“Sam’s not in the same place, though,” she said. “He’s at the Grammar School. It’s a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I’ll see that Sam shan’t fall behind them.”
Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it.
In spite of Travers’ generosity--or of as much of it as she could bring herself to accept--it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep her son at the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was Anne. The boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to go to the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was a crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his chance, at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must be as well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games are an essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant eye to the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields in cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after life. But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was put into his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to give.
Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away a form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a safe plodding “swot,” taking by sheer application a respectable place in the lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at mathematics.
That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to Sam, who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of that. She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make that vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty years of a working woman’s life behind her, wrestling with algebra and trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, and it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the mathematics examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the intervals of cook ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books which so puzzled him, and at night explained their knotty points to him with a wonderful clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing but a general capacity and a monstrous will--a will that surmounted the obstacle of acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the greater obstacle of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for mathematics. She illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his classics and made her hopes of Oxford visionary.