Dorset Days DORSET DAYS Authored by Alan Macfarlane
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DORSET DAYS AN UPBRINGING IN THE 1940S AND EARLY 1950S Rhodes James and Macfarlanes, Broadstone, Dorset,1951 Alan’s parents with maternal grandparents and family, Alan, seated on ground BY ALAN MACFARLANE For Fiona and Anne who shared those Dorset Days First published by The Village Digital Press The Orchard Glasshouse, South Willingham, Market Rasen LN8 6NG UK CONTENTS Preface and acknowledgements ix Chronology and sources xv 1. Coming home 1 2. Home 23 3. Daily life 35 4. Money and chickens 68 5. Pain 83 6. Education 98 7. Games 127 8. Outdoors 138 9. Imagination 166 Republished © Alan Macfarlane 2013 10. Assam 197 11. Separations 219 12. The View from Afar 240 Afterwards 255 Visual essay - pho tographs, drawings and letters supp Re PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are four questions behind this account of my childhood. One concerns who I was and how I came to be as I am. So this is the autobiographical quest for personal roots and identity. I hope to throw some light on the wider nature of an experience which is not confined to me – the evolution of a certain sort of middle-class, English, male in the middle of the twentieth century. A second question concerns my family and its history. It seems that I come from a well-documented and interesting family whose tentacles spread across the world and can be traced in detail from the later seventeenth century. In particular, there are sets of letters and memoranda which give an insight into the inner dynamics of colonial family life. Not the least of these are my mother’s letters and other writings which I hope to reassemble and expand. This is the genealogical quest. A third question concerns England and Britain. I came back from India when I was six and encountered a new land. I needed to start to understand its distinctive history and culture. This is an exploration I have engaged in since, both as a historian and an anthropologist. The theme here is ‘the peculiarity of the English (or British)’, and what its causes and effects have been. From ‘The Origins of English Individualism’ written in 1977, through to my latest book in 2009 on ‘Reflections on Cambridge’, much of my work has been exploring the bundle of contradictions and strange cultural pattern of this small island. Through examining my family, and myself I hope to throw further light on this. ix DORSET DAYS PREFACE My final question concerns the British Empire. Britain was sole adventure left, death.’ As I read this fifty years later it just the small hub of a great empire for more than a century. seems a pertinent remark. The British created this empire, but equally it created Britain. It has a very distinctive character which makes it different from * other empires in the way it worked and imagined itself. I am particularly interested in what held it together and how the In constructing this book I first wrote down everything I identity of those who were involved with it, such as my thought I could remember about this period when I was aged ancestors, was constructed. This knits together the three six to thirteen. I then checked this against the diaries, letters previous questions – my own education for empire, the and school reports. This has thrown some light on the way in experience of my far-flung family, the peculiarity of their which my memory works. It shows that for this period, or at British home, and how all this was shaped by, and shaped, the least before I was ten, without supporting documentation British Empire. almost everything would be irretrievable. There would be just a very few lightning flashes of memory, usually moments of high * excitement or pain or effort. A.C. Benson beautifully describes these isolated moments. I seem to have been interested in the evocation of memory ‘Early impressions are like glimpses seen through the from a relatively early period in my life. This partly explains window by night when lightning is about. The flash leaps out why I have been reluctant to throw anything away. From my without visible cause or warning, and the blackness lifts for a teens I had the idea that I would try to construct an ‘archive’ of second revealing the scene, the criss-cross of the rods of rain, my life and perhaps that of my relatives. So I hoarded toys, the trees shining with moisture.... So it is with memory; my photographs, letters, writings, anything I could. This desire to early blinks are exceedingly vivid, but they are sundered, and hold on to the past is shown in an essay that I wrote when I was though the passage of time does not dim them, as it dims the eighteen entitled ‘The past’. I shall just include the first more fading impressions of later life, they do not form part of a paragraph to show my awareness, even then, of the importance continuous picture.’1 of memory. A second thing I have found is how faulty memory is, not ‘People often find tremendous pleasure in reliving the usually in the experience itself, but in the surrounding details of pleasures of past events, partly as I have already explained, when or where the event occurred or who was involved. I have because they are surveying it from a safe peak of knowledge. It re-contextualized many memories, when I caught my first fish is only when we are not fully conscious, however that we can be at Oxford, when I learnt to cycle, when I stole from my truly transported there again and feel every emotion that we grandfather. I have also had to revise my whole assessment of once felt. We must not worship the past. It is dangerous to the degree to which I was unhappy at the Dragon School. idealise it, and useless to live continually in it. It can be utilized What I regret is that even with the detail in the documents, as a springboard to the future, and for those who have had an so little new memory has been triggered. I have sometimes unhappy life it may be the dim backcloth to the glorious future, managed to capture again the ambient smells, sounds and but that is all.’ feelings surrounding a photograph or a letter. Yet very often I There is a comment by my teacher in red ink at the end: ‘One angle left out – the aged. What does it feel like, I wonder 1 A.C. Benson, As We Were: a Victorian Peepshow (Penguin edn., when all the major experiences of one’s life lie in the past? The 2001), 67. x xi DORSET DAYS PREFACE feel I may be forcing or imposing memories now that I know Yet I soon realized that, along with a slightly head-in-the- an event happened. For, on the whole, I can recall very little of sand attitude which my mother admits to, there were also good even major events of that time, like going to India for my reasons for this. Personal letters and diaries are not usually eleventh birthday holiday, or singing in ‘Iolanthe’ when I was where you will find discussion of international or national twelve. politics or events – unless they directly impinge on plans. This Yet gazing at my past as it unrolls in photos and comments is worth remembering. The sources I have, like all historical it seems mainly to be the life of a slightly familiar stranger. I documents, create a bias - in this case away from the general to feel a little affinity, some ghostly overlap. Yet mostly it seems to the particular. be a different person. I recognize the little boy as someone I Another bias lies in the letters that I wrote to my parents knew a very long time ago but have almost now forgotten. The and grandparents. Addressing an adult, especially when one is past is not just a foreign country where they do things still learning to control language, can lead into a kind of writing differently; it is inhabited by half-familiar ghosts of one’s which conceals as much as it shows. How much of my own younger self who seem disconnected strangers, yet are also part views and voice comes out of the letters, especially those of oneself written within the scrutiny of the Dragon? I don’t notice much This again emphasizes the good fortune of having the difference in my letters from home and from school to my photographs, letters and other documents. There are clearly parents. some people who seem to be able to remember their early years in vivid detail – Lord Berners, Roald Dahl, W.H.