“And what is your answer?”
“We’ll dob, dob, dob.” This was cubspeak for “we’ll do our best.”
“And do you do your best?”
“I think so. I …hope so.”
“Then what is this?” He held out the leather purse which Ian had promised to finish hand-stitching for the next Cub meeting, but which had lain on a shelf, ignored, for a week.
“I was going to do that later.”
“That’s what you said two nights ago, and last Wednesday.”
“But I will do it.”
“Now, Ian,” said George, his voice rising in exasperation, “you are only deceiving yourself. You wanted to play tennis against the wall outside, or read, or do something else rather than keep the promise you made. The Cub Law says, ‘The Wolf Cub gives in to the Old Wolf. He does not give in to himself.’ I’m not angry, but disappointed. You are supposed to be setting an example for your sisters.”
“I am left-handed. You know I’m not good with my hands.”
But George had dismissed his protest with a disapproving silent shake of his head. I’ve failed again, thought Ian..
His father had occasion to be disappointed yet again when he sat down to work at Ian’s arithmetic homework with him. Frustrated with his son’s apparently willful obtuseness, he threw a pencil across the table, and muttered, “Sometimes I think you’re uneducable, Ian. You’ll never amount to anything without mathematics. Stories won’t put bread on the table.”
His failure to live up to expectations so troubled the boy that, upon the family’s return to England after a brief second posting to the Persian Gulf, Ian surprised George by joining his prep school’s Scout troop, taking an unaccustomed pleasure in the sights and smells of the ecstatically green Surrey countryside, in outdoor games on the nearby heath, in cross-country runs in gentle rain, and in damp overnight camping in the school grounds. “Just like Stalky and Company,” he told his patrol leader, who had not read it, knew little of Kipling, and cared less.
Ian enjoyed immensely an orienteering exercise that saw him and his classmate Digby disembark from the train in Worplesdon on a Saturday morning and make their way to Pyrford on foot by mid-afternoon using Ordinance Survey maps, a distance by road of some twelve kilometres of urbanized Surrey, a trek that took them through dense woods, past Saxon churches, and skirted an industrial park and a disused canal. On their way, older folk out walking smiled to see twelve-year-old uniformed Scouts on a mission.
