When summer comes around I think of my grandfather. Rather than my July birthday and the pangs of absence always pulling a little stronger on such occasions, I’ve realised that the operating factor is in fact cricket season. My inheritance from my mother’s father is that each summer my natural state of being becomes sitting outside listening to Test Match Special with a cup of tea.
When he died two and a half years ago I wrote an obituary but I haven’t fully closed the chapter. There is one cricketer still playing - James Anderson - whom my grandfather and I watched together at Old Trafford. For now he plays on aged 43, and this stubborn last stand in defiance of the passage of time means that for me the ties that bind have not yet been fully cut.
I thought of all of this as I read A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux last week. In what is a dispassionate and at times even distant memoir of grief, Ernaux charts an alienation from her father as she gravitates towards bourgeois tastes and literary sensibilities.
After dropping out of teaching college her father is incredulous not because of the shunned job prospects but because of the food: “he couldn’t see why I had given up a haven of security, where I was being fattened up like a goose, simply because I wanted to be free”. Ernaux’s father lived through the war as a hungry child just as my grandfather did, and so shared the same tendency to view an unfinished plate as a source of distress and indignity.
Ernaux describes her father as a simple, hard-working man who lived a life “governed by necessity”. He strived all his life to secure a degree of material comfort, yet found himself uncomfortable in this newfound skin, especially when his daughter’s friends and boyfriend - all from middle-class, well-read, high-brow stock - came to visit.
What was missing for me was an attempt to grapple with the distance that arose between them as a result of Ernaux’s social mobility and what this means. We take as read that ‘social mobility’ creates scar tissue for those left behind but also for those who move ‘up’ the ladder of class through education, marriage, hard work or blind luck - and as a result find themselves feeling uncomfortable and out of place both where they now find themselves and also from whence they came.
What the reader never gets close to understanding is whether it was in fact her father’s dream for his children to live a life of material comfort and plenty. I found myself thinking surely this is what it was all for? Is that not why he toiled and grafted - first in the fields, then in the factory, and finally in the shop he bought as the embodiment of petit bourgeois - so that his daughter could have a better life than he did?
My mother did not live the same life as her father. Far from being something he regretted that was perhaps his proudest achievement, because the distance between him and his daughter’s education, work opportunities and ‘life chances’ was built on the fruits of his labour.
It strikes me that one of the driving and motivating factors in our society has been the determination that one’s children should have a better lot than oneself. More opportunity, more material comfort and certainly less hardship. We don’t have an ‘American Dream’ equivalent in Britain but this is as close as we got in the 20th century, before that social contract was broken for Generation Rent. I would go so far as to say that the breach of this contract and the very clear realisation that life is no longer getting better for one’s offspring is one of the driving forces underpinning the anger, loss of hope and powerlessness felt by many voters who have voted for Trump, Reform or tapped out of politics altogether.
Yet despite the centrality of this notion of ‘social mobility’ to our politics and even our family lives we don’t really have the language, the reference points or the cultural touchpoints to understand or describe what this means and involves, despite it being a shared experience for millions of parents and children.
What ultimately defined the distance that developed between Ernaux and her father was her penchant for reading and her desire to leave their small town for the bright lights of Paris. I can’t remember my grandfather ever asking what I was studying or reading; it was enough for him to know merely that I was - and that I was able to do so free of hunger and poverty. He didn’t necessarily understand the job market that I would enter as a graduate; it was enough for him that I would enter it with more choice than he had.
I always think of my grandfather when middle class liberals pontificate about “working class” life - something which is an occupational hazard when working in left-wing politics. I was once in a meeting with a Conservative Minister talking about the importance of apprenticeships and the government’s commitment to promoting them when a Labour MP cut him off mid-sentence and simply said: “But not for your kids - they’ll be going to Oxford and working in the City”. That sums it up better than I ever could.
When well-heeled intelligentsia types fetishise industrial, manual work I think of how determined my grandfather was that his own children wouldn’t need to get their hands dirty and graft in dangerous conditions to earn a living. Horny-handed sons of toil actually want their children to work 9-5 in email jobs, it turns out.
Likewise with debates about housing. It is all too easy for people living in beautiful Victorian or Georgian terraces to valorise life in a tower block without actually considering the fact that people who grew up in one dream of a future in which their children will move out and own their own home with a big fancy dining room table.
All of this was missing from Ernaux’s assessment of her own father, apart from when she remarks: “he had brought me up to enjoy the luxuries he himself had been denied, therefore he was happy”. As an adult I have now come to understand what I couldn’t as a child about why my grandfather loved holidays so much; why he prioritised free time above all else; why an afternoon at the cinema, a day at the cricket or a leisurely meal with the paper was the height of luxury.
When I first moved to London he sent me money not for rent and bills but to pay for a meal out. I remember him putting money in my bank account under a strict stipulation that it had to be spent on flights so I could have a summer holiday. Last week at Lords in the posh hospitality seats I enjoyed double portions - one for me, one for him. Apparently I say bourgeois as two words with a strong Northern accent, so that’s something at least.
The way we perceieve the distance that can open up between generations, families and friends is probably more complicated and less than black and white than Ernaux makes it out to be. Maybe the problem is that the French don’t have Test Match Special.
This week I’ll be listening to the radio with my feet up and a fresh brew on. A somewhat unusual tribute perhaps, but I know for a fact that it is what he actually would have wanted.
Thank you for writing this. I am reading it from my grandad’s house in the tiny village in Crete my mom was born. It’s the first time I am visiting since he died. When I graduated from law school in London he asked me to print a photo of me with the gown and cap and degree on hand, to prove to his fellow villagers he wasn’t lying.
You ask whether the whole point of families striving for their kids is them being financially secure, even if it means cultural alienation from their roots. My mother moved from her village on the island to the second biggest city on mainland when she was a child and strived to become middle class. I wouldn’t call her family working class (if such existed in Greece, the way we understand it in the UK), they were rural people.
When during our summers in the village I started hanging out with the local kids she was happy I had company but wanted to keep strict boundaries. She freaked out when she realised me and a local boy were falling for each other. She didn’t sent me to a private school in the big city to get knocked up by her fellow islanders!
She didn’t have to worry, because I didn’t just become a middle class Greek city girl, I joined the metropolitan elite of a foreign country, which made me, in her mind, “too good” not just for Greek village boys, but also for petit bourgeois moms who sent their kids to private school to calm their class anxieties.
Alas, the Greek financial crisis came and battered her, bad health and other tragedies finished her off, she learned her lesson. She found solace in her little village, became best pals with the mother of the village boy she worried I would get stuck with. Now she often mumbles to her self that her biggest mistake was letting me move to London. The boy’s parents tease her about not letting me slip away with their son. Now mom dreams I had the simple life she tried to shelter me from, because it would mean me being close to her.
But how can she know? She knows about 10% of my own life, whereas I have access to 100% of hers. I know where she was born, and will pick where she gets buried. In my 13 years in London she visited just once, and cried for pretty much the entire trip. I took her into Parliament to meet my boss at the time, a 6’5” working class Yorkshire man, and my otherwise Olympian (herself 5’11”) mother cowered like a wet cat.
I comfort myself that if she understood the full extent of my life, she would be happier for me, that by the standards I know she has, it all went swimmingly. Not standards of luxury and comfort- I stopped caring for those when I saw what the yearning for them did to my compatriots- but of connection and meaning, and the ability to find those in the most soulless postcodes. And when they are absent, to create them myself. If the Greek dream ever existed, I think I am living it.