Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester — Read

There is little enough need to lay emphasis on the next section of Albert Brown's career. Aged fourteen and a half, he could not join the Navy (as he knew already) until he was fifteen and a quarter. Mrs. Rodgers fussed over him until even he, insensitive though he was, could hardly bear the sight of her. He said goodbye to his school with hardly a twinge of regret; he had early been impregnated with Agatha's fatalistic tendencies and he could, even at fourteen, accept the inevitable without complaint. Totally without introspection and without much notice for the circumstances in which he found himself, he was never more than vaguely unhappy during the following nine months.

He had the sense to keep to himself his crystallized determination to join the Navy as soon as he was old enough -- he never said very much at any time -- and the school sympathetically found him an office boy's position with a City firm. The only part of his life that he really hated was the bowler hat which convention compelled him to wear -- even Albert could appreciate the hideous incongruity of a bowler hat on a fourteen-year-old head -- and it was not until afterwards that he realized how much he detested everything connected with an office boy's life. He left home (he called Mrs. Rodgers's house "home" still) at ten minutes to eight each morning, and he came back at half-past six each night. He travelled on a tram to Blackfriars from Camberwell Green and to Camberwell Green from Blackfriars. He swept out the front office, he filled inkwells, he took messages (painfully learning his way about London in the process); he brought in cups of tea from the teashop next door (this was, of course, before the era of regular office teas); he copied letters; he was slightly initiated into the beginnings of bookkeeping, he experienced the incredible boredom and occasional fierce spasms of work which everyone in an office experiences. And since ordinary diligence was habitual to him, and honesty was part of his mental content, and he had brains of a quite good average order, he was looked upon with approving eyes by the powers that were, and after six months his wages were raised from five shillings a week to seven and sixpence. This official recognition gave him no thrill of pride or pleasure; office life was a mere marking time before he took the tremendous stride towards the goal he not merely desired, but considered necessary and inevitable. The time came at length for him to take it.