Lakeland Life 1954-1960
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LAKELAND LIFE 1954-1960 Alan Macfarlane 1 Contents Preface 3 Arriving Moving North 6 First experience of the Lakes 13 A Home in the Lakes 23 The place and the people 37 Home Life 1955 56 1956 60 1957 82 1958 107 1959 115 1959 – Tour Round Europe 124 1960 150 Interlude between Sedbergh and Oxford 169 Lakeland Life Walking the dog 187 Motorbike freedom 203 Passion for fishing 209 Rock and skiffle 223 Dances and girlfriends 230 Searching for God and Jesus 256 Afterwards 271 Timeline 272 2 Preface Lakeland Life is part of a series of books which I am writing which describe my early life and education. Indian Infancy covers the years in India from my birth in December 1941 to my return to England in 1947. Dorset Days and Dragon Days (with Jamie Bruce Lockhart) cover my life from 1947 to 1954 in Dorset and 1955 at the Dragon School. My own account of the Dragon experience is in Becoming a Dragon. Lakeland Life describes my home life in the Lake District from 1954 to 1960 and is paralleled by Sedbergh Schooldays, an account of my time at Sedbergh School in Yorkshire 1955-60. Later volumes will take the story on to Oxford University for six years and beyond. All of the volumes are principally based on contemporary documents, especially letters written by members of the family. This volume is based on several sets of letters, my mother’s to me and to my father (when she was away from him on home leave), my letters to my parents and my sister Fiona’s letters to my parents. It is also based on a number of short diaries and accounts I wrote at the time of travels and of my first love affair. There is hardly any of my own writing in the previous volumes, but from the age of fourteen I started to keep papers carefully and also to write with some an eye on the future. I also begin to remember this period of life more sharply, memory becoming much clearer from about the age of fourteen. I have not included many undocumented memories, relying mainly on what was written at the time in the attempt to see those changing years through the eyes of myself and my family in the contemporary materials. I have also refrained from much analysis of what was happening to me, though I may increase this at a later point when this part of the picture can be set within the larger story of my life before and after the Lakes. At present this is a set of field notes taken at the time, describing a boy of thirteen turning into a young man of eighteen. 3 This is a descriptive ethnography, 'thick description' or partial archive, which may be of value to historians in the future. I may write a more generally concise and reflective account based on this, an anthropology rather than ethnography, in the future. I have not always been able to trace those whose letters I quote. Where I have been unable to obtain their permission, I have usually just given the first name and a letter to shield their particular identity. There are numerous people who have contributed to this book, but I shall only mention only two. My sister Fiona wrote a number of the letters quoted here and I am very grateful to her for permission to use them. My wife Sarah, as always has been a careful critic and has re-shaped the book in so many ways, and given me encouragement to proceed. 4 ARRIVING 5 Moving North I was born in Shillong, Assam (India) on 20th December 1941, where my father had joined the army from the tea plantation where he was working. He remained as a plantation manager throughout the period of this book, so my parents were away for most of these years. The family had originally returned to England in April 1947, that is my father Donald, my mother Iris, my sister Fiona (born in April 1944) and sister Anne (born in June 1946). After a summer in Oxford and an autumn and Christmas on the Dorset coast we had moved to a rented house near Broadstone in Dorset in January 1948. There I had gone to kindergarten and my mother and Anne left me and Fiona in October 1948 with my mother’s parents, Will and Violet. During the next seven years before going to Sedbergh my parents came on leave twice and I visited Assam for one winter holiday. My main companions during this period were my sister Fiona and my young uncle Robert, born in 1933 and hence only eight years older than me and already at Sedbergh school. The period in Dorset is described in Dorset Days. In September 1950 I went to the Dragon, a boarding preparatory school in north Oxford. I was a middling level student at the school. I was anxious and unsmiling for the first half of my time there, but was happy and a successful sportsman by the end. I was noted for my tenacity and reached the stream below scholarship level by the end. I was then accepted for entry at the school where my mother’s three brothers had been educated. * My parents and grandparents had been searching for a house in the south of England for some months, but when my mother returned with my sisters in the summer of 1954 the search for a permanent place to live became more serious. My 6 grandparents were getting older, Aunt Nell was wanting to sell ‘By the Way’ and my parents do not seem to have been able to afford the asking price. So there are a number of accounts in my mother’s letters of abortive efforts to find a house. They illustrate well the strain it put on family relations and the difference in philosophy between my cautious grandfather and over-optimistic and ambitious grandmother. They also show how much of a whim it was to move from Dorset to the Lake District and how the final shared purchase was almost accidental. They possibly also suggest a very gradual improvement in the general financial situation as the miseries of the early fifties gave way to slowly rising salaries. On 27th July 1954 my mother wrote We are vaguely on the look-out for a house and Mummy is always answering advertizements but nothing develops. Then on 23rd August she wrote I’m beginning to look around vaguely for houses, not with any definite purpose yet, but I think it’s time we were thinking of moving on. On 30th August my mother wrote in more detail. Mummy and Daddy went off on a wild goose chase this week-end to look at a house in Herefordshire going for £800, it looked lovely from the picture, on the banks of the river Wye with its own fishing and boating, glorious country etc. we had worked out where we would all sleep and the name of the boat we would have but of course they came back without having bought it! Apparently it was terribly trippery with motor boats roaring past your front door and hotels all round, and then in the winter you are left in isolation as all the hotels close down. Of course there was bound to be a snag at that price and one never knows with M and D as they aren’t really keen to buy a house when it comes to the point, I was sorry as we could then have stayed on here for your leave. Still I am a firm believer in something turning up. The tension between my grandparents is reflected in the next account on 6th September. 7 Mummy nearly rushed off to Farnham to-day after another house but Daddy was so gloomy about it and the financial ruin they were on the brink of that she gave up the idea. It sounded rather nice but cost the same as this and is a very expensive place, stiff with aristocracy and Major Generals. I don’t know if we could afford to help towards buying a house, could we if it came to the point, I don’t know how much if anything we are going to have of our commission after the Kyahs [merchants] have been at it. My mother then left for a trip to Scotland to see my father’s brother Alan and his wife Jean, leaving the house in Dorset in confusion and anger. She wrote from Scotland on the 11th. I was glad to get away from “By the Way” really as Mummy was in such a rage that Daddy wouldn’t let her look at a house somewhere that she put all her chickens up for sale, cancelled all her papers, stopped her racing and made Daddy stop his pools and generally made us all feel uncomfortable and the atmosphere tense. It is really hopeless as Daddy won’t look at anything but the cheapest houses and of course there are snags. Mummy goes for expensive places which Daddy won’t hear of. I think myself it would be best for them to stay put until Robert is “finished” and their expenses less, but Mummy must have her own way or everyone knows about it. So I think I shall be staying at Ambleside unless its awful. How I hate being homeless and dependent on other people. Things were clearly coming to a head, so as she came back south from Scotland she stopped off in the Lake District.