My earliest memory: a lawn. Outside our little flat in Stanmore. I’m being told to run . . . run, Adrian, run. A voice behind me. Running must be a novelty, a new thing. Run Adrian run. A girl’s voice. I start to run. It’s awkward. I’m wearing dungarees, and as I set off across the grass, a hand catches the straps and pulls me back. The girl laughs. Run Adrian run. And I set off again, and I’m caught. Run Adrian run. I don’t know when this memory arrived—no one else can corroborate it. It has no provenance. Who is the girl? And the age I must be would seem too young for memories. Also, as I remember it, I can see myself. I stand apart, my striped trousers, the Start-rite shoes, but I can’t see my face, nor the girl. Dispassionately, forensically, it doesn’t stand up as a reputable memory. It’s not a runner. I don’t believe I remember it at all. I don’t trust the remembrance, but it has always been my earliest memory, the foundation of the great edifice of monolithic experience. But it’s a figment, a fabrication . . . and what’s more interesting, more concerning, is, if I was going to make up a first memory, a founding myth, why come up with this one? Of all the earliest memories I could make up, why one that was so obviously replete with Freudian imagery, such a simplistic squib of future anxiety and neurosis? The retrospective clue placed like a blunt implement, the murder weapon at the start of a thriller. It’s not as if it vies for its primary status with other memories from my early childhood. I don’t have any. That’s it. This one figure—me on the lawn failing to run, the laughter of a teasing woman. What I know of my childhood is built from photographs, like a smartly edited documentary. I montage the black-and-white images of my early life into a sort of story, not with a plot or a sense of belonging or pleasure. Here’s me and my red pedal car; tied to the back is an orange-box cart with my brother sitting in it. I’m supposed to pull him. My father made the cart with old scooter wheels. It’s the only mechanical, practical thing my father ever made. It doesn’t work. My brother is too heavy, so we just pose for the picture, looking cold and furious. I don’t think it’s a photo of us, I think it’s a picture of my father’s orange box with wheels. It’s always cold in my montage memory. I’m constantly wrapped in boiled wool, awkward arms, stiff hands pushed into mittens on string. Life is wet and muddy and smells of leaf mold; our home is tiny, a tiny slice of an ugly red-brick Georgian house, a living room we call the big room—this is the age before irony—a kitchen, a bathroom. Upstairs, two bedrooms and a box room with a skylight that is not much more than a cupboard, which is mine. What do I remember? The big room was green and cream. There was a bay window, G Plan furniture, a sideboard with sticky bottles, napkin rings, my father’s medals, a television and a Queen Anne cabinet with doors, a radiogram. I remember my first record—Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on one side, and Holst’s Planets on the other. Then Peter and the Wolf, declaimed by Peter Ustinov, Sibelius’s Karelia Suite . . . This is where I had my first drink. I can still taste Crabbie’s Ginger Wine. The merest sticky gloss on my milk teeth from the tiny thistle-shaped liqueur glass my grandmother used, clinking on her aquamarine ring and her carmine nails. She liked ginger wine and she liked crème de menthe. “Green lights,” she called them, and they reminded her of the club in India where her brother had gone to be a tea planter and she’d followed with the fishing fleet to perhaps find a husband. But they were all too uncouth, bereft of esprit or poetry. I liked the ginger wine, and at Christmas would be given a little glass of my own. I was also encouraged to drink watered wine, which I didn’t like, in what my aspiring family believed to be the French way. I don’t have memories of childhood good or ill, just the oppressive presence of a garden, which was the reason we’d moved to this tiny dark house. The great verdure was spooky and unloved. A garden made for dead people who’d planted huge cedars that creaked and keened in the wind and who’d built glass verandas that claimed a tithe of broken-necked thrushes and finches. There was the lake where I caught newts for fascination and revulsion, the great crested males that had spotted diseased stomachs and labial frilly backs and were morbidly cold with sticky feet. And the dragonfly nymphs, ferocious as Norse trolls, that lived in darkness to gut sticklebacks and water beetles. In the evening in the calm, silver water, voles would swim, and occasionally the diamond serpentine head of a grass snake. There was an island where a family of ornamental white geese lived. The gander was the first of God’s creatures. It was a bully. A malevolent hissing and strutting pimp who was bigger than me and sought me out. It would wait in ambush behind laurels to honk and flap after me on the gravel paths. I was terrified of the gander. One Christmas, the pond froze and a fox tiptoed onto the island and bit the heads off the geese. We found their decorative corpses on the silent ice. It was ghoulishly macabre, like an atheist Christmas card, and it made me very happy—like the boy in Saki’s story “Sredni Vashtar,” I sat in front of the glowing hearth eating buttered toast, hymning the gander’s demise.

As I write about the garden that loomed over my childhood, which was given to me in place of the semirural childhoods my parents had lived, I realize that this is why Pisanello’s Saint Eustace meant so much to me. His was the perfect vision of my dystopian acre. I was not yet the center of the landscape, nor yet a visitor in a realm of Elysian glory. I felt lonely and lost. The least adept animal in a system that cared neither for nor about me.

A recovered image of my mother in the garden. Physical, gamine, a thick shock of short black hair with a heavy fringe. Freckles, dark complexion. A witty, interested, boyish face, but provocative, mocking, with an exhibitionist smile that is not altogether humorous. She smiles a lot, my mum, when she’s angry or disappointed. She smiles when she disagrees. Her smile can wither or zap like Dan Dare’s ray gun. She’s dressed in a stripy Breton T-shirt with a crew neck and three-quarter sleeves and slacks with a zip up the side (when did slacks become extinct?), tight on her calves, and flat shoes. The memory is tinted with the watery green glow of old Kodachrome movies. She’s playing Jokari. A garden game that was so utterly ’60s. A rubber ball on an elastic band secured to the ground. You hit the ball away with a paddle. It bounced and returned and you’d hit it again—or more likely miss it. The game was new. So much of everything I remember was new. A new way of looking at things. Doing things. Being things. The better you were at hitting the ball away, the harder it returned. Right there was a game nullifying newness—the worse you played, the better you played. Jokari was an unsport. Unfun. But it had the postwar enter-all-areas attribute of not being prewar. Newness was everything. I was new. I was the postwar generation. A promise. And everything was new to me. I always understood that my parents were the tomorrow people. Their world needed to be remade, reinvented, retooled, rethought, and nothing was to be repeated. We didn’t have a cine camera. I don’t know why this memory is seawater-graded like a home movie. My father is lying on the lawn, wearing a pair of blue shorts and espadrilles and an Aertex shirt. He’s smoking a pipe and reading. All his life he was never farther than five steps from a book, and he always had a handkerchief. A handkerchief and a book. Body and soul. The hanky, produced with a utilitarian flourish like a carousel mechanic’s rag, for the blood, snot and tears of childhood. It was warm, soft, and smelled of sweet tobacco, and I remember his thumb as he handed it to me. He had square, striated, flat-chisel thumbs. The inheritance of some lost rural craft.

This is the part where I have to talk about my family. My mother, over there in the sun, confident, tanned, new; the pock-pock of the little ball that returns to her like a tiny, eager dog to be spanked again. My father letting out puffs of aromatic smoke, a skinny pale dragon. Whatever the captain of that other boat, the one I didn’t stop, was going to tell me, it will have come from here. Buried somewhere in this garden. Under the tartan picnic blanket, the Festival of Britain plastic plates, the Nordic-style cutlery, the copies of Time & Tide and Encounter, and a paperback John Braine or Alan Sillitoe, to a song by Dion or Chubby Checker. I’ve added a sound track to the home movie—there wasn’t outside music, but this is my biopic. My mother is doing the Twist—hands floppy, held away from her thighs like plucked wings, pirouetting on one arched foot as if putting out a cigarette. My mother called me a couple of weeks ago and said, “This memoir, this thing you’re writing, it’s best if you leave me out. I’ve been thinking . . . better not say anything.” Wouldn’t it look strange, you know, an autobiography without a parent? Readers might fill in the mother-shaped hole with conclusions? “No. I don’t want to be mentioned. You can be unkind. You think it’s funny.” I’m tempted to do as she asks—leave her there on the lawn in the fading sea-green light forever, but I shan’t. This is not my parents’ story anymore; they are no longer new. It’s mine. My uncertain, squeamish, rifling-through . . . a personal genealogy of what begat what.

Whenever I am asked, I always say I had a happy childhood. That I was loved, I was fed and shod, I was valued and listened to. There were boundaries and there were horizons, there were certainties and possibilities, there were holidays and train sets and kites that never flew and lead soldiers and colored pencils. And there was the garden. I realize that when I look back at that childhood, I can’t see anything that wasn’t perfectly happy in the generally agreed-on National Health scale of childhood contentment that ranges between Dickensian misery and Blytonian ecstasy. Mine was arranged in the middle. Comfortably in the middle. There were no great tragedies, we had indoor plumbing, but it was only recently that somebody asked that annoyingly knowing, soft-voice, tissue-box question, “What did your childhood feel like?” And before I could arrange my face into a sneer, I was back in the garden, shrouded with the cold, lonely sadness, mourning a loss that hadn’t happened yet. Sadness comes in a swatch of brown shades. Mine wasn’t overwhelming or self-hugging, it wasn’t unbearable, a curse or a blight or a cross. Looking back, it’s difficult to determine exactly what it was . . . like trying to remember a taste. And I don’t know how much I retrospectively contaminated it, like adding a sound track or the lighting, for the sake of anecdote or alliteration. Although my childhood was perfectly happy, it didn’t feel happy. It felt lonely and lost. Still, in old age, my two fears are being alone and being lost. They reduce me to a child again. My mother used to tease me with a poem that she’d recite in a little boy’s voice. She does a cartoon festival of ear-stabbing voices. The little boy is one of the most shudder-gouging. I couldn’t hear it. It would make me cry. I’d shout or leave the room. She thought it was funny. It was funny. I haven’t considered the poem for years, but I’ve just gone and found it.

I’m sittin’ on the doorstep,

An’ I’m eating bread an’ jam,

An’ I isn’t cryin’ really,

Though I ’specks you think I am.

I’m feeling rather lonely,

And I don’t know what to do,

’Cos there’s no one here to play with,

An’ I’ve broke my hoop in two.

I can hear the child’en playing,

But they sez they don’t want me.

’Cos my legs are rather little,

An’ I run so slow, you see.

So I’m sittin’ on the doorstep,

An’ I’m eating bread an’ jam,

An’ I isn’t cryin’ really,

Though it feels as if I am.

“The Littlest One” was published in the eponymous book in 1914 by Marion St. John Webb, daughter of Arthur St. John Adcock. St. John Adcock must be a contender for the worst double-barreled name ever. Webb wrote masses of simpering children’s books, The Littlest One being the most successful. Her bibliography shows that she surfed the high-water mark of Edwardian bathos. Her dad was a poet and an editor of The Bookman, who published Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London, which is interesting in a leathery, cigar-club-bore sort of way, full of ponderously recounted literary anecdotes (the worst kind, even more tedious than hunting anecdotes). It’s neatly illustrated by yet another St. Adcock—possibly a brother. I can hear my father in all this. Sometimes as I write, his voice is so clearly in the room, along with the faint whiff of pipe tobacco. What he and I did here was to escape the emotion of that hideous syrupy bilge doggerel with its simpering child’s voice. Not because it still pricks me with tears, but because I’m consumed with the shame that it ever did. Daddy has just noticed that Marion St. John Webb died in 1930—a month before her father.

The sadness was a default setting, it was how I expected to be. This was the abiding climate of my internal childhood, and I hoped I would grow out of it. Growing up for me didn’t mean growing into someone, it meant growing out of someone. “It wasn’t normal, your family—you do know they were different?” my oldest friend, Christopher, said last week. He’s waited sixty years to pass that on. We have lunch every two or three years and consequently have remained close. He’s known me all my life. Our families were close—we had holidays together. His father was an English professor; we would stay with them in their big, untidy Cambridge house, crammed with cereal bowls and poetry books, sticky with eczema cream and the pervasive comforting smell of insecticide shampoo. Our parents would sit around and talk and talk and talk and talk over one another, in a cappella descants, curating an intellectual, cultural, ivory-tower New Jerusalem, planning and gesticulating, sipping wine, smoking, laying their head in each other’s laps, stroking backs, laughing and being new. Our small house and the garden were always full of people who were making New England—concrete poets, journalists, actors, film directors . . . dozens and dozens of actors. I came home from school one day and found the Anglican bishop Trevor Huddleston sitting in the big room; another time, the art critic John Berger lying on the lawn. It was a fiercely intellectual, argumentative, didactic newness. You could get shoved into insignificance by the sharp-elbowed dialectics. They would sit around on Heal’s chairs with bottles of Bass and Beaujolais, eating pâté. I remember the ’60s as one long gluey genital-whiff terrine—pâté was the new potted meat—the air thick with Gitanes and Dad’s pipe humming with pertinence and perspicacity. I grew a stammer, like a fairy-tale curse. A verbal hurdle, a clicking turnstile behind my crooked teeth. I would gape like a landed stickleback and ttttt-tut like a football rattle. A stutter is easily mockable and guiltlessly ignorable. Talk, particularly in our house, was a competitive sport. You had to defend your airspace with volume and fluency, commitment, humor, originality and footnotes. There was no quarter given for children. The worst thing about the stammer is the dark mire of frustration and anguish that fluently and logorrheically collects behind the dam of the tongue, creating a great unsaid reservoir and terrible bitter esprit d’escalier. I would mutter vainglorious ripostes to myself on the front step. I invented an imaginary friend to tell them to—Big Mister. He in turn had his own imaginary friend—Little Mister, whom he could chat to when he was fed up with listening to me dig graves for m’s and r’s and g’s. But the most infuriating thing about a stammer is that people finish your sentences for you. Usually incorrectly and ungrammatically, with the irritated charity of helping to get a pram onto a bus. There is an unstuttered assumption that stammering is the audible symptom of a simple mind, the reversing beep of cretinism. It is, alternately, funny and irritating. Nobody has ever taken someone else’s stammer seriously as a disability—and that is another reason why it is such a torment. If you try to explain a stammer, someone else will butt in to finish your self-pity for you. I went to a health center recently that by chance housed the National Health’s stammering unit. A public relations officer told me it was named after its patron, Michael Palin, because Palin had played a comic character with an imitation stutter in A Fish Called Wanda. I stood there open-mouthed, once again rendered speechless. It’s like naming the Commission for Racial Equality after Al Jolson, a white guy who blacked up to entertain folk, or naming a mute’s charity after Sooty . . . or, indeed, the Commission for Racial Equality after Sooty. I was sent in search of a therapist to ease my blockage, which was generally agreed to be wholly mechanical and possibly willful. Miss Love was a breathy and suggestive willful woman with barely sweatered intercontinental breasts, intense dark eyes and a lot of black hair arranged into a complicated bouffant. It took ages and two buses to get to her treatment room. Mum used to take me. And along the way we’d scan the pavement for hair grips. I can’t remember why we started collecting them, but you’d be astonished how many bobby pins were lost in the street in the ’60s.

—

BOBBY—OR BOBBED—PINS WERE INVENTED at the end of the nineteenth century for a new bobbed hairstyle, crimped by Robert “Bobby” Pinot. If he’d called his ’do a “Pinot,” they could have been “pin pins.” In England, they were known as Kirby grips, after the Birmingham firm of Kirby Beard & Co. Ltd. Again a mere inverting whim and they could have been “beard grips.” Miss Love terrified me with her provocative, softly spoken Carry On sensuality. Our therapy sessions consisted of me lying on an examination table while she told me to relax in a Fenella Fielding voice, and would then touch my woolly foot and say “foot” with a great heaving zephyr of emotion. I was supposed to repeat “foot,” which I usually managed, and then she’d lay her warm hand on my shin “shin,” “sh-sh-sh-shin,” “knee,” “kn-kn-kn-knee,” “thigh,” “th-th-th-th-thigh,” and the hand would glide to my tummy. “Tummy,” “t-t-t-tummy.” I was not a credit to Miss Love’s siren repetition therapy.

My parents never treated me like a child. I was always paid the double-edged compliment of an assumption of equality, that intellectually, at least, there would be no shallow end in my childhood. By the time I got to junior school, I knew all the Greek and Nordic myths because my father had told them to me as bedtime stories. My parents wanted to be different from their parents, to be free of the dogma and the worries, the little snobberies and etiquette embarrassments. And they would do this by being true to themselves to an existential degree that would have made Sartre tip his chapeau in admiration. They constructed a mold for a modern way of being together. They fought, and both had lovers. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know the facts of life and the facts of my parents’ love life. I knew many of my father’s girlfriends, and my mother’s long-term boyfriend is still a man I’m very fond of. Terry was an important person in my life. He was a marvelous illustrator who taught me how to draw. And whilst it wasn’t so much an open marriage as a drafty one, neither was it always amicable or even or terribly sophisticated. It was unquestionably selfish and egotistical, but it was also immense fun and exciting. It just wasn’t ideal for kids. I have friends who complain, ruefully, that their parents never told them they loved them. Everybody in our house got told they were loved, constantly. If you came to read the meter, someone would have loved what you were doing. I was told I was loved on an hourly basis. It was the signal for what came next, which could be vicious. Declarations of love were the permission to impart colder, steelier home truths. There was an emotional openness, a stream of consciousness bordering on incontinent that was brave and liberated and definitely new, but it was the Wild West of child care. All love was tough.

It’s been said that you understand your parents only when you become one. I must say, four children later, I haven’t been offered any revelations about my childhood. But I am more aware of the obvious fact that all parents are themselves children and of what my mother and father came from and went through to become my parents. Which is far more telling than where we all ended up. They were born at either end of the Depression, my mother in Edinburgh, my father in Kent—though his parents were immigrants from Batley in the West Riding of Yorkshire. My paternal grandfather’s father was a semiliterate, semiskilled agricultural and mill laborer. His son my grandfather George Arnold Gill did well at school. His teacher said he had a chance of going to university. George Arnold dreamed of being a doctor. Medicine and college were unheard-of leaps in class and presumption that would have meant years of unearning study. The local bank manager knocked on the door and said he’d heard that George Arnold was a bright boy, and that if he came to the bank, he could have an indoor, collar-and-tie job as a junior clerk and bring in a wage right away. They wouldn’t have to bother with the expense and the worry and the fear of university, where he’d be mocked by his betters. So his father delivered George Arnold to the bank. He was a clever and diligent boy. In 1914 he joined the British Expeditionary Force, and he fought through the war, going into the newly formed tank regiment. I think he was at the Battle of Cambrai. There was a story passed down in the family that he had been recommended for a decoration—being the most forward British officer in the battle—but was not given it for failing to shoot his own sergeant, who had run back to the line when their tank was hit by shell fire. The story didn’t come from him; he rarely talked about the war. I remember him as a kindly, gentle, round-faced man with a white mustache who would carve the beef on Sundays and always dip a triangle of bread into the blood, sprinkle it with salt and solemnly pass it down the table to me. This now seems more allegorically profound than it did at the time. The blood sacrament from the roast beef of old England, the salt and the bread of welcome and belonging, the blood bond of sacrifice and duty, the obligation of transubstantiation, redemption, rebirth and a new generation. Sunday lunch with three generations of family was my grandfather’s quiet victory and memorial. I can still taste it, the warm bread, metallic with blood and salt, life and tears, like a slap in the mouth, a kiss on the lips. What I remember about him was the gentle, unassuming dignity. The carving of the meat, the ritual of the box with the knife and fork, the sharpening of the blade, steel on steel, the reverence for the flesh, the compliments to the gravy, and being handed down the sop. A gift, a bond and acknowledgment from my grandfather to me. It was the first time I’d tasted the great-altar truth of the table that food is far more than what is on your plate.

After lunch he would sit in his armchair and sleep. When he woke, he would peel an orange with a small silver pocketknife and give me segments, and I’d march up and down with his walking stick. The war was a constantly stoically borne ghostly tinnitus. He’d been wounded. His inseparable best friend had been killed beside him—they had considered shooting their thumbs off to escape the trenches. He remained a member of the British Legion, kept in touch with old comrades, but they were a secret society who guarded great unfathomable sorrow and pride. Every old man I knew had been in the Great War, and they all kept the omertà of silence. But I would notice that they did small things—furling an umbrella, knotting a tie, closing a gate—with the slow, reverential care of a guilty pleasure. My grandfather brushed his thin hair with a pair of silver-backed brushes and the attention of an undertaker preparing a client. A daily ritual with the mirror that I suppose said, “I live, others didn’t.” He was an exceptionally tender man. I only once saw him nearly give in to anger. The local hunt chased a fox through his garden, the hounds and horses breaking his remembrance of pruned roses and churning up his even more carefully tended lawn. His anger wasn’t at the destruction, but at the blatant bullying, the unfairness of the pursuit. And I suspect something in him identified with the fear and the desperate no-man’s-land dash of the fox.

While he was away in the trenches, the bank employed local girls to be clerks; the one who took my grandfather’s place sent him parcels of cigarettes, chocolates and socks. Mary was a local farmer’s daughter. The family had a milk round, with churns on a horse-drawn cart. They had come down in the world. Her grandparents and uncles had owned mills that made shoddy, recycled wool. Batley had hundreds of shoddy mills and shoddy magnates. One of my great-great-uncles managed to drink away the business before he was thirty and then signed the pledge. Batley was a fervently Methodist town with a large Zion temple and very few pubs.

—

MARY WAS ENGAGED to a young man who’d been sent to the Dardanelles. He contracted a fever and was dispatched back to England on a hospital ship, which took the long way round through the Suez Canal and down the coast of Africa, but he didn’t make it. Died at the Cape. The news was telegraphed to her, but the letters he’d written home and posted on the way took much longer to find her. They were full of the jolly, larky sentiment that is the inexplicable leitmotif of the time. His mother was reduced to the asylum. Mary was buttoned-down and stoical, hardly alone in her bereavement. She continued at the bank, and in 1919, a man came to her teller’s window, smiled and said thank you for the socks. They were married shortly afterward. George Arnold prospered at the bank, becoming its youngest manager and moving south to Canterbury. My grandmother was very Yorkshire. The general perception of Yorkshire people is loud and sardonic and confident. Actually, that’s just folk from Leeds. Mary was shy but steely, tough and wary. She had had scarlet fever as a child that nearly did for her. It left her alive, but very deaf. She didn’t like showing off or overt displays of anything. She wasn’t good in a room or with crowds, she was very private, but she loved her family and doted on my father, who was to be her only child. A prospective sister was miscarried late. My father, George Michael, was a sickly boy. He contracted tuberculosis and spent years of his childhood in a spinal chair being pushed around by a young tutor. He was shortsighted, had few friends—just a fox terrier called Patch who was run over by a fire engine. The ’30s ground on, the war arrived, Canterbury was hit in a Baedeker raid: the bombing of culturally significant cities highlighted in a German tourist guide—today they’d be called TripAdvisor drones. George Arnold and George Michael walked through their flaming city to see that the cathedral still stood, and my dad joined the Royal Air Force. He wrote a book about it that was published just as he died. The war preoccupied him at the end of his life. It was, as it must have been for anyone who lived through it, the defining experience, the barometer against which all cultural and political life was measured. He had a tough time in the RAF, he was still weak and too shortsighted for air crew, and he was bookish and left-wing and cerebral and a solitary mummy’s boy. The other recruits mocked and hazed him, but he was utterly committed and believed in the struggle for European civilization. Photographs of him show a serious, handsome young man, self-contained. He sat the officers’ exam, in which he was asked what he would do having shot down a plane if the pilot ejected safely and was floating back to enemy territory. Aircraftman 2nd Class Gill wrote that he would let him land. The immediate threat had passed, the individual battle had been won, and to machine-gun an unthreatening helpless enemy was simply morally wrong. The war was bearable only if we were better, superior to the enemy. If we weren’t fighting for the rightness of our culture, then it was all merely about power and gold. It was the wrong answer. The pilot was worth more than the plane. To let him go to fight again was to possibly pay for your scruples with someone else’s life later on. Winning was too important to be risked by the niceties of chivalry. My father was sent back to the grueling obstacle course to reconsider.

He became an officer, and the only person who fired a shot at him personally in anger was an Irish Republican whilst he was on guard duty at Stormont in Belfast. He joined a daylight bomber squadron of Mitchells as an intelligence officer and went on raids in support of D-day. At the end of the war he took part in the occupation of Germany, and this, as much as anything, forged the person he was to become. He talked a lot about the destruction of Cologne, of the millions of liberated homeless, lost, and bereft people setting off to walk back to somewhere that might or might not be home, to families and friends who might or might not still live. Millions of starved, weak, desperate, slave laborers, camp survivors, the displaced, misplaced, unplaced and shocked, walking hundreds of miles through a catastrophically damaged continent. He was never in any doubt of how close we’d come to destroying our civilization. Years later, he made the TV series Civilisation with Kenneth Clark. The first episode, called The Skin of Our Teeth, looked at the Dark Ages and how classical civilization had nearly perished. Clark had been the young director of the National Gallery—during the war an empty gallery, the pictures hidden in mines in Wales. Both of them understood how dark the ’30s and ’40s had been and how civilization had been wrested from barbarism by the skin of our teeth again.

Like George Arnold, George Michael had wanted to be a doctor, but he gave up a place reading medicine at Guy’s Hospital school and took a short postwar degree at Edinburgh reading philosophy and psychology—two subjects he thought a new world would be in greater need of—and there he met a young actress who was an ingenue star of Scottish theater.

—

MY MOTHER’S MOTHER, May Bailey, came from a working-class family of Scots skilled laborers. She had a hard childhood, having to sell papers door-to-door. Her father was a drunk who could be violent, her mother a characteristically unforgiving woman. May was beautiful—poised and dramatic and romantic and ambitious. She was Miss West of Scotland in an early beauty and talent contest, and a ladies’ golf champion who sang amateur opera. She would have liked to be professionally dramatic, but somehow never managed to make it more than a wish. She worked as a secretary for Sir William MacTaggart at the National Gallery of Scotland and tried to find or keep a man who would be a suitable husband. At the close of the First War, there was a shortage, and I expect my grandmother had exacting standards. In the end, she went for a French dentist. I never knew my grandfather. He wasn’t French, he was Mauritian and half Indian. I look at photographs of him and wonder how anyone could have imagined him anything other than Asian or African. But in Edinburgh before the war, he passed for white and French. He wasn’t a qualified dentist, either. He fought in the war and said that he’d turned down a commission because he wished to remain with the men, though he did have himself photographed in an officer’s greatcoat.

I think my grandparents’ marriage was not altogether what it appeared to be, or what either of them wanted or expected. He came to Scotland to study engineering, but the family firm of Coopers back in Port Louis failed, swallowing his inheritance. There was no money to finish his degree, so he became not exactly a dentist but a tooth-puller down by the docks in Leith. He had pretensions to being a country gent, kept a Labrador, dressed in tweed, went shooting and fishing, had wanted my mother to be a boy. Yvonne Jeannette was an only child who took her mother’s thwarted ambitions and made them professional. She left school at fifteen and joined a theater company, becoming a successful juvenile lead, doing panto and rep, comedy and tragedy and radio broadcasts. She was beautiful and vivacious. And her father died. Dropped dead in the street. It was suggested that the worry about the imminent National Health Service gave him a heart attack, which is a dark irony.

By the time I knew her, my maternal grandmother was a dear and exotically eccentric woman of a sort that’s not uncommon in the new town of Edinburgh. She bore an air of disappointment and lily of the valley. She had mauve hair, cerise hats, a leopard-print lamb’s-wool coat, puce lipstick and a deathly white face with rouged cheeks and large kohl-smudged eyes, pearl earrings, aquamarine rings, support stockings and elasticated bloomers. Gran was a martyr to her circulation. She had tired blood. She had also been martyred by circumstances and fate, bravely enduring ill luck, usually by singing snatches of show tunes in a trilling Edwardian voice and filling in betting slips. She lived with my great-aunt Netta, her constant, dowdier companion, whose role in life was to make tea and offer commiserations and who died a virgin, having been let down by a merchant seaman at some point in the distant past. I adored them both. I used to take Netta on pub crawls when I was a student. She was happy to sit in a corner with a sherry and be treated like an exotic visitor from another age. “Oh,” she’d sigh, “you’re all such bright and vivacious young things. Adrian, have fun while you can, don’t be like me and save everything for a sunnier day. Spend it all now.” And I did.

My parents must have been a glamorous couple in Edinburgh. They married. I was born in the Royal Infirmary, where Burke and Hare sold their corpses in the nineteenth century, and baptized in the Church of Scotland for the sake of the grandparents—my mother and father were atheists. My dad worked as a journalist and a subeditor on The Scotsman. He got a job as an arts reporter on BBC radio and we moved to London, where my mother lived with me in a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom in Chelsea whilst my father did a producer’s course to make television. They bought the little flat with the big garden in Stanmore and my paternal grandparents helped pay for the furniture, suggesting the Georgian-style reproductions that they lived with, but my mother insisted on G Plan. It was modern, it was new. And I began growing up. My father moved to television and became an immensely successful and innovative documentary maker. My mother gave up acting until I was eleven and then returned to the stage, also making television and films—Z Cars and Crossroads, Fawlty Towers, Dr. Finlay and Alan Bennett, Empire of the Sun, Chariots of Fire—but working mostly in London’s energetic fringe theater of the ’70s. And then she became a venerable speech coach, particularly championing women’s public voices, and was made a Fellow of the Saïd Business School and Imperial College.

When I think of my parents as children—rather than the parents of my brother and me—I have pockets full of admiration for the distance they traveled. How much of their lives was self-invented. How much of it was not into the unknown but into the barely known . . . or the just imagined and the deeply mistrusted. They wanted to get as far as they could from the life that they had been brought up in and that their parents represented. Not just those specific lives, but the collective life from before the war, with its fears and net-curtain certainties, its sentimental snobberies and social insecurity. All that was left behind. They and the generation of young, socialist, atheist, intellectually modernist, international men and women wanted to forge a better, improved, freer, more humane, less hypocritical template for living. One that was open to individualism and difficult ideas that questioned every orthodoxy and all tradition that offered liberty along with care.

My father was born in 1923, the year Stanley Baldwin first became prime minister. The BBC made its first outside broadcast on the wireless, The Magic Flute; Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened; a patent for the television tube was filed in America; The Inimitable Jeeves was published. My father died in 2005. The BBC broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera on television; fox hunting was banned; Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for literature, and Tony Blair was elected prime minister for the third time. That represents an enormous gamut, a social, political, cultural and emotional marathon, and millions of people made and lived through it. But the distance both my parents moved from the certainties of their birth to the possibilities of now was far, far greater than I have had to travel from 1954 to my sixtieth birthday. My cultural and intellectual and social leap is tiny compared with theirs, a mere tinkering with the model they created for me, for us.

The generation that came out of the second war made a far better fist of rebuilding Europe than the one that emerged from the First War. And though their generation is derided and blamed for everything from drugs to moral turpitude, woolly thinking and unpolished shoes, they encouraged and allowed a period that has been as exciting and creative as any comparable time since the fourteenth century. And I have never had to wear khaki. They were, though, a self-service generation. My father and mother were both self-serving, self-justifying, self-interested and, in varying degrees at various times, selfish and solipsistic in that the greatest truth was always in being true to yourself, and the greatest hypocrisy was to compromise yourself. It didn’t necessarily make for a warm and tender home, but I am the product, for good and ill, of their experiment. A new life that has had more things to cleave to than to rue. And just as they didn’t want to be like their parents, so I don’t want to be like mine.