Volume 9, Number 9 · November 23, 1967
The Autodidacts
By V.S. Pritchett
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth. Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forebears 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 histories, his grandfather had owned trawlers in Hull, but when an abashed regard for fact, uncommon in my father, touched him in his eighties, he told us that this ancestor, a decayed seaman, was last seen gutting herrings at a bench in the fish market 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 storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists 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 folklore of the North London streets; on my father's side they were harsh, lonely, God-ridden sea or country people 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 had given birth to us. She was there, she conveyed, because she had been captured. It made her unbelieving and sly.
Feature, 2898 words
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