Kate’s Listography this week is about the lessons I learnt from my parents. As Kate herself expresses it “I’m not talking about the ‘don’t fart in a swimming pool’ type lessons either (though they do have their place) – I’m talking about the real deal – the lessons that you want to pass down to your own children”.
Yes, I have things to be grateful to my parents for. But sadly I feel I have more that they (well my father anyway) did that I don’t appreciate. But we’re here to be positive. So what did I learn that’s useful?
The first thing Kate puts on her list is how to cook. And I have to agree with her. As an only child with a non-working mother, I was always around the kitchen. So I learnt a lot of cooking by osmosis, just by watching my mother rather than actually being actively taught. But I remember from an early age being involved in making buns, fudge, toffee, jam; bottling fruit; making bread. At 11 or 12 I was sufficiently accomplished to be able to keep house for my father for 3 or 4 days (during the summer holidays) while my mother was in hospital. OK my mother and I planned it all out in advance: menus, what to buy, how to cook it. But if I say so myself I think I did it well. By the time I was a student I was teaching my peers that they could cook bread, jacket potatoes and pastry in a Baby Belling! To this day I cook, although not as much as I might like. I’m not one for fancy cooking or cakes (though I could do that if I wanted) but good, wholesome, fresh cooked family meals. And not a recipe in sight!
The other big lesson I took from my parents was their bohemianism and eccentricity. Remember we’re talking 1950s/60s here when the country was still depressed and very conventional following the war. My father had been a conscientious objector during the war and spent the time working in hospitals and on the land; youth hostelling on his days off; and billeted with all sorts of interesting people. After the war my parents lived together for two years while my mother’s divorce happened. This was unheard of in those days! So I got a very free-thinking upbringing where anything could be discussed, all the bookshelves (and there were many) were on open access, doors were never shut, nudity and sexuality were normal and people were known by their Christian names, not as Aunt/Uncle/Mr/Mrs/etc. (unless they insisted as some did). Not that I was allowed to do what I liked: there were very strict boundaries and one was brought up to be respectful, polite and considerate of others — otherwise known as children should be seen and not heard. But that, together with living through the 60s and 70s, has left me with an open mind and a propensity to tell it like it is.
Something else this gave me, at least in part, was the concept of taking responsibility for my actions. To some extent I had to learn this by doing the opposite of my father. He was a negative, grumpy old sod a lot of the time and became almost a caricature of Victor Meldrew in his old age; nothing was ever his fault but always someone else’s and they were out to get him or his money. Except that isn’t wholly true; he did try to say “sorry, that was my fault” if it was just maybe not enough or loudly enough to drown out the negative. But he also taught me responsibility in a rather curious way. Despite all the “open access” I don’t recall us ever having a talk about “the birds and the bees” and in this context he only ever gave me one piece of advice. When I was about 17 (I certainly had a steady girlfriend, so we’re talking 1968/9) he said to me one evening something to the effect that I was old enough to know about how things worked followed by “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t have any bastards”. Yes, in those words. This was in the day when the pill was fairly new still, and there was still stigma in some quarters about being born to unmarried parents. A valuable lesson, but one that maybe scared me a bit too much?
Another thing which came out of my parents’ bohemianism was a love of books and knowledge and being inquisitive. Both my parents read — a lot! My mother, who’s 95, still reads a lot. We were forever in and out of the local library and knew the Chief Librarian as a friend. We had books at home. I was encouraged to have books. And I was allowed to read anything on the shelves which meant I read Lady Chatterley in my early teens (boring it was too!); and Ulysses (also boring); and Havelock Ellis (being the nearest thing then available to The Joy of Sex). Knowledge was important but being inquisitive and knowing how to find things out was even more important. As my father used to say “Education is not knowing, it’s knowing how to find out”. We still have books; literally thousands of them pushing us out of house and home.
Which brings me to the last of the five. All of this put together gave me the ability to think. Properly and deeply. As Noreen once, somewhat over inflatedly, observed of me: he has a brain the size of the Albert Hall and runs around in it. Sure there are things I don’t think about or understand (like high finance, economics and money markets) but I could if they interested me. As a result of this, plus our educations, both Noreen and I know how to do research: proper research. But then in many ways that’s been our lives.
So there are five things I learnt from my parents. And I haven’t even touched on natural history, photography, churches, history, nudism, local government (my father was a councillor) and how to be a grumpy old sod — although I’ve tried to throw away this last.
What did you learn?
Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros. 
Ideas are the motors of history. They take many forms and have many sources, and often assume a life of their own, and prove to be bigger than the epochs they influence. As such they are matters of vital concern; and therefore it is necessary that they be examined and debated, clarified and criticised, adopted when good and defeated when bad. The job of doing these things belongs to all of us, but in practice it falls to those with a particular interest in, and sometimes aptitude for, the task. Such are the ‘intellectuals’.