In our family, as far as are concerned

In our family, as far as are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth. Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forbears vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather had once taken a horse to Dublin; and sometimes in my father's expansive stories, his grandfather had owned trawlers in Hull, but when an abashed regard for fact, uncommon in my father, touched him in the eighties, he told us that his ancestor, a decayed seaman, was last seen gutting herrings at a bench in the fishmarket of that city. The only certainty is that I come from a set of storytellers and moralists and that neither party cared much for the precise. The story tellers were for ever changing the tale and the moralist tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light. On my mother's side they were all pagans, and she a rootless London pagan, a fog worshipper, brought up on the folk-lore of the North London streets; on my father's side they were harsh, lonely, God-ridden sea or country men, who had been settled along the Yorkshire coasts or among its moors and fells for hundreds of years. There is enough in the differences between North and South to explain the battles and uncertainties of a lifetime. 'How I got into you lot, I don't know,' my mother used to say on and off all her life, looking at us with fear, as if my father and not herself has given birth yo us, She was there , she conveyed, because she had been captured. It made her unbelieving and sly.

A good many shots must have been fired during the courtship of my parents and many more when I was born in lodgings over a toy shop in the middle of Ipswich at the end of 1900. Why Ipswich? My parents had no connexion with the town. The moment could not have been worse. Queen Victoria was dying and my mother, young and cheerful though she was, identified herself, as the decent London poor do, with all the females of the Royal Family, especially with their pregnancies and funerals. She was a natural Victorian; the past with all its sadness meant more to her than the hopes of the new century.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett