We are none of us born into circumstances we have chosen. Instead, we enter a readymade society and culture that fashions us before we have had any opportunity to react, let alone to leave our mark. So it was that I arrived in Finchley in North London on 8th October 1948, the first, and as it happened the last, child of Ernest and Margaret Scambler. As a postwar baby, part of the babyboomer generation, my timing may have been propitious; but for my parents this was a period of turmoil and trauma. Their origins and the paths they only too often felt compelled to tread helped define my noviciate self and so need to be explored in some detail at the outset.
My father‘s origins are more obscure and enigmatic so it makes sense to focus first on these. He was christened Ernest William George on being born on 24 August 1911, but none of these old family names appealed to him and very early on he somehow managed to substitute ‘Ron’: I have a letter that his father wrote to him whilst he was away preparing for active service in the first world war and it is addressed to ‘little Ronnie’. So Ron is the name he always answered to and the one I shall use here. His parents were Ernest Clement William, born in 1885, and Edith Mary, born in 1884. They married in 1910, aged 25 and 26 respectively. Dig a little deeper and the biography of Ron’s father assumes a measure of ambiguity. I am indebted for this point to an historian at Edge Hill College whose signature I have never been able to decipher but who happened to be doing a Ph.D on the Scamblers. It transpires that Ron’s biological father was Alfred Wilkinson, a solicitor’s clerk from Hornsey, who promptly slipped beyond trace, either to the grave or to some faraway place. He was never talked about within the Scambler family, and my father had no insight into what happened to him. Anyway, before the dust had settled, Alfred’s wife Elizabeth, described as a widow and then aged 27, married again, this time to George Samuel Scambler, a bachelor aged 34. My father had a vague notion that George was a seaman, but it turns out his travels, although extensive, were more local as he was a bus conductor in Hackney. To complete this section of the jigsaw, Elizabeth’s sister Mary had earlier, in 1878, married George’s brother, Thomas, a draper. One obvious result of all this is that my family tree is drastically foreshortened, a matter of little importance to me, though perhaps marginally more concerning for my father whom I was able to update before he died; but it was doubtless a source of considerable shame for his Victorian-born parents who remained tight lipped to the end. Some stigmas fade even as others replace them, though, as we shall see, many Victorian norms of shame and blame have been resurrected of late.
Ron’s father’s job is recorded as shopkeeper on his marriage certificate, though he was later described as a commercial traveller. His mother’s deceased father is classed as a labourer. They lived in Highgate in London and had two sons: Ron and, nine years later, Ken. Ernest remained in employment throughout the hard times of the 1920s and ‘30s. Ron, who left school at 14 to help with the family income, recalled his mother saving leftover scraps from their meals to pass on to calling tradesmen. Ernest was quiet to the point of being taciturn, something of a family trait, but I remember him as a considerate and kindly man. Edith, by contrast, had a matriarchal predisposition to impose her opinions and herself. My mother felt under surveillance whenever in her company and mildly sarcastic or cutting rebukes for this and that were commonplace (‘nobody was good enough for her boys’). ‘Nana’ would later check behind my ears during our visits to make sure I’d washed properly; and while my mother squirmed Ron would look away, though we’d sometimes hear a ‘now that’s not fair Edie’ from Ernest. When they retired Ernest and Edith sold their house at 7 Raydean Road, Barnet (for £2,668), and moved in 1954 to a bungalow in East Preston on the Sussex coast (incidentally, when Ernest, following Edith, died in 1963 their bungalow was sold for £5,150).
In sum, my heritage on my father’s side reveals a degree of upward social mobility on his parents’ part, that is, a shift over a generation from manual working-class to non-manual or middle-class employment, culminating in stability, owner occupation and, as we shall see, a more solid measure of social and even cultural capital than might be expected.
My mother’s background was of a different order. Margaret’s paternal grandfather, Joshua William Nichols, an entrepreneur of some note, was a successful builder and eventual owner of a very large house, School House in East Acton. Margaret’s father, Arthur, was one of fifteen born to Joshua’s doubtless weary wife, though predictably not all survived infancy. Arthur was born in 1881. Amongst Margaret’s earliest recollections was of him being invalided out towards the end of WW1. He had been riding his horse bareback and was thrown, damaging his spine. Several months in hospital were followed by a period of convalescence with two middle-aged spinster sisters in the Surrey village of Gomshall. Margaret remembered being taken with her younger sister Jean on visits by Arthur’s wife Caroline. Caroline Elizabeth Carle, born in 1879, was two years older than Arthur. They had married in 1909, Arthur aged 30 and Caroline 28. The occupation of Caroline’s father, by this time deceased, is listed as licensed victualler. So on my mother’s side a builder’s son married a publican’s daughter. My mother was born in 1913, followed two years later by her sister Jean. When Arthur had recovered sufficiently from his injured back to return to work it was to Regents Street in London as a wool merchant; and here, as far as I can ascertain, he remained until retirement. Caroline, like my paternal grandmother, was constrained to remain a ‘home worker’; it was considered suspect, indeed socially deviant, if a wife took paid work outside the home, the presumption being that the male breadwinner’s earning potential was too low to support his family. When WW2 broke out in September of 1939 Arthur was nearing sixty and, like my paternal grandfather, he was pressed into service as an air-raid warden, patrolling the London streets in shifts to make sure the blackout was effective. On reaching retirement, Arthur and Caroline preceded Ron’s parents in purchasing a bungalow on the West Sussex coast, this time in the village of Rustington. It was doubtless not irrelevant that both sets had opted for to move closer to Ron and Margaret. So both my sets of grandparents ended up around ten miles from us and we visited regularly. Old photographs portray Arthur as invariably smart, even dapper, and in personality he was the antithesis of Ernest Scambler. He was apparently a strong Christian, though it didn’t show, and he was an extrovert and fun. Caroline had according to my mother been the family disciplinarian, though she had mellowed by the time I got to know her. Caroline was the only one of my grandparents to survive the 1960s, eventually dying at the age of 97 in 1976.
Ron and Margaret met a local tennis club in North London, which is suggestive of a degree of middle-class wellbeing They were to have what my mother afterwards called a long engagement prior to marrying in Barnet in 1940. Margaret had attended various schools as the Nichols moved homes. She ended up at Barnet Grammar School, eventually leaving at the age of 17. She had wanted to be a hairdresser, but this ‘trade’ was deemed unacceptable by Arthur and Caroline, so she attended Pitman’s College in Southampton Row instead. Like so many middle-class women, she trained and qualified in ‘shorthand, booking, typing and commercial correspondence’. Work was not easy to come by and sometimes intermittent, but she remained for the most part in secretarial employment.
Ron too found work initially hard to come by. The minimum school leaving age had gone up from 12 to 14 in 1918, and Ron left school at 14 without qualifications, so he was not well placed in what remained an inauspicious social climate. His first teenage job was delivering cricket bats on his bike. By the time of his marriage, however, he had settled into what seemed a secure enough job aa a shipping clerk (the job recorded on his marriage certificate). His employers were Brown, Jenkinson & Co., a firm of ship, freight and insurance brokers. He was initially tied to mundane paperwork, but over time more responsibilities were put experimentally his way, culminating in a six-month transfer to Hamburg. Here he specialised in German shipping and was assiduous in learning the language (he was still able to speak German with fluency decades later). By the time he’d arrived in Hamburg Hitler had been democratically elected to power by voters tired of economic crises and hyperinflation. Although insulated from many of the day-to-day effects of National Socialist policies, and an increasingly penetrative and antisemitic state surveillance regime, he became quickly aware of unease and latent threat. On one occasion he began a conversation about the changing political scene with a German business colleague and was immediately hushed and ushered away from the ears of potential informants. It was a symbolic moment.
War broke out in September of 1939, at least as far as the UK was concerned. Ron left Brown, Jenkinson & Co to volunteer for the armed services. His spectacles proved a hindrance (no contact lenses then). He opted for the Navy and after training as a sub-Lieutenant he was promoted to Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He was to serve in contraband control in Trinidad, where his task was to check foreign shipping for the smuggling of guns and means and sustenance for German communities in Central and South America. Photographs from this period suggest a sub-tropical paradise, but Margaret was later to say that this experience changed Ron. This may be down to the fact that he contracted malaria, which sent him intermittently to bed with a fever in subsequent years, or maybe it was merely a consequence of what was in many respects an exciting time-out. He and his fellow officers had servants to attend to their needs and when off-duty explored, played makeshift games of soccer and cricket, dived and swam naked in vivid blue-green polls. The contrast with a grim post-war Britain of job and money shortages and rationing was to be acute.
Like many couples, Ron and Margaret missed each other during these disorientating long-term absences. Having married just after the announcement of war, their intention was to start a family in Falmouth where they had briefly rented accommodation. But the anticipated prompt conclusion to the war failed to materialise (it took six long years). It was Margaret’s lot to wait and hope, collecting bits and pieces of furniture that would one day make up a family home. Then, in 1943, a naval clerical officer came across Ron’s papers and made a note that this Lieutenant in contraband control possessed expert knowledge of German shipping and spoke the language fluently. The result was a reposting to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where he was to present as a non-German speaking British civilian and to mingle incognito with the sizeable German population. He was in effect a spy, and his adventures took him to other South American cities. He later told me of one perilous flight low across the Andes, travelling with a suitcase containing his naval uniform. While this entailed a risk of revealing his ‘false’ identity as a civilian if he was exposed, his status as a naval officer might afford him some protection. In the event he remained undiscovered.
Yet another assignment followed when in 1943-44 he was recalled to London to work for the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty. Deep in an underground bunker he was one of two officers under the command of an Admiral charged to track the movements of German ships and shipping across the world’s oceans. His first-hand knowledge of German shipping from his days at Brown, Jenkinson & Co was a key resource. His work here and previously in the Caribbean was covered by the ‘official secrets’ legislation and it was only many years afterwards that he felt able to share these details.
I am recounting these episodes because I believe they have a bearing on my father’s mindset when the war ended, not least because they varied so markedly in their novelty, pace and excitement from what was to come. When the war eventually ended in 1945 Ron returned to the more prosaic world of Brown, Jenkinson & Co. This was the beginning of Attlee’s would-be socialist government, which between 1945 and 1951 laid the foundations for Britain’s welfare state. Churchill may have described Attlee as a modest little man with a lot to be modest about; but he eclipsed Churchill by a landslide in the aftermath of war. By 1945, however, German shipping had been decimated. The sole task remaining was to tie up loose ends, and it was for this purpose that Ron was once again sent to the firm’s Hamburg office. Margaret was once more abandoned in North London (she had returned to the parental home from Falmouth during the war). While before the outbreak of war Ron had worked his way up from junior clerk to the promise of a future partnership in the company, now he was unemployed, with credible work experience but still no formal qualifications or credentials; and there were tens of thousands of others looking for a wage. In the absence of opportunities in shipping or allied industries he turned to teaching. There was a teacher shortage and he applied for a place on an Emergency Scheme for the Training of Teachers initiated by the Ministry of Education. Much of 1947-48 was spent at Trent Park Training College in Barnet, from which he emerged with some credit. He took options in German and Physical Education (he had been a keen and talented sportsman before the war); it was the latter that he chose to specialise in and he went on to gain qualifications in a spell at Loughborough College, enabling him to teach not only gymnastics, tennis, swimming and life-saving, but also to referee amateur soccer and boxing. It seems that at least to this point his old energy had not left him.
Jobs were scarce even with the excellent references he had. He and Margaret initially looked to return to the Falmouth area, but without success. It was largely chance that saw a move away from North London to Worthing on the south coast. Maybe my imminent arrival was factored in. In any event Ron turned down the opportunity to teach German at Worthing High School for Boys, the local grammar school, and instead took a job, primarily as a teacher of Physical Education, at St Andrew’s School, a secondary modern. I was in my infancy when, in 1949-50, a cottage belonging to one of Margaret’s aunts, a small, terraced property In Seldon Lane, East Worthing, was accepted on rental, leaving Ron a short cycle ride to St Andrew’s. At the same time our names were entered on the local council housing list, and it proved a relatively short wait before we were able to move into 10 Colebrook Close, still in East Worthing. This is where my personal memories kick in with
I have sketched the backgrounds and mixed and changing circumstances of my parents’ origins and coming together because in important senses I was the product of them. If Ron’s and Margaret’s family histories differed, with the former materially and socially more stable and the latter having to overcome more obstacles, the years after the second world war demanded a new settlement for families as well as for society a whole. Our neophyte nuclear family unit had been detached from my parents’ earlier plans and aspirations. Gone were the prospects of promotion and a good salary with Brown, Jenkinson & Co; sabotaged too was a first-choice life in the picturesque village of Falmouth. Instead, we found ourselves on a safe if parsimonious war-trained teacher’s income, which my father supplemented in the summer holidays by working in a local nursery at the foot of the South Downs. Like both my grandmothers, it was taken as given that Margaret’s job was to do unpaid work in the home rather than paid work outside it. Money was often tight and I recall more than once hiding under the kitchen table with my mother when we were short and the rent man called. Ron and Margaret said very little, but I was to overhear occasional comments to the effect that they felt like fish out of water amongst the council houses of Colebrook Close. In truth, there was a real mix of working-class and middle-class tenants. I loved it, and here my story proper commences.
Our family was resolutely middle class in outlook; as Pierre Bourdieu would express it, my parents possessed a discernible class habitus. I was never permitted to wear jeans, the uniform of manual workers, and I cannot remember off-hand a single occasion when an adult neighbour entered our household in the decade or so that we were at Colebrook Close, although relations with them were never awkward or soured to my knowledge. But the friends I acquired were a heterogeneous and friendly bunch. My closest friend, whom I shall call Sean, was one of three children whose father was a freelance double bass player and whose mother a nurse who later became Matron of Worthing Hospital. It was to their new television set that I repaired for a pre-arranged set of programmes weekly. Otherwise, we were restricted to the radio. I still recall the episode of The Archerswhich climaxed with the death of Grace Archer in a fire (though I didn’t know then that the actress playing Grace was written out of the script because she was attempting to unionise her colleagues). It was the mid-50s before our own twelve-inch screen in the top left-hand corner of its cumbersomely large – for it was home to our radio too – mahogany casing was coaxed into life by Rob Ellmore, the woodwork master at St Andrew’s and an amateur electrician (not that the vertical hold was ever truly reliable). We were to have no telephone at Colebrook Close, and our rooms were heated, if that’s not putting it too strongly, by a coal fire in the sitting room, a couple of small portable electric fires and a moveable and smelly paraffin heater in the dining room or kitchen. Rather than rely on a succession of anecdotes to capture life more generally during these years, I can draw on David Kynaston’s comprehensive list of ‘missing items’ in his Austerity Britain, 1945-51:
‘No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles, n duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolley-buses, steam trains, Woodbines, Craven ‘A’, Senior Service, smoke smog, Vapex inhalant. No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash every Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, scrubbed on the draining board, rinsed in the sink, put through a mangle, hung out to dry. Central heating rare, coke boilers, water geysers, the coal fire, the hearth, the home, chilblains common. Abortion illegal, gay relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, the march of the pylon. Austen Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars. A Bakelite wireless in the home. ‘Housewives Choice’ or ‘Workers’ Playtime’ or ‘ITMA’ on the air, televisions almost unknown, no programmes to watch, the family eating together. Milk of Magnesia, Vick Vapour Rub, Friar’s Balsam, Fynnon Salts, Eno’s, Germolene. Suits and hats, dress and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no ‘teenagers’. Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.’
I might add four farthings to a penny, twelve pennies to a shilling and twenty shilling to a pound; the sound of the air-raid siren on the roof of what was to become my primary school being intermittently tested; the delivery of milk by horse and cart; the inchoate announcements of the rag-and-bone man; and I would stress that play, weather permitting, took place outdoors. Sean and I were joined as a matter of course by half-a-dozen others to play football or cricket at the apex of Colebrook Close, a quietly convenient cul-de-sac for sport with driveways for goals and a lamppost for a wicket. These early childhood years, which I relished, now seem a part of social history where British society was more settled or ordered and everything moved at a slower pace. Certainly, we ran freer then, left to roam in local parks and waste grounds (there was a disused nursery at the end of our street that would now be deemed hazardous), counselled only to get home before it was dark. It is as if my memories exist now only in sepia or black and white. It was a tranquil and relaxed childhood, not without its minor traumas of course, but virtually trouble-free. Ron and Margaret were good parents. It was punctuated throughout by routine Saturday visits to my grandparents, at East Preston for tea and Rustington for an evening snack. With Ernest and Edith Scambler we played French cricket in summer, shove-halfpenny when it rained and then listened to the radio. Then the real treat, a short drive to watch TV with a more relaxed, and unathletic, Arthur and Caroline Nichols: the end of Grandstand and the football results, Gary Halliday, Six-Five Special, The Billy Cotton Band Show and, less correctly by today’s more standards, The Black and White Minstrels, spring readily to mind.
My attendance at the local primary school in Lyndhurst Road from the age of five to eleven meant a ten-minute walk, initially with Margaret but soon on my own or with new friends. Too much detail would be superfluous for present purposes, so it will be expedient to pass by my one canning for touching an inkwell when explicitly told not to do so, and to mention in passing my less than distinguished introduction to sport as a right-footed left back and a number eight batsman, and to re-engage with the narrative on my entry to the sixth form. It was in fact only in retrospect that I realised that all those assigned to Mr Gilbert’s fifth form went on to fail the 11+ exam, while those of us ‘selected’ for Miss Buckley’s sixth form stood a reasonable chance of passing. And the 11+ clearly mattered, though I was only dimly aware of this. As my birthday fell on 8 October I was asked if I wanted to take the 11+ a year early or to wait a year. I’m sure I was consulted, but ‘we’ decided to maximise my chances of passing by waiting a year. In the event I did well enough in schoolwork and Ron, who knew only too well the significance of the 11+ and was determined that I wouldn’t end up at St Andrew’s, got me to work through a series of preparatory questions after school. He also made enquiries about the extent of the fees, which he could have ill-afforded, for pupils attending nearby Steyning Grammar School in case I failed. I passed, winning myself a shiny new Raleigh bicycle in the process. I remember Ron bringing the letter bearing the news up to my bedroom, a broad smile of pleasure and relief on his face.
The 11+ examination was a pivotal initiative for us babyboomers, as intrusive as it was divisive. Ron was right to be on edge. Bear in mind he left school at 14 for paid employment, in the process, incidentally, helping to fund his younger brother Ken’s schooling. As a war-trained teacher without a university degree he also felt second-rate: he experienced what I was later to call ‘felt stigma’, namely, a suspicion that he was likely to be overlooked for promotion, coupled with a diminished sense of self-worth. I suspect these feelings were augmented by the far rosier prospects of Ken, already ear-marked for a future manager’s post with Barclays Bank, and of Margaret’s brother-in-law, ’Bertie’ Oliver, a Dulwich-educated man who had inherited a well-established London firm – with a royal warrant – providing cases for jewels.
But back to the 11+. This was a product of the Butler Education Act of 1944 that introduced a tripartite system of secondary education involving grammar, secondary modern and technical schools. Those who passed the 11+ attended grammar schools, those who failed secondary moderns, and the third option of technical schools existed as a kind of technical or skill-oriented backstop. The exam itself comprised tests in verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, maths and English. It was widely thought at the time that it afforded a reasonably accurate measure of innate intelligence and was therefore progressive, sorting out the naturally gifted wheat from the less well-endowed chaff. Critically: (1) it was geared to preparing children for their later contributions to the workforce (and two out of three men were doing manual work in the 1950s); and 2) reflected an elite governing view that it was both unnecessary and inadvisable to educate children beyond their ‘destined’ station in life. The result was a political decision that four out of every five entrants should fail the 11+. Statistically, very few children who failed the 11+ compelled a transfer into grammar schools by their subsequent academic performances (though as it happened my future colleague and fellow professor at UCL was one of these). For many the 11+ was a decisive and fatalistic event. Research since has clearly established that it was not in fact a simple indicator of innate intelligence but rather favoured children from professional and middle-class backgrounds: remember, Ron tutored me for several weeks before I sat the exam. In other words, it implicitly reflected existing social structural and cultural advantage. Basil Bernstein drew a pertinent distinction between working-class children who’d often been socialised into communicating in ‘restricted’ code, using attenuated forms of reasoning, and middle-class children who’d been socialised into communicating in ‘elaborated’ code, involving more complex forms of reasoning. Unsurprisingly it tended to be the latter who were better prepared for the 11+. While there is an ever-present danger of stereotyping here, there is no doubt that the dice were loaded in favour of professional and middle-class kids, like me. Ironically the 11+ was to prove unpopular with these same families if their offspring were assigned to the local secondary modern. It was not until 1965 that the 11+ was abandoned, though a handful still survive. Comprehensive schools were the new order of the day. Although this was widely viewed as a progressive move by Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, elected in 1964 after 13 years of Conservative rule, it did not, as any sociologist worth his or her salt could have predicted, vanquish class-related advantage and disadvantage. Most comprehensives introduced ‘streaming’ in one form or another, in the process delivering watered-down versions of the old 11+ divisions.
A quick mention might and should be made of a tiny segment of the education system of which I then had no knowledge, those mysteriously distant fee-paying ‘endowed’ public schools reserved for training offspring of the British elites to ascend in their turn to top jobs. It was only later, as an undergraduate in sociology, that I was to become familiar with this exclusive and prepotent social phenomenon. The term ‘public school’ had been deployed in England since the eighteenth century, though its usage was only made formal by the Public Schools Act of 1868, following the Clarendon Report of 1864. Nine schools featured at this time: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, Charterhouse and Merchant Taylor’s and St Paul’s Schools. This clutch of hugely influential and privileged outposts totally passed me and my kind by. I was to catch up with it later.
To return to my childhood world and that of the 11+ briefly. I saw its divisiveness at first hand. My friend Sean had passed and made it to Worthing High School for Boys a year ahead of me, but the two sisters at 9 Colebrook Close failed; and what in retrospect seems worse, one of two sisters at number 11 passed and the other failed. The stigma of failure was written into the colours of the compulsory school uniforms: green for the grammars, navy blue for the secondary moderns. As Erving Goffman puts it, those who stigma is conspicuous must manage the impressions of others. Personally okay and with my local friendships unaffected, the visible branding of the sprinkling of 11+ failures around me had a negligible impact. It was only in my later years, compounded when I discovered sociology, or it discovered me, that I became more reflective about it all.
What kind of boy was I at the age of 11, about to transfer to a ‘big school’? I can say with confidence that I was a shy and reticent boy, one who had been happily sheltered by loving parents from any minor local storms breaking around me. I was trundled along by events, largely unadventurous and rarely proactive. As for the causal input of each side of the nature/nurture dichotomy, it seems invidious to comment in any detail given that hindsight is as likely to be obfuscatory as enlightening. Doubtless I was in part the product of an upward causality of the biological to the social via the psychological, and, no less, of a downward causality in the opposite direction. My shyness seems more akin to my mother’s meek bearing and behaviour, though it is probably relevant too that she spent many years in amateur dramatics; and maybe my modified taciturnity (I was and remain less taciturn than Ron, who in turn was less so than his father Ernest), to which might be appended an occasionally perverse if sometimes functional streek of obstinacy. As is perhaps to be expected in an only child, my conversations with self, Archer’s internal conversations, were to-the-point and unremitting.
In his Critique of Dialectical Reason and his unpublished work on ethics, John-Paul Sartre introduced a series of concepts that might help frame and elucidate such youthful conversations with self. Most relevant are ‘hexus’, the ‘practico-inert’ and ‘spontaneity’. Hexus, a term borrowed from Aristotle, represents a person’s ongoing relationship to his or her environs via a set of acquired dispositions and habits. The practico-inert refers to those material structures and practical activities learnt or inherited from previous generations which, in combination, fuel hexus and in the process limit or nullify freedom of action. What Sartre earlier called ‘monstrous spontaneity’ is the capacity to break out, to do something that is not simply ‘what we do’. He calls this a power of negation, a term also used by critical realists: it comes out of inertia but evolves into a form of resistance to it.
Using Sartre’s terminology, it is I think possible to offer a rough characterisation of a child’s conversations with self. I do so via three derivative concepts. The first is that of an enveloping hexus. The young child is typically ‘trained’ to adopt acceptable and expected forms of behaviour, often by means of systems of rewards and punishments, that subsequently become habitualised. In my own case the rewards and punishments were subtle, but in Sean’s case less so: his otherwise quiet and amenable father ‘took his belt to him’ if he transgressed in ways deemed unacceptable and we could hear his shrieks from some distance. Second, there is a spatio-temporal immediacy: juvenile dialogues with self tend to revolve around the here and now, ruminating on anything from quarrels with friends to embarrassing gaffs to missed goals or dropped catches. Rarely do they mine the practico-inert with any depth of interest or intent. Finally, I suggest a concept of ego-spontaneity. It was Piaget who emphasised the tendency of infants and juveniles to put themselves – the ego – at the centre of their universe. While it would be wrong to suggest that children are incapable of thoughtful rebellion – Sean was always bolder in this respect than me – bids for freedom are frequently bounded by spatio-temporal immediacy and only exceptionally involve significant negation. There are of course occasional exceptions to this, though I was certainly not one of them.