Commonplace Book

'...Though I was the only child there, the household did not at all revolve around me, and so the adult world pressed only lightly upon me. My aunts and uncle had, I imagine, no theories about child upbringing, and therefore little anxiety over it. Indulgent they certainly were; but since they themselves had been brought up in a large family, they knew instinctively the steadying effect upon a child of having its own status within the group, of "knowing its place" and living by a natural system of degree under which the demands of the younger are not given automatic priority over the rights of the older; and so their indulgence to me was neither capricious nor enervating.'

from The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (Part One, Chapter 2)