A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd Page B

Helena, who was loved and admired by us all, not merely because she was very pretty, which most likely we did not notice, having apparently equally beautiful complexions ourselves, but because she was lively, full of schemes for fun, afraid of nothing, and kind. When she appeared the condition of life was heightened. She was the only one who could cast out Dominic’s devils. Whatever he had done or whatever his mood she ignored it, and spoke to him as cheerfully and naturally as to anyone else, while all the rest of us were eyeing him cautiously. He worshipped her and from the very beginning of our childhood we spoke of Helena and Dominic together. Anyhow, our hostility to Uncle Bertie was of a different kind from that wehad towards Baba. It was not without respect and was largely due to his efforts to make us more hardy and disciplined, which were probably justified. He wanted us to return from our holiday with developed muscles rather than delightful memories.
    It appears to me that as I proceed with this story I am revealing not only the events of that time, but a process in my own mind, which in turn affects what I record. When I first call up what happened in Tasmania, or at Westhill, or at Waterpark during my youthful years, I see the unaltered impression made on my childish mind, but as I write of them, my adult experience tells me that the people, except perhaps the other children, were not really as I saw them, and so I may give them in places a glaze of adult knowledge over the sharpness of a boy’s observation, in the same way that Poussin put a glaze over the bright colours of his pastorals, which the restorers now seem to be cleaning off, along with the dirty varnish. This may lead me to show Baba at times as a hard and shallow arriviste ,and elsewhere as an unfortunate misplaced woman, her life misdirected by the false ideals of a vulgar mother, and deserving of much sympathy. She was, of course, both.
    Again, though this glaze may bring out in truer depth the colour of my adult characters, it may falsify my picture of myself by toning down my crudities and eliminating those imbecilities and patches of morbid speculation which must have been part of my make-up, but after all, it is always more decent to tear off otherpeople’s clothes than one’s own.
    The great event and climax of the holiday was the Strawberry Fête at the Bower, an annual festivity at a kind of village half-way up Mount Wellington, where people ate a great many strawberries at a high price in aid of the little English church. Children know much more than their elders imagine, but as they misinterpret it, they often know less. Before we left the Bower we all knew that there was trouble between Uncle George and Aunt Baba, but we thought it was because she had again been rude to Diana, and that George did not care to see his sister, who in spite of her slight absurdities had far more good nature, sensibility and real intelligence than his wife, insulted by the latter simply because she had no money, the possession of which like all the family he regarded as desirable, but not as an occasion for respect. This may have sharpened his feeling against her, but its main cause was the following letter which came to me amongst his papers. It was still in the envelope which was re-addressed in Cousin Sarah’s spindly writing to The Bower Hotel, Mount Wellington. Dolly Potts had written to him more than a year earlier, saying that she could not go against her father’s wishes. A few months later he had married Baba. Now he had this letter from Dolly:
    â€˜My dear George,
    â€˜Perhaps you have heard that my father died peacefully in September. He was not ill for more than a week, for which I am thankful, but his death has left a gap in my life. My brother inherits Rathain, and I am going to live with my sister, Mrs Stuart, at Ballinreagh Rectory, Co. Mayo.
    â€˜I hope that you are all well. I have not heard from you for some