Growing into socialism

Submitted by AWL on 30 September, 2014 - 6:18 Author: Cathy Nugent

Many children have an acute sense of injustice, will feel righteous anger when they don’t get a “fair go” at an activity or when their opinion is dismissed by an adult. A child’s sense of injustice is egocentric but reasonable and it’s probably essential if the individual is to develop a wider sense of injustice in the world.

From as long as I can remember I had that wider view. The root of it is in my family history, and specifically my mother’s recollections of her childhood.

My mother’s parents were both from well-off backgrounds. Her father’s family were North Yorkshire coal merchants, her mother’s family were Anglo-Irish, children of a doctor in the British Army. My maternal grandfather and grandmother, or so I understand, met in India, as my grandfather was also in the army. As a child I imagined their meeting was a romantic encounter, a foxtrot round the officers’ mess. Why I had this ridiculous idea I don’t know. Perhaps it was a way to repress the facts.

After 10 years, maybe less, of marriage, and having given birth to six children (one of whom died in early infancy), my grandmother was dead. She died of motor neurone disease, alone and in a asylum for the mentally ill. My grandfather re-married, and for whatever reason he and his new wife did not look after the children, four girls and a boy. Neither side of the family took the children in, and even before their mother was dead all were sent to (separate) orphanages and foster care.

Why did these people not want to care for the children? They had money enough. Why are children without parents treated like criminals, herded into big homes and given rough care? These were the big questions I had to ask myself as I listened to our family history. So I grew up being sensitive to the inequality embedded in the world.

Being a child in the 70s also helped me become a socialist. It’s the decade everyone likes to make fun of its crap fashion and terrible food, but it was a time when class, as an identity really, was clearer. Personal memory is an unreliable facility, often a self-serving edit, but still... I believe at that important impressionable age of seven to eleven I really did have some great stuff to grow up with.

My parents had the Daily Mirror delivered, and I always looked for Paul Foot’s column which told you about bad stuff happening to good people. I remember lining ourselves up in the playground and having to choose between being a “red” or a “blue”. The power cuts provoked family arguments about how well or badly Labour was doing in government.

All of this grounded me well for the teenage years. Every Saturday we went to the library nine miles away (Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire). Though I would read just about anything I particuarly looked for novels that could tell me about maturity or subversion or both: Edna O’Brien, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Carson McCullers and yes, I’m sorry to say now, D H Lawrence.

By the age of 14 my friends and I had discovered punk; it was important to get hold of the most obscure. Crass were unlistenable to — so they were a favourite. Secretly I preferred the more melodic yearning of working-class black America; I had a big collection of Motown and other soul classics.

These things, the books and the music, were a carapace really against the ordinary hurts and humilations of teenage years and a way to make sense of it all, and a way to dream of the future.

The books and music also helped me think about the social life of the village I lived in, a place at edge of the Fens. Its class structure was the source of a lot of my confused angst about the world. I hated the fact that the daughter of our school’s chair of governors got to be Head Girl. The prejudice against gypsies. And the materialism of rich farmers and their children.

My friend Clare’s dad was the “only Labour Party member in the village”, and being something of an odd-ball she liked to act out authentic socialism. When John Major came to the village to speak during the 1979 election, she forced me to dress head to toe in red and turn up to heckle him. So Clare was a big influence.

By the time I got to college in 1983 I was pretty much ready to find the Real Left in the Big Wide World...

For me there was never a “lightbulb moment” in becoming a socialist. You could say I simply grew into it.

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