But the older we get, and the more we learn about other people in our families, communities, and workplaces, the more it becomes evident that we are all remarkable in some way or other. All our lives have themes that connect us with the lives of others—love and loss, triumph and tragedy, weddings and funerals, hope and disappointment, leaving home and coming back. It is these points of connection between our stories and other people’s stories that establish points of interest. Sometimes, it’s not one person’s story over another that is at issue. In the words of the 1970s working-class comedian Frank Carson, stories are like jokes. What matters is “the way we tell ’em.”19
The moment I truly grasped all this was when my mum was dying in Accrington Victoria Hospital in Lancashire, England. She was ninety-three years old. Because of unbearably painful conditions and what had become a dismally poor quality of life, she had decided to take no further nourishment. After she lapsed into apparent unconsciousness, my family and I sat with her for the best part of nine days until her final breath. I thought the time would pass slowly, but the hands raced around the clock at the end of her bed. Over many hours and days, I wrote a short piece about her life—the stories she told, the experiences she had, the things she did—at first, just for its own sake, and because, as a writer, I knew it was one of the few things I could usefully do.
The narrative took on a shape, and I sent it off to the Lancashire Telegraph that my mum used to have delivered every day—a widely read daily newspaper across one of the most populated counties in England. I submitted it not as an obituary but as a tribute to my mum and also to a way of life shared by women like her and families like ours throughout the region.
The editor wrote back, asked for some photographs (which we had luckily already collected for Mum’s ninetieth birthday, her last big bash), and announced they would publish it as a major feature. Just a couple of days before Mum died, when all the fluid had practically gone from her body, I leaned right over her with family members gathered around. I had no idea whether she could still hear.
“Mum,” I said, “I’ve something to tell you. I’ve written a piece about you for the Lancashire Telegraph. They say they are going to publish it as a double-page spread complete with pictures. It’s all about you and your life, Mum. A double-page spread! Here’s how it starts.”
I turned to my text. “Here’s the headline”—the one the editors had assigned to it—“How a Loving Accrington Mum Scrimped and Worked for Her Family.”20
And then I began, “Doris Hargreaves was born in a commode at the back of a sweet shop in Accrington, two years after the end of the Great War …”21
Barely two sentences in, something happened that we thought was no longer physically possible. From the corner of my mum’s eye, out of a tiny frame that had received no fluid in over a week, a single tear fell slowly down her cheek. Then I stopped. She understood. She knew. And so did I. This life, these lives—lives like ours—are absolutely worth writing about, as many people appreciated when they wrote back to me about the piece in the weeks that followed.
After the editor asked me questions about what this brief biography meant, they published my remarks at the beginning of the article. I wrote:
The point is not that my mum had an especially extraordinary life; but that she gave meaning to the underrated virtue of sacrifice.
She cared for others throughout her life by how hard she worked and what she gave up for them.
My mum’s working class life also perhaps expresses something about the social history of the town and the region, as well as its people.22
This is basically a story about what many members of my parents’ generation thought they were giving up some of their own lives for. But it’s not a simple narrative of sacrifice and reward, of investment and return. It’s about what happens to us when we move up, out, and on. It’s about what changes and what stays the same in the contours of our lives and in what Martin Luther King Jr. famously called the content of our character.23
Step by Step
Across the span of almost seven decades, I’ve made what feels like a huge change. I’ve moved from a two-up, two-down rented terraced house with no indoor toilet, on a cobbled street, in an old Victorian mill town, to being a reasonably well-known (some would even say quite famous) professor, writer, speaker, and government adviser in my field of education. These days, almost every month, I meet with a minister, president, ambassador, or other dignitary, at his or her request. I’ve lived and worked in three countries and, with my family, become a citizen of two. That’s a lot of movement.
But big changes in life circumstances usually come through smaller increments, the many tiny steps that define social mobility. This book covers the first two decades of my life with my family, in my community, and at school and university, and it is about these less grandiose but equally important changes. It is about moving in the mid-1950s, with the support of the welfare state, up the hill on the back of a coal truck and into public housing—and then, with a bit of good fortune, into a small owner-occupied terraced home. It’s about moving up from infant school—known in North America as kindergarten and first grade—to junior school, from being with the whole range of children in my neighbourhood to just the ones who were selected for the A stream. It’s about moving on, to join the 15–20 per cent or so of my age group who went to grammar school, and travelling across town to get there, from one side to the other. It’s about walking there and back, a mile each way, four times a day (though not uphill both ways!), with an ever-shrinking group of fellow students who stayed on beyond the minimum leaving age. Then it’s about moving away, off to university, as many like me did, and never truly going back.
Social mobility lifts some people up. Others are left out or get left behind. They include my two brothers, who didn’t pass the test that would have got them to grammar school and who therefore weren’t allowed to learn the things they wanted—history, art, music, and sport. Rather than going to university on the other side of the country, they ended up in factories at the bottom of the hill. The left-behind also include the kids who were down in the primary school B stream, who went to secondary modern or vocational schools, who left school early and mostly worked in their overalls while we went to school in our uniforms. They were also the kids who picked out and picked on the “snobs” and the “swots” like me, who had been arbitrarily elevated above them from the age of seven, with insults and fights—breaking my brother’s violin and giving me a black eye for my trouble. Social mobility is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. At the same moment some are able to step up, others discover they are falling more and more steps behind.
Leave or Remain
So once you move up and out from your class and community, what is it that changes about you, and what stays the same? When you come home from university, or a plum job in a new city, or back from another country altogether, do your family and friends rejoice in saying, “You haven’t changed a bit!”? Or do you let it all go to your head and put your past behind you? How do you reach for the stars yet keep your feet planted firmly on the ground?
Uruguay’s superstar football player—soccer player in U.S. terms—Edinson Cavani puts it this way. In a letter to his nine-year-old self, Cavani tells him he will fulfil his dreams of making lots of money, driving nice cars, and sleeping in fancy hotels.24