8. Masters, slaves and US

In my last piece on Workers’ Co-ops, equality and survival, I oversimplified for lack of time and space.

I noted how Class and Capital emerged as a dominant few creamed off surplus from the rest of us. While the many were bound to labour for subsistence, a few were able to take off, look around and see new possibilities. Out of this social and economic division – of labour and/or leisure – came a separation between practical and purposive aspects of working life. A minority had the time and resources to conceive and plan alternatives, impose new orders, while the majority were stuck with daily toil on the ground. The expression ‘idle rich’ misses an important point, insofar as it was this same ruling class that conceived and directed what was done. But in the separation of direction from practice, both classes and functions were impoverished: direction overlooked essential practice, while labour lacked the overview it needed to inform itself.

In stating the social and functional division between ruling few and labouring majority I did NOT explore the cross-overs and commonality between them. No ruling class was entirely removed from physical labour – if only because all sorts of women have babies. And no working class could live without some ‘higher’ aspiration. We do not live by bread alone, or fine words: our heads and bodies remain attached to each other and to mother earth.

But our divisions result in some curious cross purposes, as when lords and ladies make primitive hunting and gathering their own preserve, forests and gardens walled and fenced against the modernism of field and factory. Serfs and labourers cling to folk-custom while adopting and rejigging the fashions of their masters. Cultures mingle in church, sport and comedy. Across the mutual – though unequal – exploitation of opposing interests, an undertow of sympathy persists.

Sex jumps the firebreaks of apartheid, or our species would have subdivided long ago. Classes and peoples – like prisoners and guards - grow into each other and the structures that keep them together and apart. And just as prisons cant work without collaboration, agricultural and industrial revolutions arose from subversive exchange combinations and exchange.

Radicals ignore this mutual assimilation at their peril, until kings and maypoles are restored and rebel heads displayed to cheering crowds.* By contrast, liberals underestimate the destructive force of the structures that set us at odds. To be radical means recognising both the conflict and the commonality, making enemies as well as friends in the quest for common humanity. Without this dialectic, reform is a papering-over of cracks and revolution a vicious circle.



*After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Oliver Cromwell's body was disinterred and his head stuck on a spike over Westminster

7.Workers' Co-ops: way on or way out

RESPONSE TO TIM HUNT’S CO-OP PIECE IN RED PEPPER (JUNE/JULY 2010)

Are workers’ co-ops a distraction, or do they have the potential to change the world? The answer may be a bit of both, but it’s easy to feel that if Cameron’s for them, there must be something wrong.

Which will be the case if workers’ co-ops settle for the niche they’re being offered: harmless, cheap alternative to democratically accountable public services; kindly front for rampant capitalism, like a charity table (or fair-trade shelf?) at Tesco.

Obviously, co-operatives must not become an alternative to trade union efforts within conventional employment to improve wages and conditions and change the balance of power, either in so-called private enterprise or public service.

And yes, workers’ co-ops too can become self-serving, exploiting their customers, other workers or the community. Unless, squeezed by the market, co-operators become their own slave-drivers

I have spent years in co-operative work – in practice if not in name – and, now, as an unpaid Director of a not-for-profit commonwood, it seems to me more important than ever that we make our mission clear, collectively and as individuals.

Assuming that others are more like me than not, I feel my working life is too important to sell to the highest bidder or entrust to Profiteers. Imbued with commonplace beliefs in personal freedom and social democracy, I find it extraordinary that we routinely drop all claim to these basic rights at the entrance to employers’ premises.

As a democrat with a bias to personal autonomy, I’m not happy with John Lewis or public service models of employment: democracy doesn’t begin with the election of representative authorities, but with the decisions we take for ourselves, as individuals and between us. In our democratic process, we need something like the ‘subsidiarity’ principle invoked in European politics: only where direct democracy, face-to-face decision-making, becomes impossible should we delegate to representatives

The John Lewis and public service employment models reproduce the hierarchy and differentials –systematic inequality of power, status and reward – they inherit from the corporate private sector. Meanwhile - a necessary truism - wage-slavery is not, and never has been, the natural or noble successor to plantation or gulag slavery.

Wage-slavery is a sort of second-worst, deeply damaging to all involved, although for those near the top of the ladder – as for household slaves in the old South – a reductive subordination is sugared by superior conditions on and off the job. Capitalism underpins and exploits the graded (class) inequality on which it depends. And capitalist exploitation begins and ends in the practice and relationships of everyday working life. It is in our work that we shape ourselves, society and world – or have them shaped for us.

If trade unions and workers’ co-operatives are not to be bent out of recognition, both must be concerned with reclaiming the direction and management of working life as well as its rewards. Far from being an alternative to trade union militancy, the co-operative movement is its natural twin, modelling new practices, relationships and goals that will only come into their own when carried into the corporate economy. What we’re after is the once and future common ground on which monstrous Capital is built.

Capital accumulation began with the sweating of subsistence labour by a dominant few. Stripped of any surplus, the majority still laboured to survive. Later, industrialists believed with some reason that if they paid more than a survival wage, their workers would prefer to stay at home. (Enclosure of common land helped cut that option off). Modern employers have adopted a more progressive (?) line. For workers to fulfil their other function as consumers, survival needs are not enough. While owner-employers set the pace, managers, professionals and other workers are strung along in descending order, competing among themselves for possessions and appearances..

As long as we lack the food and fuel, clothes and shelter to live and thrive, MORE is BETTER, goods are GOOD. But we are now reaching a turning point in human history where most people are not working mainly for their own or anyone else’s subsistence. A succession of fabricated wants now fill the gap where hunger used to be. Led by the nose, we carry on working AS IF our lives depended on it, as if what we needed was more of the same. In this addiction, we miss a vital turning point: when survival was the goal, no sacrifice was too much, it was reasonable to accept whatever hardship, cruelty or constraint came our way in the labour to secure it; more material goods meant a better chance of living and thriving. Survival once secured, the emphasis changes. What matters now is no longer quantity of goods produced, possessed or consumed, but the quality of life entailed: the time we spend in employment is part of that life – we work not only FOR but AS a living – and it makes no sense to sacrifice our basic human rights at work.

This might be obvious to us all, if only our time and space were not blocked out on employers’ premises or in the pursuit of the products on offer in the time that’s left to us. Knowing nothing else, we’re hardly conscious of what we miss, of the enormity of the diversion in our way.

It’s not only our personal and social lives that are diminished, but the options for humanity. We may no longer work for our own survival as individuals, but the way we work now threatens our collective survival as a species. Too many people chasing too many goods, and that’s not just an economic platitude: on a finite ball of Earth in space, more and more people cant go on blindly taking more and more.

It is in this social and environmental context that the co-operative movement has a vital role. What matters is not just how we provide for ourselves and manage our lives at work from day to day, but how we re-organise and redirect a global economy before it burns us out.

If we want a life worth living, a just society and sustainable world, then effective, clear-sighted co-operation is the ONLY way ahead. If it’s the way we work that does the damage, it makes no sense to carry on with business as usual. As we apply the logic of our lives at work, Red and Green elements can and must combine, commitments to equality and sustainability go hand in hand. What’s at stake is – to put it conservatively – the future of human life on earth. The subjection of Labour to Capital is, literally, a dead end.

PS
That may not be what the Cameron consort have in mind when they talk of the Big Society, but…they aint seen nothing yet. What if, in our global market, the exploitation of nature and what used to be called man’s exploitation of man turn out to be co-terminous, as cheap labour and other natural resources run out in parallel? In the process, with no stone or sea or sky untouched, the beneficiaries of our exploitive system may find they’ve nowhere to escape to; if ‘terrorism’ too becomes ubiquitous, not confined to this or that old religion, the capitalist vice will close upon itself.

Caught between climate change and class war, exit the exploitive mode? And/or the rich - elite, employers, owners – may begin to recognise our common interest in saving and sharing what’s left of the natural world rather than fighting for scraps in the ruins. No ruling class is quite immune to common humanity. And to reinforce the tenuous bonds of fairness and fellow feeling, there is new evidence that inequality is bad for most of us, richer as well as poorer.*

* The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and www.theequalitytrust.org.uk

6.Overview: a sketch for now

I was going to reflect on my mother, and why she might not have cared whether we lived or died, and my father who - if she's to be believed - so easily refocussed his life on other women. Like me perhaps? I'll come back to that. For now, here below are some more general thoughts prompted by... What? Oilspills? Figures and predictions on population and climate change, underlined by irregular weather. Volcanic ash, or my mother's, wherever that may be. Taliban successes, soldiers killed. My own irregular heartbeats, piles... Intimation of mortality, indignity and the light-hearted care I get, from Ada, but also, every now and then, from the NHS, people who may or may not just be doing their jobs. Between them they, and you who pay for the pills, restore my faith. Here goes:

June 2010 - some theoretical notes

No such thing as raw materials, no finished product – every raw material itself a product and every product material for new processes.

Same goes for us and other animals who live and die, eat, excrete, breath in and out. Whatever our personal, social or technical impact, that’s a fact of life. Our bodies feed from and back into our natural environment.

Not a reductive observation, but the essential, irreducible basis of more specifically human development.

Danger now that our cultural/technical ‘superstructure’ destroys the base on which it, our species and many others depend.

Go forth and multiply, the world is in yours for the taking – until over-population, overkill and unintended consequence destroy the material base (Resource depletion, air and sea pollution, climate change.)

Did WE do this? Who is this WE? Since history began – was pre-history different? – the many have been at the disposal of the few: warlords, landowners, bosses and their priests. Much of the damage is not new, but until now, the rich have always had somewhere else to go, something left unspoiled to save for themselves.

Now technology, global organisation and population increase have used up the spare, and the damage done is so pervasive that nobody can quite escape: there is no other unspoiled air or all-forgiving ocean, pristine promised land. And, as if by coincidence, no fresh new relatively undemanding labour force to do our dirty work for beans.

The global reach of information, organisation and technology cannot always be one way. In the past century, too disconcerted govern themselves, were concerted enough to make themselves ungovernable. Now that empire is largely privatised again, with multinationals where the East India Companies used to be, terrorism is only one way for small, dissident minorities – confused but not unrepresentative - to ‘punch above their weight’.

Global exploitation of the natural world becomes a zero sum game as even the winners stand to lose. Nowhere is safe, and burgeoning ‘bye products’ – unintended consequences like the CO2 we burn and exhale – do more damage than the intended products of our misdirected industries do good. Or can cure..

OUR labour? Yes, we’re all involved, as masters and servants play their unequal parts. Mutually exploitive and mutually destructive, though its only now that the masters – owners, shareholders and those who manage in their – are forced to realise the harm they do themselves.

Domination, exploitation, has never been good for the souls of masters or slaves. For the slaves the damage to body and soul has been undeniable. For the masters, safely removed in a world apart, the damage has been buried. Material flesh and blood, the basic life we share, was reduced, disguised by manners and disdained by a spirit deemed separate from, superior to material reality. Until now, as the spiritual bubble deflates anbd subjective damage is objectivised, made manifest, material and inescapable.

Exhausted nature and outraged humanity combine to bring us back to ourselves, each other and the only world we’ve got.

5. Pop, bang...

Back into London for flying bombs and rockets in 1944. People must have thought the bombing was over by then, and my father expected to return to his old civil service job when the war was done.

46 Clarendon Road, Kensington W.11, just round the corner from Holland Park tube station. That was the first place I clearly registered as home. The address is printed in my mind, as is the phone number PAR(K) 6027, in case we find a way of ringing back through time. Our small back garden opened to the ‘big garden’ a semi-public square beyond. For a while we had a black Labrador dog called Sammy, but he took to walking out, then moved in with two women who fed him cake. Or perhaps he got fed up with children. Our house filled up. First the Wachters, an Austrian Jewish family who came to share the house, then my sister Susan, born soon after the war. With the Wachters, there was no formal division between families. I think they had the basement and a room or two above. Not a basement, but a semi basement, with a door leading into what we called the area, with a flight of steps up beside the house. Another, wider flight of steps led up to the front door above. As with previous houses, I remember these exterior details more clearly than anything inside the house: Cancellors, two or three stops earlier, had its front door upstairs, with a footbridge over to the road. (In Algiers, a long time later, I stayed UNDER under a bridge, not in a cardboard box, but an apartment in a block that formed a sort of dam across a dry ravine, with a road that formed its roof. That was immediately after another war, the Algerian war of independence)

The V1 and V2 attacks came as a dramatic coda to our war. Richard, the baby, slept upstairs near George and Mary while Martin and I slept under wooden tables in the basement with Freddy and Peter Wachter. Martin says the tables had pictures of cows and horses pasted on the undersides. I only remember that we enjoyed our basement camp, occasionally peeping out through the blackout, alerted by the undulating siren wail, we could peep out through the black out at criss-crossing searchlight beams, or lie still, listening out for the bumbling V1 engine noise.
Shoot that doodle bug down, babe
Shoot that doodle bug down
It’s Hitler’s secret weapon
Shoot that doodlebug down
First you hear its engine
Then you hear it stop
Then you dive for shelter
Then you hear it POP

With the V2 rockets, a few months later, the bang often came first, the sirens wail not a warning but in mourning. Meanwhile people still had rings made out of bits of shot-down German planes, and there were more recent stories of British fighter pilots edging up alongside incoming doodlebugs, nudging them round with their wingtips: return to sender. I don’t remember much about the killing and dying on either side. If there was talk of that, it was kept from us children. Freddy and Peter brought stories back from school, comics had German soldiers in cloche helmets and fat officers who said ‘Gott in himmel…Donner und Blitz.’
Nearer home, we knew what not to be frightened of. If a doodlebug engine stopped overhead, we could relax under our basement tables. The glidepath would take it on to someone else. We’d hear the bang, but without much thought of who or what was hit. The one that landed closest blew some of our windows out. Richard was found, his cot encrusted with broken glass, still fast asleep.

I have no picture of any rubble or gaps down our street, but the bits of shrapnel and ‘flares’ we found in the morning if we were lucky. The shrapnel was jagged bits of shell or bomb that rusted almost immediately. The ‘flares’ were strips of foil – later known as ‘chaff’ – dropped to confuse a radar we hardly knew existed.

One afternoon in the big garden we saw a V1 heading towards us in broad daylight. We were sitting on the grass, Mary. Martin, Richard and I, having a picnic in the big garden. When the sirens went, Mary showed no signs of moving and we settled back, reassured. By then nobody used the public shelters at the end of the road, except to play or piss in. Then we heard the engine noise and for the first time saw the stubby little plane. I have a picture of it in sky, coming over the end of the square from the right. I don’t know where it ended up, and Mary had forgotten all about the incident when I asked her about it half a lifetime later. I asked why she would have been so calm? ‘Perhaps I hardly cared by then,’ she said.

Caring or not, Mary dashed us to cover a few months later when a V2 rocket landed on Holland Hill. We were walking down Holland Park Avenue on the far side from tube-station, shops and home. Mary had Richard in a push-chair, Martin by the hand. When the sky exploded, Mary and the other two ran across the main road, to take cover in a shop. I set off to follow, but saw Richard’s shoe fall off, stopped, checked for traffic, then ran to pick it up. I felt quite pleased with myself, until Mary shouted at me.

That was the only time I saw either of my parents scared. When I asked Mary why she might have been past caring, that afternoon in the big garden. She said it might have been about George and Tanya. Tanya was her younger brother Tony’s wife. Tony was an army engineer, killed shortly before the end of the war. Then the Wachters went back to Austria, and Tanya and her children came to live with us. Tony and Mary had been close as children, but the war, and her pacifism, came between them for a while. She must have confided in him, her fears about losing George, if not to the enemy then the sirens of Bletchley Park. In one hastily pencilled letter he told not to worry, , he knew from his own experience – with a nurse in a military hospital – how easy it was to be distracted, but also what mattered most. George would be back. The picture I have of Tony is not him but a photograph in Grandmother’s flat, young but moustached, in his army uniform. The other picture is from life, but could have been anyone, no face just a soldier swinging out of a jeep by our house. I’m looking down from a window, the open jeep has just drawn up. This must have been when Tony called to say goodbye before leaving for France. All I remember is excitement when the jeep parked at our gate, and pride when the officer in it – Tony must have had his cap - came running up our steps.

News of his death came by phone. From Grandmother, or Tanya. After the ring, the shock of the sound that Mary made. A wail that sunk a groan as her breath ran out. Did I see, or later imagine, her slumping down against the wall the phone was on.. Martin says we helped her up the stairs and he felt her weight was too much for him.

For years I imagined Tony resting in the shade of an apple tree, taken unawares by a stray shell. But Mary said no, it wouldn’t have been an orchard in Normandy, but later, more likely Belgium, where he was salvaging some abandoned German equipment. A booby trap, or IED. Tony did not come home, but he was right about George who did.

Bluebirds? If Mary was right about George and Tanya,she never went into detail. What did George feel or do for the young widow who came to share our house? Romantic sympathy or consummated affair? Not a full-blown threesome or even we children would have noticed. Tanya was a pianist – the Queen of Thump as my mother’s elder brother Armine called her. Tanya’s mother – Mrs Polunin to us – had painted George’s portrait when his call-up cast his future in doubt. Seventy years later, his future no longer in doubt, the portrait does its job in our house. It’s my default image of my father, bless his gentle enquiring eyes, and also reminds me of my sons.)

Apart from standard wartime drama, what stands out in my memory of those years is not so much the big events as a scattering of everyday incidents, like outcrops of coral from a submerged reef. Some of them could have happened any time, not quite fixed in time, or standing in for former or later events as the tide of oblivion eddies over them. Some points can be fixed. I was reassured today when I checked a detail on a map of London. The picture I have from that picnic afternoon is of a little plane coming over the trees. We heard it first, then saw it high in the sky, not over the houses that formed the sides of the square but the wall at one end. That confused me. In my mental map, that end of the square was to the East, but the doodlebug should have come from the South. According to the street-guide, my mental map was skewed, but memory and observation spot on. The doodlebug would have approached as I rememberet it. So what about Mary’s memory, of her desolation at that time? Tony’s death, and anything between George and Tanya, must have come later. Did those events cast a long shadow back on her memory of earlier summer months? Shifting currents, changing light...

4.Next stop Petts Wood

The train we took to reach our house passed within sight of our back windows, but the station was a mile or so down the line and it seemed a long way back. We must have moved there when the blitz eased off, closer to London so my father could get home at night.

The only thing I remember doing in that house, as distinct from outside, is assembling sten-gun parts. In the light of the bay window, nuts and bolts, rings, brackets and springs spilled out of brown cardboard boxes across our dining room table. This cottage industry must have been organised through my father’s office in London. He brought back the bioxes, we put the bits together and he took them back to work with him. I never saw the finished product, or his office, but heard years later that these little guns could be more dangerous to users than targets.

How did my pacifist mother feel about this? How did they both feel some months later when my father’s call up came round? Before the war they'd both been pacifists. George didnt like standing by while friends and relations joined up, but was kept in London through the blitz, helping organise shelters etc. It must have been 1942 when his call-up come through.

I didnt notice any tension between them at the time, nor any special fear or fury from my mother at the war. Her younger brother was an army engineer, and when I was scared of a tank, or APC, that clanked through the wood behind our house, it was she who took me over to meet the soldiers in it. They lifted me on board, counted me in when they made tea in billicans on a campfire. When my father came back on leave, I was proud of his backwards bib and bell-bottoms.

Gretle, who stayed with us then, was a Jewish refugee. Warm feelings but no clear picture of her. I think she was shorter than my parents, with a sweet voice and dark curly hair. She was also a Steiner-trained infant-teacher and ran a little playgroup from our house. According to my mother, when my balls were late coming down, Gretle set me marching at the head of a little percussion band. Germany’s loss, my gain. It must have worked, but what I remember is Gretle taking us to pick wild strawberries on the railway embankment, and making nests out of newly mown hay in a nearby field, the cosy feeling of sitting in my nest and looking out.

I wasn’t so happy about having to play with Kenjon. He lived a street or two away, had a hare-lip and my mother was sorry for him, or his mother. I didn’t like the look of Kenjon's mouth, the way it made him talk or the pressure to be nice. One day we climbed a concrete tank-block near his house and I fell off, not seriously hurt but shaken and sorry for myself. I had another playmate, a girl about my age – four? - who lived a few doors down from us. Her garden also backed onto the wood and she would slip out through an opening when I went to call for her. Under an elder bush, we found an old enamel saucepan. We took turns weeing in it, but it took more persuasion for her to do a big job. I watched, fascinated, as the turd descended from her bare white bum.

The front of the house was another world, a neat suburban horseshoe of bow windows and front gardens round a turning space. On the pavement we met another(?) little girl, riding in circles on her tricycle, handlebars on lock. When Martin asked her why she did that, she said:
‘Because.’
‘Because what?’
‘Because of because.’
‘Because of because what?’ round and round.

Once my father had joined the navy, there was no need to stay near London, spending scarce money on rent. We went to stay with George’s mother near Glastonbury in Somerset. Lottisham Manor was a stone Tudor house with thick walls, dark beams, small windows and a clutter of inherited furniture, a flotsam of relics, curios and ornaments and a minefield for small children. ‘Priceless’ and ‘invaluable’ were words Granny used to warn us off. Ambiguous-sounding words. 'Priceless’ was also used to describe any joke or antic that caught her fancy. The stuffed head on the tiger skin hearthrug was big and solid enough to sit on. Its shiny reconstituted tongue less convincing than its big glass eyes. Its ears were frayed, but teeth and whiskers intact. The tiger had been shot by my grandfather. 'A maneater,' as Granny might have said, of the tiger not her husband. Hugh, an otherwise gentle man, had died before the war. Before I could remember him, but my mother loved him dearly. In a tall, dark cabinet stood tiers of glasses, some with bubbles and lace in the stems, others scaly from ages underground or sea. Another cabinet was more like a table, with a box for a top, its glass lid occasionally unlocked to give us a closer look: brown crust from the seige of Paris and a rather similar lump of lava from Krakatoa; a mutton-bone finely carved by prisoners, a rattlesnake’s rattle and, in its own little case, a silver teaspoon, relic of a failed attempt on the North West Passage. (The spoon was identified by a family crest. It had been been found in an unmanned rowing boat, but why would our forefather have chosen that to take with him when his ship went down?)

Granny’s mind, like her house, was a jumble of history, legend and myth. With adults her stiff upper lip and dry humour mostly held, but with us children the fantasy spilled out. She must have been glad to see her grandsons. Her happiest years were with her own three boys before she lost them to boarding schools. Stella, Granny’s name, was the daughter of a Boer War general, educated but in Our Island Story, and proud to have her sons in uniform. My father had seen the light, done his duty, but my mother, now standing between her and her grandsons, was unreformed. Traitor in her midst. For Granny, religion, romance and history were rolled in one, a tapestry from King Arthur to King Alfred, Sir Galahad to Sir Walter Raleigh and Bonny Prince Charlie. Nell Gwyn and Pocohontas were co-opted to the female line and she, Stella, was the star that shone in her husband’s family crest, held proudly aloft on a mailed arm.

As for the actual man, my grandfather and his wife had not seen much of each other over the years as he served in India and she stayed in England with the children. ‘When did you last see your father?’ was one of her favourite pictures, with another of a knight kneeling before an altar. That was what she wished for us, while the Puritan inquisitors were somehow tied up with Mary’s Quakerism. My mother bit her lip when Granny let us into her secret, so we could drink ‘to the king over the water’ – no words, but our glasses held over the waterjug. ‘To the little gentleman in brown velvet,’ was another coded toast, to the mole who unseated and killedKing William (my mother's father was an Ulster protestant). As they listened to BBC reports of enemy casualties, Stella smiled and Mary winced.
One of the bushes in Granny’s garden at Lottisham was a cutting from a cutting from a staff St Peters stuck into the ground at Glastonbury Tor. The space that opened off the open fireplace was a priesthole, and one night Granny dreamed that monks had buried treasure in the orchard. X marked the spot, in cubits, and she pegged out a plot between the apple trees and set us digging. With Martin I dug, for days or hours, but the roots of her Beauty of Bath were harder than their soft, pink flesh. Mary preferred hard apples

At the village school, my first proper formal education, I tried to bridge differences in class, clothes and accent, by vying with the naughtiest boys. As the teacher approached, one of us would drop his pencil on the floor, reaching down to pick it up. By turning his head as she passed, he might get a glimpse up her skirt, then whisper out the news: she'd got pink bloomers on today. We sat in wooden double desks, may even have used slates.

Granny was a church warden and I got the part of King Alfred in a school show. I sat like Rodin’s Thinker on a stool until a girl in a long dress came in and told me off for burning cakes. Once or twice I sang in the church choir, to get on the choir outing to Western super Mare. Half a day following the sea out over the mud, half sloshing back as the tide came in. Over the playground wall from school was a field we sometimes climbed into. One day I fell, or got pushed, seat first into a cowpat. Mary was picking me up early that day, for a visit to the doctor, and I felt she was angrier than I deserved: the cowpat was punishment enough.

Sometimes it was Hula, a teenager from the village, who came to meet me after school. My mother had two of us, and a third, Richard, on the way. Granny, though not yet 60, would retired to bed after lunch, in a stable so as not to be disturbed. With Hula I would back across the fields, picking cowslips for my mother. I picked, Hula carried, my hands sweated even then. It must have been a mile or so. Last summer, when Ada and I drove through Lottisham, we couldn’t find the school. It turned out to be in the next village, transformed into a house. Granny had a car, but petrol was rationed. On the road to school, what I remember is not the way we went, precise directions, but looking in under the hedges on the banks, a shadowy world of dark roots and damp weeds at eye-level.

George, my father, came ‘home’ once on leave to Lottisham. Fit and sunburned in light summer kit. I remember standing with him by wide old wooden door’that opened on the garden. On the wall of the hall, a yard or two in, hung a sword, which my father took down to show me. More rapier than sword, with a tricorn blade. ‘Toledo steel,’ he said, flexing the blade crosswise between his hands. It bent, this fine well-tempered steel, then snapped. Priceless indeed, and both of us were shocked, I wondered how he’d break the news to his mother. Later he tried to mend it with wire.: the navy had taught him to knot and splice.

Then he was away, and a month or two later Richard was born. He was born in the house, but Martin and I were taken to stay with Hula’s family. I don’t know what they made of us, but we didn't feel at ease. Different manners, accents, food, and the Hula we knew seemed distant, diminished in her family. Martin and I cried ourselves to sleep in a feather bed. I clung to him, as never before or since. It didnt occur to me then, but I'd also been sent away when he was born, and it was Granny who came to collect me. I didn’t know her then and dont remember it, only the recurring nightmare of a wicked old woman and a train.

After Richard was born, Granny asked us to leave. She was jealous, Mary said, and could bear our presence no longer. We may just have become more than she bargained for, with a new baby the last straw.

Granny's stable was empty apart from her day bed. Our new destination was a rectory, with real horses, church and vicar en suite. There were ducks that waddled from garden to graveyard if the door was left open in the wall between. Honor Greenstreet was the vicar's wife. I dont know how she heard we were homeless. She didn’t know my parents well, but said ‘Come and stay with us.’ The rectory was in Bramley, Hampshire, and the vicar, Tip went about his business benignly in the background,. Honour was an unlikely vicar’s wife, a casual, racy in slacks and headscarf, cigarette hanging between wide red lips. Besides horses, she ran a couple of graceful high-wheeled traps and a spotted dog called Plum. Plum was an overgrown puppy, being trained to run between the wheels. One time when we both got excited, he bit my leg. Honour’s daughter, Sue, was in her teens, less vivid, more like Tip. An elder, prettier daughter had died, and Honour may have been glad to have us little boys. We helped groom the horses and were given turns holding the reins when we drove out. ‘Like ribbons, not too tight.’ I have the feeling in my hands, half closed fists, palms down, side by side in front of me; between them the loose ends of the reins, on the outside, under my little fingers the leads to the bit in the horse's mouth. The opposite to what you’d expect. The same goes for mounting, where you start facing backwards, and twiddle the stirrup towards you before putting your foot in (a long way up). Otherwise, when you swung up and over, into the saddle, you’d end up facing backward. And or kick the horse on the nose. The little finger on the rein must serve as cushion to the horse’s lips.

On the ground, we were to move gently, keeping clear of the hind legs and not taking the horses by surprise. Feeding them was fine, but from an open palm. No danger of getting bitten then, just the soft brush of lips, blow of breath, long, stained teeth. ‘Grip with your knees, not your heels,’ Honour said when we rode. The breakthrough for me was getting the rhythm, rising in the saddle when we broke into a trot. Like dancing, or matching the movement of a treadle driven machine.

Once, I made the classic mistake, letting my mount follow its head under a clothes line. It went under, I did not, caught short like a jet on a carrier, but still a long way up from the deck. When the horses were grazing in their field, Martin and I would climb on the wooden fence and entice them over with titbits. Then, sometimes, we could get a leg over and ride bareback, holding on by the main.

Honour was generous, kind but in offhand way that demanded no gratitude. She even made light of it, more so than my mother, when motorists complained that I threw gravel at their cars. Sue and some friends up the road, all girls, embarassed me by asking who my girlfriend was. They taught me a song I couldn’t understand.
‘Mairsy dotes and Dosie dotes
And Little Lambsy Tivy.
Kiddly Tivy Toowood…’

The village school must have been full, and the Greenstreets made room for an overflow class in their house, half a dozen children and a young woman teacher we liked. One day she called me to the front for a slap on the hand. I stood before her, hand outstretched, palm upand she raised her ruler. Then our eyes met, and she laughed. The ruler tapped my palm, but light as a bird’s wing, and that was it.

George, meanwhile, had been at sea in the Mediterranean, on an overloaded old cruiser HMS Adventure. He saw little action but helped look after some German prisoners and managed to send us food-parcels from Oran and/or Alexandria. Oranges and bananas, strange, forgotten fruit, out of the blue to the gate at Lottisham. What shook him on that boat was not the occasional threat of air attack but the dog-eat-dog among the crew. On basic training, he’d enjoyed the sweating, swearing and joking in cross-class company, moments of sympathy, comprehension, a new levelling. At sea, with more hard-bitten crew, the feeling changed: doge-eat-dog, hammock-space up for grabs, trading and betting in rum rations, goodbye to anything left lying. When panic-stations sounded, shipmates fought for a foothold on the ladders to the deck.

Then it was up and out, for my father at least. Someone noticed his Oxford degree, or his accent. Class convection proved its power, if not its worth: George’s degree was in Law, not mathematics (as in code-breaking), or languages, as in the Japanese he was set to learn at Bletchley Park. My father looked very handsome in his new peaked cap and braid, though my mother somehow lost the icon portrait photograph. What I remember when he came to us at the Greenstreets, was not the Cary Grant good looks, but his faraway head at the top of a lime or chestnut tree. As he climber, he disappeared behind the foliage then popped up like a bobble on a teacosy. Hallooed and waved at us.

I don’t know when or how we left the Greenstreets, only that Martin and I were sent to a curious boarding school called Sherwood. For a term or two, with only four memories: one, happy, with other children, sliding down a muddy slope on trays; two, unhappy, lagging behind the others on walks with a pain in my leg; three, disappointing, a visit to Epson Downs, short worn grass, matchsticks and fag ends; four, relief, when Mary came. Now my lagging and grumbling was no longer laziness; the pain in my leg ‘like a bruise inside’ was x-rayed and treated with a drug with a name like MNB.

Mary was also shocked to find vomit stains round Martin’s bed. To be near us, she got a job at the school. Later Mary said she’d been torn between her husband and children. When George was away at sea she’d feared for his life, now what she feared at Bletchley Park it was losing him to other women. I remember one, a lovely, big bright Mary Rose, but she was Oliver’s girlfriend and sometimes stayed over at their digs. When I was taken to stay there one weekend, Mary Rose found me ice-cream, Oliver laughed and joked, and George took me on the back of his bike to see Lancaster bombers at a nearby airfield. That evening,I was put to sleep in George’s bed. Now it was my turn to be sick, but when my father came up he didn’t seem angry, more sorry for me. Comforted, with fresh bedding, I went back to sleep.



5. Next stop…so what?

What, if anything, has all that to do with my declared subject, Work? I don’t know, yet, but these disjointed memories of disjointed times may serve as evidence. If not of my own work, then of who and what was working in and on me.

First, I recognise that memory may not record the facts that matter most. What struck at the time, and what stayed with me, was not a representative cross section of what happened. For instance, I don’t remember learning to read and write, any more than a few years earlier I remembered learning learned to walk and talk, eat and excrete in accordance with prevailing norms

As I write, I am proving that I learned my lessons, whether in class or at my mother’s knee. What I don’t remember is the actual lesson and the work that entailed for me or my teachers. The things I do remember were often the exceptions, not the rule. What does that tell us about the value of oral history and folk tradition?

Removal is a recurring theme in my account of those war years, but not what actually happened from day to day. If I remember our moves, and being sent away, it’s because they came as a, mostly unwelcome, surprise. Of course, wars and childbirth keep happening, we were lucky to come out more or less together and alive, but those events must leave their mark, character-forming for better or worse, and those who are will bear the marks.

Through that second world war, my parents were not untypical, just doing their jobs in slightly more comfortable circumstances than most of their peers. My father served king and country, as civilian then as serviceman, while my mother kept the homefires burning and looked after us. Both did the best they could in the light, or shadow, of their upbringing and education. My father, though rarely with us, may have been better equipped than my mother for relating to children. Granny had been a devoted mother to her sons until they went away to school. My mother and her siblings were left to paid hands in the nursery. As they grew up, the balance changed. George and his brothers learned to fob their mother off – their school motto was ‘Manners makyth man.’ Mary read a lot and became able to share her mother’s Quaker concern with ‘higher things’ - reason, morality and social progress.

For both my parents, removal was almost the norm, as professional parents considered it normal to put their children in care, saving themselves for service to empire, commerce and society. While my paternal grandfather served in India and Nepal, my mother’s father served as judge in far flung colonies. The first world war overhung their childhoods as the second did mine and Martin’s.

With the institution of prep and public schools, removal and separation became systematic. As in tree nurseries, where taproots are cut to ease transplanting and encourage quick new growth. With children, what’s lost is a certain depth, but what they lose in old familiarity and constancy, they gain – those that survive and thrive - in quickness and adaptability. By intuition, calculation or a mixture of both, they learn to live from hand to mouth, seize opportunities, find allies if not friends. What’s lost is simpler trust in things and people as they are, because they’re there in the present as in the past. In myself, I feel that I can rise to most occasions, but without much to fall back on.

It took me most of my life to discover – rediscover? - any great warmth of feeling towards my mother. Between projects and preoccupations, my default mode is a bored emptiness. I know what I should feel, but don’t. Or else the feeling’s there, but locked away until it’s too late. I take for granted the presence I should delight in, only to register and feel it in its absence, when it’s lost. The well-spring of romantic love? Perhaps, but less than satisfactory between lovers, would-be lovers, in the flesh. A standard image in classical Arabic poetry, has the camel nomad coming upon the ash of a fire gone cold, the fire where only last night, or last week, his beloved cooked or looked into the embers, warmed her hands.

Writing is a sort of lifeline. Time disappears, not only the time between now and then, but the time that passes between breakfast and lunch, or at night as phrases and images circle in my head. I know, as I try to recall and define, that I’ll never be able to recall or invent the intimate detail of everyday movements and feelings – the detail I disregarded at the time, on the qui vive for something more or different. And yet, just often enough to keep me going, I find that there is something down there. My line, or net, is not quite empty when I reel it in. Not the whole truth, or the best of it, but better than nothing.

I think my mother longed to write, her closest friend from schooldays on was a poet, Anne Ridler. She consented to be my godmother and gave me the Shorter Oxford Dictionary for my 21st birthday. My godfather, Peter Burra, was a precocious young critic, there at my christening but dead, killed in an aircrash, before I could get to know him. Overawed perhaps, Mary kept reading, but hardly wrote. It was George, with a lighter touch and no literary pretension, who began to write for the fun of it in later life..

Lying awake the other night, the same few words going round in my head, I wrote them down on the back of a hospital appointment slip. To be free of them, get to sleep and come back to them later. In grey pencil:
example+shared experience = empathy+learning
Apartheid not an option
Nothing new there, even to me. People talk of role models, and learning-by-doing, but what’s important is to link the two. Playing games with my father, him chasing me and me chasing him, we swapped roles. That’s one difference between most games and most work. In this exchange, I learned to do, and to feel from the inside, what I had seen him do. When I ran away from him, or chased him, I was not just copying him, but trying to escape or catch something. Chase in its own right, and what I learned wasn’t just something from him or something in me, but a pattern in the world between us.

My mother read to me, must have listened when I read to her, often at bedtime when for once we were comfortable together, not arguing. Her voice was clear, almost formal, but clearly hers. My grand-daughter is 10 years old next Saturday, her birthday Mayday, 2000. About five years ago, I was called or sent upstairs to read her a bedtime story. She chose a book, got into bed and sat me down beside her. Then she took the book from my hands and read it, with hardly a he-sit-ation, from start to finish. Feeling redundant, I said ‘You’ve read it before,’ but she said no. A couple of days ago, I read to Luka my five-year-old step-grandson, rather pleased that he consented to join me. The book was The Story of Horace, which my parents read with me when I was about that age. Horace was a yellow bear who ate his way through an extended family from Great Grandpa to Paul and little Lulu. Everyday, while Pa was out hunting, another family member went missing. When he got home, ‘Pa was just WILD, and he said, I will KILL Horace.’ When this had happened two or three times, Luka was saying the words, was partly from memory, partly by reading the words. When it came to ‘Horace has eaten little Lulu,’ – a girl about his own age – Luka asked why the little was smaller than the rest. ‘Because it IS little,’ I said unhelpfully. But his eyes lit up. He’d noticed the smaller print, asked the question and created an opening in his mind for my answer to fit into, once turned around.

And apartheid? Separate-but-equal was the mantra of Afrikaaner nationalists in South Africa, enabling them to segregate blacks. With all due respect, except that you cant respect someone you don’t understand and you cant understand someone you’ve never got close enough to share with. To begin to understand the Other, we have to be able to touch each other, relate each others moves and responses, see ourselves through each other’s eyes. With or without sex, we need proximity, to see and feel through what pleases, hurts, offends each other. We need to be able to step into each other’s shoes, swap tasks and roles, adjust our currencies: a coin, beer or cigarette can mean such different things; bread and water stand for life, but in quite opposite ways: freedom from want or systematic deprivation, dependence for the prisoner, power for the guard.

As with races, so with class, gender, income and divisions of labour: however we care to classify and generalise, freedom and equality depend on openings and crossovers between them: some sorts of people may be statistically more inclined to this or that, but nobody should be barred or discouraged from venturing out, crossing the lines. Without that interchange, we cannot properly understand each other or ourselves.
Maybe some such instinct was behind our little adventure in the wood, the piss and poo in a pan. We were not like some infant Adam and Eve discovering our nakedness, and with it the difference between us. We’d already lost that innocence, if we ever had it, as we were taught to cover and hide what went on between our legs, to keep ourselves clean and clear of whatever came out of them. Nothing much went in as yet, but the general message was clear, particularly as between boys and girls. I had no sisters then, and don’t remember seeing my mother naked until she was an old woman, needing me to clean her up.

I don’t know what was in it for my little partner in PettsWood, and can only guess what motivated me. There must have been some need, impulse to get over the given barriers, between boy and girl, and between us children and our mess. I didn’t look closely between her legs and had no thought of getting into her. But now I saw what I half knew already, that her shape and position as she pissed in the pot was different from mine. And what was missing in her as she squatted was clearly visible in front of me, visible and manageable. I was used to directing, targetting my piss. But what came out at the back was always more of a mystery, and more hit and miss. For me as for her. When I saw her bum and what came out of it, our differences disappeared – except that I’d never seen, could not see, myself in the same position. Did that make for a bond between us, or enable me to dissociate myself, despise ma soeur, semblable (myself objectified in her)?

When Richard, my youngest brother then aged six or seven,, first heard the story of Cain and Able, he said Cain’s punishment wasn’t fair: the elder brother had killed the younger, but couldn’t have known what he was doing, because nobody had died before. By the time I realised how unfairly Eve had been treated I was old enough to focus on the teller as well as the tale: who, if not God or the Devil, invoked the snake to the apple in her hand, and why? It didn’t immediately dawn on me that the snake was neither savage reptile nor devil-incarnate, but a projection of male authority, or authorship. The snake was part of the Man, the bit that takes on a life of its own, disobeys, intrudes and leads astray. In the tale of Adam and Eve, male authors disconnect and disown their own sex organ in the guise of a snake, so the temptation of Eve had nothing to do with them. Eve took the apple, fell for the snake and dragged Adam down on top of her. Man was the victim of her sex, not his own

In the wood with the little girl, I don’t know what if anything she wanted, or how much persuasion it took from me (though I hope that if we had been caught I wouldn’t have blamed it all on her).

Vicious reptile, disgusting worm? Last year I came across a reference to ‘reptilian brain’ the primitive bit at the back that we share with our pre-mammalian ancestors. The image I picked up was of three brains rolled into one. One inside the other like a Russian doll, with the frontal cortex being the most specific to ourselves and other primates. Mates indeed. That set me thinking what other old animal forms live on in us. Most mammalian organs and limbs are obvious enough, but what about older less respectable forms? Earthworms, maggots? For seventy years, I was able to take my own digestion for granted. If it aint broke, don’t fix it, leave be. I was not concerned with what happened downstream from my throat or upstream from my bum. But I did come across the word ‘peristalsis,’ to describe a process common to our own innards and earthworms. Only when the wear and tear of aging drew my attention, did it occur to me that the gut my life revolved around was itself a big pink worm, primeval invertebrate internalised. Earthworms are animate tubes that move through the earth as they move the earth they feed on through themselves. But worms have only themselves to feed as they expand and contract, and are free to move where the process takes them. My digestive tract is trapped in me, depends on me to feed it, as it feeds me. Now that my guts are more prone to make themselves felt, I must treat this business, in worm and me, with new respect. If not exactly gratitude.

Fact or fantasy, image or hypothesis? Am I reinventing reinventions of the wheel? I don’t know, and never will, but luckily the process doesn’t begin or end with me. ‘Yes, but… No, but…’ you may say, and put me right where I go wrong.

Looking back at what I’ve written so far, Aeroplanes keep popping up: the big, balsa glider my father made for me one Christmas, the Lancasters we watched warming up, and now – as images fresh images beget - several more that I forgot to mention. One was the light plane which crashed, killing my godfather in it; he was not the pilot but eager to learn; after Guernica, the republicans badly needed air support. A the Greenstreets, in the wide sky above garden, horses’ field and tree my father climbed, we saw small Dakotas pulling gliders bigger than themselves. Just practicing, or already on their way to France? Could I have seen two or three gliders behind one plane? We could just about see the strings, as we could when we went to Peter Pan in London soon after the war. How did these aircraft avoid bumping into each other or getting tangled up?

I don’t think these aircraft memories linked directly to my dreams of flying, mechanics to miracles. Nor do I remember specially wanting to go up in one. But I do remember the hum of a plane engine, faint and far above me as I lay on my bed. Not in the dark at night, but sent to rest in the afternoon, with daylight coming through thin curtains. I imagined the plane above me, like others I’d seen, silver, barely visible, my longing spun out to it from where I lay.

PS Round and round: I don’t think Martin could have been old enough, at two years old, to ask the little girl why she rode her tricycle in circles. So why do I attribute the questioning to him? The answer, I think, may be that I questioned her while Martin watched and listened. He then remembered the incident while I forgot it, until I heard the story back from him. Now he’s probably forgotten again, leaving this narrator with the last word.

3. Walking and running, sawing and flying

I was too young to notice when my parents' rented house in Chiswick had its windows blown out. That was at the beginning of the blitz. Mary, my mother moved out with me, aged three, and Martin, one, to a cottage in the country near Newbury. The cottage was lent us by my mother’s Aunt Olive who ran a girls’ boarding school up the road. My father, a civil servant, stayed on in London helping organise shelters and civil defence. He came out to join us most weekends and my earliest memories – brief clips and cameos – go back to these visits of his.

What price oral history if what’s preserved is more the exception than the rule? Is what I remember what happened, or a distant derivative, reshaped in the retelling?

In one clip I am walking down a straight country road with heathland on either side. My mother and father walk side-by-side, a long way ahead. Have they got Martin with them? If so, his pushchair is out of sight in front of them. I shout after them to wait but they don’t turn or slow down. Now, seventy years later, I realise they must have had a lot to talk about. Then, I could probably have run and caught up with them. But I seemed too far, and I hadn't the heart.

In a TV clip, we see lions stalking a herd of deerlike animals. The one they take is a youngster that lags behind. Still in Africa, a family of emaciated elephants trudges in search of food and water. This time it’s a baby elephant that cant keep up, its legs crumple and it falls to the ground. The mother does turn back, but cannot carry it or wait. She sadly leaves it there.
Keep moving, keep up, catch up or you’re lost!

My father is sawing firewood in the yard beside the house. The log he’s cutting lies across a sawhorse and I’m the rider sat on top. When the log gets too short for him to saw, my father lifts me off. I help pick up the sawn-off bits, brush the sawdust off with my hands. I can smell the sawdust, see the logs, but now I’m not sure when or where. Is the child on the log me, or one of my sons? In Berkshire 1940-41 or in ‘70s Manchester or ‘90s Wales, when it was my turn to saw and another son's to play around.

With my father sawing, I knew that this was work and felt happy to be part of it. It was also a game, not just the horse for me, but a welcome break for him from London office, stiff collar, bombs.

My mother was somewhere there, but indoors, out of sight and mind. She was the constant presence then, and constantly busy with two young children, no washing machine, hoover, car or fridge. I know all that but don’t remember it. I have no picture of her then, except the distant view from the back on that walk, or snapshots seen later. The inside of that house, where we must have spent most of our time, is blank and dark. The nearest I get is a glimpse or two from outside looking in, through the French window or a half-open kitchen door. It may have been on the doorstep that I helped Mary salt some sliced green runner beans in a big red earthenware jar, a layer of beans and a thick sprinkling, crusting of white salt, then another layer. I', sure she had me helping her from early on.
She never felt her own place, or women’s place, was at the kitchen sink. But if that’s where she had to be, why not her children, boys or not. I wouldn't have grasped that then, only years later, after the war, when all of us, three brothers and sister, were expected to do our share.

This ‘Cancellors Cottage’ in Berkshire was the first of several war-time billets for our little family of DIY evacuees. I do remember one indoor scene, fraught threesome in a dark little dining room. Martin, aged 18 months or so, is sitting in a high chair more or less facing me. Mary, back to me again, is trying to feed him. Martin, survivor of twins, was always reluctant to eat. Spoonful after spoonful went astray, he'd shut his mouth as the spoon approached, or let it in, then spit the contents out. Or swallow, then sick it up. Dreading that moment, I cowered behind a chest. Maybe Mary turned to me than, and Martin seized the moment, and his bowl, raised it in both hands, over his head, and dropped it on the floor behind his chair. It could have been the one with rabbits round the rim.

How common is very partial remembering? What I remember is the exception, not the rule, the best of my father, the worst of my mother. Is this unfair selection common? About men and women? If I had been a girl, would it be the other way round, or does the bias work on both? Is it his scarcity-value that gives George pride of place in early memories, a real or assumed male dominance, or the fact that I identified with him as another male? I'm sure I was closer to my mother, not comfortable - any more than she was comfortable with herself - but too much a part of her to see her face.

Back in the sun, on another weekend or holiday, my father and I are out on the lawn playing Tom Tiddler’s Ground. He is Tom Tiddler, the lawn is his ground. I have to run onto it and off again without being caught. He’s chasing me and I’m running for the safety of the path between lawn and house. The path is narrow, there’s the French window beyond it and I put out my hands to stop myself. My left hand goes through the glass. I remember the blood more than the pain, the firm white bandage that hid the damage, and being told how brave I was.

I can still see the scar on my wrist, shaped like a high-heeled boot, ankle tapering away across a small blue vein.

But for the scar, would I remember the incident? Or is memory itself a scar? By what everyday magic are mental images formed and stored, filed and recalled? How much can we remember things before we have words, or images, to fix them to? There is an ongoing, if intermittent, physical process, as with external records. There's a portrait of my father on our stairs, painted when he was called up, in case he got killed. Now the portrait hangs on our stairs, the portrait reminds me of him and when I try to remember him at other times its often the portrait that comes to mind. What I see is just paint, quick daubs picking up the light reflected off his skin nearly 70 years ago, when he was younger than than my elder son. The movement of light, to painter's eye, through brain to hand, brush, paint, canvas. And now, the light off the paint - same light or another, is light one thing? - to my eye, and somehow from there to times I spent with him... Or is it just his name, George, and the painting, steady, gentle eyes and rough-weave jacket. Between these appearances, moments, events there is a continuing process, an actual chain of events running to and fro through time and space, in us and between us. Very odd, these images, but not imaginary.

I've almost stopped taking photographs. Partly because I dont know what to do with them, partly because I'm uneasy about the way they stand in for memory. Sometimes they prompt remembering, but it disturbs me when I find myself remembering the picture instead of its subject in real life. How much could people remember before they started making images, in pictures or words?

When a friend mentioned my father's voice the other day, I tried to remember how he sounded. We have no recording of him, though he sang. He also stammered when he spoke, and if I try to remember him talking, that's what I recall most easily, the moments when he struggled to get a word out. Exception to the rule again, perhaps. Sometimes, when I remember the sort of words he said, what I hear is not his voice saying them, but my own.

With animals, I get the feeling that they only remember me when they see me again, with surprise. Perhaps animals have no way of recalling my image in my absence. Perhaps before we had words or pictures we were the same. Or perhaps we merged mothers into daughters, fathers into sons, recalling the one, reborn and transformed, in the presence of the other. One generation rediscovered in the next, changing all the while, like a film, where one frame blurs into the next with perfect clarity.

The other night I was preparing Brussels sprouts, peeling off loose outer leaves and cutting crosses in the stalks. I suddenly felt I’d been doing it all my life, my mother must have showed me what to do, explaining that the cuts let the boiling water in. When Ada trims the pastry off a pie, I have the same feeling. My mother would give us bits of left over pastry to make leaves out of, bowls to lick. Sometimes we got mixed messages, 'Come and help,' one moment 'Out of my way' the next. Some of the messages I picked up before my memories began, and I only remember them when I come across them again. I must have been at least 11 when I a new puppy made a mess on the floor. The noise Mary made at the dog, rather than rubbing its nose in it, disturbed me. I'd heard it before, when younger siblings messed themselves - I would have remembered it then, if not when the mess was mind. 'Ugh, ugh..' in a rasping rough disgusted voice, unlike herself.

For one Christmas, or birthday - mine was five days before the sacred one - George made me a balsa-wood glider, its wingspan as wide as my arms. For its maiden flight we took it to a grass arena at Downe House, my great Aunt Olive's school. It was a boarding school and the girls were gone for their holiday so we had the Greek Theatre to ourselves. A terraced hollow surrounded by walls and a cloister that led to the school chapel. The first flight was perfect, wide wings sailing out over the terraced hollow, rising slightly then dipping to land gently on the other side. Encouraged, my father - I think it was my father - threw it harder for its second launch. Again it sailed away, horizontally, up a bit, down, and up again. Instead of landing on the grass it cleared the boundary wall and disappeared among the pinetrees beyond. My heart sank with it.

I’m told I had a friend who lived not far away. I don’t remember him, but a picture of the two os us playing together in a sandpit. He, Barnaby, was the one with fairer hair. The other thing I know about him is that he got run over and killed by a lorry. When I was told about it, I said – my mother said I said - ‘Can I have his toys?’

It was from that Cancllors that I first went out to school, or rather a playgroup - kindergarten as it might have been called ar kindergarten. I don’t remember starting there, but I think I quite liked the teacher. That may explain my disappointment, and why I do remember one incident in the playground. When we went outside, the teacher told us to be birds. I was never and imaginative child, so I may have taken it literally. 'From out of the wood did a cuckoo fly...' and I circled round the wire perimeter fence. 'He hopped, he curtsied, round he flew and loud his jubilation grew...' I was brought back to earth by a shout the teacher at the classroom door. The playground between us was empty. 'The others all heard when I called,' she said, and she'd have to keep me in.

Like a bird indeed. The teacher was not my mother, school not home. I had arguments with my mother but hardly ever felt my parents were unfair. At bedtime, our differences were forgotten. Mary would read to us, sing a nursery rhyme or hymn, with with George if he was there. We said prayers. If there were any sorries to be said, Mary added hers to ours.

I’ve always had flying dreams, and still do sometimes. Not of flying in planes, but on wings of faith. Sometimes I’m running, on the flat, or downhill, or down flights of steps. All I have to do, once I believe in it, is take my feet of the ground. Sometimes I rise slowly like a balloon, up the outside of a building, or a stairwell between floors. Sometimes I launch myself out from a cliff or rooftop. There’s always a moment of doubt, until I'm sure I'm airborn. Perhaps I'd heard the story of Peter walking on water, or perhaps that story is a replay of ancient dreams, where what we believe becomes true. In my own dreams what mattered at first was to know I could fly, then for others to see that I could, and, a long time later, for others to be able to fly with me. It was disappointing when I could swoop past people's heads and they wouldn't notice, and embarassing when it was only me. How could I be sure of myself if I was the only one?

When Sam, my eldest son, first got a bicycle, he rode off almost unaided. I ran a few yards holding the saddle from behind, then he started pedalling and pulled away. I watched him round the end of the recreation ground and back the other side. Where the path sloped down he found he could stop pedalling and shouted across to me 'Look, look, I'm hovering.' Next time out, he had a fall and for months wouldn’t ride his bike again... But how in a moment of excitement did he hit on that word 'hovering'?

When that teacher suggested we be birds, she probably didnt have to tell us we needed to flap our wings, or that wings were arms. We made the association for ourselves, but how? Years later, when boys all did athletics in the summer term, I noticed all the legs go up around the high jump pit. As the finalist took off, the legs of all those watching rose in sympathy.

How does that transferance work, between people and other animals, jumping species and elements? Is there a bit in the vertibrate brain that stands for limb, so that arms, legs and wings can speak to each other direct, instantly, on sight?

Other animals are more tightly programmed than we are to a particular species behaviour. We learn ours as we go along. With us high-jumpers, it wasn't quite as simple as leg to leg. What counted was not just a congruence of limbs but a systematic shared experience: although only the champions were jumping that day, we'd all had a go for ourselves. What we had was not just the model before our eyes, but conditioned reflexes to match. Inner and outer, genetic and cultural links.

2.CHILDBIRTH

Hard labour, at least it was for my mother. In childbirth the effort and suffering, conscious purpose and reflex come together. Afterwards. mothers often say they dont remember much, the experience anaesthetised or censored out. And babies, the other party in the process, have no memory of it at all.

And yet, memory or not, the imprint of events must be there, on infant tissue, nerves and brain.
We’re more or less familiar with the mother's side of the story, and external events of afterbirth and cutting cord. We don’t know so much about what goes on inside the infant body, the other side of the belly-button, as that vital terminal is closed, oxygen and nourishment dramatically rerouted.

Does this reflex revolution stay buried without trace? We talk of five senses, and a will-o-the-wisp sixth sense, but not in any clear way of what we sense inside ourselves. We’re ‘gutted’ or ‘fed-up.’ Our ‘hearts sink.’ These cliches denote commonplace physical sensations, not flights of fancy. We talk of ‘tingling up the spine,’ our ‘hair stands on end’. These sensations break surface in visible events. As dogs’ and cats’ hairs bristle, so does ours.

What of deeper, slower-burning, sensations? Not sudden responses to image or stimulus, but in that shapeless space we sometimes call the ‘pit of the stomach’? The name is apt, it's where the sinking heart sinks to, the dark side of that trivial external navel pit.

What if that external cord-cutting has its internal counterpart in every mother’s child? Not so much a wound as a sealed lock, blank memorial for all future partings, aimless signpost for future departures. The physical separation and shutting-off at childbirth leaves a neural footprint, a path for subsequent experience to reopen. That vague ache, dread or longing in the space the heart sinks to may be as rooted in the flesh as the sensations reported by amputees in ‘phantom limbs.’

Of course, the labour of childbirth is the opening of a new world as well as the closing of an old. Both are lost for the child, buried in preconscious wordlessness. And it is that dark space that sometimes intimates itself to us in later life, to be pondered between dusk and dawn, old life and new.