HOW I RELATE TO MY MOTHER

Not that I wish to deny that there is proletarian blood in my veins. For, thanks to my mother, there most certainly is! If my father was the son of middle-class intellectuals, or Irish national schoolteachers, then my mother was most definitely the daughter of proletarians - her father having gravitated from being a private soldier to a regimental sergeant-major (RSM) in the British Army. Even now there is much of the sergeant-major's daughter about my mother, what with her habitual disposition to words like 'blinkin'', 'bloody', and 'bleedin''. Her mother, as already noted, was a Catholic, but it's essentially after her father that she takes, having strong Protestant sympathies, if no accompanying religiosity. As I would seem to take after my father (though I never knew him personally) in ethnic allegiance - and indeed it's usually the male parent who conditions both the class and ethnic allegiance of his offspring, particularly when of the same sex - there has never been much understanding or sympathy between my mother and myself. Rather, I have mostly despised and disliked her, taking umbrage at her pro-British mentality whilst I, especially of late, have developed a more consistently pro-Irish one.

But the gap that exists between us over ethnic identification is no less conspicuous where culture is concerned; for while she has never displayed the slightest inclination for serious culture, I have long been a devotee of it, having spent many years immersed in various of the fine arts, both as a spectator and as a participant. Not once has she shown any inclination towards either serious music or literature, and I can only conclude that what is best in me, i.e. my intellectual and cultural interests, stems from the legacy of my late father, who must have possessed or inherited a capacity for higher things. That I should be so spiritually different from my mother ... is often a source of amazement to me, though just as often one of considerable pain and humiliation as well! To have nothing in common, intellectually or culturally, with one's mother is indeed a grave misfortune, and I am quite baffled that a person as given to higher matters as myself, who, besides being no mean scholar, has become one of the greatest self-taught writers and philosophers of all time, should have emerged from the womb of such a confirmed philistine! Perhaps, after all, woman is little more than the carrier of a man's seed, the bearer of 'his' child? If so, then it could certainly explain why the offspring inherit their father's surname, not to mention nationality, being, in effect, extensions of him, and most especially where the male child is concerned.

No, I don't approve of the way my mother usually speaks, nor of her habit of showing off as much of her legs as possible to her West Indian husband, as she lolls in her armchair in front of the television, an epitome of sensuous abandon. She is a vulgar, ignorant person, and I have never been particularly at ease in her company. My father, although a failure by the professional standards of his parents, married beneath himself, on ethnic as well as class terms, and I, more than anyone, have had to bear the consequences! This is the main reason why, on no account, would I wish to inflict a similar fate on anyone else. I would rather spend the rest of my life alone, leaving the ordinary working-class girls of Crouch End and nearby areas to others. I'm sufficiently equated with solitude by now not to have any doubts on this matter. An attractive proletarian may be tempting from time to time, but after the sex had run its dreary course, there would be long silences, agonized cultural and intellectual incompatibilities, even the possibility of ethnic rivalries along Irish/British or Catholic/Protestant lines, as one discovered no real spiritual kinship to exist. Better to make do with one's own company than run the risk of enduring that!