"I remember a few days after my arrival he called a council of war with
Mrs. Durham, at which I was present, and I may say in passing, that
Mrs. Durham and I were by this time fast friends.
"'There is one thing that must be done at once, Mrs. Durham,' I remember him saying during that important interview; 'the youngster must go at once to school. Now the difficulty is this: I don't want him to start at a disadvantage from the very beginning, and speaking as he does now, no ordinary school would take him.'
"'I'm afraid not, sir,' debated Mrs. Durham.
"'Very well, then,' said the Alderman, 'at present there is only one thing to do; we must have somebody here to teach him English, anyway to speak properly and to write and spell before he goes to a school. It must be done, but I think myself it is going to take time,' concluded the Alderman. Then he put on his hat and started for the City.
"I am not going to dwell upon this youthful period of my life, for everybody's school-days very much resemble every other person's, but I do know that the Alderman's belief that my education would take time proved to be only too true. I shall never forget how long and painfully I worked and toiled to speak my verbs in their proper tenses, to stop dropping my aitches, how I longed to drop the Cockney slang, how my life became possessed with a sort of terror that I should come out with some expression that would cause concern to either my benefactor or to Mrs. Durham.
"Well, I strove, and at last I succeeded so well that I was sent to a fine school where I received a first-class education, and the only effect of the great struggles I went through at this time was a sort of nervousness which I shall have all through my life, and which results, no doubt, from intense anxiety all those years not to make mistakes.
"And so I skip along until one night after the school had broken up at the end of a winter term. I remember it all so well. I had taken the best prizes in the fifth form, I was barely fifteen, and I rushed home, tore into the library, and emptied all those beautifully bound books into my benefactor's lap. He had been smoking his cigar, and was dozing in front of the fire.
"'What do you think of that, Dad?' I yelled. I always called him Dad as a sort of distinction, for although he wasn't my father really, he had been a ripping father to me.
"'Bless my heart, my boy,' he said, 'have you taken all these prizes?
Why, I'm proud of you.'
"'And I proud of you,' I said; then I laughed at him. 'You've tried to keep a secret from me, Dad,' I cried, 'and you haven't succeeded a bit. Where's Mum?'