William Golding’s mother:  In Wiltshire

At her marriage in 1906, Grandma [William Golding’s mother] moved from Newquay, a place defined in so many ways by the sea, to Marlborough in Wiltshire , ‘about as far from the sea’, says my father, ‘as you can get in England’ (about 60 miles).  It is a small market-town, now pretty and picturesque, but then rather dusty and neglected.  It had been a staging-post on the Great West Road, and coaches had come through the town on the journey between London and Bath.  Passengers had patronised its many inns.  Willoughby, the dangerously attractive anti-hero in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, stops there for a pint of porter on his frantic journey from London to Somerset.  But these days had long gone.  Nevertheless, Marlborough in 1906 had two railway stations, a royal forest dating back to Norman times, and a boys’ public school (that is to say, fee-paying and only for the very prosperous).  My father felt Marlborough ‘sloped up’ towards this institution.  My grandfather was a teacher at the other school, the grammar school, and the ruthlessly measured distinction between the two coloured my father’s entire life.  This is no exaggeration, and I am sure I owe my own expensive education to it.  If class weren’t so serious a matter in England, it might be thought of as the national hobby.  British people, at least in the twentieth century, and possibly still, were born and bred experts in its gradations and boundaries.  My grandmother was no exception. To her pitch-perfect awareness of class, she added an intense curiosity about people.  My father writes:

I remember her standing by the dining room window, looking through the muslin curtain at the passersby, but standing well back in case she should be detected… Sometimes if the specimen or the victim, whatever it was, was far enough off, she would lift the corner curtain for a clearer look … It was a direct curiosity about individuals, went on sometimes for hours, and in the days when she was spry, became almost a dance.  Meanwhile, my father would be doing something abstract – standing by the fire and contemplating a galaxy, perhaps; and receiving her ejaculated remarks with a nod, or yes or no; until my mother would exclaim with vigorous impatience – ‘Alec! You’re not listening!’ – as indeed he was not, contemplating radioactivity, or the instruments of the orchestra.

Eventually my grandmother enlisted an ally in these arts.  He continues:

I remember once, returning on leave [from the navy during World War II].  My mother [Grandma] was looking out of the window, ‘gunning’ as we called it, while Ann [his wife] was sitting by her and sewing.  They talked of the passersby and Ann helped my mother’s inspired deductions with her wider social knowledge.  So my mother took off.

‘That must be the Parkinson boy.  He’s back from Egypt then.  He’ll be sneaking down to see the Willis girl while he can, because his mother’s still in hospital.’

I remember how wide my eyes and mouth fell open with astonishment at this accurate assessment made from behind muslin, so that Ann, who is post-suffragette [,] laughed till she pricked herself.

He saw this whole process as mysterious but emphatically feminine — he refers to it as ‘witchcraft’.  He was admiring, though suspicious, of women’s capacities, and I saw this many times.  In the days when British telephones gave a small but audible click before they rang, my mother and I were both able to hear it while my father, a bit deaf (something he inherited from his mother), could not.  In the brief gap between the click and the ring, my mother and I would each stretch out an arm towards the phone, which would then, obediently it seemed to my father, burst into life.  Witchcraft, he would mutter again, and I don’t think he was joking.  Similarly, for him, and probably for his father and brother, too, much of my grandmother’s knowledge of other people’s lives appeared out of nowhere, as if in defiance of the laws of physics.

Perhaps because women’s capacities were always opaque to him, he could be sentimental about them – even, oddly, about motherhood.  It was very important for him to see the whole process as deeply instinctive.  When my first child was about two, back in the 1970s, I worried about taking my son in a car without a baby seat – this was before it became mandatory.  I was doubtful about my capacity to hold on to my small son, if there were an accident.  My father replied,

‘You wouldn’t be able to let go.’

Luckily, this was never tested.  He idealised motherhood, and this prevented him from seeing many of its frustrations and difficulties, even in the case of his own wife.  In particular, he refused, almost to the end of his life, to accept that the relationship between my mother and her two children was not perfect – when is it ever?  This is all the more puzzling, since his attitude to his own mother seems to have been ambivalent, at least until late middle age.  He once told me (admittedly he was slightly drunk at the time) that he never had a mother – ‘You’re my mother,’ he added.  I certainly didn’t feel like it.

He wrote much about his early childhood, and one of the most astonishing things in these writings, at least to me, is that my bearded, bluff, broad-shouldered father wanted as a child to be a girl.  When he was small, he thought of girls as superior beings, gorgeous, knowledgeable and skilful.  He was thrilled to wear a tortoiseshell slide in his hair.  He wished to be of the same stuff as them, soft, beautiful, neat … Later, he simply adored them.  Aged about seven, he fell terribly in love with a little dark-haired Belgian girl, a refugee in World War I.  She vanished suddenly from his life, and he suspected his parents had ensured that the tentative friendship should end.   He remembered the little Belgian girl painfully for the remaining seventy years and more of his life.

The old house in Marlborough, where he grew up, was dominated in the most gentle way by my grandfather, with his rationalist, atheist (or at least agnostic) beliefs.  My father and my uncle Jose, both much bigger than Alec and his wife, and both very athletic, were pupils at his school, and frequently taught by him.  He was a popular, engaging teacher, and my father describes him as surrounded by crowds of children who were ‘questioning, watching, or just illogically and irrationally wanting to be near’. Alec was small, not handsome and not striking.  But he was in some way charismatic.  People wanted to be near him.

Back at home as well, this meant that the two sons belonged far more to their father’s world than their mother’s.  Not that it was an unimaginative world.  My grandfather had a superb capacity not only for imagining things such as gravity, the solar system, or the laws of thermodynamics, but also for passing them on, for dramatizing them.  The state-funded school, under-resourced as you might expect, naturally lacked science equipment, so my grandfather mimed many experiments to his fascinated pupils.  My father, in his seventies, could still vividly evoke them and describe them in detail.  And Alec, like his wife, was a good story-teller.  But the world he described, unlike hers, was calm and rational, predictable, and obedient to the laws of nature.  For a while my father stuck with it.

This state of affairs lasted throughout his boyhood, and for part of his time at Brasenose College, Oxford.  He admits in his journal that he studied science at university to please his father, gradually coming to the realisation that he could not bear it.  The cost of his attempt to stay with science was great.  He was in any case unhappy at Oxford, but the grimness of his studies there exacerbated this.  Eventually, he had what he described to me as a breakdown.  The college suggested he make himself scarce for the summer term of his second year.  During the vacation, he had a showdown with his parents.  He wished to study English.

My kind and generous grandparents agreed that he should do this.  They also agreed that he should have an extra year, since he was effectively starting his bachelor’s degree again.  However, he completed the three-year course in two years, and was given a ‘good’ second class degree.

So my father abandoned the world of scientific enquiry and allied himself to one of his great loves ever since childhood – the use of words.  It had been too hard following the way of his father – he needed to allow some other influences to be felt.  I believe he needed to pay more attention, and possibly respect, to my grandmother.

Grandma often demonstrated a clear belief that the world was not rational, not benevolent, not reliable.  She shouted at me in real terror when I started to open an umbrella indoors, bringing as she thought terrible bad luck on us all.  She had a whole list of the small inadvertencies (putting a shoe on a table, for example; standing a loaf on its end) which would result in the sinking of a ship. Her stories left you with emotions and perhaps a question; they did not provide you with certainly about the physical world – in fact, they did the opposite.  In addition, I suspect for my father she brought with her, up from Cornwall, the sense of the nearness of death and the real possibility that the dead might decide to visit you.