Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 27

I have just received another letter from Tottie. I hope you enjoy yourself in the country, you will be further from the Pentlands than before, for if. I am not mistaken there was no road that way. Has Papa to walk in to office every day if so I pity him. I must now stop & ask you to write soon to your ever loving son

Tired as he was, Conan Doyle could not help but notice that letters from Edinburgh conveyed a sense that all was not well at home. Charles Doyle’s behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic as he succumbed to alcoholism, and the income from his surveyor’s post was no longer reliable. ‘His thoughts were always in the clouds and he had no appreciation of the realities of life,’ Conan Doyle remarked in Memories and Adventures without discussing his father’s problems directly in public. It was left to Mary Doyle to cope with what he called ‘the realities of life’, particularly the raising of the large family. She did so, including changing addresses in Edinburgh at least six times before young Conan Doyle reached the age of eleven, in a search for more affordable quarters.

In London, where the prosperous Doyles lived, he had a number of aunts, but the ‘Auntie’ referred to in the next letter was probably Annette, his father’s sister, who never married and so took a special interest in the boy, eleven years old now.