Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
First Stirrings
I was born in 1950, five years after the end of World War II, in West Hartlepool, county Durham, a small mining town in the northeast of England. The hospital in which I was born was a converted workhouse, or homeless shelter as it would be known today. My mother was twenty years old, my father twenty-six, and I was their first child. Both my grandfathers -- whose names were both Joseph, like my father's -- were coal miners, as were all of my uncles except one, who was a carpenter and bricklayer. Life expectancy among miners was low, and both my grandfathers died young from work-related diseases. Everyone in my family was short and wiry. My paternal grandfather was known in the mine as "Joe the Agitator" because of his activities in fighting for improved working conditions; he eventually became secretary of the local miners' union, and read Karl Marx and Rudyard Kipling in his spare time. He was a kindly, clipped man, not much given to conversation, devoted to his Woodbine smokes. I never remember a time when my tiny, shrill-voiced, constantly cussing grandmother had any teeth; she chewed meat with her gums. She said "thee" and "thou" (pronounced thoo) as part of ordinary speech, as in "thee knaas Jack Ridley" (meaning "you know Jack Ridley"). Of a blunt knife she would say "I could ride bare-arsed to London on this" and give out a throaty, high-pitched cackle. I have no recollection of my maternal grandfather, though his widow is still miraculously alive at ninety. My father left school at fourteen and went "down the pit," his first job being to pickstones out of the coal as it was shunted by on a massive belt contraption. But he quickly escaped this form of premature burial by going to night school and learning the building trade. He was sufficiently proficient at this to become general manager of a small building company while still in his twenties, and he made his career as manager of various branches of the building department of the co-op in different parts of England. He retired early and now has a second career as a painter, mainly of scenes from the mining towns in which he grew up. Some of his work is in the historical record of the art gallery that serves the area his paintings record. Both my brothers, Keith and Martin, are artists too, though I was never very strong in that department.
I have no recollection of my first three years in the northeast, and when I was three we moved to Gillingham, Kent, in the southeast of England. What a difference three hundred miles makes. Kent is known as the "garden of England," while county Durham was a place of enormous smoking slag heaps, cramped terraced streets, and chilly outside toilets. In Gillingham I enjoyed the woods and the fields, taking a special interest in wildlife -- particularly lizards and butterflies -- and grew to be the tallest McGinn on record (I am five feet six inches tall), -- until my giant of a younger brother took over at a remarkable five feet nine. At age eleven I took the infamous Eleven Plus, a scholastic test to determine what type of school you would go to for the rest of your school years, and did not perform well enough to go to a grammar school. I was therefore sent to the local technical school, where I was expected to learn the skills necessary to become a tradesman or technician. However, after only eight years in Gillingham we moved again, this time to Blackpool in the northwest, and after a series of mishaps I was sent to the local secondary modern school -- one step down from the technical school in the south.
Blackpool is a rough, tough, garish seaside town, windy and wet, frequented mainly by working-class people taking cheap trips. Its streets are lined with pubs, fish-and-chip shops, and amusement arcades. Cultural it is not. And yet there abided an odd sense of privilege in the locals, even a kind of snobbery, since people did actually choose to pay good money to visit the place. The main activities of young men in the town were drinking and fighting, and trying to take clumsy advantage of visiting girls under the piers. The school I attended was loutish and philistine, mainly an exercise in crowd control, though frequently hilarious (the tubby headmistress was actually named Miss Bloomer -- "Keks" to the boys, local dialect for "knickers"). On one occasion the PE teacher caned an entire year of boys -- some ninety behinds -- because someone had thrown potato crisps over the locker-room wall at the swimming pool and no one would reveal the identity of the culprit. I was caned three times in all, the other two times for no particular reason either (and it really stings too). It was not a school from the experience of which you were expected to amount to anything; most of the boys I knew there were in low-level jobs by the age of sixteen. Still, I always did pretty well in mathematics and English (but boy, was I bad at geography). I made a point of getting my homework over with as quickly as possible and spent most of my time on sports, playing drums in a rock band, and perfecting my pinball skills.
I did, however, perform well enough in my O-levels, taken at age sixteen, to be transferred to the local grammar school to study for my A-levels. Here I was spectacularly outshone by my classmates, who struck me as virtual geniuses, comparatively speaking. Some of these boys actually read books for pleasure! I was a big reader of children's books when I was young, especially the Dr. Doolittle stories, but since adolescence I had read almost nothing, just the odd horror story or piece of science fiction. Reading had lost its magic...
The Making of a Philosopher. Copyright © by Colin McGinn. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
