I can see now, of course, that he didn't really like me. It was not the poor man's fault. He had never expected to be the father of a genius a genius and it filled him with foreboding. He looked around him at all his contemporaries who had normal, bloodthirsty, illiterate children, and shuddered at the thought that I would never be good for anything but being a genius. To give him his due, it wasn't himself he worried about, but he dreaded the shame of it. He would come in from the front door with his cap over his eyes and his hands in his trousers pockets and stare moodle at me while I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by papers, producing fresh maps and illustrations for my book of voyages, or copying the music of " The Minstrel Boy ".