On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'. An ambitious young man, he had given up his job as a shop assistant in Kentish town and had opened a small newsagents and stationery in the Rushmere district of Ipswich. He did not know the city and had gone there because he thought he had a superb 'opening'. He did not know the trade but he had found 'premises'- a word that was sacramental to him all his life. He spoke of 'premises' as others speak of the New Jerusalem. He had no capital. He was only twenty-two; the venture was modest, almost pastoral; but he had smelled the Edwardian boom ant it enlarged a flaw that had - I've been told- even then become noticeable  in this character. one of nature's salesmen, he was more one of nature's buyer. He looked at the measly little shop, stripped it and put in counters, cabinets and shelves('You know your father, dear'). The suspicious Suffolk folk hated this modern splash and saw he had spent so much on fittings that he had nothing left to stock. the bright little shop stood out as a warning to all in a crafty neighbourhood. Few customers came. The new painting smelled of sin to them. At the age of twenty-two my young father was affronted and flabbergasted to find after a few months that he was bankrupt, or if not legally bankrupt, penniless and pursued.
 There a picture of him a year or two before this time. he is thin, jaunty, with thick oily black hair, a waxed moustache and eyes caught between a harsh, brash stare and a twinkle. He would be quick to take apencil out and snap down your order. He wears a watch and chain. not for long: he will soon pawn them - as he had done before -and my mother's engagement ring too, escape from the premises, put her into those rooms over the toy shop. once I was born, the young Micawber pack us to his father's Manse in Yorkshire, while he goes indignantlyback to London to get a 'berth'. The fact that he has gonebust means nothing to him at all. He goes to the nearest Wesleyian Church - for he had already left the Congrecionalist - and sings his debts away in a few stentorian hymns. And so I, dressed in silk finery and wrapped in a white shawl, go screaming up to Yorkshire to meet my forbears.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett