‘…your Mum and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ (That’s Philip Larkin, of course.)

Well, not necessarily; and I wouldn’t like to blame my parents for my own fuck-uppedness (everyone’s fucked up to a degree). But obviously one’s early upbringing has some influence on one’s later development, for good or for ill; together with many other factors, and – hopefully – one’s own free agency. In the course of our lives these influences mingle together in subtle and complex ways, so that one can never say for certain that – for example – Adolf Hitler was only the product of his upbringing by the Schicklgrubers, or Boris Johnson of his awful father and abused mother and – in loco parentis – his boarding school. That would be too simple.

Looking back on my own childhood, however, I can see how not I, but my mother, was clearly fucked up by her Mum and Dad; in ways that gave me an insight into how people of her generation, especially, could be fucked up, in ways that might have had an effect on history. She was the only child of a grim Baptist father, Ernest, and a doormat of a mother, who tried to block her marriage to my father on the grounds that his father was too working class – in reality there was only a sliver of difference between them socially – and as a result boycotted their wedding, so that a cousin of my father’s had to stand in to ‘give the bride away’. He also got my granddad sacked from the factory where he worked, until his fellow-workers went on strike to have him reinstated. He only visited us once, when I was about twelve; bringing me as a present a collection of ‘improving’ sermons. (I remember it was called In the Days of Thy Youth. Amazon have it: https://www.amazon.com/Days-Thy-Youth-Practical-Marlborough/dp/B00A84CHBI.) When he died he left my grandmother penniless and without a home, so that she had to move into a caravan on a relative’s farm. A curious thing about him was that at some stage he had changed his family name by deed poll from ‘Rabbit’ to ‘Rabbett’, which seemed odd to me; if he was paying all that money in legal fees (I presumed), why stick with a name which still sounded silly? (Maybe he thought it would be pronounced ‘Rabbé’, like Hyacinth Bucket (‘Bouquet’) in Keeping Up Appearances.)

I won’t elaborate on my poor mother’s fucked-upness here. Maybe later. But it’s too painful for me to recall just now; and I think ‘bad form’ for one to sneak on one’s own mother. It also looks like making excuses for one’s faults and failures. In the main I think I survived it.But who knows?

And besides, how much have I fucked up my own children? ‘We may not mean to, but we do.’