Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable. Love in a little shop have been - and remained for life - my mother's ideal. Now, though a cheeky Cokney girl, she was wretched, frightened and ashamed. (' We never owed a penny; up the girls were brought up straight') Sha was a slight and tiny fair-haierd young woman with a sulky seductive look. In the train a salior pi
ulled oof ajack knife and tossed it about: she called the guard. The sailor said he was only doing it to stop the baby crying. The arrival at the Manse was awful. My grandmother was confirmed on her opinion- she had given it bluntly and within earshot, when my father had first taken my mother there, wearing her London clothes -that her favourite son had been trapped and ruined by a common shop-girl of whom she said:
'I lay she's nowt but a London harlot'
She said she'd take the baby.
'She tried to snatch you away from me, Vic dear, and said, she'd bring you up herself,' my mother often told me.
Mary Helen, my father's mother, was a great one for coveting a dress, a brooch, a ring, a bag even a baby from any woman.
As for choice of words - this bonnie little white-haired woman with a smile that glistered sweetly like the icing of one of her fancy cakes, fed her mind on love stories in the religious weeklies and the language of fornication, adultery, harlotry and concubinage taken from the Bible, sharpened by the blunt talk of the Yorkshire villages. Harlots was her general name for the women of her husband's congregations who bought new hats. The old lady assumed that my mother, like any other country girl, had come to leave me and would return next day to London to take up her profession again.
In the early years of my boyhood I spent long periods at the Manse. I have little memory of Repton,beyond the large stone pantry smelling of my grandmother's bread and the pans of milk; and of the grating over the cellarwhere my grand father used to growl up at me from the damp, saying in his enormous and enjoyable voice:
'I'm the grisly bear'
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett