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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781789551495 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Legend Times Group |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, and Professor of Biology and Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Duke University. He is a Faculty Affiliate at the John Locke Foundation and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York (UK). He has published more than 200 research papers and six books.
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CHAPTER 1
War Toddler
No child's home seems strange to him. Yet mine was much stranger than I knew. I was born in 1937 in Lavender Cottage, a small house in the village of Grayshott, on the Hampshire-Surrey border. The house had been rented by my mother's brother, Eric Rayner, when he came to England in around 1933 from Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, where he had been working as a journalist – for a publication with the wonderfully Kiplingesque name of The Englishman.
Eric came to England first. My mother, Dulce Norine, and widowed grandmother, Irene Florence Rayner, came later, from Rangoon, Burma, where they had been living in a flat at 97 Sandwith Road with Ram Saing, their longtime servant, and my grandmother's two beloved cocker spaniels, Toots and Brownie. In Rangoon, my mother had been secretary to the head of the Burmah Oil Company, Sir Kenneth Harper. In any event by the end of 1936, mother and grandmother were in Lavender Cottage. Very fortunately for them, as most of my mother's friends who remained in Burma died a few years later during the Japanese invasion. My father, Leonard John "Jack" Staddon, was away, in the army, still in Rangoon, but returned to England late in 1937.
Mother, father and grandmother moved to London after a year or so. First to Barons Court, Kingsbury, and then briefly to a flat in Wembley. In 1941 we moved to a rather drab, lower-middle-class area of northwest London called Cricklewood, a location then relatively cheap because quite inconvenient for getting into the center of the city. My mother had to take a bus and then the tube – underground – from Kilburn, to get to her job in Baker Street.
Once a village, Cricklewood's axis is the Edgware Road, which runs straight as a die NW from Marble Arch along the route of the old Roman road Watling Street. In the early 1940s, like its neighboring districts of Kilburn, Willesden, Harlesden, Neasden and Dollis Hill, Cricklewood consisted largely of street after street of late Victorian row houses with a few more spacious streets lined with detached and semi-detached houses. We wound up in the poorer side. The area was mostly Irish – pretty girls and rough boys. Cricklewood was in fact a kind of entrepôt for Irish immigrants. Their entertainment was provided by many pubs and the famous Galtymore Dance Club on Cricklewood Broadway. I remember Jimmy Shand and his band (Scottish, but hey, all Celts together!). I heard recordings when I learned to roller-skate there in the daytime. Their music seemed to jingle along in hypnotically repeating circles of sound. The band members did manage to all stop at the same time, but I could never figure out how. Alas, the Galtymore closed in 2008, the current residents of Cricklewood having very different musical tastes. Check out Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth for the current multicultural state of play in Cricklewood.
The middle class, mostly Jewish, lived in the larger houses to the South. All the houses had gardens, some quite spacious, which offered lawn-mowing work to young boys like me (with tiny barrel-type push mowers; power mowers were unheard of in those days). I found later that famed neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks grew up in a grand house on Mapesbury Road not far away from us, but I never met him – although I might have mowed his parents' lawn.
We were not Irish or Jewish. We were in fact very much the odd family out, although I was not aware of it at the time.
Originally, we – my mother, father, grandmother and, after 1942, little sister, Judy – just rented. First, briefly, in Heber Road, and then, our longtime home, the ground floor of a two-storey end-of-row house: 36 Cedar Road. It was within my family's modest means and the house had a good-size garden – always my Father's priority, I believe. The ground floor was just three rooms plus a tiny scullery kitchen, which served also for face-washing (and shaving when my father was on leave) for two or three adults and one, and then two, children.
The house was heated by an open coal fire in the middle room. The coal was delivered every week by a large cart drawn by a handsome dray horse with 'blinkers' and fringed hooves. The blinkers were to prevent the horse being startled by goings on to his side. The coal was in large sacks carried through the house to a bunker at the back. The coal men wore leather caps with long flaps at the back to protect their clothes from the coal sacks. One man's cap had not a flap but a bag, which contained some kind of large growth – it was something a kid would notice and puzzle over. I never found out what it was. The unheated loo was part of the house, but had no interior access. It was reached by going outside, under a lean-to. The bath upstairs, with an ancient copper gas 'geyser' water heater, was shared with the upstairs tenants. Our life in Cedar Road is vividly described in my sister Judy's lively memoir Finding a Flame Lily.
My father and mother met in Rangoon, where my father was a rifleman (private) and then lance-corporal. He served first in the King's Royal Rifle Corps (KRRs) from 1930 to 1937. Then for two years he was a civilian, and for a time worked as a male nurse in the small Manor House Hospital in nearby Golders Green (defunct since 2000). He re-enlisted in 1939 just before WW2 was declared. Finally, in 1944, thanks to his success in psychological tests, he transferred to the Intelligence Corps in India. Judging by a bunch of photos of warning signs that I found ("Think Twice Before Talking Once" and so forth), he worked on security.
My father and mother had very different histories. He grew up in East London in a highly dysfunctional family. Alcoholic mother and absent father, three sisters, and a brother who died in a motorcycle accident. His father, my paternal grandfather, was born in Plymouth. Staddon is a Plymouth name: check out Staddon Heights, Fort Staddon, Staddon Farm, Staddon Lane and many other Staddons in Plym. His eldest sister, Constance, emigrated to the U.S. when two daughters married GIs. We had no contact with my father's side of the family, largely because of my mother's disapproval of them. Was she right to shun them? I have no way to know.
My father left school at 14, worked until he was 16 then ran away and joined the army, lying about his age. He was hauled back by his mother – out of love for his wages rather than for him, I suspect. He had another go two years later. This time, he was successful. He was eventually posted to Burma and eventually to India where he spent much of the Second World War.
Dad was a good-looking lad, six years younger than my mother. They were both great dancers. He recollected with some pride dancing, somewhere in India, with beautiful young actress Merle Oberon, future star of (among many other films) Wuthering Heights, with Laurence Olivier and David Niven. Oberon claimed to have been born in Tasmania but was in fact Anglo-Indian ...
My father's attraction for my mother was obvious, despite his lowly career prospects. And she was 32, almost beyond marriageable age by the standards of the day.
By the time I was 21/2, WW2 had begun. I have very few and feeble early memories, but one of them is being carried by someone down into the basement of our first Cricklewood flat in Heber Road (several streets in the neighborhood were named after Anglican bishops, Heber, Chichele and a couple of others) while sirens wailed and bombs and ack-ack guns detonated outside. This must have been late 1940 or early 1941, I think, during the blitz. I also remember flocks of barrage balloons, intended to deter low-flying planes, and searchlights illuminating the underside of clouds. But we were very lucky. During the war, all windows were striped with paper tape to limit flying glass. I suppose our windows must have been blown out once or twice. I remember one bomb site at the end of the road where the explosion must have been powerful enough to break windows a hundred yards or more away. But I have no recollection of any close-by explosion until much later – 1944 and the period of "doodlebugs."
My Father was on active duty in England during the first part of the war – guarding the Queen Mother, Queen Mary, at Badminton, for a while. Badminton House is the grand home of the Duke of Beaufort, in Gloucestershire. Dad also spent time at Sturminster Newton, in Dorset and the Salisbury Plain and even guarding Hendon aerodrome, close to us. He took me and my cousin Benedick, a year or so older, to see and board a bomber on the airfield. I remember crying. I have always been puzzled at this because I loved planes and machinery. But when I told my father many years later he said, "Oh no; it wasn't you who cried, it was Ben!" An odd false memory.
My memory is vague on exactly where and when my father was in England. But sometime during the war he was sent out to India – Karachi, I think – on the P & O liner RMS Orion, requisitioned as one of the more comfortable troop carriers. He remained in India, safe but remote from us, for the rest of the war. From satirist Michael Wharton's extraordinary autobiography, I learned that he also went to India on the Orion, probably on the very same long trip in convoy (via Cape Town in South Africa, as the Suez Canal was controlled by the Germans). Wharton sailed in the greatest comfort in the middle of the war – fancy meals, waiters and white linen and so forth. Amazingly despite his eccentricity and limited qualifications, he was a Lieutenant-Colonel. The 'other ranks' he says, traveled cattle-fashion, below decks. That was undoubtedly my father's fate.
Wharton – 'Peter Simple' – author for more than fifty years of the "Way of the World", a 4-day-a-week satire column in the London Daily Telegraph – is perhaps best known for the Prejudometer. This device is scientifically designed to solve the eternal problem of racial prejudice: who has it and how do we know? Peter Simple alerted his readers to a nifty solution:
THE Macpherson Report's definition of a "racist incident" as "any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person" is causing immense trouble and confusion for all concerned. Yet there is a simple answer. As I have pointed out before, the Racial Prejudometer was originally developed by the West Midland firm of Ethnicaids for use by the race relations industry, but is now available to everybody (ask your nearest race relations stockist).
Inexpensive and handy for pocket or handbag, you simply point it at any person (including yourself) you suspect of "racism", press the easy-to-find "action" button and read off the result in prejudons, the internationally recognised scientific unit of racial prejudice.
A satisfied client writes: "After reading the Macpherson Report, I began to worry about being racist. I was sleeping badly and losing my appetite. My job in an important call centre was at risk. My marriage was on the rocks.
"Then a friend told me about the prejudometer. What a difference! As I began to use it regularly, all my worries about racism vanished! Now I sleep like a baby, eat like a horse and am so full of energy and keenness that I have been promoted call centre section leader. I have just returned from an idyllic 'second honeymoon' in Florida and feel like a million dollars. Thank you, Ethnicaids, for all you have done for me." (Name and address supplied).
This is only one of thousands of testimonials. Why, then, is the prejudometer not in use by everybody in Britain today? Is it because of an all too common fear of science and technology? This simple electronic device is admittedly not yet perfect. There have been incidents in London when black people, Indians, Pakistanis, Somalis, Chinese, Japanese and others have all been involved, causing their prejudometers to "over-read" and implode.
"There are still some snags and headaches to be ironed out," says a spokesman for Ethnicaids. "But the backroom boys in our research division are working flat out, and one of these fine mornings they're going to come up with the complete answer. Then we'll all be able to think about racism not just some of the time but every minute of our lives."
It is surprising that despite the availability of a technical solution, racism still vexes much of the Western world.
As I grew up, with the blitz raging on London in 1941, we were 'evacuated' (as the word was) to Chisledon and then to Aldbourne in Wiltshire, along with many other London kids and usually, I believe, with my grandmother, 'Gran', who really raised us as my mother always worked. The intent of evacuation was to save children from the bombs. My mother was probably then in Northampton, following the re-location of Marks and Spencer's head office away from London.
I do remember time at a rather primitive farm, in Wiltshire, I think; I must have been about six. One of the owners had two Alsatian dogs a small black bitch and a larger, more conventionally colored male. I loved the dogs and spent hours with them. The little black one was especially tractable and I trained her in various ways – to the point that the lady who owned her evidently became quite jealous.
When I was six or seven we, Mother, Gran and me, visited an extraordinary lady called Dorothy Hartley, a friend of Eric and Daphne's. Dorothy lived in a tiny Welsh village called Froncysyllte (we just called it Vron). She was a writer and social historian. Unimpeded by a college degree (but aided by some independent means), she co-wrote a six volume history: Life and Work of the People of England but became famous for her 1955 book, Food in England. My Mother used to tell anyone who would listen that during an early visit, my contribution was to take apart Dorothy's vacuum cleaner and, more surprisingly, actually put it together again. I do remember a much later visit to Vron. Dorothy still had her by now very elderly cat, who got in and out of the house through her own little door.
During this early period, I went to boarding schools at Fortis Green (in North London) and Hemel Hempstead, but I have only the vaguest recollection of either. I apparently got very sick – scarlet fever, I think – at one of them, but it left no memory trace.
Near the end of the war, in 1944, the Germans developed what amounts to a primitive, unguided drone, the Vergeltungswaffe 1 or V1 "buzz bomb" – so called because it was powered by a buzzing pulse-jet motor. Some 9000 of these 'revenge weapons' were launched in 1944, most at London although the aim was not perfect. The rumor is that south London got it much worse than north because the Bletchley Park people somehow fed the German targeters false information about where the buzz-bombs landed. The idea was to get the Germans to send the V1s to the south, to the country and away from the docks and the center of London. This policy might now be controversial of course, like many such decisions – opening dams on the Mississippi in times of heavy rainfall so as to flood rural rather than urban areas for example. Or the classic ethical problem: do you switch the runaway railcar away from the group of children onto a line where only one man is working? I daresay these fine points did not deter wartime leaders from what they judged to be best for the war effort.
The warning air-raid siren is still evocative after many years, as I found when I heard it again for the first time during the ITV WW2 series Danger UXB, aired in the U.S. in the early '80s. One day, late in the war we heard the siren and all, myself, my sister and Gran, dived under what was called a Morrison shelter – basically a large metal table in your living room under which you could huddle for protection should the building be hit. But I could see out of the window. It was a doodlebug. I was just 7 years old but I knew three things about buzz-bombs: that first the light went out (when the motor ran out of fuel), then the buzzing ceased (sound traveling slower than light) and finally the bomb would crash and explode. I saw the V1 flying by, then saw the light (engine) go out, then the sound ceased and then, after a second or two, there was an enormous explosion which blew out all our windows. But we were spared. I was terrified of course. Smart enough to know that when the buzzing ceased the exploding was about to begin, but not smart enough to realize that if I could actually see the flame, the machine was probably heading away from me and would explode at some distance. In any event, no injuries, but a memorable experience.
The next day I walked down to gawp at the wreckage – this was a regular recreation for kids at that time. The V1 had destroyed a half dozen row houses on a neighboring street, Ivy Road, two on one side of the road, four on the other. The rebuilt area is now a small square with new buildings. I hope the current residents realize why their little neighborhood is so different from the rest of the street.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Englishman"
by .
Copyright © 2016 John Staddon.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Buckingham Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1 War Toddler 1
Chapter 2 The Philological School 30
Chapter 3 College Daze 47
Chapter 4 Fort Rosebery 67
Chapter 5 Roanoke, VA 89
Chapter 6 Cambridge, MA 103
Chapter 7 Time and Cognition 128
Chapter 8 Oh, Canada! 145
Chapter 9 North Carolina and 'Superstition' 159
Chapter 10 Time and Memory 175
Chapter 11 Bird song, evolution and analogy 194
Chapter 12 Benedictus benedicat 207
Chapter 13 Nuoro 232
Chapter 14 Dahlem 239
Chapter 15 Mexico, Ribeirão Preto 254
Chapter 16 Shiraishi 267
Chapter 17 Administration 272
Chapter 18 'Possum' 282
Epilogue 300
Acknowledgements 303