Brittain, Vera, Diary, 22 August 1915

00000298-22.jpg
Description: 
Diary of Vera Brittain

Tabs

Case Study: 
From Youth to Experience: Vera Brittain’s Work for Peace in Two World Wars
Creator: 
Brittain, Vera
Source: 
diary
Date: 
22 August 1915
Collection/Fonds: 
Contributer: 
McMaster University Libraries
Rights: 
Vera Brittain estate; McMaster University has a non-exclusive licence to publish this document.

Identifier: 
00000298-22
Language: 
eng
Type: 
image
Format: 
jpg
Transcript: 

and rather pathetically requires attention so seldom that it seems to be an invariable rule of the household (inculcated no doubt by Mrs. Leighton, whose chief feeling towards him seems to be a warm & gentle consideration) to do whatever he asks immediately. After a time he stopped his intelligent manipulation of the matches and came & sat with us. They began to talk of when Roland was a little boy, and recounted one incident to me of how he nearly fell out of a railway train on the way to join his parents in Paris. Mrs. Leighton said her inexperience at that time was very manifest in allowing a mere servant to bring him all that way. I imagine that he must have been very self-willed and [lordly?] when he was a child, though even in those days the perfect gentleman who never took advantage of anyone's weakness or indulgence of him.
Mr. Leighton produced from somewhere a letter Roland had written him when quite small, the predominating note of which seemed to be "How are you getting on without me?" Conscious of his own value as usual! Mrs. Leighton looked first at Mr. Leighton &, then at Roland and said rather sadly "Father's reminiscent to-night. I think he must be getting old." She herself told me another sweet story of Roland's boyhood. She & her husband had been discussing some people they knew and she said to him rather scornfully "Oh! they're very eccentric people." Roland (aged two) had been standing in the doorway & now said indignantly "Not centric people; No." She said that the reason of her punishing him when he said Clare had no imagination had been that he was hitting her & pulling her hair, all because he said to her "Now just imagine that that door is red," and she replied "How can I,