Extract from Alison Light's 'Common People' published by Fig Tree

This is an extract from Common Peple by Alison Light published by Fig Tree. 

 Preface

I began this book because I realized I had no idea where my family came from. Of course I knew things about my parents, and some stories about my grandparents. But I knew very little, and what I did know was not part of a bigger picture. Our family history was espe­cially truncated. My mother’s mother was an orphan; my mother’s father left his family behind when he joined the navy. The Smiths, my mother’s family, ten brothers and sisters, were a universe unto themselves; they had no roots, it seemed, except in the immediate past. On my father’s side, things were equally amputated: his mother died when he was four and nothing much was known about her. His family had then moved across Britain, and lost touch with any cous­ins or aunts and uncles, had they ever existed. My grandfather Light had died when I was still a baby. I had dabbled in checking births and marriages for my last book, when I researched the women who worked for the writer Virginia Woolf, and had begun an embryonic family tree for my father’s seventieth birthday. I hoped that a family history would bridge the gap between the official records and the felt loss of the person who had really lived, a man or woman who had once been known and cared for.

Everyone does family history nowadays. Genealogy used only to belong to the wealthy; once upon a time only they owned a past and laid claim to a history based on land and property. Now everyone who can use a computer or go to a local records office has a stake in the past. Since the 1970s, family history has boomed; it’s now the third most popular activity on the Internet in Britain after shopping and porn – and equally addictive, some would say. Once forbidding and hushed, Britain’s records offices have become welcoming, embracing family history. Once squeezed into the corners of town museums or town halls, or even, as in Pembrokeshire, taking up the corner of a castle, they have moved into large purpose-built archive centres; local and international societies are mushrooming; magazines and television programmes (like the BBC’s hugely successful Who Do You Think You Are?) give advice, and an endlessly proliferating variety of websites and software make it possible to turn any home computer into a public search room. What was formerly an eccentric hobby for a handful of antiquarians, or the territory of Burke’s Peerage and the Herald’s Office, is now ancestry.co.uk or findmypast.co.uk. Everyone feels entitled to trace their pedigree or sketch a family tree. But family detectives in search of lost ancestors need to be democrats: their fore­bears are far more likely to be dustmen than noblemen, labourers rather than landowners. At the beginning of the twentieth century about 85 per cent of the British could be deemed working class.

That, though, is not the point. Poverty homogenizes, whereas family history humanizes. Despite decades of ‘history from below’, and the immense popularity of historical novels, of rags-to-riches autobiographies, film, TV and heritage re-enactment, there are still few histories of the working poor and even fewer in which they have names and faces, and stories to tell. Family history can individualize what otherwise seems an anonymous crowd. And yet even that may not be what people are after. If they are not searching for a story to tell, a unique person who ‘bettered’ themselves or one who went to the dogs in a grand manner, most people, it seems, are looking for a place. They want to know where they ‘come from’, an origin. They want that plot of land which will give them a plot, a story of their lives. They want to feel connected, where formerly they felt cut off.

When I began investigating my family’s past I soon found I had little to go on. There was scant evidence of the lives of earlier generations. I had a handful of official certificates pertaining to our immediate family (though my parents’ birth certificates, like my own, were cheap replace­ments showing only place and date of birth), but almost no ‘ego-documents’, as historians now call them – letters, diaries, mem­oirs – which might give the flavour and attachments of a life. Nothing had survived: school reports, farm or shop accounts, passports, certifi­cates from work or Sunday school, union or political party membership cards, character references, mortgage documents or deeds to land or graves, not even shopping lists or cheque stubs. Had such evidence ever existed? I did not know. The ancestors were silent, unattached, and also invisible. While I was growing up, I never saw wedding photo­graphs of my grandparents on either side, no pictures of chubby Edwardian babies on leopard-skin rugs, no school or college photo­graphs, studio portraits of budding beauties or earnest young men in uniform. There were no visits to family graves where a nineteenth-century epitaph or two might have sketched in an outline; no portraits hung on walls. Our own photo album stretched only as far back as army photographs of the 1940s, my father in shorts in Egypt. There were none of him as a child with his parents or siblings. My mother appeared briefly in button boots, but she too had no prehistory.

We were city creatures for at least a couple of generations, that much I knew. We rented Victorian terraced housing, like the vast majority of Britons. There was no family pile or seat to return to, an attic in a farm or manor house to investigate, where the relics of our past were stored. I was not going to be able to track my family through a treasury of biographical objects which might stand in for their lives. Nor were there heirlooms, if an heirloom, unlike a bequest, comes to you from those unknown in your lifetime, a sign of continuity and care, and, usually, of respectability. No family Bible with its litany of marriages and baptisms on the flyleaf; no oil paintings, objets d’art, sil­verware or porcelain, cultured pearls or diamond rings passed down through the generations; no grandfather clock or dresser, fur coat or fob-watch, nor the lace tablecloths or pillowcases of a trousseau, no christening robes or apostle spoons; not even a souvenir mug or trin­ket, a plate to mark Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee or a child’s sports day. No battered toys cherished from nursery days or books inscribed from doting relations. My parents began married life with a couple of relics from wartime. A scratchy grey-brown army blanket that did the rounds of our beds; and my father’s khaki, sausage-shaped kitbag, which served to take the washing to the new launderette in the fifties, my brother and sister, each clutching a leather loop, swinging me as I sat astride. Our hand-me-downs were not heirlooms to look forward to but cast-offs. Such ornaments as we acquired were modern, like the pottery Spanish donkey that graced our sitting-room mantelpiece. A holiday memento from a family friend, his panniers brightly spotted, they sometimes held a shilling or two for the electricity meter (forty years later I salvaged it when my parents moved, and now use it for paper clips).

Wherever my forebears had come from, they had travelled lightly through time, without baggage. Who had these travellers been? Was their lack of belongings a sign of deprivation or of mobility (or both)? Had they been desperate or enterprising, both or neither? The paucity of letters and papers suggested little schooling, but an absence is not a proof. Any treasures that my mother’s mother had inherited might have gone in the Blitz of 1941 when their house was bombed. What did a lack of belongings mean? Were belongings and belonging related? I knew, or thought I did, that they had been poor, these working people from the past, but who were ‘the poor’? And why had they been poor? Every historian, like every biographer, wonders how much is chance, how much is choice, how much people’s lives are shaped and limited by forces far bigger than themselves.