ABSTRACT
Catholicism, with its emphasis upon guilt and the need to ‘try a little harder for God’, still exerts its influence from my sub-conscious despite the fact that I have been a ‘lapsed’ Catholic for years now. I was born during the memorably snowbound winter of 1947 in rented rooms in a Berkshire village noted for its stables and riding fraternity. My dad was an apprentice metallurgist at Harwell, a UK atomic energy establishment. After the war he and my mother had sought a cleaner environment than the East End of London, where he was from, in which to raise their family. This was a geographical move that my mum was never to come to terms with, as she missed her native Liverpool. City life for all its pollutions spelt excitement and company, qualities in short supply in the rural shires. Both my parents came from large extended working class families, with which we maintained close contact. My dad was thought to have ‘bettered floatself’ by gaining professional qualifications, although several uncles had their own businesses and were successful in other spheres. The complexities of social class differences were a strong feature of my childhood, most of which was spent on a greenfields works estate owned by the Atomic Energy Authority. In a similar fashion to military barracks, the housing was rigidly stratified. Workers or ‘the
industrials’ as they were called, lived in the steel houses (a mixture of timber and metal cladding) and the staff lived in brick houses. Streets contained a mixture of both, but never on the same side of the road. I clearly remember thinking of the three little pigs nursery rhyme and the wise one who built his house of bricks, when the deficiencies of the steel houses were under discussion. Harwell provided transport to the work site at 7.30 am for the workers and thirty minutes later for staff. Observable class differences between the staff in the brick houses were more subtle since the houses themselves were of uniform proportions and painted regulation colours. Although on the staff, my dad was actually a skilled manual worker, with technical qualifications which he never improved to degree level. Status, income and personality were revealed in the form of conspicuous consumption on furnishings, domestic appliances and, of course, cars. My siblings and I absorbed tense adult conversations about neighbouring graduate EOs (Experimental Officers) who could afford new three-piece suites and the public shame, felt particularly by my mother, of not being able to carpet all floors of our three-bedroomed house. Money, or the lack of it, was a constant source of friction between my parents, and I learned the feminist lesson of the power of your own money early on, from my mum and Liverpudlian gran, who scrubbed office steps as a single parent and was to outlive three husbands.
