As the years went on he became more serious. He conceived the idea of going to see the world. He spent weeks with maps and made a plan of a journey. Boys will do such things, and the difficulty generally comes when the tickets have to be bought. That was where David Lloyd George’s plan broke down. But if he could not wander in the body, he could at any rate travel in the spirit. He read more and more as the years went on. After twelve, remaining on at school after his friends, he became rather a lonely boy. At that time he would often go off with a book into the woods; and he acquired the habit of climbing a tree and there reading for hours in some kindly fork of the branches far away from his romping friends.
There, alone in the woods, his mind formed; and the shadowy whims of youth—perhaps influenced, like Wordsworth’s, by the surrounding mountains and sea—steeled into firmer stuff. When he was a very small boy he would say, boy-like, to his uncle, “I am going to be a giant, like that tree.” This infantile yearning after something larger than his natal fate seemed to grow upon him. A sense of power seemed to be working within him. Strange, when you consider the cramping conditions of his life. Here was a boy living in a little cottage in a remote Welsh village; talking a despised language; an obscure member of a race scoffed at by the powerful of this earth. He had already proclaimed himself faithful to a religion contemned by all who wished to rise in life. He was surrounded by a peasantry long trained to humility; living in houses that belonged to others; with few rights in their own land—excluded from their own woods and fields by laws of trespass, and menaced with dire penalties if they killed the wild animals of their own land. He found himself born with little freedom beyond the liberty of the village street. There were few adventures for him that were not crimes in the eye of the law. In such a life there seemed enough to quell any growing spirit and to crush any latent ambition. For in those days the social power of the Welsh squires was still scarcely challenged; their claims shadowed all the large spaces in the world around him.
Yet this boy began to look at all this with candid, unprejudiced eyes. He began to grasp the fact that what was required was daring, and still daring.
In this vision he was by no means alone. It was a perception dimly stirring in the minds of all those multitudes of youth who were then, during those years, the first to pass through the new schools of the nation and to win the franchise of the mind. Again, where he was alone was in the courage to pursue this vision—the courage to act as well as to see.
At the age of fourteen (1877) it became necessary to choose a life-calling for David Lloyd George. The village National School had finished its work for the boy. The extra two years’ schooling had brought him as far as that training could take him.
Richard Lloyd was not indeed compelled by any law, human or divine, to carry the boy’s education any further. He would certainly have achieved as much as most men consider due to a sister’s child if he had now taken David from school and apprenticed him to his own honourable handicraft of bootmaking.
But Uncle Lloyd knew only too well the carking cares of a workman’s life. He knew what it was to feel a mind-hunger which cannot be sated. Those who saw much of the preacher-bootmaker in those days tell how eager he was for books—how in this eagerness he struck up a very admirable friendship with the kindly village curate; how, after his long day’s work, he would read half through the night, and how the village doctor, going on some errand of midnight or dawn, would still see the light of his candle shining through his bedroom window.
Such a life is often filled with an aching regret. The hardly tasked body yearns for a fuller freedom—the freedom to follow, undisturbed, the clear call of the mind.
It was such a life that he dreamed of for his boys when he decided to send them, at all costs, into one of those learned professions which Britons hold in so much honour. His eager aim was to free them, at any sacrifice, from the great burden of manual drudgery.