by Doug Munro
The reason is clear enough to Walvin – namely, Joe’s commitment to his
own mother, the only person who had never given up hope for his safe
return from the war. Joe’s own wife had left him for another man during
his absence and he ‘resolved to care for the one woman who had stuck by
him through the bleakest of times, and whose daily prayers had somehow
worked. As long as his frail mother lived, Joe could not commit himself
to another woman’, and so he lost his opportunity (p. 68): ‘I was her son
before I loved you,’ as the lines in Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore go, ‘I cannot
abandon her now.’
There is nothing so dramatic in My Father’s Daughter. Sheila is the daughter
of the radical Australian historian and civil libertarian Brian Fitzpatrick
(1905–65). There was one outright affair (pp. 51–3) and he had numerous
girlfriends, platonic or otherwise, which naturally upset his wife Doff.
Sheila also ‘started to find Brian’s girlfriends seriously irritating’ (p. 106).5
This was not the only dynamic making for an uncomfortable home life.
Dominating the household was Brian’s heavy drinking, which ate into
the family finances and prevented him getting an academic appointment
5 An account by one of ‘Brian’s girls’, in reality a protégée, is by Beverley Kingston, ‘Brian Fitzpatrick’s Graduate Student: A Memoir’, in Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds, Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 88–96. See also Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter, 210.
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3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD
and a secure income. Sheila was able to make her ‘great escape’ from what
she frankly describes as an ‘unhappy’ family (pp. 2, 9) at age 15 when she
enrolled at the University of Melbourne and lived in a residential college.
Doff’s grievances with Brian and her not unjustified perception that
he was the cause of her misery (pp. 17, 64) had a snowballing effect,
with every new grievance piling upon the last. Bearing the brunt of her
dissatisfaction was Sheila: ‘My memory of my mother in these years was
that life was unrelentingly hard on her, and she was unrelentingly hard
on me’ (p. 96). Sheila’s close childhood relationship with Brian soured at
adolescence when he became a repeated embarrassment to her, notably
when his drunken personality took over from the sober one (pp. 105–6,
166), and it had hit ‘rock bottom’ when she made her ‘second escape’ and
left for postgraduate work at Oxford. As a mark of her disapproval, she
refused to answer Brian’s letters when he offended her with one of his, and
then suffered appalling shock and guilt when he suddenly died. There was
eventual rapprochement, first with Brian’s memory when Sheila returned
to Australia after a 15-year absence, in 1979, and discovered that he ‘had
become part of the pantheon of the Left during the Whitlam era, it was
an enormous relief to me; I had come to see him so strongly in pathetic
terms, in terms of failure and futility’ (p. 110). Reconciliation was also
achieved with Doff. John Legge, the foundation professor of history at the
recently created Monash University appointed Doff to a tutorship (having
already rejected Brian for a position). Her confidence and self-esteem
soared, her outlook on life changed, and by the 1990s she had abandoned
‘a lifetime’s practice in communicating grievance’. The metamorphosis of
Doff and her changing relationship with Sheila are beautifully conveyed
in the final pages of My Father’s Daughter, where we get the definite sense
that Sheila, finally, had also become her mother’s daughter.
The theme of change
That there is change over time is a truism, especially in the context of
the accelerating changes on all fronts in the eight decades since Rickard
was born. Every autobiography deals with dissimilar times from the
contemporary present, when circumstances were not the same and when
people thought and acted differently. Whereas the theme of change over
time is implicit in My Father’s Daughter, it recurs in Different Times, as its 43
CLIo'S LIvES
very title suggests.6 One motivation to write the book stemmed from
Walvin’s talking to his sons and grandson: ‘they listen to my tales as if
I were talking about a lost Amazonian tribe. It was utterly beyond their
ken’.7 Different times is also an underpinning theme in An Imperial Affair.
It is also ‘a portrait of a marriage’ in much the same sense as is Nigel
Nicolson’s famous book of that title about his own parents,8 and Rickard
uses the story of his parents’ marriage to illuminate:
the larger story of Australia’s role as a ‘dominion’ in the British Empire,
which, although it had entered a terminal decline, still commanded the
cultural allegiance of most Australians. My parents, like most middle-class
folk then, took England and Empire as a given … Australia was a much
smaller and more conformist society, with a population of a mere seven
million, and although the War had exposed the irrelevance of Britain
to our defence, the imperial connection remained fundamental to our
sense of national identity … [World War I] was, as far as Australia was
concerned, a British war in defence of empire (pp. 3, 7).
With Philip being in the air force, the forms and observances that tied
Australians to loyalty to the reigning monarch were intensified in the case
of the Rickard family.
The notion of the recent past being so different from the present is most
pronounced in Different Times, which, as the back cover blurb states,
‘weaves the personal details of one family’s life into the broader story
of the industrial north’. When Walvin was a youngster, his hometown of
Failsworth was still dominated by the cotton industry. The characteristic
chimneys of the cotton factories extended in every direction, an
unrecognisably different landscape from today. Not simply the landscape
but life itself was in the thrall of cotton. Although in terminal decline,
cotton remained the greatest single employer, dominating the district,
6 Historians’ autobiographies of childhood that make explicit comparisons between past and
present are surprisingly rare. Even when their titles suggest a then-and-now approach, this does not turn out to be the case. See Paul Johnson, The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004). Those that make explicit contrasts include William H. McNeill and Ruth J. McNeill, Summers Long Ago on Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2009); Peter FitzSimons, A Simpler Time: A Memoir of Love, Laughter, Loss and Billycarts (Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers Australia, 2010).
7 James Walvin, email, 26 November 2014.
8 Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, and numerous subsequent editions).
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3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD
much like the coal mines and steel factories in other parts of Britain.9
But the sites of labour that sustained life were also ‘killing industries’.
As well
as the numerous-enough industrial accidents, respiratory diseases
such as pneumoconiosis (from coal dust) killed miners and byssinosis
(from the pervasive cotton fluff) saw off many cotton-factory workers
(pp. 27–8, 73, 192). Walvin provides a salutary reminder that some of the
conditions of labour associated with the nineteenth century persisted well
into the twentieth century.
Family life
Childhood involves being part of a family. The Fitzpatrick and the
Rickard households were described as being ‘tight’ or ‘tightly knit’ little
families, but they mean two different things. The Fitzpatrick family was
‘tight’ in the sense of being ‘close, crowded, tense, hard to breathe in’, not
to mention being hard-up (p. 9). The Rickards were ‘tight’ in the sense of
being cohesive (p. 114). Their dynamics were quite different. They were
marched in directions they did not want to go.
Doff Fitzpatrick’s negativity cast a long shadow over the family, as did
Brian’s drinking (pp. 80–2). Both caused rifts between Sheila and her
parents. The Rickards confronted an intruder of a different kind with the
onset of Pearl’s depressive episodes in the early 1950s followed by heart
palpitations, which the doctors were unable to diagnose correctly, and
eventual shock therapy for the depression. In delicate health until her
death 10 years later, in 1962, Pearl endured more hospitalisations, lived in
fear of a recurrence of depression and was then diagnosed with cancer of
the bowel. Family life was anything but normal despite ‘a sense of guarded
determination to live a normal life’ (p. 133). Rather, Pearl’s ill-health was
a brooding presence, intrusively and inescapably hovering over the family.
In the same way, the Walvins’ home life was dominated by his father
‘wasting away under the corrosion of tuberculosis’ (p. 13). A stark
childhood memory is his ‘enfeebled’ father coughing gouts of blood into
the kitchen sink – the only sink in the house – whilst being physically
supported by his wife (p. 39). This general scenario went on year in, year
9 Catherine Cookson’s novel Maggie Rowan (London: Macdonald, 1954), ch. 1, compellingly portrays how a Tyneside coal-mining community was dominated at every level by living in the
shadow of the pithead.
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CLIo'S LIvES
out, and Emma was left with a ‘pervading sense that there was no way
out of the cycle’ (p. 48). She was the breadwinner and responsible for the
upbringing of two small boys. Walvin recalls the ‘unrelenting drudgery’
that became part of his mother’s daily life. There was never enough money.
Midweek the money would run out, and often too the food had run out
or was running low, so that ‘there was nothing to do but wait for the next
pay packet, or hope for a gift or a loan from a relative or friend’ (p. 48).
The food itself was unappetising and unwholesome, dominated by Spam
and potatoes.
It was only the kindness of friends and especially of relatives that enabled
the Walvins to get through. Whereas the Rickards and the Fitzpatricks
were essentially nuclear families, the Walvins were more an extended
family. During their childhood, the two Walvin boys were in the care or
spent time with their maternal grandparents (p. 39), which took some
of the strain off their mother. The grandparents helped out by buying
shoes and clothing for the children, they chipped in with financial help,
and they took the boys to soccer matches and for seaside holidays at
Blackpool.10 But they also gave more than material assistance; the moral
support provided an emotional ‘safety net’ (pp. 82, 201).
The charity of friends and wider family were expressions of working-
class solidarity, but as Walvin points out the tight-knit working-class
communities of Greater Manchester were essentially ‘local’ – that is,
bound by a narrow locality – and based on nearby institutions such as
‘workplaces, shops, places of worship, drink and entertainment, and
schools’ (p. 97). There is no nostalgia in his account, only a vision of
a largely unlamented world, inhabited by the crooked timber of humanity,
which nonetheless had it good points, foremost of which was a sense
of responsibility to others. Help and even salvation could come from
unexpected quarters. When Ian was having difficulties with his uncaring
stepfather, a couple with whom the family had very little contact enabled
him to escape a difficult domestic situation by taking him in as a boarder
(pp. 96–7, 188). The short and simple annals of the poor make for
depressing reading.
10 Seaside holidays were a national institution. During their stay in England in the late 1930s, the Rickards also went on seaside holidays, but at respectable Bournemouth rather than the more-distant and downmarket Blackpool ( An Imperial Affair, 40).
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3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD
Walvin’s working-class background has shaped the historian he became,
as evidenced by two of his books on nineteenth-century British social
history. Not only has he written about seaside holidays, which he so
enjoyed in his youth, but about childhood itself, and both books are
to some extent concealed autobiography.11 Much of the content of
A Child’s World corresponds to childhood experiences of his own. A Child’s
World is not only informed by the events of his own upbringing but is
overwhelmingly about impoverished children, as he once was.
Sexuality
The greater willingness of contemporary autobiographers to relate more
intimate detail is another indication of living in ‘different times’. The same
authors who might, say, 40 years ago, have been circumspect are now less
restrained and move with the spirit of a more candid age. Nonetheless,
Rickard, Walvin and Fitzpatrick tell markedly different tales of sexual
awakening and early experiences.
When he was well into his teens, Rickard’s father introduced him ‘to
something called “the facts of life”’. That such a highly sexed man should
feel so awkward and embarrassed by his fatherly duty speaks volumes
about the reticences of the age. ‘You’ll soon get interested in girls’, he
explained, a statement that struck Rickard as both ‘faintly indecent’ and
‘highly unlikely’ (pp. 113–14). If the penny does not drop, it does so
14 pages later when Rickard relates his first homosexual relationship. His
parents suspect what is going on and he is outed; in what must have been
an excruciating experience for all concerned, Philip and Pearl suddenly
confront him, framed by the doorway to his bedroom, ‘leaning forward
a little, yet careful not to step into my room, as if somehow respecting
my privacy while even intruding on it’ (pp. 128–9). As Rickard explains
elsewhere, ‘for me the 1950s was a sex-free zone. Not of course that
I wasn’t thinking and fantasising about sex but, given the social mores of
the time and my own family background, I had great difficulty coming
to terms with my sexuality’.12
11 James Walvin, Beside the Seaside: A Social History of the Popular Seaside Holiday (Lo
ndon: Allen Lane, 1978); Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982).
12 John Rickard, ‘Sydney: The Class of ’51’, Australian Historical Studies, 27:109 (1997), 176,
doi.org/10.1080/10314619708596052.
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CLIo'S LIvES
Walvin is equally frank in describing the lack of sexual knowledge and
experience of his generation of teenagers, who went to single-sex schools
where sex education was off limits. Neither were such matters discussed
in family circles. There was, nonetheless, a fascination with all things
sexual. Adolescent males had a rampant interest in this great unknown
and would swap coarse stories, but that was pretty much the extent of
it: they were ‘innocents in an age of innocence’ (p. 130). The height of
his experience, if it can be called that, came at dancing lessons, which
provided the ‘fleeting opportunity to hold a girl in my arms. One girl
was especially busty, and holding her close, in the last waltz, was an early
experience of sexual bliss’ (p. 108).
Fitzpatrick was more liberated. Living in Women’s College, an affiliated
residential college of the University of Melbourne, gave scope for sexual
expression that would have been out of the question had she remained
at home. An early entrant to university, aged 16, her new milieu was
liberating in more ways than one:
In this new world, remarkably, there were people like me; I was not
[the] oddity [that I felt myself to be at high school]. I had friends, even
a boyfriend. Away from home, I could forget the old dragging undertone
of uneasiness, the everyday worry of what unpleasantness might turn
up next (p. 128).
It also involved swapping stories with fellow students-in-residence about
what awful parents they had.
It went from good to better. To solve her shyness, she had boyfriends
and for the first two years was always holding someone’s hand. There was
a practical as well as a romantic reason – her short-sightedness presented
initial difficulties in finding her way around (p. 127). There was also the
discovery of sex, which was enjoyable ‘both in and of itself and as a way
of being close to someone’, and it is difficult to imagine these days that