| | 1 | Author: | Locke, William John | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Fortunate Youth  | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs.
Button, his stepfather, Mr. Button, and six little
Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was
not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a
kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little house in
a grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar
grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred
similar streets in a northern manufacturing town.
Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in a factory and took
in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked in
factories. They were not a model couple; they were
rather, in fact, the scandal of Budge Street,
which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a
reputation for holiness. Neither was good to look
upon. Mr. Button, who was Lancashire bred and
born, divided the yearnings of his spirit between
strong drink and dog-fights. Mrs. Button, a
viperous Londoner, yearned for noise. When Mr.
Button came home drunk he punched his wife about
the head and kicked her about the body, while they
both exhausted the vocabulary of vituperation of
North and South, to the horror and edification of
the neighbourhood. When Mr. Button was sober Mrs.
Button chastised little Paul. She would have done
so when Mr. Button was drunk, but she had not the
time. The periods, therefore, of his mother's
martyrdom were those of Paul's enfranchisement. If
he saw his stepfather
come down the street with steady gait, he fled in
terror; if he saw him reeling homeward he lingered
about with light and joyous heart. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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