H G Wells

Kipps H G Wells

Until he was nearly arrived at adolescence it did not become clear to Kipps how it was that he wasunder the care of an aunt and uncle instead of having a father and mother like other boys. Yet hehad vague memories of a somewhere else that was not New Romney-of a dim room, a windowlooking down on white buildings-and of a some one else who talked to forgotten people, and whowas his mother. He could not recall her features very distinctly, but he remembered with extremedefinition a white dress she wore, with a pattern of little sprigs of flowers and little bows of ribbonupon it, and a girdle of straight-ribbed white ribbon about the waist. Linked with this, he knew nothow, were clouded half-obliterated recollections of scenes in which there was weeping, weeping inwhich he was inscrutably moved to join. Some terrible tall man with a loud voice played a part inthese scenes, and either before or after them there were impressions of looking for interminableperiods out of the windows of railway trains in the company of these two people.... He knew, though he could not remember that he had ever been told, that a certain faded, wistfulface, that looked at him from a plush and gilt framed daguerreotype above the mantel of the "sittingroom," was the face of his mother. But that knowledge did not touch his dim memories with anyelucidation. In that photograph she was a girlish figure, leaning against a photographer's stile, andwith all the self-conscious shrinking natural to that position. She had curly hair and a face faryounger and prettier than any other mother in his experience. She swung a Dolly Varden hat by thestring, and looked with obedient respectful eyes on the photographer-gentleman who hadcommanded the pose. She was very slight and pretty. But the phantom mother that haunted hismemory so elusively was not like that, though he could not remember how she differed. Perhaps shewas older, or a little less shrinking, or, it may be, only dressed in a different way.... It is clear she handed him over to his aunt and uncle at New Romney with explicit directions and acertain endowment. One gathers she had something of that fine sense of social distinctions thatsubsequently played so large a part in Kipps' career. He was not to go to a "common" school, sheprovided, but to a certain seminary in Hastings that was not only a "middle-class academy," withmortar boards and every evidence of a higher social tone, but also remarkably cheap.