I was going to write about how my first active involvement with politics – in the early 1970s – came through being involved with Friends of the Earth, recycling newspapers, tidying Llandudno beach and demonstrating to Save the Whale. I’d become a union shop steward at work but didn’t then join the Labour Party even though I met members at Llandudno Trades Council, which I attended as an “environmental” consultant of sorts.
And that memory led me further back to me visiting the Natural History Museum in London to actually meet a full size Blue Whale when I was the age of 11 or 12. It was a model of the whale, not the actual whale, but still enormous, discovered unexpectedly through an ordinary museum doorway, filling the long gallery. There were films about whaling and whale products because these were different days. The exhibition was not concerned with conserving the whale. It was concerned with exploiting the whale and the heroic lives of the men that hunted, harpooned and then cut it to pieces.
And then I remembered why I was in the Natural History Museum in London in 1962. It was because I was running away from school. It was because I was running away from the endemic cruelty of all the bullying that happened at school. It was because I was running away everyone else – pupils and teachers – at school, from my own failure at school; from the confidence-shattering anxiety and complete academic failure I experienced. It wasn’t just a few psychos: the bullying had spread like a virus across the whole class of 28 pupils and also across the class next door and probably throughout the school. I could be – would be – kicked, punched, dead-legged and Chinese burned by anyone. Bottom of the pecking order. No good at There were reasons; things that made me a very easy target. I have written about those elsewhere and I’ll come back to them in a future post.
At school nowhere was safe. No-one could be trusted. So here I was, running away from school to visit museums and art galleries – where no-one stopped to question a boy in school uniform – and the Natural History Museum was one of them.
Those were smoke-blackened, cruel and nasty days – just before the Beatles brought us technicolour – but the grandeur of The Blue Whale stuck.
Sometimes my reactions and thoughts disturb me. The other day I was asking myself about politics and about my early naivety and about whether I am a racist deep down inside. And the answer is unfortunately, probably yes. Because I was a child of the Empire, a child from the age at the end of the British Empire.
All the men I knew had been soldiers. My father had been a Grenadier guardsman, my uncle John had been a tank driver at in the Western Desert. My grandfather, Harry Baker, had served in the First World War and been slightly gassed by our side at Paschendale. Unable to find a job after being invalided out he went back in to serve in the Military Police in India until his health made his service impossible. My other grandfather had been traumatised at war, although we never heard more about that. They all served abroad in parts of the empire. My father served in Palestine and in post-war Germany.
And now here they were, (like my teachers) the victors in their wars, living in post-war austerity Britain, hopeful with a new Labour government and a National Health Service.
It was also a very damaged post-imperial Britain (although most of the population didn’t really believe it) with people arriving from the Commonwealth to help rebuild it. My father didn’t really want to accept that he was a racist either. He tried to explain to me that the word “wogs” came from the initials stamped on their passbooks when they arrived. Workers On Government Service. Nothing to do with golliwogs. Someone had told him that. Naivety seems to run in the family.
I didn’t understand the arguments that were going on, the discomfort that was beginning to show in parts of London as the Windrush people were met by racism (including ours), poor jobs and appalling housing.
My grandmother maintained that there were good and bad in all races, in all people. And that was attractive to me. I think that’s what I wanted to believe. She’d been born in 1901. And she knew that what she said was true. And I think that’s where I planted my naive little flag at an early age. Maybe about seven or eight years old. And that’s where my flag has stayed ever since. Even though there have been various windy seasons when the flagpole has bent in a storm.
This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t dismissive of other people’s cultures or dismissive of other people’s colonial inheritance it doesn’t mean that at all but it wasn’t really until I went to work and then later on to university and when I worked and studied alongside people from all over the world that I just began to understand.
There is good and bad in all people, and that there are wonderful, wonderful cultures out there that will enrich our own. And it wasn’t really until the 80s that I accepted, I think, that England wasn’t going back to the 1950s but it was always going to be a multicultural, multicoloured society..
Af university, I studied politics and became politically active. I was an atheist. I studied, ate, slept, drank, danced and demonstrated alongside people of many ethnic, religious and political backgrounds and countries.
In my professional career I worked with clients and parents many ethnic backgrounds and who had many different experiences. And still my understanding developed not as deeply as it should have done. I still don’t really know what some of the Muslim and Hindu festivals were about. I hardly ever ran into anyone I recognised as Jewish. I just stumbled along showing all people basic respect and politeness. But as an atheist just not quite enough respect and politeness to spend any time studying which variety of sky-god or wandering desert magician they believed in.
My radical atheism excused me from such learning. They were all deluded, the fools. I saw no reason to respect the religious or have them rule over me with any special privileges (e.g. bishops in the House of Lords). I was arrogantly and contemptuously ignorant of the beliefs, rituals and festivals that provided the communities around me with cohesion, shared love, values, dress codes…and often an excuse to blow each other – and even any nearby atheists – apart.
And with ignorance – even an ignorance based upon a scientific rejection of falsehood – comes misunderstanding, discomfort, irritation with the constant need to display tolerance of the strange, to respect the idiocy of supernatural beliefs. In isolating oneself from all the deluded humans one is isolating oneself from a huge chunk of humanity. There’s all of them and there’s me.
You can’t run an empire without racism. If you truly believed that all men and women were equal you would die of embarrassed empathy. The racism that came with being born at the end of The British Empire might have been crushed within me by education and experience and been replaced by toleration and an understanding of colonial history but without active engagement with the communities of belief around me it had remained as an inevitable small germ sheltered by my radical but ultimately lazy atheism. And that’s frightening.
My racism and I have unfinished business.
And now I wish I knew more black people. I wish I knew more Muslim people that I could talk to and be friends with and be neighbours with and join in with. And they could join in with me. But at 73 and living an isolated life in the countryside I don’t think that’s going to happen easily.
In a strange twist of fate. I am now the immigrant. I’m living in France. I guess I haven’t run into any bald racism against me. Except when I met a particularly chauvinistic dermatologist who told me I shouldn’t be there if I can’t speak French and I should go back to England. Not really an entirely helpful comment. Anyway, that’s where I am at the moment, aware of my failings, aware of the failings of others, aware that I can only overcome my own.
I am here with unfinished business.
TerryMiles.blog 