them outside, until, getting wind of the transaction, his employers con-
fronted him with a constable at the gates. Arrested, searched, and
severely admonished, he thereupon vowed revenge on that constable,
and seized the first occasion to wreak it. Unfortunately, it was the
occasion of his father's funeral. It was just as the long procession was
winding round Sheerness Green that he happened to catch sight of his
enemy, and, throwing discretion with frock-coat to the winds, pro-
ceeded to settle the account. But this lesson too went home. His son
(another John), who had been sitting beside him in the carriage, was
so appalled by the squalor of the scene--the constable being borne off
to hospital, his father to gaol, while the cortège paused open-mouthed
-- that he, like his cousin, turned his back on the proletariat for ever,
ending his days as a Civil Service pensioner -- and father of John
Middleton Murry.

This second John was evidently endowed with a formidable energy
and determination. At the time of the funeral, 1871, he cannot have
been more than eleven, and, as the only responsible member of a large
and feckless family, he had his sisters' welfare as well as his own to
consider. Yet by dint of sheer hard work, without a word of encourage-
ment from anybody, he succeeded in teaching himself to write, in
securing a post at Somerset House -- first as boy-messenger, then as a
temporary clerk at £1 a week -- and, by his twenty-eighth year, in lay-
ing aside enough to marry and set up house on his own, in Ethnard
Road, Peckham.

His wife, Emily -- née Wheeler -- loyally reinforced his efforts. While
he, to earn a further sixpence an hour, trudged from Somerset House
to a Penny Bank in the Brompton Road, toiling as a cashier till mid-
night, she took in lodgers at home. Their life together, for the first few
years, was confined to the small hours and Sundays. That was the price
to be paid, in the 1880s, for rising above your station. She knew it and
did not complain. If she submitted as a wife, however, she must have
grieved as a girl: for she was only eighteen when they married, and,
though no better off than he -- she brought a dowry of £30 -- less
obsessed by the spectre of poverty. By nature gay where he was dour,
tender where he was hard, reckless where he was circumspect, she never
completely resigned herself to the meagreness of their existence. She
would day-dream of gipsies and caravans. The couple, indeed, were of
singularly opposite temperaments -- and the opposites emerged in their
son.

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