Story of my life — my ancestry

This is the story of my life, but I can see much of myself in my parents, so I will start with them.

My mother was, strictly speaking, a Cockney since she was born within sound of Bow Bells. Her father was a wiry little man who had left school when he was twelve. In those days you could leave school younger if you could pass the leaving examination, and my grandfather had done this so as to be free to make his way in the world. First he had been a shop boy and then he had saved enough money to set up a shop for himself. He worked in his shop day and night, and all his family helped him. His mental arithmetic was superb.

My mother’s mother was the daughter of farmers. She was a gentle, detached and very religious lady who believed in Christianity as she had been taught it. She really thought there were angels hovering around. She worked very hard bringing up her large family and helping in the shop. Her family, for generations, had a tradition that children were to be brought up without punishment and with respect for their individualities. This tradition was not verbalised, but it was acted upon. When my mother and her sister had been pulling another little girl’s pigtail for fun, her mother had only to say to them, rather seriously, ‘You know, we don’t do that. You wouldn’t like it if it was done to you.’ And they never did it again.

My grandmother thought her children had a right to minds of their own. When my mother told her that she wouldn’t be going to Sunday School any more, because she didn’t believe in it, my grandmother accepted it without argument, saying only, ‘Well, you must do what you feel is right. But myself, I believe it.’

My grandfather had a practical cynicism. He subscribed generously to the Police Ball in the hope that the police would look after his shop. He chased vigorously anyone who stole things from the display outside the shop, but without rancour. ‘Just give me that back, please,’ he would say, when he caught them. He never prosecuted or got anyone into trouble. It was enough for him to regain his possessions.

All the family, as I have said, helped in the shop. Once my grandfather entered a national competition which offered prizes for the greatest quantities of wrappers from a certain brand of soap. He ordered as many boxes of this soap as could be contained in the cellar and elsewhere, and my mother, who was then five, spent the whole of one day in the cellar unwrapping them. She was quite happy doing this. My grandfather looked in on her from time to time. ‘How are you getting on? All right?’ he said. My grandfather won third prize in the competition.

He would open his shop in the middle of the night if someone wanted to buy something. When restrictions on opening hours came in he shook his head sadly. ‘They don’t know what they’re beginning,’ he said. He always regarded the growth of socialist ideas with misgiving. My mother, as a young woman, did not agree with him, and argued about all the good that could be done. ‘That’s all very well,’ he would say. ‘But you don’t understand. You’ll see. Once liberty starts to go ...’

When an early closing day was first instituted he deplored the fact, but my mother thought she did quite well out of it, as he took her to the Music Halls on those days.

Extract from Celia Green’s forthcoming autobiography.

Story of my life (1)

I have not found it easy to write the story which follows. I am aware that I live in a society where the ideological trends and taboos which dominated my education still prevail; in fact they are, in many cases, more openly stated and advocated than they were then.

There is an immensely strong tendency to criticise parents and to exonerate agents of the state educational system. There is no recognition of the possibility that a precocious person might need to be educated in accordance with their ability and motivation, and that great harm might come to them if they were refused opportunities to use their ability when they felt the need to do so. There is no recognition of the fact that exceptional ability is likely to arouse hostile and irrational reactions, although what else would you expect it to arouse? No recognition of the fact that agents of the collective can do harm by talking to a parent about a young person, it being generally supposed that they can only do good. And so on. [...]

The story begins in East Ham in the earlier years of the last century; a time before the Welfare State, a time and place of grim and grimy reality. It was not too far from the Docklands, and many areas were working-class in a fairly sordid sense, but there was also a lower-middle-class population which conducted respectable and struggling lives. The hard edges of poverty and ill health were not far away. Able people fought bitterly for a chance to rise in the world and resigned themselves to their lives as shopkeepers or town hall officials when they failed. And yet life was more dramatic than it is today; I think it is not my imagination that many had a sense of heroic effort in their struggles with adversity. Tragedy and deprivation were frequently visible, but there was more admiration of superiority than there is today, more projection of ideals.

* * *

At first my life did not seem to go wrong, and yet the structure that would give rise to future tragedy was already present.

Myself: clearly exceptional enough to arouse the strongest reactions that exceptionality of that kind can arouse. My father: a bitterly frustrated person who had rejected ambition in himself and feared it in me, who decided that the right approach to intellectual precocity was to reject all flashy and showy assertions of it in favour of a sensible and balanced life, which meant waiting until an age which was actually quite unnatural, in order to live like everyone else. And yet he boasted about my feats to the environment, as if the environment were not hostile enough without that. The environment: already hostile to him as a person whose abilities and qualities invited their jealousy, programmed to attack ambitious parents who might do some good to their children, inflamed by my father’s red rags and, a little later, by the achievements which, however retarded, I started to produce. My father: pinned down by his low socio-economic status to a position in which, as headmaster of a state primary school, he could hardly evade pressure, and in which he could not afford private education for me as a matter of course.

Extract from Celia Green’s forthcoming autobiography.