A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd Page A

reputation for eccentricity, as much of it was an unconscious condemnation of the bourgeois standards of their listeners. Baba suffered most from these irritations.
    So Alice, with the hangers-on, of whom I was one, set out for Tasmania, but we did not all travel together. The Craigs went by sea all the way round to Hobart in the Manuka ,a new large ship. Uncle Bertie always knew about the latest thing, and either had it or used it, so that they gave the impression of advancing with the world. George and Baba went with them as she thought it better to travel with the rich. The rest of us crossed in the Loongana and went down to Hobart in thehorrible reeling train.
    The whole holiday simmered with family rows, and when the tension reached its climax Dominic was at the place where it snapped, though he was not the cause of it. The Manuka arrived in Hobart the morning after those of us who had come from Launceston by train. All the children of our party, the Flugels, two Dells and ourselves, trooped down to meet it, and as we wanted whenever possible to share the rich pleasures of the Craigs, we streamed into the saloon to breakfast, which quite spoiled Aunt Baba’s picture of herself as a fashionable lady travelling. We went back to our respective hotels and boarding houses, as we could not all squeeze into the same place and the Flugels had to go somewhere cheap, and we told our parents that Aunt Baba had been cross because we went to the ship. They were annoyed and said: ‘What impertinence!’ There was trouble when the invitations came. It happened that the A.D.C. had known thefamily in Somerset, and Aunt Diana and Wolfie were asked to dine at Government House and Baba was not. Steven was asked to dine on a battleship and Bertie was not. The rejected took it as part of a deliberate conspiracy to send the rich empty away. We children thought the dissensions between the grown-ups were very amusing and whispered about them in corners. There were also rows between ourselves about seats in coaches, or who was to go sailing with Steven in the yacht, which laden with aunts and children looked like a more respectable version of a painting by Etty. But there was not much rancour in these squabbles, and they merely added to the liveliness and enjoyment of our holiday, which was a succession of delights. We went on the little river steamer up to see the salmon ponds at New Norfolk, passing old villages and houses nestling in their coves on the shores of the wide and beautiful river. We went in an absurd train, from which we could get out and run when it went uphill to a place called Sorrel, where we lay along the branches of the cherry trees and stuffed ourselves. We went in another steamer to the old convict settlement at Port Arthur, and climbed over the ruined church, the local equivalent of Glastonbury. We skimmed about the river in Steven’s little sailing yacht, hauling quantities of black-backed salmon aboard, which we caught with a spinner. On the slopes of Mount Wellington, the fruit growers allowed us to enter their gardens and eat all the gooseberries we wanted as there was no market for them. They were said to be starving. Baba, whose astutelittle eyes were watching the people we met to learn the pattern of smart behaviour, and who had probably heard of Marie Antoinette, said: ‘They can’t be starving if they have gooseberries. I adore gooseberry jam.’ She included callousness amongst the other cheap easy tricks of the social climber—pretending to forget the names of unimportant people, or being late for appointments with them, speaking a great deal of ‘the lower orders’ as if they were the chief affliction of humanity, and affecting a look of bewilderment when people said or did things which were not smart.
    I think there was amongst us a feeling of hostility towards Aunt Baba, and perhaps towards Uncle Bertie, but we could not give much expression to the latter because of