Discworld - Still of the Night
Sam hates remembering Cockbill street.
It is something he feels guilty about, one of those many guilts he carries around with him in the back of his head, every moment of every day – up there with His Grace Sir Samuel, and the mansion on Scone Avenue, and the carriage, and the estate on the Sto Plains that he had never even seen. And you’re afraid you might be a class traitor, Lady Margolotta had said to him, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
Oh, there were things that could never have been forgotten. Too honest, too stubborn, too proud, too common, that’s what Sam Vimes still is, and that’s Cockbill Street through and through. Couldn’t afford paint, but never stoop to whitewash. Educated, even if poorly. Went to bed clean, even if you were hungry.
It’s those smaller, more specific things that he tries not to remember. The look of those proud, bare houses in painfully neat rows, badly done sums, clothes not quite sturdy enough to hold out the cold, the tired, worn expression his mother wore every day of her life. Quiet, honest people doing quiet, honest work, and if anyone raises their eyes to notice them it’s to stamp on ‘em a bit more.
But he’s thought about it more, since young Sam was born. He’s watched his son sleep and been unable not to think it - My son will never want for anything. He will grow up in this house, he will be a duke because that is what his father was. He will be as much Ramkin as Vimes.
It frightens him. Not that he would wish anything else – gods no, Vimes would protect young Sam from every discomfort or horror invented by man* - but it sits strangely in his gut. He can’t tell Sybil, bless her; for all she loves him there are things she never could, and never should understand.
Most such nights find him melancholic in his empty kitchen, a place he has learned not to venture during waking hours to avoid the uncertain looks and awkward stances of the servants. He sips lemonade and stares at nothing, and wonders how the hell it is that plain Sam Vimes, drunken night watchman from Cockbill Street ever ended up here in the first place.
*Or troll. Or vampire. Or werewolf. Or, he reminds himself grimly lately, dwarf.