I’ve been reading the Guardian for exactly half a century. I was born into a working-class family in Darlington not long after the second world war. A great-grandfather worked at the wire mills and dressed shire horses for agricultural shows. The great-grandmother left school at nine and “went into service”. A grandmother was a milliner, her son (my father) was a department store salesman. Mother was a book-keeper/typist. It was a family of Methodists, who knew their place and were deeply suspicious of ideas, learning and books.
Two things saved me: the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Darlington and a boy I met there, newly moved from Peterborough and made to sit next to me in Latin. From the school I learned self-respect and from Stephen Jeffery (the new boy) I learned about conscientious objection (his father had been an objector), an utterly bizarre notion to me at that time. I learned about liberalism, pacifism, the Society of Friends, BBC2 and the Guardian with its big, bold, black masthead – the “Avant Guardian”/ “avant you read it yet?” Remember that?
Heavily against the odds, the universities of Durham, Leeds and London were allowed to prepare me for an international career in education – much of it behind the iron curtain – with blue-chip employers including the British Council, the United Nations and the BBC – and in Sweden, to which I owe another colossal debt of gratitude.
We read the Guardian, my wife and I, in its airmail edition, in China where we lived during the Falklands war. We read it a day late in Stockholm and a couple of days later in Mariestad and Rättvik, and we read it courtesy of the diplomatic bag in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia during the late 70s and early 80s. We read it in British Institute libraries around the world, and occasionally in hard currency hotels where there was little danger of its corrupting local sensibilities.
Fifty years on I still do the crosswords first, then the short letters. Next the Country Diary and probably seven out of 10 long reads. I try hard not to have a favourite columnist but can’t deny a soft spot for Lucy Mangan.
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