Belonging

I was born in the bedroom on the right (Google Streetview)

Yesterday, under the headline, "Experiment", I wrote an extract from an imagined memoir. I thought that would be the last of it but no. For whatever reason, today I sat at this keyboard and began to write a second excerpt. I wanted to dig into a less safe, perhaps less comfortable aspect of my life. These thoughts have always swum around in my head - wondering how I came to feel like an outsider. I am sure that there were several ingredients but in this writing I am touching upon how my parents and the life they fell into after the second world war contributed to that feeling. Of course, the experience of reading Richard Hines's memoirs has once again sparked this piece. Next week I think I will print off a copy of it for him. After all, I know so much about him but what does he know of me?

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Where do we truly belong? I know that I am Yorkshire through and through because this was the county of my birth and all my family's births - going back at least four generations. This is undoubtedly my homeland - the land of my heart.

However, though I was born in The East Riding of Yorkshire, my mother was born in The West Riding and my father in The North Riding. They were not "from" the village where I was born. In fact, they only settled there in 1952 - just a year before I was born.

They were incomers, unlike most of the village's established residents. The majority of my primary school classmates had deep roots in the village or the outlying farms. They had cousins there, aunties and uncles and some of them had grandparents there too. I was always a bit envious of that because we had no relatives there. They all lived miles away and I hardly ever saw them. 

In fact, I never saw the family of my Uncle Derek. He was my mother's only sibling. After the war, he had married a Lancashire woman called Irene. They lived over there in the Manchester suburb of Middleton where they raised five daughters. They were my cousins and I did not meet them until July 24th 2014 - the day of Auntie Irene's funeral. In life, I  met her only once at my mother's funeral in 2007 but I never once met my Uncle Derek.

How could that be? We lived less than a hundred miles apart and before World War II , Mum had always been very close to Uncle Derek. He was her little brother and they had been through a lot together - including their parents' acrimonious separation around 1929 that saw Mum and Derek being permanently farmed out to their maternal grandparents in Rawmarsh, north of Rotherham.

Why had this separation arisen? What had happened? Once, I quizzed Mum about it and her explanation follows.

After the war, many civilians struggled to get back on an even keel. The same was true for military personnel who had been posted abroad. Returning was not easy. Economically, Great Britain had been devastated by a costly five year war. 

In April 1946, Uncle Derek asked Mum and Dad for a loan of £50. Apparently, he was desperate for this money and though Dad was reluctant to lend out money he himself could hardly afford, he reluctantly agreed - on the condition that Uncle Derek repaid the loan within two years. Derek assured them that he would honour the debt and even signed an agreement.

Back in 1946, £50 had the purchasing power of £2700 in today's money. Not an insubstantial amount - around $3700 in US dollars. 

But the two years passed by and Uncle Derek did not settle the debt. Then three years. Dad was so incensed that he refused to meet with Derek and his family ever again. Words must have been exchanged but I do not know what was said. A rift had developed between the two families and Mum felt very bad that she had vouched for Derek's integrity. He had let her down at the very time that Mum and Dad badly needed that money to re-root themselves as a newly married couple.

Silver-plated cigarette box presented to my mother in India in 1945

My parents had met in India in 1943 and they married in New Delhi after the war had ended - on December 8th, 1945. The following month, they began the long boat journey home. 

Re-establishing themselves in England was not easy but the Royal Air Force helped my father to secure a temporary teaching position in Uxbridge, in London's western suburbs. Before volunteering to join the R.A.F. in late1939, he had been a primary school teacher for two or three years, having secured his first paid position in Hessle near Hull.

Their married life proper had begun but they yearned for a return to Yorkshire and within a few months they were back, living temporarily with my paternal grandparents in the market town of Malton - or more precisely Norton-on-Derwent which is just over the river. In the summer of 1947, my oldest brother Paul was born in Malton on August 5th, the same day on which Dad had been born thirty three years earlier.

For a little while they lived in the tiny village of Laxton south east of Howden where Dad was the headmaster but it was probably as quickly as 1949 that the little postwar family moved again to Barmby-on-the-Marsh where there was a bigger village school. It came complete with a spacious headteacher's house that was and remains bang next to the old school building.

My second brother, Robin, was born in Goole near Barmby-on-the-Marsh in February 1951 and he claims to have memories of that village but I suspect they are received or imagined memories born out of what he was told. After all, he was only eighteen months old when the family moved once again.

This time they moved to the village of Leven on The Plain of Holderness between Bridlington and Kingston-upon-Hull - a name which is more commonly shortened to Hull which is the name of the river that splits that sprawling port city in half.

On October 8th 1953, I was born in Leven in the tall Victorian schoolhouse attached to the school so I had never figured in the previous family history I have just described. Fortunately perhaps, Mum and Dad decided to stay put in Leven where Dad was the village headmaster for twenty six years. Leven was my home village. It was where I truly belonged... wasn't it? 

Decades later, I realise that in some ways I didn't really belong there at all. We were like immigrants in a foreign land. Our roots there were not deep and fundamental to our being. They were shallow and could easily be torn from that earth. That is the truth.

Mum's inner psyche was rooted in the South Yorkshire coalfield and Dad's true heartland was back in Malton and surrounding countryside. His own grandfather had been a rabbit catcher. They often spoke about their childhoods and of course there were the life-changing experiences they had both had in India.

As years passed, they both grew to love Leven and became integral, respected figures in the community. As well as being the headmaster, Dad was also the village's polling officer on election days. He chaired the parish council and was, as I have said before, a church warden. He also led a successful campaign to establish a recreational playing-field to serve what had become, by the mid-sixties, a growing dormitory village that had already doubled in size.

For her part, Mum was the key mover in establishing a Women's Institute branch in the village. Neither of my parents sat on the sidelines, they were always involved in village life. It is, I think, less easy to be that way in a city of over half a million - like Sheffield.

But did we truly belong in that village, did I belong? In those days, village doctors along with parsons and headteachers were often viewed as the educated elite. They did not labour in the fields or quarry gravel or shoe horses. Nor did they sweep the streets like old Joe Grubham. 

I suppose that in some ways  - these pillars of the community were seen as a cut above the rest though Mum would have fiercely contested such a notion. Growing up in the South Yorkshire coalfield with a father and grandfather who were both coalminers, she was destined to be a Labour voter all her life and often argued with villagers whose political stance was conservative. 

Being one of the village schoolmaster's sons I was different from many of my peers. We had books and both of my parents were ardent readers, curious about the wider world. Also we had family adventures.

In 1957, Mum and Dad bought a secondhand caravan - what North Americans would call a trailer. Every Whitsuntide for a decade, we went up to The Lake District and unhooked the caravan in a farmer's field in the village of Braithwaite. Together, we climbed the Lake District hills from Skiddaw to Hellvellyn and regularly walked to the inn at Swinside which children were not allowed to enter. My three brothers and I sat on the wall outside swigging pop and chomping on potato crisps.

In the long six week summer holidays enjoyed by schoolchildren and teachers alike, Dad towed the Lynton Triumph caravan  down to Dover where we took cross-channel ferries over to France - usually via Boulogne rather than Calais. Only the rich travelled by aeroplane in those days.

Like gipsies, we journeyed through France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and even down to Italy. We never ate out as families do nowadays. Mum prepared everything in the caravan which was laden with necessary provisions from home. It was very much continental Europe on a shoestring budget.

Back in the village, none of the other children had holidays like that. Instead, their families visited Yorkshire coastal resorts, Butlins camps or maybe Blackpool over in Lancashire. That's if they could even afford a holiday.

I think that my parents' war years in India gave me a sense of what was possible in terms of travel. The world was big and wonderful and there were no laws to say I could not go. Mum and Dad were also inquisitive people who looked beyond safe horizons to the outer world and that broader outlook rubbed off on me.

Each year, well ahead of Christmas, Mum would prepare a cardboard box of treats and essential items to send to a war-affected family in benighted East Germany. I have no idea who they were or how she knew about them. Perhaps a charity like The Salvation Army had been the link. 

That quiet annual act of kindness speaks faithfully of the kind of woman Mum was - a socialist firebrand with a heart of gold  who always remembered her roots and the poverty of her childhood. It did not matter to her that the receiving family were German. They were not her enemies. They were just people who needed a little help and encouragement in those bleak postwar years.

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Okay. I could go on but that's probably enough for today. If you got this far, thank you for reading it. I feel as though I have removed the lid from a private well, opened up a part of me that was previously in shadow. Maybe I will write some more memoir pieces and maybe I won't. Everybody has got a readable story to tell. I guess it is about making the right selections and finding the right words.