was in the income-tax. The
minimum income to be taxed was L100 instead of, as formerly, L160. The
scale ran like this: sixpence in the pound upon incomes of between L100
and L150, ninepence from that to L200, one shilling from that to L250,
one and threepence from that to L500, one and sixpence from that to
L1,000, two shillings upon all incomes of between L1,000 and L5,000, and
four shillings in the pound upon all incomes of over L5,000.

It was on the day following that of the Invasion Budget issue that I
received a letter from my sister Lucy, in Davenham Minster, telling me
of my mother's serious illness, and asking me to come to her at once.
And so, after a hurried visit to the South Kensington flat to explain my
absence to Constance, I turned my back upon London, for the first time
in a year, and journeyed down into Dorset.

II

ANCIENT LIGHTS

Then the progeny that springs
From the forests of our land,
Armed with thunder, clad with wings,
Shall a wider world command.

Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway.

. . . . .

COWPER.

In the afternoon of a glorious summer's day, exactly three weeks after
leaving London, I stood beside the newly filled grave of my mother in
the moss-grown old churchyard of Davenham Minster.

My dear mother was not one of those whose end was hastened by the shock
of England's disaster. Doctor Wardle gave us little hope of her recovery
from the first. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia; but I
gathered that my mother had come to the end of her store of vitality,
and, it may be, of desire for life. I have sometimes thought that her
complete freedom from those domestic cares of housekeeping, which had
seemed to be the very source and fountainhead of continuous worry for
her, may actually have robbed my mother of much of her hold upon life.
In these last days I had been almost continuously beside her, and I
know that she relinquished her life without one sigh that spelt regret.

Standing there at the edge of her grave in the hoary churchyard of the
Minster, I was conscious of the loss of the last tie that bound me to
the shelter of youth: the cared-for, irresponsible division of a man's
life. The England of my youth was no more. Now, in the death of my
mother, it seemed as if I had stepped out of one generation into
another. I had entered a new gen