couples when he was away. I was shaken outof my cavalier attitude to housework. The baby immediately caughtenteritis, and I was shattered by guilt when the doctor attributed thisto the dirty flat. The housework proved enormously difficult in itselfpartly because I was still tired, partly because the place was so large anddilapidated. I was humbled by the discovery that what I had con-sidered work fit only for fools was beyond my capacity. Worst of all,Joe, who had regarded my non-domestication with complete tolerance,suddenly found the dirt and untidiness depressing, and begat statusyearnings. As a man with a wife, a son and a salary for the uncongenialjob foisted on him by Carl’s appearance, he wanted a clean shirt everyday, not just as something practical, but as his right. We were jolted outof our self-sufficiency, and reverted desperately for a while to Mummy’sand Daddy’s standards. If Joe was indignant when the dinner wasburnt, I felt he had every right to regard me as a failure. And I sterilizedeverything that came remotely into contact with Carl, becoming deeplyinvolved in germs. This provoked some passably hysterical scenes withour unfortunate poet, who held a generous communistic view offlannels and toothbrushes.

The following autumn Joe got a university post, and we moved to theflat we are in now. It is the ground floor of a whimsical Victorianbuilding, and the four flats represent a curious social conglomeration.We have most contact with the Pakistani and the German who live inthe basement. They sometimes invite Carl down and give him bananas.Their flat has a pungent smell of damp and garlic; and last time thelandlord came inspecting, his mother-in-law pointed with elegant dis-dain at the torn plastic curtain draped round their kitchen window. Atdinner time our bathroom is swamped with curry, cooked cheese, orfried onion smells, and late at night beautiful, lonely Pakistani songsfloat up to us.

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The decorations in our flat were very shabby. We have done some our-selves, and the landlord has just authorized repainting the walls of thepassage (but not the woodwork and none of the hall). I suspect Carl is tothank for that gesture because he has been running his nails over thepeeling paint, uncovering faded rose-coloured blotches. Most of ourfurniture consists of comfortable, unpretentious pieces given us byJoe’s parents; otherwise we have a few prized items found cheaplysecond-hand, like a vast and quite immovable pretend-leather sofa,with carved wooden arms and feet. Our modern reproductions areunashamedly attached with sellotape or drawing pins, and a large, in-tense photograph of Braque dominates the study. We did lavish £50on our lounge carpet and curtains. It is a beautiful room, lofty, withenormous French windows on two sides, looking on to trees. The sunwhen it shines glows all day on the dark gold carpet, and I can believemyself anywhere. Apart from the splendid curtains we had made for us,I have bought remnants of normally costly material and rigged themup to serve more or less functionally, being useless with a needle. Onecurtain is merely pinned to the old rag that was already there (it neverneeds to be drawn), and has won the deluded admiration of a lady witha Jaguar. Another set of four, great splashes of sunflower yellow stripedwith dark green and grey, are all different lengths; three too short, andone too long.

I have long since passed the point where control of the houseworkseemed unattainable, and Carl as he grows older requires fewer andfewer elementary attentions. But I realized recently that I have develop-ed an absurd cyclical pattern which stretches over a period of one ortwo months. I work up to a point where every room is in so organized astate that it requires only a few touches every morning to keep itperfectly clean and tidy (by my standards). Even the occasional job likedusting books or cleaning the cooker are done, and I move brisklyfrom room to room in quite the efficient manner. The hearth is notonly brushed after I’ve laid the fire, it is wiped and polished. As I workevangelical hymn-jingles from my carefully obliterated past well up inmy mind. But I cannot achieve that degree of irony. It would be hubris,and the world might fall in if I started chanting,

I’m H - A - P - P - Y

Perhaps this stage lasts a week or two. Joe has his clean shirt every dayand clean underwear; Carl is bathed several times. Then suddenly I flop.Every gesture requires an effort of will. The flat quickly sinks intochaos, dishes are washed under the tap as they are needed, and the air-ing cupboard stinks of urine because I have dried Carl’s pants out in-stead of washing them. On Sunday evening I pick over the litter on thebedroom floor to find Joe’s clothes to wash for Monday. The dinnercomes out of tins, and far from presenting a clean hearth, the firedoesn’t even get lit. Worst of all, that oasis in the afternoon when Carlis asleep and I can at last get down to my books, I waste destructivelyby going to bed. I have usually reached that point of tiredness where ittakes some moments of fumbling to fix a plug in its socket, and there isan area of buzzing and shimmering between me and what I am tryingto do, so I sleep. But my dreams are of the things I am trying to forget;static dreams, like a nauseating plateful of steaming sprouts.

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What seems most undermining is that housework is an anathema toconcentration and intensity. Joe tells me I am freer than he is — I cando things in my own time without pressure from anybody. But thatseems to me poor compensation for the sameness of jobs that requireperhaps less than a quarter of one’s mental awareness, while leavingthe rest incapable of being occupied elsewhere. When somethinghappens to stimulate me to my former awareness — an enjoyable socialoccasion, or the tutorials which I still give once a fortnight in theuniversity — I feel I have come back to life; I am ashamed to admit that quite frequently I come home afterwards in a mood of savage rejection. I intended, of course, to carry on with my thesis quite as if nothing hadhappened after having Carl. I wanted him very much once I was preg-nant, but expected him to play a limited role whose boundaries I wasgoing to set. Alas! Long after I had pulled myself out of the morass ofthe first few months, come to look on Carl as something other than acataclysm, and worked myself into a fever pitch of busyness to geteverything necessary done first (I used to run to the shops), I was stillnot getting my thesis written. Two substantial chapters were alreadydone, I was amassing ample material for a third — it was a genuinelyinteresting subject — and there, except for one joyous week lastsummer when they were both away, it still stands. I began to feel guiltyabout this failure too, because I had been so overweeningly confidentin my ability to look after a baby, do the housework, and write a thesis,that I was still drawing a research scholarship. When it becameobvious that I really was not capable of getting the thesis written in thecircumstances, I had out of honesty to resign the money. My self-respect began to rot away. Step by step I dropped all the small ritualsof vanity, and for a while it was a great effort even to bath.

I used to think there was no real significance in such traits as hair-styles, clothes and cleanliness, because one has to know a person for along time before understanding his ways of thought and response. Thiswas bound up, of course, with my rejection of the cheap and meaning-less estimate, ‘that man has long hair, therefore he is an anti-social lout’,or ‘that girl lets her kids and her home get dirty, therefore she issluttish mentally.’ The sanest graduate mother I know lives easily andhappily in the most apparently disorganized house I have ever seen.But I let the flat get dirty when I am depressed, and the dirt depressedme further, even though I do not consider myself immoral for slippinginto that state. Yet even this is not simply true; my happiest moodsmay coincide with the worst disorder. Then I am absorbed in thoughtsof something else, and no longer notice my surroundings. Even whenthe flat is at its best it seems slightly sordid; we can’t afford the spatialescape a car would give us, and mental ‘escape’ has to do instead.

My hair-style is also an indication of the mood I am in. I grew it longone period when I was feeling resigned to this female role. Shortlyafter I had Carl I cropped my hair down to about an inch all over. Itwas a rejection of femininity because the dependency feeling pleasantlyaroused by pregnancy, far from disappearing after giving birth as I hadexpected, intensified beyond all bearable limits. Feeling motherlyseemed to be the last thing I would ever find time for, and an enormouschasm opened between me pregnant, and me with a deflated belly, my

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hands immersed in filthy nappies. I would not be so crudely symbolicalwith my hair now. I have achieved a measure of true independencewithin myself in the teeth of the last two years, and feel no need toflaunt it in the face of men. It is there, and does not need their recogni-tion to exist. It was never a burden to me to be a woman before I hadCarl. Feminists had seemed to me to be tilting at windmills; womenwho allowed men to rule them did so from their own free choice. I feltthat I had proved myself the intellectual equal of men, and maintainedmy femininity as well. But afterwards I quite lost my sense of identity;for weeks it was an effort to speak. And when I again became consciousof myself as other than a thing, it was in a state of rebellion which I hadto clamp down firmly because of Carl. I also grew very thin and I stilldo not menstruate. This self-imposed penance, or this disgust at mysubservience, had repercussions on all of us, some of which have still tobe worked out. In a sense it is a triumph and a release not to menstruate.I have my sexual self intact with almost no danger of being called toaccount for it by pregnancy. But it seems that now I can achievenothing unequivocally. I should hate Carl to be an only child; I knowtoo well what that means to inflict it on him. But treatment for amen-orrhoea is lengthy and success uncertain. Meanwhile the time when Ishall no longer be housebound recedes into the distant future.

My most obvious way back to feeling creative is to write the thesis, andI think I shall soon be able to tackle it again. The practical problem oflibraries is minor compared with the fear I have felt of not being able toconcentrate in the same way as before. It is not only mental concentra-tion that is sapped by baby care and housework, it is personality con-centration as well. A baby demands the whole of you. Before I had himI could turn away from everybody, into myself or my books, if Ineeded to; it was on this basis that I had resources and kept myselfbalanced. But I remain turned towards Carl even when he is asleep. Atfirst this was a terrible burden. Now I bear it lightly, but not so lightlythat I have felt safe so far in resuming the thesis in the odd periods offree time I have.

Instead, I have tried less obvious ways, like yoga. Yoga seems to com-pensate a little for the unrhythmic nature of housework. Also, anyonewho has gone from a totally bookish life to babies must feel the needof more physical stamina. But I did become involved for a while withyoga philosophy, in my hunt for a way out. For months I used to get upin the middle of the night, and sit reading in the kitchen for a couple ofhours. I read the Bhagavad-Gita, and tried to disengage myselfemotionally from my predicament by telling myself grotesquely,‘Gunas are simply attaching themselves to gunas. The Atman is else-where.’ But even as oblique an approach as that did not work, and if ithad it would simply have exaggerated my mistakes. How can a philos-ophy of non-attachment and no desires be applicable to a girl with ahusband and a child? It would have emerged as a subtle form of cruelty.I still have respect for the ideal of remaining poised in life in the sameway as a lotus leaf floats unwetted on the water. But like so manyphilosophies created by men, it now seems to me to be of practical useonly to men, or to women with a man’s biological and social freedom,if such a state exists. Many of my literary admirations have been

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shaken and resorted by the past two years. I am not sure that anyoneother than Rabelais has emerged unscathed. But he, as a positive retortto the insipid and unrealistic sweetness, light and dignity themes ofGrantly Dick Read seems to me unanswerable. I hang on to Rabelais asa possibility for vital happiness in a situation where there is more arse-wiping than philosophizing.

But this means I am not always clear about the value of what I am sup-posed to be teaching Carl. It seems to me a shame to repress a child’sfresh whimsy, unconscious surrealism, and spontaneous Rabelaisianqualities by straightening out his ideas till they fit the neat boxes ofadult concepts. A week or so past Joe got Carl up while I was still inbed, and stood him on top of me. As he danced around, faeces fell outon the eiderdown. He picked them up and started pelting me with them.It seemed such a just retribution for all the times I have made him siton the pot against his will that I badly wanted to laugh. If I had beenmy mother I would have been horribly shocked and embarrassed. If ithad been my second child I might have tossed them back. But I simplypicked them out of my nightdress and went to throw them away.

Perhaps this seems to be an aside from ‘work’, but Carl and houseworkare so closely interwoven that I cannot mention one without the other.This is especially true since I could never consider the possibility ofstaying at home as a housewife, even part-time, if I had no child tohumanize the work for me. Office or factory work seemed moreannihilating because even less of me would be involved, but if I weregiven the choice between that or housework I would rather be outworking in any conditions. My feelings of satisfaction or happinessare never connected with the housework, and are often in strict opposi-tion to it, because Carl’s vivacity and lawlessness oppose the reign oforder and hygiene. I have, of course, received such a specializededucation, voluntarily, that I would have to undergo a radical characterchange in order to fit the new mould adequately. That is a possibility,but one I have rejected. The other possibility, which I sought urgentlyfor a long while, is to have other babies; I would then be so engrossedin the work entailed that I would not have time for thoughts of freedomtill I emerged on the other side, maybe. But I have explained how thishas not come about. I am not a bad mother most of the time, and mightbe a much better one in social conditions which did not try to integratetwo hostile activities, but I am an incurably bad houseworker because Icannot pretend it is an essential, personalized task. Joe’s work is muchmore necessary — we all live on it. Housework is housework, whoeverdoes it. It is a waste socially, psychologically, and even economically,to put me in a position where my only means of expressing loyalty toCarl is by shopping, dish-washing and sweeping floors. I have trainedfor teaching literature to university students; it would be far moresatisfying to guide a nursery class with Carl in it than it is to feel tooharassed by irrelevant jobs to pay his development much attention.

I am aware of having joined a vast community to which I am half glad,half sorry to belong. At first, I was absurdly possessive about Carl, andhated other women coming and talking to him, waggling their headssentimentally over the pram. Now I know my inadequacies, and feel

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glad that his socialization does not belong to me alone; I am gratefulto others for taking a voluntary share in him in this way. Sometimeswhen I am feeling negative I take him into the town, and we go to acafe for a drink together. He loves this, of course, and we alwaysattract admiring, slightly envious attention from older women. I over-hear snatches of conversation like, ‘that’s how I failed as a mother’. Idon’t know quite what they are talking about, and I feel ambivalentabout my need to be boosted in this way, but it makes me feel better.The mornings are always my worst time — the day stretches ahead indreary sameness, with no possibility of anything unexpected; I wouldrather listen to anything or nothing than ‘Housewives’ Choice’. Thethought of all those millions of women performing exactly the samegestures as me, enclosed in their little circular activities, and perhapswith no desire or possibility of ever escaping, depresses me more thanI can say. By the evening I am battered down to size, and ‘Roundabout’and ‘Playtime’, which are much younger programmes anyway, afforda very welcome relief.

When the housework was still new, I used to take a little pleasure infinding ways of doing the jobs quicker and better. But it is an ex-haustible subject of interest, as you can tell by the way I keep veeringoff it. Now I am simply bent on eliminating as many tasks as possible.This is sensible to a certain extent. Joe did not notice the sheets wereunironed last week, so it seems pointless to iron them any more — butit does cut the ground from under my feet. Another factor that under-mines my interest is having to keep my mind on two things at once. Iused to get very tense carrying on with a task while making sure Carlwas not getting into trouble. I have overcome that by freeing the surfaceof my mind from thoughts altogether, leaving it swimming aimlesslyso that it can be called into action by an alarming sound. This is afurther loosening of concentration, and one that has to be practised fora distressingly large part of the day, often leaving me too empty forreal concentration when the chance comes. And, as I said, any in-clination I might have to take my work seriously, is comically scotchedby Carl himself, in his constructive moments as much as his destructiveones. Anything I do attracts his attention, so if I tidy a room he picksup the object as I put it down. Or if I clean windows on his level hecomes after me, imitating my movements with his hands, and smearingwhat I have just done. Even if I give him a duster his fingers slip off;it is the movement he is intent on, not the sense of the gesture. I beginto feel hilariously unreal.

It is constantly niggling not only to be doing jobs that require so littlevaluable effort, but also jobs which are mainly concerned with simplykeeping level with natural processes—cleaning jobs, whether ofobjects or for people, which once done are not done for good, and willhave to be done all over again, just as if I have not already made theeffort, the next day, or even within a few hours. There is something sonegative about this role that society heaps entirely on to the shouldersof women, that of making sure things do not get dirty, and people donot get unhealthy. I want to believe in health as something basic,neutral, to assume that all the essentials are cared for, or at least will notmagnify themselves into a full-time occupation. In my research I always

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felt at the end of a day’s reading, writing or teaching that I had somehowadded to life, enriched my experience, moved forward in a quitetangible sense, since I could discuss the new ideas I had met or formu-lated. Over several years of study I accumulated riches, and could lookback to a time when I could not have comprehended this philosophy, orresponded to that novel. Life that does not move forward seems tome to stagnate, and in this sense I cannot help seeing Carl as a parasite.He can move forward to the time when he will no longer need me onlyon the understanding that I am prepared to stand still and grow olderquietly, without too much fuss. My life slips away uncharted preciselywhen I am most eager to find out what I am capable of. I sit crouched ina chair, feeling all that useless and unwanted power suppressed insideme. I neither feel I have married the wrong man, nor that I don’t wantCarl, but I often wish that I had not had such confidence in my abilityto ignore the established meaning of marriage, and had waited a fewyears longer before marrying. Sometimes I want to stretch out myarms to bring the whole imprisoning structure of home and familycrashing around me, annihilating me with the rest. This is the onlypossibility, unreal as it is, that presents itself vividly to me. To walk outis never a real, live image, although I am curious to know how muchof me would be left if I did. This, all round me, is my only creation sofar, however incomplete and shoddily achieved; my split functiongoes too deep to be resolved by such a gesture.

Can you imagine what would happen to a man who was suddenly up-rooted from a job in which he placed the meaning of his life, anddelegated to a mindless task, in performing which he was also cut offfairly completely from the people who shared his interests? I thinkmost of the men I know would disintegrate completely. (The maternal‘instinct’ is a comfortable male myth; a woman can only give freely ifshe is in a position where she does not feel deprived herself.) This isonly a small example, but after two years of the sights and smells of ababy, Joe still refuses to change a nappy, except once a fortnight whenI am literally not there to do it. He plays with Carl better than I, be-cause the responsibility is not in terms of his own personal success. Butchores are a different matter. I would like to be able to feel the same.Sometimes I feel bitter to be his equal in other respects, yet spendingmy days on work which to him would be a revolting waste of time. Theway the family is structured leads inevitably to tyranny, against all one’sclear-sightedness and efforts to avoid it. Financial and patriarchaltyranny in Joe, however discreet its expression, is a reality, and itdrives me to tyrannize over Carl. Then Joe will often reassert justice —by siding quite rightly with Carl against me. I would not believe a girlwho claimed this had not happened to some extent in her family, be-cause I know how hard we have struggled to avoid it.

Housework in these circumstances also constitutes an outright attackon femininity. It suddely becomes a problem to keep slim, an im-possibility to look attractive all the time. What is the point of puttingon my favourite off-white sweater if I must get the coal in? It rapidlybecomes obvious that the attempt to maintain my vanity at the formerlevel is absurd. I must wear horrible old clothes most days. I must putup with smelling sweaty. And I must get used to the fact that my hands

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are always red and chapped. I remember that in Little Wives Meg ispraised by her father when her white hands become work-worn. It’sa sign she’s done some good honest labour!

Yet it never occurs to anybody that young educated mothers are a socialproblem, and could be given some help in readjusting, some alleviationof the drudgery, even if only for the children’s sake. As in everythingelse, men’s viewpoints prevail, so there are no new nursery schoolsbeing built. And there are so few state places that, in this town atleast, you have to put the baby’s name down by the time he is sixmonths old. I have managed to get Carl into a private nursery school ina few months time, afternoons only; some of those afternoons I shallspend teaching to pay for it, and I hope there will be some left forwriting my thesis. He was sociable enough to spend half days at schoolmonths ago. I would not entrust him to a nanny if I had the money, butI know many of his frustrations could be sorted out by a good nurseryclass, where he was given something constructive to do, and morecompany of his own age than I can arrange at the moment.

A situation involving such dissatisfaction on my part rebounds un-fairly on Carl and Joe. Of course there are days when I feel poised andself-confident enough to give as much as is needed without feeling it asanything but a pleasure. But I am quite capable of interrupting Joewhen he is saying something interesting with some remark like, ‘don’tyou want the sugar?’ thus reminding him savagely that I have to keepmy nose closer to the earth. I have lived two years in France, and theurge to get out and away is sometimes overwhelming. I have grown sosensitive about Joe’s opportunities for a complete break that he feelsthe need to prelude any announcement of a week or a week-endlecturing elsewhere with apologies. Or I get unnecessarily annoyedwith Carl when I have to repeat the same obvious and trivial piece ofinformation several times — ‘you write on paper, not on the table’.Sometimes I get frenziedly insistent on the pot-training, just becauseit seems so drearily banal that I would rather neither of us had to botherwith it. These are only concrete examples of something more insidiousthat saps all of us a little all the time, and sometimes has to be allowedto dwarf everything else. It would obviously be beneficial to Carl not tohave to live with me so much. Perhaps it is unfair of me to blackenother more adaptable women with my dirt, but I feel it should be morewidely recognized that it is in the very nature of a mother’s position, inour society, to avenge her own frustrations on a small, helpless child;whether this takes the form of tyranny, or of smothering affection thatasks the child to be a substitute for all she has missed. Perhaps otherwomen do manage to justify their own existence by proxy. But I feelmore capable of creating disinterested relationships as a teacher.

But I do have some compensations which spring directly from myeducation. I like to think that I avoid some of the more drastic mis-takes my parents made, because I am coherent enough to criticizethem without resentment. (Now I’m really going to contradict all mycontradictions.) It is possible that I go to the other extreme, and over-emphasize the value of independence in Carl, but at least that seems amore healthy tendency than the apron-string relationship my mother

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wanted with me. (Shall I ever exorcise the curse?) As far as I andcircumstances allow, Carl is my mate more than my son, and I couldnot place on him the burden of feeling gratitude for all the sacrifices,etc. That seems to me the meanest way to be a parent; it is giving withone hand and taking back with the other. Gratitude is irrelevant to ourrelationship, and I think of my success as a mother in terms of hisability to shake free of the dependency as soon as reasonable, as soon ashe feels the need. If I can achieve his freedom to find himself, that isenough; if I can also win his friendship when he is grown-up, I shall bevery well pleased. To me, a good mother works for the annihilation ofher own role; the parent-child relationship diminishes in importancegradually, and ceases at some point during adolescence to be a livingreality. The attempt to prolong it is to nurse a corpse. I am also de-termined that he shall not suffer from the hypocritical inhibitions whichI had to overcome before I could think of life as something enjoyable.Undoubtedly this is easier for men to achieve than women. Carlprances around naked for a few minutes before going to bed, andcreates rhythms and gestures, more for his own pleasure than ours.The other evening he found a small, narrow-necked cream-pot on thefloor, and promptly popped it over his penis. He did not look up to seeour reaction.

Again, I do not wish to impose any particular socializing pattern onhim; I just want him to be himself, whether that means being a foot-baller or a motor mechanic or a deluded egg-head.

There are odd moments exquisitely satisfying in themselves, momentswhen I identify myself with Carl’s discoveries. I suddenly see into hismind as if it were my own. One day he bent down to scratch a pale spoton the pavement with his finger nail, to find out if it was raised or level.Maybe without my book knowledge I would not have noticed, or notrealized what he wanted to know. Or I can anticipate his discoveries;he looks at a toy vehicle sideways, and I ask him how many wheels ithas. He answers two, so I turn it upside down for him to see all four.

In postscript, it is obvious that Carl is quite the best thing that has everhappened to me. And Joe isn’t a tyrant.

SG

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