EARLY YEARS & LINEAGE

9303 Extended Family & Proximity

My relationship with my relatives was asymmetric. That with my mother’s family was very tight knit, closely following the traditional extended family model even though they lived a number of miles away from us rather than in the same street.  

That within my father’s family was much more distant, with the notable exception of my grandmother, Nana Mercer, who I saw several times a week. My father’s family had been, to a degree, dysfunctional. His father was Roman Catholic, as in theory he himself was, and, as such, in later life my father must have been one of the few Catholics in the Masons! His mother was Church of England, and my father went to a CofE Sunday school; so he must have been pretty mixed up when young. The relationship between the two parents was rather formal, as it often was in the earlier years of the century, and in later years she still referred to him as ‘Mr Mercer’.  Indeed, it was years before I knew that his name was Joseph, the same as his eldest son – my Uncle Joe - again another custom in those times. In any case, this grandfather died of blood poisoning when I was just one year old, so it became in certain respects – and in my eyes - a single parent family.  

The children, three brothers – Joe, Horace (my father) and Barry, in descending order of age – and one sister – Phyllis – gradually left home and, apart from my father and myself, only visited it occasionally. This was more of a social gulf, since they had very different lives, rather than a geographical one – since they lived as close by as the members of my mother’s family. 

My father always said the only friend he had in the family was his Alsatian, Denny. 

That all changed when he married my mother, in 1936. 

On my mother’s side, however, there was another shared interest which held us all together. The husband’s all worked for the same company, Prices. Moreover, my formative years were spent on the factory village, Bromborough Pool. I lived there from the age of five until I was 20 years old.  

This was not, though, the same as the traditional picture of mill-workers sharing a common culture. They were, instead, all managers; part of the first generation of such lower middle class managers. The company was itself one of the new ‘high-tech’ companies, producing chemicals for the Unilever (multinational) group. Nor, as I have intimated, did they live in the street next to the mill. All three families lived in middle class suburbs. Even though we, ourselves, lived on the factory village, it was in one of the Georgian villas built for the managers of the company – which were sited in a privileged position overlooking the cricket field and discretely separated from the rest of the village.         

The intimacy of the family link to Prices was enhanced by our closeness to the factory, such that my father cycled home for lunch every day. Even my Uncle Sidney, who ate his lunch in the factory canteen, walked up to our house most days to have a cup of tea and a chat in the time remaining from his lunch break. Sidney was a bachelor all his life. In those days, even though it was unusual, his lack of a partner did not hold any special connotations; though my Uncle Barry, who was also single, certainly was gay – though, then being a criminal offence, he never came out of the closet. Sid, however, had plenty of girlfriends; and some of these were very good-looking. I suspect, though, he never enjoyed carnal relations even with these; since in those days such relationships were chaste until sex was sanctioned by marriage. In any case, if he did ever indulge, such were the taboos and the damage to the girl’s reputation, that he never would have spoken about such activities.

Whatever the state of play in the rest of his life, we effectively became his ‘atomic’ family, and I became his surrogate son.

My father was very practical, but somewhat taciturn. He spent much of his spare time working on the two loves of his life. One was his car, which in those days was necessarily second-hand, and sometimes temperamental. Above all, he spent his time in the garden; which probably ran to a quarter of an acre, mostly given over to vegetables. We were self-sufficient in all our vegetables. He stored the harvested potatoes in a clamp and the onions and apples in the various outhouses. The fruits were bottled and even the runner beans were salted down. All of this was a necessity where, in common with most workers, his income allowed for few luxuries. In the context of our lunch-time debates, however, he was usually a passive listener.    

Although my father was bright, he passed his chemistry exams at night school at a time when any further education was very much the exception, my mother’s family was much more overtly ‘intellectual’. My grandfather had been a teacher and, especially, my Uncle Sid was a born – extrovert - debater. Thus, in the school holidays, he and I – along with my mother – debated all the issues of the day. These debates were, I suspect, an especially important formative influence for my later development.

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