biography?

i don't really want to write an autobigraphy.that seems far too self centred and egocentrc.besides which i am,or try to be as thoroug-going in my view that we are social beings as possible.

and then i have to start somewhere.one place would be at the start of my own own self consciousness except that hangs on memory.so i will start a little with background and then refer to my earliest memory...

the background.i am the eldest son of a solidly working class mother who had been brought up in a district of east london herself the only daughter of a railway worker,nominally a member of a railworkers union and a working mother who was mostlya prfessional cook all her working life.my mum was 13 at the start of the second world war,refused to leave the london of the blitz and married my father in 1948.my father was the 3rd of 4 siblings in an essentially downwardly mobile upper working class family.my grandfather ran what must have been a small specialist stationary company that must have existed for some time,but which became both increasingly a general stationer but increasingly irrelevant to the development of that trade.that business was taken over by my uncle who continued to earn enough of a living from it until its closure with his retirement,for him to maintain my grandmothers household.

i was born in on australia day in january 1954,which was always of significance to my father,as he was fond of the country he had been demobilised into at the end of world war II.arriving on the wrong side of australia in 1946 he then walked and hitchhiked to see family on the other side of the country and eventually returned to britain.

in 1948 he married my mother,much to my paternal grandmothers dissapproval who did not attend their wedding.

unsurprisingly i have no recollection of my 1st 3years,as most of us dont.all the evidence is that most people start recalling at about 3 years old.the precocious few start early at around 2 years old.

i still tell stories about earlier events but i think those are recollections of my mothers stories about my early childhood and not my own.i think my 1st genuine memory is of sitting on the living room floor behind furniture in my mothers cousins house,playing with a large model aeroplane,when my dad visited me.i guess he will have told me of the birth of my sibling.i dont recall much else in detail for some time.i do however have general recollection of playing in the garden particularly with certain toys and also of a wider range of games in the house.

.......to be continued...