I would abandon myself in compliance with her need to shore up my unhappiness behind the frontispiece of normality. I became my own worst enemy. I remember that film. I lost myself in the speed and excitement. But nothing we did together ever changed the silent fatalism that bound us together.
My mother’s childhood in South London had been interrupted by the war. She had been sent to a boarding school and then had moved to the countryside with her parents. Her father was a small businessman whose tastes were continental. He dressed with a fastidious élan which belied his English conservatism. She shared his ambiguous loyalties. A part of her held to the Puritanism of a petit bourgeois culture and the order it gave her. But she disliked its meanness and the sanctimonious hypocrisy it cultivated in the better off. She chose convention. It stifled her, confirmed her desire to escape into something of her own making. But she held to it. The Puritan inside her anchored her against drifting ambivalence. I think she believed that pursuing what she wanted was wrong. She feared it would lead to madness, and to the loss of her sense of belonging. Her own mother had suffered years of mental instability. Addicted to barbiturates, she would phone her psychiatrist at moments of crisis. When she lay dying, she had asked my mother if she loved her and my mother told me she had lied and said that yes she did. Hers had been a solitary childhood which she had palliated with her sense of fun; always the gay, vivacious one in the photographed group of young women. Popular and beautiful, she enjoyed parties and making friends. She had grown adept at hiding her feelings of despair. She expected the same of me when I was sent away to boarding school. I sensed a desperation in her when this did not happen, which left me stunned and pensive. She chivvied me, distracting herself.
My childhood was similar to those of tens of thousands of middle-class English boys growing up in the suburbs in the 1960s. We were the children of men and women who had married in the 1950s. Our families were divided between the domestic world of mothers and the masculine public world of work. Despite the trappings of modern culture, relations between men and women were fashioned on the example of the mid Victorian middle-class family, with its almost feudal ascription of roles. Nature still appeared to determine one’s destiny. My mother was the central figure at home; the housekeeper who managed relationships, organized our schooling, bought clothes, birthday cards, food; arranged holidays; cooked and entertained. Her work produced the family – myself, my two sisters, my brother. My father, on the other hand, was a more peripheral figure in family life. He left home each morning at 7.05 for the City of London and returned at 7 p.m. Every Saturday morning he took us to the sweet shop, then went to the pub. In the afternoon he worked in the garden. On Sunday he returned to the garden and in the evening went to the pub again. Our family life was maternal. The language of emotions – of need, pleasure and pain – were profoundly feminized.
The years after the war had witnessed the promotion of this kind of family. A growing number of childcare experts reinforced this division of roles by emphasizing women’s natural inclination to be mothers and their instinctive need for a child. In a series of radio broadcasts in 1944 D. W. Winnicott had introduced the public to the idea that the psychological health of children was determined by the quality of mothering they received. John Bowlby postulated his theory of human attachment, originating the term ‘maternal deprivation’ to describe the consequence to children of an inadequate bond with their mother. In 1958 Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care and gradually supplanted Truby King’s orthodoxy with his more intuitive approach to mothering. A new emphasis was placed on a woman’s empathy with her child. Mothers and children were fixed and frozen into domesticity, in service to the child’s developmental needs. This promotion of women as mothers provoked a misogynistic backlash. Motherhood came under renewed scrutiny from welfare agencies, academics and social commentators. Following research in the United States it was claimed that mothers were overprotecting their children and failing to allow them to separate. A woman’s domestic power and her control in the middle-class home was seen as a potential threat to male dominance. Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger railed against the influence of women: ‘No, there is nothing for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.’ The drama of this historically specific family – the domestic division of labour, the polarization of masculinity and femininity, the misogyny and the male anxieties and fantasies about the power and influence of mothers – introduced the spectre of the doting, overprotective mother, who smothered her children and undermined their capacity to become independent adults.
The mother–son relationship was subject to particular attention, and this is still the case in all classes and among all ethnic groups. To different degrees, a boy’s need for his mother is seen as shameful and effeminate. Social attitudes cultivate in boys a pseudo independence, in which a boy’s need for his mother is repressed and denied. He is forced to relinquish his attachment to his mother prematurely. The mother is lost as an object of love. Freud writes of this loss in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’: ‘one feels a loss … has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost.’ Grief at this loss holds the boy prisoner to his mother. Unable to mourn, his capacity to love another is inhibited. The mother assumes an omnipotence in the unconscious of her son, because only she can satisfy his need. She becomes a threatening figure at the gateway to male freedom and desire, the original gorgon who will deny her son his potency and transform him into a block of stone. Adrienne Rich has described this male fantasy of the mother: she is ‘controlling, erotic, castrating, heart suffering, guilt-ridden and guilt-proving; between her legs snakes; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son’.
As he grows up, a boy idealizes his mother at the same time as he hates her, an ambivalence he later brings to his relationships with other women. When I began to try to understand how this relationship had shaped my life I turned to Freud. His ideas pervade our common-sense understanding of how masculinity is formed in our childhood struggle to become independent from our parents. For Freud the father was the central, most important figure of family life. In his 1909 essay ‘Family Romances’ he argued that a boy’s rivalry with his father in the Oedipus complex meant that he battled to be free of his father rather than his mother. But as I was growing up in 1960s Britain, the problems of my independence centred around my mother. Freud was not so helpful in understanding this issue of separation and the role of motherhood in the making of masculinity. Much of his comments on the subject reproduced his own society’s idealization and demonization of mothers. While he praised the special bond between mother and son in several of his essays, his glowing remarks do not disguise the ‘terrifying impression of helplessness’ he felt in a boy’s dependence on his mother. He argued that a mother naturally projected her thwarted ambitions onto men: ‘even marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well as acting as mother to him.’ It has been the mother, not the father, who has been the psychologically dominant figure in the family. I struggled to be free of my mother, and at the same time I did not want to be parted from her.
II
I was fourteen and walking with my mother up the high street, five paces behind, ashamed of being with her, but reluctant to lose sight of her in the crowd. We’d been shopping for clothes – clothes she wanted for me. On the other side of the high street there was a large gang of skinheads. Boys my age and older cut a swathe through the shoppers; their bald heads and Doc Martens and tight jeans and sharp-cut Ben Shermans condensed their bodies into hard, clear, dispassionate lines. I imagined them glancing across at me, and felt the humiliation of trailing behind my mother. I wanted my feet encased in a pair of strong, masculine, industrial boots. I had saved my money and several weeks later I bought a pair, ankle high, but not too thick soled. My mother disapproved. We fought over clothes as we’d later argue around politics: bell bottoms, loons, three-button shirts with Indian embroidery, army surplus great coats, patched jeans and patched denim jackets and long, badly cut hair, later to be displaced by the regalia of punk rock – black drainpipes, motifed shirts, pierced ears and dyed hair. Clothes were a battle between our competing ideas of who and what I was to be.
I conjured up my future when I left school. It was a world far removed from my mother. I would live on a croft, a commune, a kibbutzim. I’d take off and hitch-hike anywhere. I bought
