My Memoirist Credo

I’ve read that, if we go back far enough, every one of us is a descendant of someone fabulous like Attila or Queen Victoria.  Fifth century history is pretty patchy but in between putting Eurasia to the ax, Attila apparently managed to sire a whole pack of children--which allows, I suppose, a Mongolian goat herder today to feel a glow of pride for the blood of a conqueror coursing through his veins. As for Victoria, I can attest (having published a book about her) that, before settling down to the serious business of sowing the seeds of the royal houses of Great Britain, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Norway, her ancestors made good use of their droit de seigneur to produce lots of illegitimate children. Any of these could--realistically but improbably--be one of YOUR ancestors and make you thus a (distant!) cousin of the present King. A well-heeled American featured in the New York Times claimed to trace his ancestry back to not only Mary Queen of Scots but Sir/Saint Thomas More which is hard to beat, genealogically speaking. 

Alas, such heart-wrenching visions of a legendary past are not for the likes of us in OUR family. So far, only the Salmons (the family of my maternal grandmother Mabel Emily Salmon Croft) have been traced as far back as the late seventeenth century and there is not a duke or an earl among them, much less a queen and a saint. Instead of a family tree, WE have a bush, and a short, spindly bush at that, with several branches lopped off at the trunk in my great-grandparental generation, and then a sudden profusion of growth in the early twentieth century. 

As for documentary evidence of some legendary past, we have almost nothing, not even a family bible passed lovingly down the generations like the one Joe Biden used at his Inauguration. Every year in the American press, it seems to me, someone reports discovering something that opens a window onto their family’s history-- a battered leather suitcase full of old diaries in a barn, love letters tied up in faded ribbon in the attic. Nothing of that sort, I fear, will ever be ours. Our ancestors carried their belongings in bundles over the shoulder, then kitbags, and then cardboard suitcases. As for country barns and city attics where stuff could be squirreled away, these were not available to us since we didn’t start owning real estate until the early twentieth century. Even when they finally got the chance to read and write, even when they could afford paper and ink, our ancestors—unlike, say, those of Florence Nightingale or Ralph Waldo Emerson or Virginia Woolf--left nothing that bore witness to their lives. A family archive, like a monogrammed set of silver cutlery or an antique Persian rug, was something we had yet to acquire.

History, my young readers have to remember, is the story of what happened in the past for which documentation exists, and for millennia, the rulers of the world made up the story and had it written down for them. The pharaohs of Egypt, to take one very big example, understood in their crumbling incestuous bones that a person who left no written record of his existence might just as well have never lived On steles and pyramids and papyrus rolls, the rulers of Egypt went to, literally, colossal lengths to leave written records of what they had done—or claimed to have done which, once the record was set, amounted to the same thing. 

Of course, it was extremely rare for a Pharoah or a Khan (but not a Roman Emperor) to actually write. They had scribes and stone masons to do it for them, and these men in turn aped their superiors by leaving their own marks behind them in the form of Assyrian clay tablets, Egyptian wall paintings, Roman graffiti, medieval manuscripts, etc. By the eighteenth century in western Europe, the professional middle class had taken over the business of writing history and was accumulating that ever-increasing mass of information about themselves we call literature as well as history. 

While the business of history-production was going on over the millennia, the vast majority of the population that was neither royal nor bourgeois remained unknown, unnamed, interchangeable. In ancient Egypt, the men who quarried the stone, hauled the obelisks into the sky, and died in the shadow of the pyramids they had built, were nothing but a backdrop to the doings of gods and rulers. Their lives had less value than the thousands of semi-divine cats and crocodiles whose journey into the afterworld was ensured by mummification. 

Today, of course, everything is different--but today is only a few decades old. Today anyone can contribute to history, and everyone knows it. Armed with a cell phone, even the poorest person can make a record of her life (and that poorest person is still usually female) and dream of it going viral and thus living forever in “the Cloud” (whatever that exactly may be now and going forward).  If ancient history has a problem of documentary sparseness, our contemporary history has a problem of pullulating profusion. Instead of threading a few tiny, irregular beads onto a long string, we build crumbling castles out of the fine sand of innumerable beaches. 

My mother Esme Catherine Croft Scobie was the first person I know of in our family who had, first, the urge to record her life in letters and diaries, then the talent to make them interesting, and finally the ability to keep hold of them in case somebody in the future (like me!) might read them. By putting shards of her world down on paper and keeping the paper, my mother made our family an infinitesimally small but uncontestably real part of HISTORY. And she not incidentally proved that our family had moved definitively away from its working-class roots and secured its place in the professional middle class. 

So, do I dream of having an ancestor who fought for King Charles against the Round Heads, his hair flowing over his lace collar, his high leather boots caressing his manly thighs. NO! Do I fantasize that my great-grandmother yielded in secret to the fervent embraces of a duke or a Tsar? Hardly.  Do I hoot with laughter when I find Edgar Rice Burroughs accounting for Tarzan’s ability to lord it over the jungle by making him an English Viscount? You betcha! High class status, in my book, is a structure we are born into, not an ineffable substance that we carry in our blood.  In fact, after decades of research as a biographer and family historian I tend to define “aristocratic” NOT as good and clever and brave and romantic but as in-bred, moronic, pampered, and tyrannical. Sir Percy Blakeney, AKA the Scarlet Pimpernel, is a fiction, the product of a silly woman’s imagination. The Marquis de Sade was a real man who raped, tortured, and minced up a lot of young peasant girls and Paris prostitutes and would have kept going if his mother-in-law had not managed to get him locked up in the Bastille. 

We can feel pride in OUR family because our story is not one of decline from some privileged past but of slow, accelerating rise. Just to survive and reproduce through the centuries we had to work hard and be provident. When finally given a chance at education, we proved that we were quick and smart and handsome as well as industrious, a creative cross between ant and grasshopper. And once we could rely on having a roof over our heads and food in the larder, we could at last indulge our intellectual curiosity and our love of learning.

As a result, the members of our family in this third decade of the twenty-first century are almost certainly wealthier and higher in the social hierarchy than any of our forebears. We are teachers, doctors, managers, architects, professors, computer scientists, business consultants, journalists, mathematicians, authors. If we want to be stuffy, we can put a string of letters behind our names—BA, MA, MD, MSc, MBA, LLB, PhD.  Over the course of a century--let us say from 1850 to 1950--our ancestors laid siege to the professions in Great Britain that were so ferociously defended against them--and they captured the castle.  

But our history does not stop there. Where once we were solidly British, monocultural, and monolingual, we have over the last three generations become an international tribe. We are now American, Australian, Canadian, Dutch, Egyptian, Ethiopian, French, Guyanese, Indian, Iranian, Japanese, Korean, and Nigerian. 

We still have mountains to climb.  Our family has yet to produce a great scientist, a great musician, a great actor, a great sportsman. We have no billionaires, no Sir this or Dame that, no senators, no members of parliament--at least not yet! 

The leap from achievement to fame, from distinction to greatness, has to come from the next generation—from my grandchildren and great nieces and nephews and second cousins. It is for them that I write this beginning of a history of our obscure, unchronicled, wondrous family. 

My grandchildren would be appalled by my life as child and girl. No skiing. No snorkeling. No horseback riding. I was given a bike when I was eleven and ten years later I was still peddling that sturdy machine through the streets of Cambridge, Cambs., but as a child I was never taken for bike rides. I went to a roller-skating rink a few times in my teens but never owned a pair of skates. I walked back from school most days to save the tuppenny bus fare, but I did not discover how much I loved hiking until I went to France when I was fifteen. I loved to run and climb as a little girl but then, in my teenage stupidity, I came to believe that to be a real woman one could not do sports. Swimming was never much of a pleasure for me before I came to the USA and found Cape Cod. After almost drowning at the start of my first swimming lesson (I was told to line up along the pool and jump in and I did—in the deep end) I learned to paddle around a swimming pool but no strokes. 

I was never taken to a museum, and even though Wales with its male voice choirs and eisteddfodau is rich in the choral tradition, no music was played in my home except the national anthem that closed the BBC programming each day in my youth. I had no radio set and my sister and I owned three records, two LPs (The King and I and South Pacific) and a freeby EP (My Fair Lady) , to play on our toy record player. 

To sum it allup, I can’t say I was bored as a child as I had yet to be introduced to the concept of boredom, yet bored and desperate for stimulation without really knowing it pretty much describes me as a girl. That said, I am not complaining, just stating. As a social historian, I can say with some authority that I am one of the luckiest women who ever existed in the whole history of mankind. I am part of the top 0.0001% of humanity. The riches of my childhood cannot be counted in money or listed on the stock exchange.  I did not have skis and skates and swimsuits, but I had education and opportunities in a world where male hegemony and woman-hatred were (slowly) waning. If only a majority of capable young women all over the world in the twenty-first century had my advantages! 

Mine is not a story of poverty and deprivation. Even less is it a story with those staple themes of young adult fiction today—death, cruelty, neglect, abandonment, rape, incest. And if that means that I will never write a best-selling memoir like The Glass Castle or Educated and that I will never get invited to go on Oprah, well, so be it. This will sound as corny and boring as a vintage Hallmark card, but throughout my childhood, love and care and safety were things I never had reason to notice much less question. I was held firm in a small network of people who loved and respected one another and who loved me. That network was in turn part of a peaceful, law-abiding, progressive, and increasingly affluent society, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the decades following World War II. 

That secure familial foundation has stood me in good stead throughout my long life. It is what makes me the contented (but not, I believe I can say, boring), depressive but not (at least quite yet) despairing, balanced but striving person I am today. It has enabled me to cultivate a tiny patch of garden (to borrow the words of Voltaire’s Candide) for my children that added skiing and hiking and snorkeling to loving and trusting and caring.