Fragment 3 - The Life & Times of a Social Experiment

Jul 08, 2023

The Ant-Lion (detail), E.J. Detmold. From: Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914)

If you have read this tale so far you’ll know that I was born in a stately home. However, so far as I can ascertain from the few documents at my disposal, I checked out of there pretty sharpish and chose less ostentatious quarters in the city of Plymouth. So modest, in fact, as to be referred to as “a poor type of foster home” - and that’s in a letter dated just three weeks after my birth, signed by a Miss Gillbard who commanded the jaw-dropping title of Moral Welfare Officer.

As far as I can tell, I remained with the foster-mother until I was nearly ten months old, at which time I was ‘received’ by George and Nellie. On 13 August 1946 they scooped me up and bussed me the 55 miles or so further south-west to Truro in the county of Cornwall.

Truro - a brief sojourn

I confess I have no recollections at all of the place. (Although I have subsequently visited the city and a jolly fine one it is too.) Well, this was at the time when I was under one year old up until I was about three years old.

All I learned later was that George was employed as a butler to somebody or other. On George and Nellie’s marriage certificate George’s ‘rank or occupation’ is given as ‘Man-servant’. At over six-feet tall he would have been physically rather imposing in that role but I doubt he’d have exhibited the wit or wisdom of a Jeeves. He did, however, share a feature of another Wodehouse character in that it could be said that the lunches of, in his case, less than forty years at that time, had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor.

George’s employment meant that Nellie, by contrast a diminutive four feet ten inches tall, was available to look after me. But that didn’t last long …

Lincoln - a bit longer

By the time of my first real memories, aged four, we had relocated 300 miles north west from Truro to the city of Lincoln (aided, I suppose, by the support of the mysterious Canon mentioned in Fragment 2) and Nellie had become what passed for the breadwinner because, from this time on, George spent significant periods of time in mental hospitals.

In fact, the Truro-Lincoln transition presumably happened precisely because George was ill and could not reliably fulfill his work duties. I presume we were reliant upon the work to keep a roof over our heads, so that would have put us out on the streets.

Some charitable arrangement had been made (courtesy of the mysterious Canon again?) for us to lodge in the house of a Mr Goodman. I do actually recall the house: it was in a street of back-to-back terraced houses And I do actually recall Mr Goodman: an elderly gentleman with a white moustache who I only ever remember wearing a thick, dark, three-piece suit, the waistcoat draped with a pocket-watch chain.

I remember the living room or, more accurately, I recall a sense of it. It was wallpapered with some faded, brown-patterned paper. Or perhaps it was something else entirely but over-layered with the smoky outpourings of Mr Goodman’s pipe and the gas-powered lighting system. The ceiling, probably once white, was grey, and greyer still above the gas light fittings. There was a small square table (brown) at which we ate. A couple of lumpy chairs (brown) at the fireplace end of the room. A sideboard (brown) and a bookcase (brown). What was on the floor? Can’t remember, but I bet it was linoleum (brown).

The books in the bookcase fascinated me and, wonder of wonders, I was allowed to look at them. Volume after volume related to the First World War. I recall black and white engravings: a sad young woman sitting on the gnarled roots of a bare-branched tree; a broken-looking soldier staring out across a desolate landscape; the repeated phrase, ‘Brave little Belgium’. An unremitting mass of melancholy. But, in a melancholy way, I quite liked melancholy.

Several of the illustrations were, to me anyway, spooky and mesmerising, but one really scared me – a colour plate featuring a strange crab-like creature feeding on insects. Decades later, an extraordinary thing happened. Walking past an antique and bric à brac shop window, a book cover caught my eye. And there it was, a copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book, my ticket back into that brown room of my past. I bought it – how could I not? – and turned straight to the image.

The colour plate and accompanying story are called The Ant-Lion. I can see why it scared me: it’s an image that might well have featured on a mood board compiled by an art director for the Alien movies.

The Ant-Lion’s author was a renowned French entomologist called Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915). Victor Hugo called him “the insects’ Homer”. Had I understood this at the time, my fears might have been mitigated by the realization that it was all a matter of scale. The Ant-Lion begins:

My big and little readers, look at the picture illustrating this story and tell me what you see. First of all, a hideous little monster. It has six short legs and an enormous body – the sign of an insatiable appetite – and carries on its head two sharp-pointed, curved, movable horns, which open and shut like a savage pair of pincers.

These words and the accompanying colour plate were enough to discombobulate a sensitive little soul like me. Okay, M. Fabre does say “hideous little monster” but ‘hideous’ and ‘monster’ were enough for me; the fact that the Ant-Lion was about the size of a fingernail didn’t even occur to me. As far as I was concerned this foul creature was a big bugger, big enough to eat me, and definitely hid under my bed at night when the candle (yes, truly) was blown out.

After checking up on the Ant Lion I thumbed through the rest of the book. Published in 1914 to support the efforts of Britain and its allies in the First World War (“All profits from sale are given to THE QUEEN’S ‘WORK FOR WOMEN’ FUND which is acting in conjunction with The National Relief Fund”) it includes contributions from renowned authors including J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. But these are not great new Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quartermain or Just So stories. No, this is 1914, the outbreak of war, and the whole mood is martial.

Take, for example, A True Story From Camp by-lined by ‘The Bishop of London’1. Writing about a muster of 5,000 volunteers, he writes:

But what touched them most was the thought of what England stood for in the life of the world. It always has been, and always will be, the Home of Freedom. Let a slave once reach a British man-of-war – he is free. Britannia’s daughters are rallying to her now because she has given them Freedom, for they see that she is the champion in this war of the Freedom of the World against a universal Tyranny.

(The emphases are as per the original.)

Bloody hell! No weasel words there. No doubts. No ifs or buts. No equivocation. Just straight, unadulterated certainty. Including, very clearly, a strong belief in the good that Britain stood for in the world, including its unequivocal anti-slavery position.

So, there I was, sometime in 1949 or 1950, a four-year old, born just after the end of the Second World War, thumbing through propaganda for the First World War and reading about some of the great achievements of British history, including the point made by the Bishop of London regarding the abolition of slavery.

Here’s what happened. In 1807 the UK parliament passed the Act to Abolish the Transatlantic Slave Trade, followed in 1833 by the Abolition of Slavery Act. As Douglas Murray has written,

If Britain’s decision to abolish slavery in 1807 was unusual, more unusual by far was her decision to send the Royal Navy around the world, establish the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, and grow the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade.2

Indeed, as Murray goes on to enumerate, the successful campaign ongoing from 1807 to end the slave trade not only cost a vast sum of money, it also cost the lives of more than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy.

Slavery has been part of human life since the dawn of time. To give just one reminder of this fact, here is an exclamation recorded on the walls of the temple of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (1473-58 BCE) about the return of an expedition deeper into Africa:

Look, they are returning and they have brought something truly amazing! Trees heavy with fresh incense ready to plant. Ebonine, precious ivory, baboons, monkeys and dogs, countless leopard skins, even slaves and children. Nothing like this has ever happened to another king of Egypt.3

Slavery is seemingly a universal and eternal feature of the human realm. How else could it be that, still, after all of the efforts to wipe this scourge from the face of the earth, around 50 million people are in slavery right now? Further, how could it be that, at a time when a vocal constituency is bleating about bad things that happened over two centuries ago, they seem to remain silent about the fact that the number of slaves in the world has increased by an estimated 20 per cent (+10 million) since 2016? Why are the slavery obsessives not obsessing about those who are in servitude today?

I know, I know, the world has changed. Of course it has. It always does. But, right now, although there inevitably are injustices in the world, much of the griping of the moment actually diverts attention and energy away from those issues. The approach of a vocal minority is to declare everything from the past as beyond the pale … but such undermining does not help.

For example, in 2018, a few weeks prior to the centenary of the end of the First World War, the Times4 newspaper carried news that students at that world-class centre of learning Cambridge University had rejected a motion to honour British war veterans on Remembrance Day. This would have been unthinkable even a decade earlier.

And, affection for one’s own country of the kind expressed by Nellie is now frequently derided as an out-of-date concept. It even gets labelled ‘far right’, from which position it seems now to be an easy step to smear those who do actually have a sense of attachment to place as ‘fascist’ and even ‘Nazi’.

On 22 May 2019 in an interview on CNN television, Jean-Claude Juncker, then President of the European Commission, referred to,

These populists, nationalists – stupid nationalists – they are in love with their own country.

Nellie would have wept at such a statement. I’m with her. In the past decade, once-cherished ideas are not just being challenged but utterly overturned, with any counter arguments summarily dismissed. It is depressing. Arguing for changed thinking and reassessment is healthy. Seeking to block such argument is not. I shall no doubt return to these and other right-on re-writings of belief systems but, for now, back to my history. What else happened during this time?

I have recollections of lovely, gloopy orange juice provided free to little persons like me, and stuff called Radio Malt which was meant to fatten us up a bit. Yup, the vast majority of us post-war kids were skinny little creatures.

I have recollections, too, of a nursery school where we napped for a time each day on camp beds. We each had a blanket: mine was embroidered with a cockerel. And, later, recollections of my first primary school, St Andrew’s Primary School, Lincoln, with lessons often taught by black-cassocked priests. It was a Church of England school of what Nellie called ‘the high church variety’. Not that that meant anything to me: the black-clad clerics might as well have been votaries of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for all I knew. Indeed, that might have been preferable.

Curiously, on numerous occasions, I uttered involuntary shrieks during lessons: short, sharp shrieks delivered with no warning. I suppose it was a form of Tourette’s Syndrome. The shrieks seemed to release tension, made me feel better, and, so far as I know, did not greatly alarm my contemporaries. But, on several occasions, the black-robed spectre-in-front would stop in mid-sentence and shout: “Who was that?” I sat stock still, as did everyone else. Again, “Who was that?” (Pause. Silence.) “I shan’t ask again. I will find out who it is.” The lack of congruence between these two sentences seemed not to occur to him. And after several glowering seconds of silence, he would resume whatever it was he was talking about.

I recall accompanying Nellie, presumably during school holidays, when she went to her work as an office cleaner in Lincoln. Offices that were as drab as the living room in Mr Goodman’s house. Brown, brown, brown, with the occasional splash of green or cream.

I recall regular visits, with Nellie (and George when he was not hospitalised) to the Well Lane Wesleyan Mission. My mental picture is of a small, dark chapel and the sounds of hymns ranging from Onward Christian Soldiers to The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended and, of course, the hymns of Charles Wesley, including Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. One thing I do not remember was the 1951 Well Lane Mission Sunday School Outing to Skegness … but a photograph shows that I was there.

And I recall meltdowns – by me. I suppose the world is fairly inexplicable to all young children. It certainly was to me. Not that I could even articulate the inexplicableness at the time. The inexplicableness was itself inexplicable. No wonder then that my only response from time to time was to scream the bloody house down.

Just two years prior to my birth, Leo Kanner, an Austrian-American psychiatrist working at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, coined the term early infantile autism. I now know, through testing, that I was (am) a tad autistic and generously seem to have passed it on in my genes, but that realization was not available in the UK in 1950. So poor Nellie just had to put up with my meltdowns while remaining ignorant of the cause.

But she had also to put up with something worse – George’s fragile mental state. During our time in Lincoln, George was absent much of the time in a mental hospital where, I learned, he was treated with electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). Much later he told me that he thought the many courses of ECT that he had received over the years had helped him. Maybe, but it was often far from obvious. From time to time he was also absent even when he was not in hospital. A much later letter (1984) to me from my adopted godfather, Rupert, includes …

During that time I remember that George had one (or two) of his mental collapses, when he just wandered off into the ‘blue’, to be picked up miles & miles away, by the police, with no memory of what he had been up to.

Back then, in many ways I preferred it when he was in hospital because, when he was at home, an enduring recollection is of him screaming in despair (and I really do mean ‘screaming’) about his failure and our lack of money. This usually happened after I had gone to bed. Nellie would plead with him to calm down: “Shh, you’ll wake David.” But the noise was enough to scare away an Ant Lion. I would go downstairs crying, sometimes throwing my arms round George’s leg, tearfully pleading with him to stop.

The situation was desperate. There was no money to keep a roof over our heads and provide the necessities of life. And, although Mr Goodman had put up with us for three or three-and-a-bit years, I suppose charity has its limits. Something had to change.

Aargh! by David Pinder

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