Saturday 5th November
Things would start to get serious from now on…
He was so certain that June was the girl he wanted to marry, that he started planning almost immediately. “Slow down” she said, “we don’t even know each other yet. You might hate my smelly feet, or more likely, my Mother.” He assured her that her feet were as wonderful as every other bit of her, and that next to his Father her Mother would be a doddle. And then the awful realisation hit him; that he would have to tell the old man everything, about June, about being in love and wanting to marry her. He had never had a real conversation with him, about anything that mattered anyway, and he was petrified. And then he began to think about how on earth they were going to manage. As an articled clerk he would be paid pocket money for years, and June only worked in a shop; how on earth would they manage. But in reality they were better off than many, and he really didn’t care how much money they would have, they could live in poverty for all he cared, as long as he could have June. Well, common sense, of a sort, prevailed and they agreed to wait until he was settled in his job before telling either of their parents.
* * *
June also knew what a problem her own mother might be, she had next to nothing to live on and her sister Julie and her were half supporting her. Julie was working as a typist and earned even less than June did, so if she left to get married her mother would really struggle to make ends meet, she might even end up losing the house. But later on Phil came up with the answer, and it was so obvious – “Sell the house.” he said, which being detached and with five bedrooms, was far too big for her anyway, “and buy something a lot smaller, and invest the difference and live off the interest.” He wasn’t studying law for nothing and, as Phil explained to June, being a solicitor in a small town would be ninety percent about property and mortgages and stuff like that, so he had been swatting up on this for weeks anyway.
June still didn’t speak to her mother for a few months, but once Phil was working he came round for that first dreaded visit. And amazingly he charmed her from the word go. Oh, she still complained that he was only a solicitor, as if she expected him to be a Lord or something, but deep down June knew she liked him.
“Well, he certainly has promise; I’ll say that for him, better than Julie’s choice of boyfriend, what on earth she sees in that farmhand I’ll never know.” She said after that first meeting.
“Oh, I think he’s rather dishy actually Mother. Anyway, I’m sure she won’t end up marrying him, she’s only just started going out with him.”
“I sometimes wonder what the world is coming to, I really do. When I think of my family, we really used to be looked up to. Once, and now where are we going to? It’s all this wretched Socialist Government’s fault – I knew no good would come of it. And now even my daughters are letting me down, you with your trainee solicitor is bad enough but Julie; a farmhand – really?”
“But Mother, you married a Grocer yourself.”
“That was different,” she insisted, “he owned the Grocer’s shop, well the business, if not the building, I can’t understand why it was worth so little when he died and I had to sell it. I am sure I was robbed by those solicitors, and now you are going out with one. Where will it all end, I ask myself, where will it all end?”
* * *