They played tennis moderately well, but I found that all of them looked upon it as a matter of course that they should take it in turns to sit by my wheel chair for five or ten minutes and talk to me very brightly and conscientiously.
I think they looked upon this exercise as something which cheered up that poor Sir Miles Flower, and no doubt, had they been Boy Scouts, it would have been counted as the One Good Deed, or Kind Act, or whatever it is that Boy Scouts are presumed to perform daily.
The Kendals, in reality, are a pre-war survival.
“Nothing ever happens to us” might be taken as their motto.
They frequently proclaim this negative state of affairs in the tones of aggressive resignation peculiar to themselves, rather as though they resented this absence of drama in their lives, and yet regarded it as a mark of superiority.
During the war, Blanche Kendal, the eldest daughter, stayed at home “To help Mumma,” and Amy, whom Mumma has decreed to be delicate, was not allowed to do anything except what her Mother called “cheering up poor Puppa in the evenings—that must be your war work, darling.”
Dolly and Aileen, after an inordinate number of family conclaves—the Kendals are nothing, if not tribal—had, in 1915, been permitted to go daily to the County Hospital, where they had zealously washed dishes and listened enviously to the talk of girls much younger than themselves, who worked in the wards as nurses or masseuses.
Alfred, whom neither parent would have dreamed of trying to coerce, did not succeed in passing as fit for foreign service, and had to content himself with Salisbury Plain.
It follows that the Kendals, although they would no doubt repudiate the suggestion indignantly, have, for all practical purposes, completely forgotten all about the war.
Where Puppa previously condemned and denounced the Radicals, he now condemns and denounces the Labor Party; and when, as sometimes happens, he loses his temper for no appreciable reason, Mumma explains the lapse by saying, “Poor Puppa is so worried about this wicked Income Tax” instead of, as in former days, “Poor Puppa is so worried about this nonsensical Servants’ Insurance Bill.”