George used to go to a day school too at first, and then he got his Winchester scholarship and went away. Mr. Addington was quite well off, but he had said from the beginning that George should not go to a public school if he did not get a scholarship.
‘And so I got it,’ said George with his broad smile. ‘I don’t suppose I should have, except for that. Father was like that; he was grim, and he made people do things.’
Mollie looked after them both. I think she would have looked after them anyhow, but her father put her definitely in charge of the house when she was fourteen. She was given the keys of the store-cupboard and the domestic cash-box, and three months later the housekeeper was dismissed. ‘I will give you three months’ apprenticeship,’ her father had said. ‘You will do the housekeeping with Miss Hopkins at first, then under her supervision, and at the end of three months you should be competent to undertake it without help.’
He gave her eight pounds a week, and she had to account for every penny she spent. On the first of each month there was an ‘audit day’ when she brought her account-book into the study and handed over to her father all the receipted bills. Everything had to be paid in cash, and she might not leave one penny unaccounted for. At first there were many discrepancies. She forget to enter tram-fares; sometimes she gave pennies to beggars and forgot to put them down. Her father was patient with her, she said. He would go over the whole account, checking each item to see if the missing pennies could be traced. Sometimes they could not, and he would write ‘3d. unaccounted for’ across the foot of the page. He did not punish her when this happened, but she felt it a disgrace, and sometimes she would cry about it in bed.
This did not happen often after the first year, and Mollie was a wonderfully capable person when I knew her.
Afterwards, when I tried to do accounts and couldn’t, I used to wonder if I should have learnt better if I had been trained to do it by Mollie’s father, but I don’t suppose it would have made much difference really.
Mr. Addington was a Unitarian and a teetotaller. George and Mollie used to go to a big chapel with Morris windows, and they were put into a ‘Band of Hope’ when they were eight years old, and signed ‘pledge cards’ to say they would never drink alcoholic drinks. When she was fifteen Mollie had to teach in the Band of Hope. She had to give lessons on the effects of Alcohol on the Human Body, and her father gave her books to read about it in. All this seemed very odd to us when we first got to know the Addingtons. It was so different a world from ours, and yet the Addingtons were like us in fundamental things.
Mollie showed me her ‘pledge card’ once. It had a picture of St. George fighting the Dragon, by Walter Crane, on it, and some rather fine texts round the sides. It seemed to me a queer, barbarous idea, like ‘unclean meat,’ or some old primitive taboo.
Mollie laughed when I said so.
She said: