Lower Middle, Upper Lower

...From one point of view, it doesn't matter...

...With Wordsworthian power reminiscent of the early parts of the Prelude, Holloway recollects the first nine years (1920-29) of his life in South Norwood, a suburb of southeast London...

...It was while eating one of these puddings that I first heard the cuckoo: and the note of the cuckoo and the taste of ginger still go together in my mind...

...His point of view is that of the Romantic lyric speaker looking back on his childhood and seeing it through older, educated eyes...

...The picture is not a portrait of the artist as a child, but a portrait of lower-middle-class life near London just after World War I. This is his true subject, and a curious and revealing one it is...

...With this growing consciousness of himself, his place, and his world, the boy soon became accustomed to the family's persistent and losing struggle to remain just above the working class—even though his father was a laborer—by making the proper distinctions down to the brand of cigarettes and the titles of comic books...

...What Holloway now finds so peculiar to his family life in the "working-class-middle-class fringe" is that they had no politics and no unionism, no knowledge of social and political realities through history, or even the laws of probability...

...It describes the narrowly circumscribed world of upper-working - class - lower - middle - class life, a world enhanced partly by its own peculiar limitations but primarily by the author's affectionate recollections of his childhood perception of it...

...Indeed, Holloway's prose, with its controlled strength and poignancy, is a fine representation of the attitude he has described...

...Holloway imaginatively recreates the immediate and particular details of his initial impressions, which made the discovery of his ordinary world exciting to him...

...rather, he has tried to be as accurate as he can and to put in "what makes a rounded picture...

...Because as a child he was erroneously suspected of having an "enlarged heart," he was prevented from playing the rough sports of other children...

...Holloway clearly perceives how this habit of mind made his family susceptible to exploitation on the one hand by an Apocalypse-prophesying Christadelphian offering an idea of fullness and order that their lives lacked, and on the other by a garage man with phony duplicate bills for housing a motor bike that offered them an escape from their daily fives into the country...

...He can still affirm the human value of that life, though, not only because of the love and joy he shared with his parents in the crowded suburban villa, but also finally because of its tough-minded, self-sufficient strength and resilience: "The disciplined development of life meant little more for us than avoiding hypocrisy on the one hand, or silliness on the other...

...Several times we ate our lunch there in the snow, and sharp, sharp cold...

...In an intelligent and unsentimental way, Holloway also knows that one loses something of value in acquiring this new knowledge: "I do not see how one can opt for naivete, but one cannot dismiss it either...

...Department of English, Hamilton College Compared to all the autobiographies, memoirs, letters and diaries being published by successful Englishmen to show their prominent places in the fashionable intellectual, social and artistic circles of English life, John Holloway's A London Childhood stands out as a remarkably unpretentious, finely worked little book...

...Holloway's warm yet clear-eyed attitude toward his London childhood shows that this code, with all of its limitations, continues to meet the demands of his more disciplined and developed life, for there is nothing in this fine autobiography that is silly, self-righteous, or barbarous...

...the warm coal fire after a bath...

...He would have been giving up if he'd gone over to Woodbines...

...But Holloway is ultimately not so much concerned with the process of recollection, or with the analysis of perceptual experience, as he is with the careful presentation of the society of his youth and its influence on the consciousness of a child...

...It met most, though not all, of the limited opportunities and limited demands which our condition of life held out to us...

...Above all she would bring ginger puddings, which I adored, in our white pudding-basin wrapped in an old towel to keep warm...

...This isolating, resigned ignorance manifested itself in the education of children according to the "what-you're-told—wfcen-you're-told philosophy" at home, and the catechis-mal teaching of "doing my duty in that station in life which it hath pleased Providence to call me" in church school...

...Consequently, he spent most of his time with his mother, who lovingly cared for him and taught him all of her country knowledge...

...In the first chapter Holloway notes, "We were at the margin of two big social groups, and exactly what class we were it will take this whole book to convey...

...His country parents maintained themselves marginally on the father's salary as a furnace-stoker at Queens Hospital, the mother's savings from wartime wages earned in a munitions factory, and rent from two lodgers...

...a nightingale singing in the moonlight...

...If it no longer seems dull, that is because the mature man can recognize what was special about it, what gave it distinctive value for him...

...the texture of the bedding in a dark, cold bedroom...

...He knows now that one had to learn "a bit of not-bloody-likely philosophy" to offset the debilitating weakness of ">v/!ar-you're-told?w/ieH-you're-told" and to survive in the world...

...From another it matters a lot, because it mattered to us...

...There was no feeling, he points out, that people ought to have what they want, and certainly no assumption that society was or could be designed to give it to them...

...There was no understanding of class as a system of social order, never any attempt to question the system or to challenge the upper classes, who were regarded fearfully, but simply the desire to keep visible the personal and fine lines separating lower middle from upper lower...

...Perhaps nothing is dull...

...As a child he noticed the "constantly varying nuances" of his parents' voices as they spoke of particular houses or streets in the neighborhood, and he became sensitive to the slightest distinctions of style and material worth which were made for the finicky business of separating lower middle class from upper lower class—whitened steps, bow-windows, frosted glass in the front doors, fences, iron railings, front gardens, hedges, golden not green privets, a myrtle bush...

...And he shows how these perceptions are associated by the feelings of love and joy, fear and sadness, plus a mixture of sense, imagination, and memory with the people and events of his early days...

...Wills's 'Woodbines' were the same price as Player's 'Weights' (10 for fourpence) but my father thought them a low cigarette...

...She must have spent the morning on them...

...He has not, he says, put in all the facts important to him, and the book is not at all self-indulgent...

...His recollections demonstrate just how much class differences mattered to his parents and how their concern became his own...

...Holloway, a distinguished poet, critic and scholar, writes: "I have told this story because for many years I thought my childhood a dull one...

...For me it was like magic, on a cold day, to sit on one of the green slatted benches, and see the towel and then the pudding-cloth come off, and the steam from the pudding fume up...

...Here is the way he presents one of his memories of childhood: "My mother used to bring fine lunches...

...When I think of these times I recall the bite of the cold and the hot taste and warm color of the pudding together too...

...He understands that the narrowness and ordinariness of his family's life was caused by its being too withdrawn and private to have a sense of belonging or political responsibility to the working class, and too removed and poor to share in the middle class ideals of ambitious culture and intellectual distinction...

...and there was little in it that was silly, and nothing that was either self-righteous or barbarous: which is more than can be said of most codes, if the truth be told...

...Charlie Crabb up the road had The Rainbow and later The Magnet: so I left these alone, a little I think in the spirit that my father left Woodbines alone...

...There is often a beautiful lyric intensity and excitement to these passages...

...But for all this, our code warranted respect...

...Now I think that, at least in retrospect, this is not so...

...He evokes the wonder of a child's experience of the bright brass bonnets on the local fire-engines...