At his new job Ern did not work very hard. It was not in him to do that; for he had his father's complete lack of ambition. But he worked just enough to keep his place, to pay his mother for his keep by the time he was seventeen, and have some "spending money," as he called it, over, with which to buy cigarettes, and join the cricket club. In time he even attained to the dignity of an office stool: for his handwriting was excellent, his ability undoubted, and his education as good as most.
"Ern don't lick the stamps no more. He writes the letters," was Alf's report at home.
The younger brother too had now launched out upon the world. But Alf was very different from Ern. He had his own ideas from the start and went his own way. Somehow he had ferreted out the facts about his grandfather's career; and that career it was his deliberate determination to surpass.
Those were the early days of the motor industry and the petrol engine. Alf made his mother apprentice him to Hewson and Clarke, an enterprising young engineering firm in the East End, off Pevensey Road.
"No Old Town for me," he said knowingly. "New Town's the bird!"
And the boy worked with the undeviating energy of an insect. All day he was busy at the shop, and in the evening came home, grimy and tired, to have a wash and then settle down in the kitchen to study the theory of the petrol-engine.
His mother, ambitious as her son, watched him with admiration, guarding his hours of study jealously from interruption.
"He's his grand-dad over again," she confided to her husband in one of their rare moments of intimacy.
Edward Caspar shook his head. He was interested in his second son, although in his heart of hearts he disliked the boy. He disliked ambitious men—their restlessness, their unhappy egoism, their incapacity to give themselves to any cause from which they would not reap personal advantage, offended his spiritual sense; and he followed with amused benevolence the careers of his contemporaries at Harrow and Trinity who were reaping now the fruits of Orthodoxy, and just becoming Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, and the like.
"Alf hasn't got my father's physique," he said.