This is a memoir of my private and professional life as a teacher. The blog describes how I fought for the cause of working class education in England and against politicians who have made teachers scapegoats for supposed failure. It is also an account of the people, places and experiences that have shaped my hopes and opportunities and explains why I have adopted the attitudes and strategies that I have. On what grounds did I choose my friends and enemies and how did I help and hinder them?
These are a participant's memories of home and school in the second half of the twentieth century, and include triumphs and disasters that I have struggled to treat 'just the same'. I am unsure whether my personal story is of much public interest and significance but I have been involved in dramatic events and confrontations that seem exciting to me, even in retrospect.
Dr Rhodes Boyson denounced me as a Maoist when I was a radical teacher in Hertfordshire. I became a community school principal in Cambridgeshire in 1980 and campaigned against first the Thatcher cuts and then the National Curriculum. Exhausted by my struggle, I retired at 50 and began a ten year career in higher education. Almost at once I found myself leading a crippled school out of special measures, and challenged the 'name and shame' regime introduced by New Labour. Summoned to S
anctuary Buildings, I was subsequently tracked by a special adviser and threatened with professional extinction. But I survived to become Professor of Educational Leadership and Management at the University of Leicester, where I found new ways to resist the bureaucratic machine that has swallowed education in our time.
Politicians, with their research-assisted and otherwise ghosted memoirs, have given the genre a bad name. The publication deals are sealed before they leave office and the modern equivalent of the Victorian triple volume biographical epitaph thuds from the presses before the author's temporary celebrity has a chance to fade. Readers are usually disappointed by the less than juicy revelations of failed careers, while few diarists in search of an after-life have matched Samuel Pepys, with his delicious combination of secret code, royal gossip, naval adventures, illicit sex, corruption, plague and fire.
But I have reached the age of indiscretion and have a compulsion to tell my story almost as strong as that of the ancient mariner, who buttonholes a wedding guest with a rambling tale about painted oceans and albatrosses. At this moment, aged 62, I suppose my career as a teacher is over, and feel as if my 40 year quest for the Holy Grail of education has ended in complete and utter failure. Between 1957 and 1999, I was a pioneer pupil, teacher and principal at comprehensive schools in London, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Leicester.
I believed I was an insurgent in a campaign for learning communities that would be at the heart of a more equal, more fair social order. I collaborated with friends, colleagues and students to create a new, comprehensive pedagogy that would enable everyone to succeed. For me, drama, games, simulations, music and dance seemed to offer the potential for learning experiences that would change the world. Over thirty years, my public appearances, books, articles and journalism challenged the old, conservative order of private and grammar schools, IQ tests, streaming, setting and didactic teaching.
Although I seemed to be successful at the time, all this has come to nothing. The English education system is as socially differentiated as it has ever been. Every school and child has a place in a complex hierarchy of status and prestige. Parental occupation all but determines a child's prospects and even those who feel threatened by other people's social mobility complain that our society is insufficiently open and mobile. School heads have become agents of national policy, shackled to the idea that there is a direct link between test scores and prosperity. Everything is sacrificed for examination results that match criteria invented by the government. Performance is measured in the present rather than explained by the past.
Teachers are required to 'deliver' a prescribed curriculum derived from the grammar school and are disciplined by an apparatus of inspection and testing that destroys confidence, initiative and enjoyment. The schools themselves have almost ceased to be educational institutions. Re-engineered on small business principles, they are often as concerned with their own image and reputation as with the welfare of their children. Each institution is part of a market, not a community, driven by consumer choice rather than moral vision.
Like so many other educators in my time, I have been consigned to oblivion by this relentless process of school reform. At the beginning, I had hopes of becoming a comprehensive version of Dr Thomas Arnold, the legendary Headmaster of Rugby. I dreamed of myself as a missionary amongst the heathen, striving to embody certain values and principles. This is now impossible. When I started, inspired by Shelley's Defence of Poetry, I wrote about teachers as the 'unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. Now they have become instruments of a ruthless bureaucracy.
The hyper-accountability regime today is as oppressive as the Tsarist system imposed on Polish schools in the nineteenth century. Marie Skłodowska-Curie, winner of Nobel prizes in Physics and
Chemistry, was forced to learn her lessons in Russian. Despite the inspectors' vigilance, however, Marie and her Warsaw friends were determined to remain Polish. Our tyrants seem determined to convert our ordinary people into blue ants, docile workers and consumers destined to experience the cycles of debt, poverty and unemployment that come with the global economy. I am not confident that our English working class children have the courage or resources to resist their fate and fear that ceaseless tests and failure may produce only disenchantment.
As time has gone by, I have become a dissident rather than a crusader, an erstwhile reformer obliged to define himself in opposition to Conservative and New Labour reforms. Several of my friends have compared me to Don Quixote, a comical figure tilting at windmills, as if there were a chance of halting the advance of their towering sails. Like Matthew Arnold, a school inspector from another age, I have been forced to 'hear the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,/At their return, up the high strand,/Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in.' The 20 year destruction of comprehensive education leaves those who campaigned for it in a position of defeat and despair similar to that endured by the higher grade elementary schools after the 1902 Education Act.
Now completely forgotten, the first large urban comprehensives were created in the 1890s by radical school boards in places like London, Birmingham and Bristol. Successful, 'higher grade' elementary schools were encouraged to expand by offering education beyond age 14. Growing from the bottom up, these schools created new opportunities for the sons and daughters of city clerks and skilled workers, especially in technical and scientific subjects. This innovation challenged the selective, gendered and classical forms of education provided by the then dominant endowed grammar schools.
The Board of Education was upset by the absence of rugby football and Greek. Inspectors noted an unfortunate lack of 'ethos', although they were honest enough to admit that the teaching was generally good. Sir Robert Morant decided that the solution was to abolish the school boards and direct the available funds to established grammar schools. The 1902 Act's funding regime ensured that in future elementary schools were indeed elementary. All the existing higher grade schools were eliminated within a few years. As a result, as late as 1938, only 14% of children accessed secondary education.
As an historian and educator, I am not content that teachers' lives should be forgotten, then or now. I believe it is important to hear the voices of pioneers and to understand their perspective on the struggle for working class education. Where did the higher grade heads and teachers come from? How were they educated? What were their schools like? What did they think they were trying to do? How did they do it? After 1902, did they suffer the pain of defeat? Did they re-invent themselves?
These questions are now very difficult to answer. Despite rescue bids by a handful of historians, the heads, teachers and students who pioneered this prototype, higher grade education have left only the faintest trace in the records of their time and have disappeared almost entirely from the national memory. My post-graduate studies in labour history taught me how easily ordinary people's documentary remains are lost and destroyed. Without written material, memories do not last long.
Our historical imagination is dominated by Dr Arnold because we know so little about the lives, careers and intentions of the men and women who fought our battles over a century ago. Painstaking research amongst scattered sources can recreate an occasional life, as Jane Martin has done with London school board member Mary Bridges Adams, but first hand accounts of teaching lives remain rare. This silence of the archives is at least helpful to our enemies and stirs my spirit of rebellion. If we long to hear authentic voices from the past, do we not have a responsibility ourselves to describe our experiences of injustice and tyranny?
This historical awareness prompted me to ask my father, when he retired in 1974, whether he would write his memoirs. 'My life wasn't worth living, never mind writing about,' he said and did not record details of his personal and family history until 2000, when I pressed for information for my own use. I don't agree that his life wasn't worth living or writing about. To my biased eyes, my parents seemed the most remarkable individuals I ever met. In their domestic lives they were passionate enthusiasts, warm-hearted, three-dimensional exceptions who remained, nevertheless, deeply interested in other people.
There was also an element of the disingenuous about my father's portrayal of himself as unworthy of life history. His 'Counter Chronicles', published in a union journal The Post between 1954 and 1967, were more or less autobiographical and described the trials and tribulations of clerks working in the London post office. As an old man he helped found The London Counter Veteran and contributed articles that memorialized incidents, places and people that he remembered. He also hoarded publications, letters, documents and other records of the world and people he knew. This was no denial of history. Despite his protestations that he was not important, he found his life and career supremely interesting and wished to preserve memories of his friends, family and milieu.
Acts of conservation and of remembrance are also part of an unacknowledged but ceaseless struggle for power and survival. Unless history is a printed space reserved for elite males and celebrities, the private and domestic life of ordinary people deserves as much attention as the world of high politics. Failed, unknown radicals are as vital to our understanding of the past as the triumphant ministers, generals and media stars who have the leisure and contacts to provide the public with written evidence of their importance. Nothing troubled the Jewish victims of the Warsaw ghetto more than the thought that every evidence of themselves, their families and communities, even their very names, would disappear forever. The Nazis were equally concerned with history and bulldozed every trace of Jewish society and culture, including the cemeteries.
If the historian E.P. Thompson aimed 'to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity', there seems little shame in trying to rescue ourselves while we can. We should not leave history to be written by the winners or allow the devil all the best tunes. Our world will be lost and forgotten if we do not take the trouble to bear witness to what we have seen and known.
Our grandson Conrad's birth in Walthamstow this autumn (31.10.08) has further stimulated my desire to write about my friends, family and life. An interest in family history is a common but acquired taste. At twenty I had no interest in my ancestors, perhaps because the present was more than enough. I managed to read my father's 'Counter Chronicles' and letters home from the war only after his death, though I knew how much he would have loved my enjoyment of them.
As a teacher I was concerned with explaining how things happened and often neglected the tiresome details of the past, especially if they were parochial and limited in their implications. I pursued big pictures and big ideas. Now, I devote hours to hopeless searches through census records, hunting in particular, and with some desperation, for my maternal grandmother's birthplace. She was dead before I was born and I know nothing of her family and early life in Norfolk. Although Conrad may be 50 years short of the age at which most people begin to wonder about their family tree, his fragile, scantily recorded antecedents span two continents and his paternal grandfather is dead already.
The fact of my own laborious research into the register of births, deaths and marriages tells me that I should give a fortune for a grandparent's memoir, indeed for written evidence about them of any kind. For me, grandparents have been remote, almost mythical figures and I do so wish they had been closer. As my relatively long-lived contemporaries have become grandparents they have begun to rejoice in relationships often unknown in previous generations. My mother's mother (1943) and my father's father (1945), for example, were dead when I was born.
I met my father's mother a couple of times and am unaware of any interest that she took in me. I remember that she wore a fox fur round her neck and once said in her kitchen that one of her tin openers was older than my father. My mother's father was the only one of the four that I knew and loved. He lived with us for nearly three years when I was small. He apparently read to me a good deal, though I do not remember it. He appeared a couple of times a year to tip my brother and I half a crown and visited every Christmas to join in the festivities. He lived to see me go up to Cambridge and to my disappointment expressed no opinion about the event and died, aged 81, during my second term (February 1966).
Conrad is more fortunate than me in the number of his relatives surviving from previous generations at the time of his birth. He has a great grandmother in Mauritius, who seems exotic and mysterious to me, even if in time the logistics of age and distance fail to impress him. He has three grandparents already devoted to him. I am particularly glad to see him because my suburban nuclear family of the 1940s and 1950s has almost disappeared. Ann (my wife) and I have lost our son and all four of our parents. We have no remaining aunts or uncles. We each have one surviving brother.
A sense of loss has permeated our thoughts in recent years and in bleak moments I seem to face genetic as well as educational extinction. This is not a noble sentiment but it influences my behaviour and drives me on, even when it seems that I have nothing left to prove. As a result, this blog combines the private, personal and professional in a serious attempt to understand and perhaps justify my life and to explain what I thought I was doing and why. I have no religion but seem to have inherited a Puritanical mindset that is not easily set aside.
This on-line blog-memoir is framed as an historical narrative, with myself as the omniscient observer and author, even when this is an implausible pose, recording the twists and turns of fate and my own perceptions as I hurtle towards the future and death. I rely upon my own memory; my personal and fairly extensive hoard of primary sources, family documents and photographs; and my father's archive of papers and memorabilia, now placed with the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University. I have published a considerable number of articles and monographs about my professional experiences and have preserved detailed records of events at the institutions with which I have been connected.
From the spring of 1956 until the autumn of 2005, I wrote regular letters home and sent my parents copies of anything that I found or published or otherwise generated. I tried to involve them in my life and knew that they were very proud of me. The saddest gift my father gave me, a couple of years before he died, was the complete set of papers, a carefully filed and dated 'Bernard' archive. I felt as if he were returning love letters. In fact, I suspect he had always envisaged this last gesture and was preparing for his own death.
I write as honestly as decency permits but I am well aware that this is my memoir and my perceptions and that other people may view everything from quite another point of view. I know, too, that memory is not an indelible photograph but a soup constantly bubbling on the stove, improved, enhanced and changed by new spices and sauces. We are consistent in our personalities and attitudes (towards risk, for example) but we are changed by time and struggle to admit or remember discomfiting episodes from youth. There is also an unacknowledged editorial presence in our choice of memories, sources, stories and words. We hold the video-camera at our own lives and make sure that the film clips are consistent with our mature selves. All writing is about impression management, and this applies especially to autobiographical endeavours. So I acknowledge that this is a self-conscious and self-aware account of myself and leave you to draw your own conclusions about the writer and his life.
These are a participant's memories of home and school in the second half of the twentieth century, and include triumphs and disasters that I have struggled to treat 'just the same'. I am unsure whether my personal story is of much public interest and significance but I have been involved in dramatic events and confrontations that seem exciting to me, even in retrospect.
Dr Rhodes Boyson denounced me as a Maoist when I was a radical teacher in Hertfordshire. I became a community school principal in Cambridgeshire in 1980 and campaigned against first the Thatcher cuts and then the National Curriculum. Exhausted by my struggle, I retired at 50 and began a ten year career in higher education. Almost at once I found myself leading a crippled school out of special measures, and challenged the 'name and shame' regime introduced by New Labour. Summoned to S
anctuary Buildings, I was subsequently tracked by a special adviser and threatened with professional extinction. But I survived to become Professor of Educational Leadership and Management at the University of Leicester, where I found new ways to resist the bureaucratic machine that has swallowed education in our time.Politicians, with their research-assisted and otherwise ghosted memoirs, have given the genre a bad name. The publication deals are sealed before they leave office and the modern equivalent of the Victorian triple volume biographical epitaph thuds from the presses before the author's temporary celebrity has a chance to fade. Readers are usually disappointed by the less than juicy revelations of failed careers, while few diarists in search of an after-life have matched Samuel Pepys, with his delicious combination of secret code, royal gossip, naval adventures, illicit sex, corruption, plague and fire.
But I have reached the age of indiscretion and have a compulsion to tell my story almost as strong as that of the ancient mariner, who buttonholes a wedding guest with a rambling tale about painted oceans and albatrosses. At this moment, aged 62, I suppose my career as a teacher is over, and feel as if my 40 year quest for the Holy Grail of education has ended in complete and utter failure. Between 1957 and 1999, I was a pioneer pupil, teacher and principal at comprehensive schools in London, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Leicester.
I believed I was an insurgent in a campaign for learning communities that would be at the heart of a more equal, more fair social order. I collaborated with friends, colleagues and students to create a new, comprehensive pedagogy that would enable everyone to succeed. For me, drama, games, simulations, music and dance seemed to offer the potential for learning experiences that would change the world. Over thirty years, my public appearances, books, articles and journalism challenged the old, conservative order of private and grammar schools, IQ tests, streaming, setting and didactic teaching.
Although I seemed to be successful at the time, all this has come to nothing. The English education system is as socially differentiated as it has ever been. Every school and child has a place in a complex hierarchy of status and prestige. Parental occupation all but determines a child's prospects and even those who feel threatened by other people's social mobility complain that our society is insufficiently open and mobile. School heads have become agents of national policy, shackled to the idea that there is a direct link between test scores and prosperity. Everything is sacrificed for examination results that match criteria invented by the government. Performance is measured in the present rather than explained by the past.
Teachers are required to 'deliver' a prescribed curriculum derived from the grammar school and are disciplined by an apparatus of inspection and testing that destroys confidence, initiative and enjoyment. The schools themselves have almost ceased to be educational institutions. Re-engineered on small business principles, they are often as concerned with their own image and reputation as with the welfare of their children. Each institution is part of a market, not a community, driven by consumer choice rather than moral vision.
Like so many other educators in my time, I have been consigned to oblivion by this relentless process of school reform. At the beginning, I had hopes of becoming a comprehensive version of Dr Thomas Arnold, the legendary Headmaster of Rugby. I dreamed of myself as a missionary amongst the heathen, striving to embody certain values and principles. This is now impossible. When I started, inspired by Shelley's Defence of Poetry, I wrote about teachers as the 'unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. Now they have become instruments of a ruthless bureaucracy.
The hyper-accountability regime today is as oppressive as the Tsarist system imposed on Polish schools in the nineteenth century. Marie Skłodowska-Curie, winner of Nobel prizes in Physics and
Chemistry, was forced to learn her lessons in Russian. Despite the inspectors' vigilance, however, Marie and her Warsaw friends were determined to remain Polish. Our tyrants seem determined to convert our ordinary people into blue ants, docile workers and consumers destined to experience the cycles of debt, poverty and unemployment that come with the global economy. I am not confident that our English working class children have the courage or resources to resist their fate and fear that ceaseless tests and failure may produce only disenchantment.As time has gone by, I have become a dissident rather than a crusader, an erstwhile reformer obliged to define himself in opposition to Conservative and New Labour reforms. Several of my friends have compared me to Don Quixote, a comical figure tilting at windmills, as if there were a chance of halting the advance of their towering sails. Like Matthew Arnold, a school inspector from another age, I have been forced to 'hear the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,/At their return, up the high strand,/Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in.' The 20 year destruction of comprehensive education leaves those who campaigned for it in a position of defeat and despair similar to that endured by the higher grade elementary schools after the 1902 Education Act.
Now completely forgotten, the first large urban comprehensives were created in the 1890s by radical school boards in places like London, Birmingham and Bristol. Successful, 'higher grade' elementary schools were encouraged to expand by offering education beyond age 14. Growing from the bottom up, these schools created new opportunities for the sons and daughters of city clerks and skilled workers, especially in technical and scientific subjects. This innovation challenged the selective, gendered and classical forms of education provided by the then dominant endowed grammar schools.
The Board of Education was upset by the absence of rugby football and Greek. Inspectors noted an unfortunate lack of 'ethos', although they were honest enough to admit that the teaching was generally good. Sir Robert Morant decided that the solution was to abolish the school boards and direct the available funds to established grammar schools. The 1902 Act's funding regime ensured that in future elementary schools were indeed elementary. All the existing higher grade schools were eliminated within a few years. As a result, as late as 1938, only 14% of children accessed secondary education.
As an historian and educator, I am not content that teachers' lives should be forgotten, then or now. I believe it is important to hear the voices of pioneers and to understand their perspective on the struggle for working class education. Where did the higher grade heads and teachers come from? How were they educated? What were their schools like? What did they think they were trying to do? How did they do it? After 1902, did they suffer the pain of defeat? Did they re-invent themselves?
These questions are now very difficult to answer. Despite rescue bids by a handful of historians, the heads, teachers and students who pioneered this prototype, higher grade education have left only the faintest trace in the records of their time and have disappeared almost entirely from the national memory. My post-graduate studies in labour history taught me how easily ordinary people's documentary remains are lost and destroyed. Without written material, memories do not last long.
Our historical imagination is dominated by Dr Arnold because we know so little about the lives, careers and intentions of the men and women who fought our battles over a century ago. Painstaking research amongst scattered sources can recreate an occasional life, as Jane Martin has done with London school board member Mary Bridges Adams, but first hand accounts of teaching lives remain rare. This silence of the archives is at least helpful to our enemies and stirs my spirit of rebellion. If we long to hear authentic voices from the past, do we not have a responsibility ourselves to describe our experiences of injustice and tyranny?
This historical awareness prompted me to ask my father, when he retired in 1974, whether he would write his memoirs. 'My life wasn't worth living, never mind writing about,' he said and did not record details of his personal and family history until 2000, when I pressed for information for my own use. I don't agree that his life wasn't worth living or writing about. To my biased eyes, my parents seemed the most remarkable individuals I ever met. In their domestic lives they were passionate enthusiasts, warm-hearted, three-dimensional exceptions who remained, nevertheless, deeply interested in other people.
There was also an element of the disingenuous about my father's portrayal of himself as unworthy of life history. His 'Counter Chronicles', published in a union journal The Post between 1954 and 1967, were more or less autobiographical and described the trials and tribulations of clerks working in the London post office. As an old man he helped found The London Counter Veteran and contributed articles that memorialized incidents, places and people that he remembered. He also hoarded publications, letters, documents and other records of the world and people he knew. This was no denial of history. Despite his protestations that he was not important, he found his life and career supremely interesting and wished to preserve memories of his friends, family and milieu.
Acts of conservation and of remembrance are also part of an unacknowledged but ceaseless struggle for power and survival. Unless history is a printed space reserved for elite males and celebrities, the private and domestic life of ordinary people deserves as much attention as the world of high politics. Failed, unknown radicals are as vital to our understanding of the past as the triumphant ministers, generals and media stars who have the leisure and contacts to provide the public with written evidence of their importance. Nothing troubled the Jewish victims of the Warsaw ghetto more than the thought that every evidence of themselves, their families and communities, even their very names, would disappear forever. The Nazis were equally concerned with history and bulldozed every trace of Jewish society and culture, including the cemeteries.
If the historian E.P. Thompson aimed 'to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity', there seems little shame in trying to rescue ourselves while we can. We should not leave history to be written by the winners or allow the devil all the best tunes. Our world will be lost and forgotten if we do not take the trouble to bear witness to what we have seen and known.
Our grandson Conrad's birth in Walthamstow this autumn (31.10.08) has further stimulated my desire to write about my friends, family and life. An interest in family history is a common but acquired taste. At twenty I had no interest in my ancestors, perhaps because the present was more than enough. I managed to read my father's 'Counter Chronicles' and letters home from the war only after his death, though I knew how much he would have loved my enjoyment of them.
As a teacher I was concerned with explaining how things happened and often neglected the tiresome details of the past, especially if they were parochial and limited in their implications. I pursued big pictures and big ideas. Now, I devote hours to hopeless searches through census records, hunting in particular, and with some desperation, for my maternal grandmother's birthplace. She was dead before I was born and I know nothing of her family and early life in Norfolk. Although Conrad may be 50 years short of the age at which most people begin to wonder about their family tree, his fragile, scantily recorded antecedents span two continents and his paternal grandfather is dead already.
The fact of my own laborious research into the register of births, deaths and marriages tells me that I should give a fortune for a grandparent's memoir, indeed for written evidence about them of any kind. For me, grandparents have been remote, almost mythical figures and I do so wish they had been closer. As my relatively long-lived contemporaries have become grandparents they have begun to rejoice in relationships often unknown in previous generations. My mother's mother (1943) and my father's father (1945), for example, were dead when I was born.
I met my father's mother a couple of times and am unaware of any interest that she took in me. I remember that she wore a fox fur round her neck and once said in her kitchen that one of her tin openers was older than my father. My mother's father was the only one of the four that I knew and loved. He lived with us for nearly three years when I was small. He apparently read to me a good deal, though I do not remember it. He appeared a couple of times a year to tip my brother and I half a crown and visited every Christmas to join in the festivities. He lived to see me go up to Cambridge and to my disappointment expressed no opinion about the event and died, aged 81, during my second term (February 1966).
Conrad is more fortunate than me in the number of his relatives surviving from previous generations at the time of his birth. He has a great grandmother in Mauritius, who seems exotic and mysterious to me, even if in time the logistics of age and distance fail to impress him. He has three grandparents already devoted to him. I am particularly glad to see him because my suburban nuclear family of the 1940s and 1950s has almost disappeared. Ann (my wife) and I have lost our son and all four of our parents. We have no remaining aunts or uncles. We each have one surviving brother.
A sense of loss has permeated our thoughts in recent years and in bleak moments I seem to face genetic as well as educational extinction. This is not a noble sentiment but it influences my behaviour and drives me on, even when it seems that I have nothing left to prove. As a result, this blog combines the private, personal and professional in a serious attempt to understand and perhaps justify my life and to explain what I thought I was doing and why. I have no religion but seem to have inherited a Puritanical mindset that is not easily set aside.
This on-line blog-memoir is framed as an historical narrative, with myself as the omniscient observer and author, even when this is an implausible pose, recording the twists and turns of fate and my own perceptions as I hurtle towards the future and death. I rely upon my own memory; my personal and fairly extensive hoard of primary sources, family documents and photographs; and my father's archive of papers and memorabilia, now placed with the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University. I have published a considerable number of articles and monographs about my professional experiences and have preserved detailed records of events at the institutions with which I have been connected.
From the spring of 1956 until the autumn of 2005, I wrote regular letters home and sent my parents copies of anything that I found or published or otherwise generated. I tried to involve them in my life and knew that they were very proud of me. The saddest gift my father gave me, a couple of years before he died, was the complete set of papers, a carefully filed and dated 'Bernard' archive. I felt as if he were returning love letters. In fact, I suspect he had always envisaged this last gesture and was preparing for his own death.
I write as honestly as decency permits but I am well aware that this is my memoir and my perceptions and that other people may view everything from quite another point of view. I know, too, that memory is not an indelible photograph but a soup constantly bubbling on the stove, improved, enhanced and changed by new spices and sauces. We are consistent in our personalities and attitudes (towards risk, for example) but we are changed by time and struggle to admit or remember discomfiting episodes from youth. There is also an unacknowledged editorial presence in our choice of memories, sources, stories and words. We hold the video-camera at our own lives and make sure that the film clips are consistent with our mature selves. All writing is about impression management, and this applies especially to autobiographical endeavours. So I acknowledge that this is a self-conscious and self-aware account of myself and leave you to draw your own conclusions about the writer and his life.
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