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.
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. [...]
* * *
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.