"The kind of hell that doesn't reveal itself as so"
My Croatian grandfather’s home — and therefore my mother’s at one point in their lives
I've said recently, maybe on a couple of occasions, why power doesn't rule in the #uk and influence does.
Let me explain from my own lived experience.
I was born in #oxford. The #johnradcliffeinfirmary, in fact.
I lived near #witney during my early years. It was a small village and a thatched cottage with a church just across the street in a place with a real duck-pond and real ducks: a place actually called #ducklington, in fact. It was near an #american airbase, too: very near. This is relevant to the story.
I was terrified of flying until the age of 53. My mum had what much later would be diagnosed as #ptsd from #worldwar2: fear of planes because for the child she was at the time they meant bombs. Every time a #us tanker-plane flew low over our back garden, she'd run out and gather me up and take me indoors to the safety she, though at first not I, needed.
At 53, that is to say, when on my birthday that year I just turned 54, I met you: and lost all my fear of flying.
One of the things I know how to do
But for all the years prior to #bloomsday2016 — the day of my 54th birthday, which obviously I spent in #dublin — I feared the very idea of flying: and this, in a plane for sure ... but also more widely in life.
Why did this fear of flying, concretely and more widely, happen in the first place? For me, primarily because in the #uk power doesn't count half as much as influence.
People who acquire power also learn they will lose it. People who exert influence, meantime, get used to the fact that they will be able to misuse and abuse it permanently.
At least in #britain. At least in my case.
My father was very intelligent. He passed his exams to go to #cambridge at 17. They didn't allow early entry in those days. He trod water for a wasted year. He ultimately emerged with a third, and, for a while, a wealthy #chinese girlfriend who gave him pricey presents .
She soon disappeared.
Despite the third and the #chinese girlfriend, he was offered a job in something atomic. Maybe because his father, my grandfather, had worked for #ici during #worldwar2, in something he never ever mentioned, ever: not even later when all the shooting was over.
My father refused the thing in something atomic. He started work as a teacher for the public (in #britain this means expensively private) school called #charterhouse. It was said in the family later that it was never a space he felt comfortable in (he was #northern and his upbringing was firmly #labour — maybe this was part of it, maybe it wasn’t …) and so this was why he decided to step down a rung to a private school nearby.
I remember one day a visit to the thatched cottage by an #american couple. It was one of my first memories. I remember the accents. I liked them a lot. I remember uniforms too. But this could be me, embellishing later in life.
My mum was offered a job by #gchq, whilst we were still living in #ducklington. She was a university-trained #english speaker, exemplary university too, and was recently arrived from a #communist #yugoslavia for which she lost no love. She'd already worked for a while previous to this in #london as an au-pair. Time to have observed her, surely. What's more, her parents were known to be vigorously anti-#tito: lifelong #romancatholics, for sure. To all appearances, quite a safe bet. She refused the role.
In a country like the #uk, where power counts for little and influence counts for everything, what chances do you think the children of two parents who had so firmly snubbed the establishment (as, indeed, my parents clearly chose to) were ever going to have, career- and profession-wise, to freely make their own meritorious ways?
Well.
I think my lived experiences — and those of my siblings, too — indicate quite obviously very very few, where push ever came to actual shove.
Because influence's great party trick is to make you think, longitudinally, that chances and opportunities are there, if only you continue to try hard enough. If only you carry on battering away and bleeding and attempting to overcome that which you are led to believe is just life’s random events.
But whilst power can be seen and known reasonably, and therefore effectively identified and fought as the enemy in some way or other, sooner or later, influence is like water as it seeps and rots everything it dampens in the most unexpected and unforeseeable of ways.
And so this is why my experience of the #uk: why I know my future doesn’t lie here, and can lie elsewhere.
Two parents who both preferred — separately I would assume — not to play ball with the authorities at the highest of levels anyone could have offered them ensured that the resulting watchlist for their offspring became a long-term living hell.
But the kind of hell only some of us know: the kind that doesn't even reveal itself as so.
When the living are the walking-dead — and don’t even see what they really are …
Because in 2016 you taught me it didn’t have to be … and now I realise it no longer shall …
