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My mother’s brother, an active trade unionist, worked, not simply to improve conditions for the boot and shoe workers, but also to raise them up morally, so that they might lift their eyes above the factory bench, the bookmaker and the shadow of Theda Bara at the Temperance Hall, long converted from a palace of sobriety to a cinema. He performed a function that later devolved upon social workers - interceding with officials on behalf of the inarticulate, confronting landlords and moneylenders, getting compensation for the widow of a man crushed by a factory hoist that failed.
He sat with the dying and comforted those who had no belief in an afterlife with the assurance that their work in this one had not been in vain. He wrote letters for the barely literate, sad missives of consolation to a bereaved sister in Australia, letters of joy and love, but more usually, of commiseration, to separated kinsfolk. His letters made them cry. He was wise and humane, and when he attended classes of the Workers’ Educational association, he went to learn not about the contradictions of capitalism, in which he needed no instruction, but about flower-imagery in Shakespeare or the glory of Etruscan Art. He died when I was eighteen, before I had had time to appreciate the austere grace of his life. I later realized that he held, within his skinny, careworn person, my own narrowly avoided identity as worker by hand – a role omnipresent in our town, but immensely distant from my own protected experience.
For I too would have been a working-class intellectual, a species now believed – falsely – to be extinct. I would have attended adult educational classes, and if I debated Marxism, with the pragmatism, dissent and xenophobia of the shoe-workers of Northampton, probably would have have repudiated it as continental rubbish, about as durable as the gimcrack shoes produced in cloudy regions known as ‘abroad’.
I would have been seen by the drinking companions I shunned as one set apart; but an honourable apartness, since I would have been respected for a learning employed as a useful neighbourhood resource. My wife – for such was the pressure on those who preferred their own sex that it took a brave man or woman to resist – would have complained bitterly. She would, no doubt, ascribe the low level of my sexual interest in her to the fact that my head was always in a book, as though scholarly activity drained individuals of their sexuality. She would complain to neighbours that the doors of our house stood open to all the riff-raff of the town and the cold winter draughts, but that while I cared for the wife beaten by her husband in his addiction to milk from the brown cow, I was indifferent to the welfare of my own wife and children.