the quick and the dead
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The servants knew and were sorry. One of them had known him for eight years, another for four and yet another for two; and their unnatural silence and stillness had a meaning which struck a chill to my heart. Then, the ten minutes being over, he got up and kissed us good-bye all round. A curious look came on his face as he saw the tears in his father’s eyes brim over. He went out very suddenly, walking a little blindly. He would have no one go to the station with him. For one thing, he was not going there immediately, and, secondly, he always hated being seen off by anyone that he loved.
Sir Edward Poulton had not been able to communicate what he really wanted to say to his son, Ronald Poulton Palmer, the preternaturally gifted England rugby captain and heir to the Huntley & Palmers biscuit business in Reading and, as it happened, a good friend of the Sutton family of Hillside. ‘It was impossible to speak of the thoughts that were within us,’ wrote Sir Edward. ‘He knew how dearly he was loved; he knew the fears we felt. Speech was not needed to tell him this, and so he talked, as he had always done, of the things that had interested him in his work and he well knew would interest us.’ Sir Edward was devoted to his young officer son and it is noteworthy how Marie Leighton’s childlike terms of endearment for Roland were not peculiar to her family but shared by others. The Victorian era is often characterised today as austere, even brutal, in its attitude towards children. While this is not entirely without foundation, it is certainly not to be taken as typical. Sir Edward, for one, was anything but patriarchal and unfeeling. The signs and symbols of affection between parents and children were not abandoned as Ronald grew up. As it had been between my father and me, so it was between me and my sons. In neither generation could any point be recognized in which a love that
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