Recently I have been thinking about my great-grandparents. I never met them, but as I grow older I can see their lives more clearly and, to my surprise, find myself identifying strongly with them.
As a child, I was frightened by my family. I recall uncles who were angry, curt and intimidating. Some male relatives were downright scary. They barked questions and could talk only about The War or The Villa. They might give you half-a-crown, but they would cuff you as they did. They were grumpy, taciturn men who shouted at their children and hit them. Aunts were not much better. They disparaged you to your parents in front of you. They would hit you, too, but it was more of a slap, usually on the bare legs, and it would carry on stinging for longer than a thump. The worst thing that could happen with an aunt was to be slapped for no apparent reason and then told off for crying. I think many of us had that experience growing up in Britain after the second world war.
Friends of the family and neighbours were pretty similar. I was forever being shouted at by strangers for being in the wrong place, or told off just for being a boy or (perversely, so it seemed) for not being manly enough. Old ladies in particular were adept at taking a swing at any child they took exception to. The parents of your friends were pretty intimidating as well. As for school: teachers, male and female, were licensed to thump, whack, slap and pick you up by the thin wispy hair that grew just in front of your ears.
I have this image of running a gauntlet of perennially angry grownups.
I rewatched Cinema Paradiso recently and was struck by a scene in which the hero’s mother hits him repeatedly in the street. It goes on for about 20 blows and reminded me how, when I was growing up, you would see mothers outside shops or on the walk back from school walloping their children over and over again. It was commonplace and no one took any notice. This wasn’t only in the rougher neighbourhoods. At the age of 11, I can remember my own mother shouting: “Stay still so I can hit you!”
If you were brought up by a parent who had been through one of the world wars there was a very good chance they were, by today’s standards, pretty traumatised and alarmingly capable of violence.
My own children grew up in a much kinder world, thank goodness, and I think I know exactly when it began to change. It was towards the end of the 60s, about the time that my 45-year-old father’s hair began to creep over his collar. Around that time, aunts and uncles said you could drop the honorific when addressing them and schoolmasters began occasionally addressing boys by their first names. The greatest shock came in September 1968, when someone in my school year hit a first-year and that child reported it to a teacher. News of this echoed around my school world, because not only did everyone hit us, but we hit everyone, too.
At the time, people blamed social change on the summer of love that had now reached as far as Birmingham. They also blamed the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who was the object of an extraordinary level of rage (“Bloody Wilson!” even gets name-checked when Basil Fawlty’s kitchen catches fire). But when the terrifying school bully addressed me in a friendly way as “Adrian”, I knew, as they say in coming-of-age films, “that things would never be the same”. The world of Hobbesian violence was being superseded by the age of Aquarius.
I now see that time differently. Human interaction wasn’t changed for ever in the 60s and 70s. Instead, the harsh world of my parents and grandparents finally began to revert to the kindness of the early 20th century. This becomes clearer still when I examine the lives of my parents and grandparents.
My grandfathers were brought up in a Britain that had known almost a century of peace. There had been wars since 1815, but they had been fought by professional soldiers in far away places such as Balaclava and the Khyber Pass. My mother’s father and my father’s father left home to join the army when they fell out with their parents, but soldiering was a game for them in the long Victorian and Edwardian summer that existed up until 1914. The first world war changed all that. These two young men, one from Wales, one from Birmingham, both served for four years in Flanders. One was wounded, the other almost interred alive by a pile of corpses when he fell asleep, too tired to move. They both survived long enough at the front to become NCOs whose job was to make sure other young men went over the top (often to their deaths).
They lost relatives – brothers-in-law, cousins and the fiances of their sisters – in the slaughter, as well as friends. The world they came home to was populated by less fortunate men who had lost limbs or who were crippled. As a child, I remember being taken to see a great uncle who slept in the living room because he couldn’t climb stairs any more and could hardly speak, either. He had never been right, I was told, since he was gassed at Ypres.
When the first world war ended, my grandfathers returned home to their families, and were expected to carry on as before. The world they returned to contained a generation of unhappy sisters and cousins who would go on to be the fierce, unmarried great aunts of my childhood.
These brutalised people were the adults who brought up my parents’ generation, but, by 1939, their own children were being sucked into a second world war. This time it wasn’t only the young men who were conscripted. My father had a relatively safe war, certifying airworthy aircraft for the RAF and providing sketches of new machinery. Nevertheless, he worked at aerodromes where Wellington bombers came down in flames at dawn as they returned from attacking Germany. Everyone used to rush to try to get the crews out, he told me, because the chief fire officer was useless and prone to fainting.
My mother was called up and wanted to join the Wrens, but because her brother had just been killed at El Alamein she agreed to my grandmother’s request that she do war work instead. So as a teenager she stayed at home and worked by night, manufacturing shells and mortars in shifts at the Lucas factory in Birmingham. One night when she was not working, the other shift – scores of young women in their late teens and early 20s – were wiped out in an air raid. My mother told me how she arrived at work the next day to see the crater. Fragments of her friends were being scooped up and buried in a mass grave by bulldozers.
My parents and their generation were brought up by damaged fathers who had witnessed thousands of deaths. They themselves were lucky if they only witnessed a few dozen deaths in their late teens and early 20s. It is impossible to believe they were not damaged by all that.
No wonder these adults shouted and lashed out when I was young. Our parents and grandparents were living through collective post-traumatic stress disorder on a scale that Britain hadn’t seen since the civil war.
Which brings me to my paternal great-grandparents Tom Mourby and Mary Lerego. Recently, my wife found a memoir my father had written about them. Tom and Mary were born in the 1860s. He came from Gloucester, and given he was 6ft 5in, must have come from a family that could feed him well. She was also tall and spoke English but with a Welsh idiom. Her family were probably from Ross-on-Wye, but before that from Italy or Portugal.
When they married, she insisted he retire from the merchant navy. He had been a chief engineer when steam was introduced. As they wanted a family, Mary said they should live in the country because that was the best place to bring up children. I remember a similar discussion with my wife. Thus it was that Tom ran a series of gasworks on the Welsh border and ended up owning one. He had five tall daughters and two sons, one of whom (my grandfather) took over the family firm and the other, who did well at the grammar school, went into local government.
Tom and Mary lived a happy life of not much work and lots of holidays by the sea (Tom would swim all day if she let him). They had their domestic squabbles (Mary did not like him drinking in the house so Tom hid his whisky bottle inside his riding boots). They had their eccentricities (my great-grandfather liked to sit outside during a storm to watch the lightning). They took an interest in politics (neither approved of the Boer war with its naked agenda of seizing other people’s land). They voted Liberal and lived in a warm world of practical jokes and forgiven debts (my father was once told that the Mourbys would have been wealthy but for Tom’s refusal to enforce payment).
The strange thing is that the more I discover about my great-grandparents, the more they resemble my generation in their values, and the more the two generations that separate us seem like aberrations. Tom was very fond of his drink and did a lot of business in pubs. He had a pony and trap and his children could always find him by looking for where the horse was waiting. Indeed, it knew his routine so well that, at the end of the evening, the horse would often bring him home asleep. Evidently Mary knew about the whisky bottle in his boots and used to take the occasional nip herself, topping up with water. Neither of them ever mentioned this double deception.
Tom considered himself a Christian, but did not go to church. His religious observances mainly involved giving coal to the poor. He never donated to foreign missions because in his seafaring days he had seen too much trouble caused by the introduction of Christianity among happy indigenous peoples. Mary outlived him by many years. Despite having brought up seven children with only a daily “help”, she gave the impression of never having worked in her life. She was easygoing and didn’t even get angry when she discovered my father trying to dismantle the new gramophone in an attempt to extract the little man inside who was doing the singing.
My great-grandparents lived a charmed life that was not untypical of their time, and reading about it has helped make a lot of sense of my childhood. What began in 1967 or thereabouts was not the destruction of everything Britain had been. I think it was a reversion – not without its problems – to the people we had been before the unimaginable cruelties of two world wars.
Tom and Mary Mourby died before I was born so I can never be sure, but I have the feeling that I am closer in personality and outlook to my great-grandparents than my parents or grandparents simply because my life more closely resembles theirs. And I do not think I am the only one by far.
