How to stay alive longer

Elderly should be encouraged to downsize ...

[Housing Minister Grant Shapps] said that authorities should encourage elderly homeowners to move to more suitable accommodation by helping them rent their old homes to families. He pointed to the example of a pilot scheme in east London where Redbridge council has helped elderly people move without having to sell their homes in a bid to tackle the housing crisis. They also get to keep rental income from their property, so they can fund any care costs they have to face. ...

There was outrage after a report by a think tank linked to Labour suggested last year that older people should be taxed out of their homes to free up space for younger generations. The Intergenerational Foundation argued that ‘empty nesters’ in their 60s should be encouraged to downsize by a new ‘land tax’. (Daily Mail, 17 January 2012)

Pensioners to be ‘helped’ by councils to ‘downsize’ so that any spare rooms can be used by families. Population with an above-average IQ to be squeezed tighter still, for the benefit of expanding population with average IQ certainly not above average for population as a whole, and quite possibly below it.

But maybe some of the pensioners do not want to downsize. Perhaps some of them, like me, had a ruined education and are still trying to make up for it by expanding their incipient independent academic establishment to a tolerable size for even a minimum of productivity to begin. When it does begin, that will be the start of my adult academic career, so far as I am concerned, even if I am having to start at an age that is past what the oppressive society around me likes to regard as retirement age.

What any pensioner with a house of his own could do (and from some points of view should do) would be to sell his house and buy one in Cuddesdon, perhaps not with so many spare rooms as his former house but with as many as possible, do some voluntary work for my struggling and squeezed independent university, and cooperate in some of the business operations which can be set up to make the best use of the abilities of associate workers who may have restrictions on their physical mobility, and of the abilities of those who do not.

My institute is desperately in need of storage and office space and could probably pay them rent for their spare rooms to supplement their incomes. Then the rooms would be being used to reduce the disadvantages of a population with above average IQs, instead of used to provide advantages to the expanding low-IQ population.

Now the pensioner, living in the house which he owns, and which now has too many vacant rooms, may of course have no plans of his own to get started on his long-delayed business ventures or academic research; nevertheless, if he is persuaded to leave his familiar environment for an unfamiliar prison cell, and knowing that it is the end of his life and that he is now expected by everyone to go into a decline, this can easily undermine him psychologically so that he does go into a decline very soon after. I know of several cases of people who have died soon after selling their houses to go into retirement.

Therefore it would be a good idea if people were to move to Cuddesdon, or nearby, well in advance of retirement age, do some voluntary work for us and perhaps join in on some of the smaller business projects, in anticipation of more full-scale involvement at a later stage.

Professorship in Education

Below is the text of a letter of application to Oxford University recently sent with regard to a professorship in Education.

Dear ...

I am applying for the Professorship of Education being offered by the Department of Sociology in association with Green Templeton College, as advertised in the University Gazette, and attach my CV, which includes the contact details of three referees, together with notes on my CV and a testimonial from the late Professor H J Eysenck.

As my position is an anomalous one, I would be grateful if you could read the enclosed notes on my CV, as they give information about how I came to be in this position. As you will see, my CV is one that was prepared to go with an application for an appointment in philosophy, rather than education. I cannot in fact comply with all the criteria listed in the requirements for the post. However, I can comply with some of them.

I have decades of administrative and fund-raising experience as the Director of the Institute for Psychophysical Research. I also have completely original insights into what is called the educational process, due to the unique and extreme circumstances of my early life and education. The introduction to my book Advice to Clever Children provides some background on how I have been exposed to the inner machinery of the educational system, from being observed by educational experts as a case study at the ages of 4 and 11, to experiencing the contrasting approaches and outlooks of private and state schooling. The latter provided me with knowledge of the underlying motivations of those that chose to teach; having teachers for both of my parents doubtless also contributed.

I am in fact capable of carrying out research, teaching, and administration in areas in which I do not have paper qualifications, owing to my own ability to learn new topics very fast and very thoroughly in any situation in which I need to learn them.

For realistic information about my life, abilities, and situation, please see the Preface ‘How this Book came to be Written’ to my book The Lost Cause, a copy of which is available at http://celiagreen.com/thelostcause-preface.pdf. I apologise for the anomalies in my application, which arise from the extreme social misplacement which has resulted from my ruined education. There is no recognition of the predicament of the exiled academic.

I am making this application in spite of being above the normal age for a Professorship because the process of recovering from a ruined education is extremely slow, in fact there is no provision for it to be possible at all. There was a time lag of decades before the work which I had done in exile from an academic career led to my being offered testimonials from senior academics who were willing to act as my referees. After still further delay, one of the areas of pioneering work which I had initiated (lucid dreaming) came to be recognised as a suitable topic for doctorates, yet this still did not lead to my reinstatement in a normal academic career.

The enclosed notes can give little impression of what I would have achieved by now if I had had a normal life, i.e. one that was normal for a person like me. As it is, they are a statement of how efficiently the expression of my abilities has been prevented by the society in which I have been living. Academics advising me have often said, ‘Don’t say anything about your ability, only about what you have done’, and ‘Don’t mention your unofficial teaching and research.’ But society can prevent one from doing anything officially, i.e. within a normal academic position, and is what one does outside its auspices in an attempt to regain reinstatement, automatically to be regarded as disqualified from consideration?

Apart from the fact that getting me back into a normal position as a senior academic would be remedying an extreme anomaly and injustice, there are strong reasons for supposing that the field of Education would be benefitted by a Professor who is prepared to take into account factors other than those which have supposedly been considered by those who have done research in this field over the preceding decades. Clearly their insights into the situation have not created any solution to the current situation, and in practice the results of the current educational system are deteriorating rather than the reverse.

So the academic world should consider there is a need for work to be done under the auspices of someone who does not have a vested interest in the rationalisations which are currently fashionable. Those who were successful in entering normal academic careers to which, no doubt, they felt they were suited, did have such a vested interest.

The attitude to the outcast of the socially approved academic system should, in itself, be the subject of research. When one is outcast, destitute, and socially disgraced, one is described, amazingly, as being ‘free to follow one’s interests’, it being supposed that a university appointment would be a restriction on one’s freedom.

It should not be held against me that I have published fewer papers than other applicants. The exiled academic, struggling to build up an institutional environment from scratch without an income, and with no eligibility for income support when not receiving a salary, lives in circumstances which negate the possibility of carrying out research of any kind, even leaving out of account that if one did manage to produce publishable research it would have little chance of acceptance by academic journals, on account of one’s lack of an academic appointment.

I give the referees I do, as best I can, because it should be regarded as amazing, and highly creditable, that I am able to give any at all. However I expect that my referees will observe the usual conventions that (a) one’s case is not to be considered highly anomalous and in need of redress, that (b) only work done by the holders of official academic positions counts as academic, and that (c) there is supposed to be no such thing as ability which is transferable from one field of intellectual activity to another. Therefore they can do no more than damn me with faint praise for the few pieces of work which I have been able to do within the restrictive parameters of what is regarded as ‘relevant’.

Finally, I should like to make a statement. It may be that you reject this application out of hand, on the basis that it does not meet the ‘essential requirements’, or that I otherwise fail to fit the University’s idea of what an education professor ought to be like. However, it is my belief that if the University really wanted to contribute to the advancement of education, rather than merely occupy a prestigious role in what has developed under the label of ‘academic educational theory’, it would take this application very seriously indeed.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Celia Green

No escape from state education

The basic moral principle is that one should avoid imposing on other people one’s own interpretation of the existential situation, and overriding their reaction to it. This principle is weakly, and occasionally, recognised in human societies, and best protected, more or less unintentionally, in capitalist societies in which you can only get other people to do anything for you if you are willing to pay for it. This does not mean that they will necessarily provide you with what you really want, but at least it avoids the socialist situation in which, in many important areas, such as health and education, you can only get what other people want to provide you with; in fact you may be forced to surrender your liberty entirely and submit to what they want to impose upon you.

At present it is possible, although very difficult, to opt out of the state educational system and let your child work at home, although you must still in many ways comply with state prescriptions about what will count as acceptable.

This, however, is coming to be regarded as unnecessarily permissive. Within recent years I have seen the view expressed that this loophole is no longer necessary, as the present state educational system is tolerant of all religious beliefs (this, apparently, is the only grounds on which objection to the state system could be considered acceptably valid). From this point of view, people can now have no justifiable reason for preferring any variant to the system provided by the state, and so it should be a legal obligation to ensure that one’s children are forced to attend the child-prisons, as required.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, debating this issue, argued that home schooling ‘could be a cover for child abuse.’ (Daily Mail, 20 January 2009)

This dubious logic may be generalised to any area in which the individual is free to do anything other than comply with the requirements prescribed by the state. He might take the opportunity to commit any crime or depravity that occurs to him. ‘Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do’, as the 18th century hymn-writer said.

If people are not fully occupied with the necessities of staying alive, they may (it is feared) use their freedom to do something unacceptable, including finding out important things in science, especially if they are rich enough to be able to afford to do this independently of having a university appointment. So, better that there should be no freedom at all.

Of course, one may mention that state-provided incarceration may also be a cover for child abuse, which obviously includes any sort of programme of psychological warfare and undermining devised by teachers.

While ‘home schooling’ is considered an option that provides unnecessary freedom for the individual, it should be noted that it scarcely exists at present in the UK. While it is possible to claim that your child reading books at home constitutes ‘education’, as soon as you consider him ready to take an exam, you must invoke the approval of the education ‘authority’.

Personally I did not think of taking an exam as separate from the process of preparing for it, so someone like me would have tripped over the landmine straight away (even if my parents had home-schooled me).

It is very dangerous to have anything to do with an education ‘authority’. In fact, if you are forced into the clutches of one as soon as you want to take an exam, you cannot really be said to be opting out of the education system at all. Being allowed to spend less time in a school doing purposeless things which are not directly aimed at exam-taking does you little good if the time saved from demoralising purposelessness at school must be spent in demoralising purposelessness at home. As soon as you want to do anything for real, you have to fight it out with the local authority. But that is precisely what you may wish primarily to avoid in ‘opting out’ of the state educational system.

I conclude that although at present there is a nominal possibility of ‘opting out’ of state education, this is only a euphemism, and there is no real possibility of keeping clear of the dangers of contact with education authorities.

There should be a real possibility, but that would involve quite different arrangements to be made. Far from considering how the deadly clutch of the education authorities on the lives of their victims could be loosened, there is a drive to eliminate even the ambiguous possibility which exists at present.

The Welfare State and the exponential function

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. (Professor Albert Bartlett)

I do not know that I would agree that unawareness of the exponential function is the greatest shortcoming of the human race, but certainly this unawareness (real or apparent) facilitates legislation which is designed to reduce the advantages of one section of the population while increasing those of another. This may be represented as ‘fair’, but it should not be overlooked that it may produce drastic shifts in the balance of the population quite rapidly.
If an initial quantity A increases by n%, and the result is again increased by n%, and so on, the resulting growth is shown by the graph of
y = A(1 + n/100)^x.
To illustrate how this may apply to groups in the population which are increasing continuously, here are the charts of a hypothetical population group which numbered one million in 1945 (at the onset of the Welfare State) and increased by 1%, 2%, 3% and 4% respectively until the present day, i.e. 66 years later.

Characteristically, the exponential graph remains close to the lower axis at first, but the gradient gradually increases until it is more vertical than horizontal and tends asymptotically to infinity (i.e. it approaches infinity ever more closely and rapidly, but without ever reaching it).
On the timescale being considered, the increase in the population supposed to increase by 4% per annum is already acquiring the characteristically exponential appearance, aiming upwards rather than merely along the lower axis.
The unsophisticated are unlikely to imagine how great the changes may be which ultimately result from relatively small percentage changes in taxation or benefits, which may be applied, initially, only to small populations.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Who cares?

Recent remarks by the Care Services Minister, Paul Burstow, express the warmest goodwill towards unpaid carers who help elderly relatives. But there is something suspicious about this, as about recent expressions of outrage that house owners who go into care homes should be forced to sell their houses to pay their fees, so that their children will be deprived of their inheritance.

We know that, as a population with above-average IQ, pensioners do not attract sympathy, but are scapegoats and whipping boys. So if a Care Services Minister sounds as if he wants to do them good, we must ask ourselves what is his real motivation. It is a case of ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’, ‘I fear the Greeks when they come bearing gifts’, as a Trojan is supposed to have said when he saw the Greeks, enemies of Troy, bringing a wooden horse (the Trojan horse). When taken into Troy as a harmless gift, armed warriors emerged from it in the night.

Now we may suppose that not only are pensioners personae non gratae, but also that those who are most likely to give them unpaid help are likely to be relatives with above-average IQs. So the object of the exercise is certainly to prevent pensioners in need of help from getting any, at least not without falling into the power of the Welfare State and surrendering their liberty. Also, no doubt, there is an intention to prevent the carers from deriving any benefit from exerting themselves on behalf of their relatives. It might, for example, be preventing their relative from impoverishing himself, perhaps selling his house, in order to obtain paid help from the Welfare State or the free market. And the unpaid carers, or other relatives with relatively high IQs, might then inherit more assets than if they had failed to provide for the needs of the relative.

Clearly, no Care Services Minister could want this to happen. So carers must be protected against themselves; they must not be allowed to decide for themselves what has priority in their lives.

And, after all, what is the real underlying motivation? Nothing to do with health and well-being, we may be sure. The object of socialism is to destroy freedom. A pensioner and relatives who are looking after him probably have relatively high IQs and some middle-class or upper-class relatives not too far back. They are sitting on a chunk of assets, maybe more than one house, and investments, and this chunk will not be diminished so long as they do not pay money to outside workers or sell a house to pay for a state care home, etc.

So the assets will pass on to a population also with above-average IQs, their descendants. What can be done about this? The carers might wish to live in hardship for a time for the sake of the long-term rewards. However, they must not be allowed to work harder than other people decree is good for them. (My education was ruined by people who ostensibly wanted to save me from working too hard.)

The NHS will have to 'cooperate with carers'? But surely that can only mean that carers will be forced into meeting doctors (!) and getting their permission for everything they do. The doctors will say what the carers will be allowed to do, and that which is not allowed to be done by them will presumably need to be paid for. With any luck that chunk of assets will crumble to nothing, long before it might be inherited.

The welfare wolves close in

As has been pointed out, pensioners are fair game for anything because they constitute a population with an above-average IQ. At the start of their lives, they are exposed to compulsory education, but at the end of it they are free, with whatever assets they have managed to retain after living for so many decades in the oppressive society. This cannot be allowed.

Britain’s army of unpaid carers are to get new rights to protect their health and wellbeing under plans being considered by the Government.

More than six million people care for loved ones, friends and neighbours but many fail to get the recognition and support they need, say campaigners.

For the first time, plans to reform the social care system, due to be published next spring, will make carers’ needs a priority (Daily Mail, 28 December 2011)

But we know what ‘rights’ and ‘needs’ mean. If you are given a ‘right’, society is given the ‘right’ to force you to have what you have a ‘right’ to.

In the spring, Sainsbury’s will pilot a scheme in 14 of its London stores to identify hidden carers who may need support.

I have already commented on the disgusting idea of having supermarket staff trained to ask ‘unobtrusive’ questions without revealing their motive for doing so. Any supermarket that involves itself in persecution of this kind should be boycotted. I hope Sainsbury’s sales will drop significantly on this piece of news.

The Care Services Minister, Paul Burstow, says disarmingly:

Without the support of relatives and friends, many people who aren’t able to look after themselves would not be able to stay at home.

(Unspoken implication: we will be able to close in on them so much better if it is made illegal for them to get unpaid ‘help’.)

The Care Services Minister continued:

Carers should have their needs looked after as much as the person they are caring for. A carer’s health often suffers because they don’t have time to look after themselves. Some often don’t have time to eat properly. So it’s vital we support them to look after their health and wellbeing.

As ever, any amount of coercion and interference is justifiable because it is assumed that the motives of all agents of the collective are benevolent.

The NHS will have to cooperate with carers, and those being cared for, to ensure their needs are assessed in a bid to make their lives easier.

One proposal is for the rights of carers to be put on a firmer footing so that in social care law they have similar rights to the people they care for.

This could entail pledges to facilitate the wishes of carers who want to stay in employment, while young carers could be given help to stay in education.

Carers must, of course, be given help to enable them to stop caring at all, and to subject themselves to socially approved ways of spending their time, especially of course educational incarceration.

Who wants the NHS taking an interest in their health and well-being? I certainly do not. Why should the NHS be regarded as benevolent? Its motivation is a composite of those who run and work in it. I certainly do not regard the motivation towards me of the man in the street or of the average politician as benevolent; and that of qualified medical sadists is even more likely to be malevolent, since they are willing to work for financial reward in an oppressive and immoral capacity.

What would relieve the stress on carers much more effectively than interference, medical or otherwise, would be to restore pensions to something more like what the pensioners who paid into them for forty years or more might have expected.

Suppose the basic (non-means-tested) state pension were raised from about £5K per annum to about £15K per annum – then every pensioner would have an extra £10K per annum to spend on paid help, delivered meals, etc, which would certainly relieve the burden on many carers, at present unpaid.

If carers are given a right to have their needs assessed, will they also have a right to refuse assessment of their needs?

Lucid dreams, Disney, and a new philosophy department

copy of a letter to a salaried philosopher

I suppose a Philosophy Department would be the most obvious thing for my incipient (squashed and suppressed) independent university to start with. It is incredible that no university anywhere has taken any interest, nor any sufficiently wealthy individual.

On the face of it, a Philosophy Department is cheaper to set up than a Science Department, which makes it less good from our point of view. The larger the scale of the operation, the easier to include a dining hall and kitchens, and live-in staff.

A further shocking reminder of our continued lack of support (not to mention hostility towards us) is provided by the fact that lucid dreams are now part of the popular culture, as well as continuing to provide an area of research for many salaried academics. A recent episode of a popular new Disney cartoon series, evidently expected to reach a wide audience, starts with one of the main characters having some odd experiences, then saying, ‘Oh, this must be one of those lucid dreams.’

I was shocked when I first found that lucid dreams were being taken up by various American academics without the slightest benefit to me, and I have been more amazed the longer lucid dreams have continued to receive attention (of a kind – though not of such a kind as to advance understanding of them, or to provide the slightest opportunity to any of us).

As you know, I worked on them in bad circumstances as the best thing I could find with which to regain entry to a suitable academic career.

I do not think you, or any other senior academic, should find the continuance of our cold-shouldered position acceptable.

David Cameron is proposing to spend about half a billion pounds on advising ‘problem families’, and it is long odds that this will do no good to anyone, in fact it may make things somewhat worse. But that amount of money, although small for setting up a full-scale university with several research departments, would enable me and some other downtrodden people with high IQs to use our abilities to be productive.

NHS budget ‘to rise for ever’

Andrew Lansley last night warned that NHS spending may have to rise for ever, simply to keep pace with rising life expectancy.

The Health Secretary told the Spectator magazine he was not satisfied with managing to get a real-terms rise in health spending for this Parliament – he wanted to see increases in the years beyond. Mr Lansley said the NHS was still immune from cuts, even though other departments were having to cut back on spending.

He added: ‘We have been very clear that the NHS is going to have real terms increases year on year. We have a profile of rising demographics and demand and cost pressures and technology in the NHS.’

Asked whether he believed that spending would have to rise in real terms every year from now ‘until kingdom come’, he said: ‘I believe so.’ (Daily Mail, 14 December 2011)

This is misdirection of attention in order to focus attention and blame on those of pensionable age – a population with above-average IQs. The ‘rising demographics’ referred to – rising expectation of life – may owe something to the increasing number of people who reach pensionable age as a result of NHS expenditure throughout their lives, rather than as a result of their own genetic endowment and prudent life-style. But is the expectation of life not also somewhat reduced by the ever-increasing population of life dependents? Kept alive at considerable expense, the genetically dysfunctional must, statistically, have a below-average expectation of life.
And surely this ever-growing population must contribute far more to the increasing costs of the NHS (and also of ‘education’ and other forms of ‘welfare’) than does the population of pensioners which statistically has an above-average IQ, and is hence the most convenient scapegoat.
On page 23 of the same issue of the Daily Mail there is a report on the case of a girl who has died at 13 after a short lifetime of painful and expensive medical treatments, reduced in her case by her convincing her parents that she would prefer to be free to get what she could out of life without treatment (at least without the most expensive treatment, which kept her in constant pain).
How does the life expectancy of those who never have a normal expectation of life, but are kept alive as victims of the NHS, affect the overall life expectancy figures?

* * *

The state pension system was not originally part of the (oppressive) Welfare State, but mimicked commercial schemes, in which what you paid in was supposed to be what determined what was to be paid out to you at a certain predetermined age, whether or not it provided adequately for your ‘needs’, as determined either by your own aims in life, or by what other people would consider acceptable.
As the costs of the Welfare State, and its growing population of dependents, increased, the state pension was brought under the umbrella of Welfare by being retrospectively means-tested. This brought the population of pensioners, with its above-average IQ, into play as an acceptable scapegoat on whom the rising costs of the NHS etc. could be blamed.
So long as they had commercial-type pensions they were outside the benefits system, and pensions were paid ‘as of right’. That is the reason that I, as a victim of state-funded ’education’, made voluntary contributions for so many years.
Now attention can be focussed on this above-average population as the cause of the rising costs.

* * *

Further misdirection of attention is in asserting that it is not ‘fair’ that those who go into ‘care homes’ should have to sell their houses (if they have them) to pay for the ‘care’ they receive. This, of course, will lead to families being deprived of their inheritance.
Families are said to be ‘betrayed’ by care home funding, which leads to many pensioners being forced to sell their homes. This is described as a ‘scandal’, and it is hoped that a ‘fairer’ system can be devised. This rhetoric in itself should make one aware that a misdirection of attention is involved.
The population of those who reach pensionable age, and have homes to sell, are a population with an above-average IQ; so will their offspring be. So surely the modern mind can see nothing ‘unfair’ in a relatively high-IQ population being deprived of the inheritance it might have had from its parents, also with (statistically) above-average IQs. It is the obtaining of advantages from a previous generation of above-average people which is regarded as unfair, surely? How can ‘fairness’ be increased by transferring assets from one relatively high-IQ population to another?
And so we infer that these expressions of concern that homes will be lost to some of those who might have inherited them must have an ulterior motive. What is presumably aimed at is justification for an additional tax of some kind, resulting in the usual transfer of resources to a relatively low-IQ population.
It is suggested that what a pensioner pays towards his care home fees should be ‘capped’ with ‘the state stepping in’ to pay the rest. That means taxpayers stepping in to pay the rest, including pensioners who do not go into care homes. ‘In a further blow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley refused to rule out a pensioner tax to pay for old age care.’ Aha! This idea – an extra tax on those above retirement age, mooted in the Dilnot Report – approaches more closely the principle of transferring assets from the relatively high to relatively low IQs.
The population of pensioners who do not go into care homes at all may be expected to have higher average IQs than those who do go into them and have homes they might be required to sell, because the former are likely to have better genetic constitutions, have lived more prudently and/or successfully, or because they have devoted relatives, which are all factors likely to be correlated with high IQs.
So it may be seen as ‘fair’ that those pensioners who do not go into care homes should be taxed in order to transfer assets to those who do go into them.
This is no doubt the real reason for blaming the rise in life expectancy of pensioners for the increasing costs of the NHS, so that as usual a population of people with above-average IQs can be penalised for the benefit of a population with below-average IQs.
As for changing demographics, figures for life expectancy are usually quoted in relation to specific ages. E.g. people who are 50 now have a life expectancy of so much. But by the ages one sees quoted, the majority of those with a low life expectancy at birth are likely to have died off, although not before being a considerable drain on the NHS, state education (with ‘special needs’ tutors?), etc. Clearly these are an important part of the real demography, usually left out of the discussion. Those who are still alive at pensionable age (a population with a relatively high average IQ) are certainly not responsible for the rise in the costs of the NHS caused by the genetically dysfunctional (a population with a low average IQ).

Two footnotes

notes on photos of my parents

1. My father missed getting a First by one mark. There was an easy explanation of a shortfall in his marks, but the examiners made no allowance for it, and awarded him second class honours. There was no oral examination for borderline cases at London University in those days, as there was at Oxford and Cambridge.

In fact he had arrived 40 minutes late for the practical exam, to which he had to travel on an unaccustomed Tube route. He was working too hard in the Gas Works to try out the route in advance, and missed a connection on the day of the exam.

2. Classes taught by my mother were getting such good results that she was expected to become a headmistress almost immediately, in spite of some resentful grumbling among other teachers to the effect that she must be ‘pushing’ her pupils.

Photos of my parents

My parents were great people (‘great’ in the old-fashioned sense) who had terrible lives. Like me, they were models of what the modern world most wishes to destroy, having aristocratic genes and high IQs. They were very idealistic, honest and responsible, perhaps too much so for their own good (or for mine). Here are a few photographs which may convey more than is easy to verbalise.

William Alfred Green, aged 15

The first is of my father (William Alfred Green) at the age of 15. He must have left the East Ham Grammar School by then, since the school-leaving age was 14, and his ostensible father did not want to support him for a moment longer than was necessary. So he left school and home, as his ostensible father (an engine-driver) had taken a mistress and did not want to have any children from his former family living at home after their ‘mother’ had died.
My father was the youngest and the only one still living at home. His ‘mother’ (who may have been an aunt) died when my father was 12. From the age of 14 onwards, my father supported himself by working very long hours as a junior (hack) chemist at the Beckton Gas Works, preparing at night school for the equivalent of the exams taken at 16 and 18. He did his homework on the Tube train which he took to get to the night school.
Then, also from night school, he took an Honours degree in chemistry, externally from London University. As he was very tired from his day’s work at the gas works, he found this difficult, in spite of his high IQ, and did not take the degree until he was 24. [1]
He disliked the working-class environment in which he grew up, and felt a strong need to rise in the world. His ‘mother’ was an invalid until she died, so she cannot have contributed much in the way of emotional support.
He read very few books while he was living at home, in fact I do not think he can ever have had time to read many. Nevertheless he came top of the borough in the grammar school scholarship.
He was fortunate to meet my mother (Dorothy Elizabeth Green, née Cleare), when they were both 14, at the East Ham Grammar School. She was precocious and brilliantly maternal, and must have supplied at least some of the deficits which resulted from the insecurities of his early life.

William Green and Dorothy Green (on left)

The second photograph shows them together, in their late teens, on a seaside holiday, or more likely weekend break. They both look older than I was told they were, which sometimes results from high IQs. In my father’s case the discrepancy with his chronological age is particularly marked, which probably results from the hardships of his early life, and from his continuing to work hard in his determination to rise in the world by taking a degree, in the first instance. At the time this photo was taken my mother was probably at the teacher training college, and the third person in the photograph (on the right) was at the college with her. This person later became a teacher at the primary school at the docks of which my father was then headmaster.

William Green at East Ham Grammar School

The third photo shows my father with other teachers at the East Ham Grammar School (middle of back row). He would now have been in his late twenties, having completed his degree but found no prospects open to him. With my mother’s support, he had hastily qualified as a teacher in the last year that this was possible without attending a two-year residential course, as my mother had done.
His hopes of rising to an adequate position in society had, however, been destroyed, and my mother married him when they were both about 24, recognising, I think, his need for support in living out his ruined life. This was damaging to her own prospects of a successful teaching career, although she continued to work as a supply teacher until I was born. [2]