A childhood at the edge William House Retired GP; Chair of the BHMA
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. John Lennon Reading and reviewing Alison Gopnik’s thought-provoking book on parenting (see review page 47) gave me pause to test her ideas and stories against my own childhood. So here goes! When my parents married my father was running the family packing business in a ramshackle haulage yard at the side of his family home in Islington, central London. Both parents were from large local families. My father’s was a tough masculine world of the boxing club and hardy outdoor swimming, softened by a family talent in fine art. They had both left school aged 14. My big sister was born eight years before me in 1939, becoming the apple of my father’s eye. But her childhood was disrupted not only by the war, but also by our mother’s post-natal depression. After the war, the family business was thriving, prompting my parents to move out of Islington to the northern edge of London where I was born. The father I knew aspired to posher things in the new suburbia. He joined a Masonic Lodge and took my mother to Masonic Ladies Nights at the Grosvenor Hotel in Mayfair and to The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. My mother was warm, kind, very clever and anxious. She sang operatic arias when she wasn’t cooking, cleaning or crying. My father had bigoted views and fell out of friendships. My first memories were of a 1930s house much loved by my mother, with a playmate living opposite. My increasingly self-possessed sister taught me to read, but would beat me up if I tried to join her and her friends. Sadly, for my father this house was much too near other people and when I was five he sold the house (without consulting my mother) and we moved to a small cottage two miles down a country lane. In the midst of the move they forgot to register me for school. So with the nearest other child living a mile away I was left to play alone. I grew to love this solitary childhood. I explored at every level. My toys were taken to pieces and put back together. I was obsessed with how things worked and as I grew older I moved through electric train sets and onto dismantling and rebuilding pre-war Austin 7 cars to drive around the field below the cottage. When I wasn’t driving or riding my bike (with no brakes), I climbed ‘like a monkey’ up the mighty lime tree towering over the
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The House family about 1951
cottage. My feet and hands knew every branch to the very top, where I sat like a bird looking down on its little world. I finally started school, like Christopher Robin, when I was six. I enjoyed the lessons and made friends. My mother took me and collected me and all was well. But this would not last. The family business began to fail and when my mother became company secretary I had to take the bus home from school. Alone at home my solitary explorations continued. After a few years the business ceased trading. Through her intelligence and social skills my mother quickly found secure, well paid work, while my father had a series of poorly paid unreliable jobs. She was the breadwinner and housekeeper and child carer. I watched her struggle, smoking and drinking gin. I hid her cigarettes but she found them again. My sister lost interest in school and was pursued by foolish boys, one day falling pregnant on the hearth rug. From my tree I watched the perverse pageantry of human folly. I managed to scrape through the 11+ exam a year early so was back with my own age group. I chose the grammar school three bus rides away. Though bright I was put in the bottom stream. My classmates struggled and I helped them. I had friends, but was never part of the crowd. I watched from the edge of school life and did what I wanted to do, including at age 13 deciding on medicine. I caught the three buses until I was 17 when I drove my Austin 7. It was in that year that my mother died of cancer and I met this tragedy with the emotional detachment I had, unknowingly, spent my life cultivating. My father sold up and moved to France, still trying to get away. Years later, and two weeks before her own death, my sister said sorry for her treatment of me. I can see many elements of Gopnik’s book in this story: the importance of love from my mother, having fun and playing (albeit often alone), a messy childhood. I have ended up being very good at ideas and imagination, curiosity, perseverance, self-reliance, resilience and helping people who struggle. This is nearly all accidental. The price I have paid is having a poor paternal role model, clumsy social skills and being too much inside my own head. If nothing else, it makes a nonsense of attempting to design a child.
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 14 Issue 1 Spring 2017
