Notes towards an Autobiography
Introduction
An autobiography is a view from the inside. In that respect it is like G. Gordon Liddy's story of the Watergate break-in. It does not tell the whole truth but it tells you how it looked to him. If you want to know the truth about me, ask my friends, or better still my enemies.
This, then, is how it all seemed to me.
The Remington
At the age of ten I got a second-hand Remington typewriter. It was given to me by my sister Janice. She went on to be the poet, short story and crime writer, Janice Robinson. I went on to write short stories, Sci Fi and crime stories. My poetry never went beyond limericks.
There was a young lady from Worthing
Whose manner was somewhat unnerving
She'd grab at your throat,
And feed you to her goat,
Regardless of your deserving.
You see what I mean.
There is a special corner of Hell for those who deride bad poetry. Devils with whips of fire make them put their deepest emotions into words and then they mock and they laugh. They torment their hearts with knives of stone.
Although my father wrote poetry, my love of poetry actually comes from my mother. It seems her education consisted of memorising poems, at least that was the bit she remembered. I was in the very fortunate position of having a mother who could recite poetry at the drop of a hat. In fact the hat wasn't necessary.
The typewriter was fascinating in itself. Remington made some of the first typewriters and this was a quite ancient model. To stop the “typebars” from getting stuck together the QWERTY keyboard was invented. It separates frequently used letters. This keyboard is so familiar that it has carried on being used long since that purpose has vanished. This is despite the fact that practically any arrangement of letters would be more practical.
The great advantage of the typewriter was that people could read my stories without having to struggle with my handwriting. Throughout my school days my teachers encouraged my story-writing and tried to improve my handwriting. They succeeded in one but the other turned out to be intractable.
Our house
We lived in Thornton Heath. To get a flavour of the place, please remember that it was normally pronounced Forntoneaf. We lived in a council house when such things existed. We were very lucky to live on the corner of our street because we had a large front garden as a result. When it came to mowing the lawn, we didn't feel lucky but we were.
There were seven children. I know that sounds a lot but it did encourage all of us to leave home so it served a purpose. I was the youngest and a lot of the child-care responsibilities were taken on by my older sisters. I loved them and they got on my wick in roughly equal proportions.
We were at the top of the road and we were to find out that there was once a drainage ditch which ran down it roughly where our house stood. We found this out on one particularly rainy night when the water started flowing in through the front door and made its way to the back door. The council eventually got around to putting in a storm drain but the council in Croydon took their time because they were not fond of spending money on council tenants. They were Tories and we doggedly refused to vote for them.
Our road was red when elections came around, red with Labour posters not the blood of Tory canvassers. There was one neighbour who didn't vote Labour, Queenie Knight, the Communist candidate.
The other side of Green Lane might as well have been in another world. My mother recalled that the parents of children on the north side of the road would not have their babies weighed in the same scales as the council estate babies.
I was foolish enough to try to join the cubs which met at St Oswald's Church on the north side. In those days the Church of England was the “Tory Party at prayer” and they were not happy about some snotty-nosed council-estate oik trying to join them. They very politely told my parents that they thought I wouldn't be comfortable joining their troop. There was another one about a mile down the road and they were not so fastidious.
Naturally we couldn't attend St Oswald's Church either. We wouldn't have been comfortable and they would probably have disinfected the pews when we left.
I attended Downsview Methodist Church instead. It was a deliberately austere building and devoid of decoration. When I first saw the beauty of a Catholic Church it came as a bit of a surprise.
My father, Roland McMillan, was an atheist but he always thought we should hear both sides of the argument and make up our own minds. None of us was baptised as infants, we had to make up our own minds about that too. He little realised it would take me sixty years to come to a decision on that one.
I believed in God. In fact I was such a devout Methodist that my mother never tired of the story of me coming home from church and trying to pour a bottle of gin down the sink. I am glad I failed because although my father never hit me, my mother believed in the laying on of hands.
Although my mother was an atheist, she also believed that “the best book to read is the Bible.” All atheists should study the Bible because otherwise they are prone to the most crass solecisms.
My father believed in dialogue. One story from before my birth was an occasion when the police came to our house to break up a communist cell they had heard about. It was in fact a discussion group and my father had invited the new vicar to come along. So the result was that the vicar answered the door to the police who were embarrassed about the whole incident.
Books
I watch my nieces and nephews who are constantly on their phones and I hear the narrative about them becoming anti-social as a result. They don't talk to the people around them but they communicate with other people their parents might think undesirable.
I was just the same. I was always reading a book Even before I could read I had a marvellous book about King Arthur and his Knights which had lovely colour pictures. It was to be the first book I read. I remember the opening sentence which was “The people of Britain were sad because their good kind Uther was very old and ill.” I couldn't pronounce the word 'people' and my siblings never put me straight when I read it out loud.
I went on reading out loud into my early teens. Nobody in my family seemed to mind.
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