Book: The Enchanted Places

Quote :

My mother's family were well-to-do and had dozens of servants from butlers downwards, and among them was Gertrude, my mother's personal maid.  When Miss Dorothy married she was allowed to take Gertrude with her as part of the marriage settlement.  Mrs Penn cooked, and seldom left the kitchen except to go up to her bedroom, which she shared with Gertrude on the top floor.  Gertrude did everything else.  She cleaned the house before breakfast.  She laid the fire in the drawing room.  She served at meals.  She made the beds.  She polished the silver.  She went round the house pulling the curtains when it got dark.  And when it grew chilly she would apply the match that lit the fire.  And all this she did with quiet efficiency and great solemnity.  I never once heard her laugh.

I'm re-reading Christopher Milne's account of growing up uncomfortably famous on account of his father's Pooh books, because it's been dog-years since I read it and I'm cooped up.

It strikes me that we Americans we have a very different attitude toward servants than the Brits.  Ours were mostly imported from Africa, and grew to be symbols of great shame.  Americans who did not cook & clean for themselves became pariahs, looked down upon as lazy or overprivileged.  Self-sufficiency and self-reliance became American trademark traits.

Reading Charles Darwin, or watching "Mary Poppins," are entirely foreign experiences.  I cannot imagine having a "dresser" or a driver.

In chapter 3 Milne discusses religious training with his nanny, learning to say his prayers at three.  He takes issue with his father's poem "Vespers," which is a wholly cynical look at a child's experience of religion.

A.A. Milne wrote:

Vespers

Little Boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on the little hands little gold head.
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

God bless Mummy. I know that's right.
Wasn't it fun in the bath to-night?
The cold's so cold, and the hot's so hot.
Oh! God bless Daddy - I quite forgot.

If I open my fingers a little bit more,
I can see Nanny's dressing-gown on the door.
It's a beautiful blue, but it hasn't a hood.
Oh! God bless Nanny and make her good.

Mine has a hood, and I lie in bed,
And pull the hood right over my head,
And I shut my eyes, and I curl up small,
And nobody knows that I'm there at all.

Oh! Thank you, God, for a lovely day.
And what was the other I had to say?
I said "Bless Daddy," so what can it be?
Oh! Now I remember it. God bless Me.

Little Boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on the little hands little gold head.
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

Christopher disputes his father's cynicism.  He think he was totally sincere in his prayers as a youth, and believed in god whole-heartedly.  In fact, he makes the point that learning religion later in life -- say at age five -- leads to a cynical view of religion, and a qualified belief in god.  Belief with an asterisk, as it were.  Christopher says only the child brought up with religion from infancy believes it absolutely, without reservation, without qualification.

He's probably right.  At the tenderest age we absorb things around us without questioning them, without putting them in context, without testing them against reality.

True believers require this level of absolute certainty, unchallenged by facts.

Of course, this sort of blind fealty is not what the bible tells us that the god wants.  It wants mankind to have free will, and to chose god freely.  The biblical god does not want to be loved blindly, as a child would.  It wants adults to come to god in their own reasoning minds -- which is contrary to how this usually works, of course.

It's an odd little dichotomy.  "Bring me the little children" but don't indoctrinate them in the magical beliefs.