13th January 1826

Great uproar in school today when Percy Muzzle’s white mouse escaped. Ballast has a fat ginger tom called Wellington, but he was not at all inclined to take up the chase and preferred to loftily watch proceedings from the window ledge, while one of the porters pursued the poor little creature with a brush. Finally, it disappeared under the closet in the yard. I made a very clever joke about Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo but I think nobody must have heard me in all the confusion. Muzzle was rather in the doldrums for the rest of the morning – the mouse being considered quite lost – so I gave him a ginger-snap which I had been hoarding. He said this was nothing compared to a mouse of quality; ate it; and then burst into tears. Charity is utterly wasted upon some people.

Papa, meanwhile, returned home this evening merry as a grig. He went to Somerset House early this morning and was told that he is to be given ten pounds more per annum, on account of ‘the demands of his expanding family.’ He then spent the rest of the day in the Stray Cat and Mutton. Mama said that £155 per annum was still a shabby pittance for a lifetime’s dedication to his country; and, furthermore, ‘that if His Majesty’s Royal Admirables wanted to starve decent families out of house and home, then they had better erect a tent, exhibit her children as a gang of living skellingtons, and be done with it.’ Papa said that he thought it highly unlikely that the Royal Navy harboured any such ambition. Mama, I think, said nothing in reply, but became very crotchety with her crochet work until it looked less like the beginnings of a shawl and more like a nest of aggravated vipers.

Half past nine o’clock p.m.

Papa came up to my room and asked if I could lend him a couple of shillings, on account of ‘assorted pecuniary shortcomings of a purely temporaneous character.’ I lied and said that I had lost all my savings playing Sykes and Muzzle at cards, at which, he looked quite downcast, muttered something about a primrose path, and wandered back downstairs.

But he can jolly well wait until I have a £155 a year for doing nothing!