Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [128]
As for long-term planning, anyone who enters upon marriage can no longer avoid it even if he or she wanted to. I had already been forced to consider the problem a couple of years earlier, when a child was impending from an earlier relationship – my children’s half-brother Joshua – and only the refusal of the woman concerned to leave her husband had removed him from my life into others’ lives. By the middle of the 1960s I was the father of Andy and Julia, the first-time owner of a small car in which I transported them to a holiday cottage in North Wales and first-time house-owner of a large house in an as yet very incompletely gentrified part of Clapham, divided in two by an austere architect friend, which Marlene and I had bought jointly with the taciturn Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight. ‘Has he won the pools or something?’ the local newsagent asked Marlene, since in those days of full employment he could not understand what an obviously healthy and respectable-looking youngish fellow was doing not going out to work in the morning and coming back of an evening like other men. Though Alan was as much of a workaholic as most writers, this guess was not totally off target: he had, after all, written Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which, thanks to their merits and the enormous growth of secondary education, became two of those contemporary classics which, set for O-level and A-level examinations, generate a lasting flow of royalties. He could afford to live off his books, and could avoid the treadmill of freelance journalism. I, though writing at home, did conform to type, for I went to work at Birkbeck on the Northern Line and came back from there late at night. On the other hand, I remained peculiar, inasmuch as I showed no enthusiasm for gardening, and, unlike the Caribbean electricians and transport workers in the short street that led to the Wandsworth Road outside our front door, I did not spend Sunday mornings cleaning our car.
Clearly I was well on the way to the everyday life of academic and middle-class respectability. At this point, except for travel, nothing much happens any longer to the subject of autobiography except inside his or her head or in other people’s heads. This is also true for that matter of the subjects of biography, as generations of the writers of intellectuals’ lives have learned to their cost. However towering the achievement of Charles Darwin, once he returned from the voyage of the Beagle and married, there is not much more to be said about the material events in his life for his last forty years than that ‘he passed his time at Down, Kent, as a country gentleman’2 and to speculate about the reasons for his poor health. The life of the respectable academic is not full of professional drama, or rather its dramas, like those of office politics, are of interest only to those directly involved in them. Again, though there is plenty of drama in family life, especially when parents and teenage children confront each other, third parties, such as the readers of biographies, are usually less gripped by the drama of life inside other families than their own. The scenario is familiar. So the years around 1960 form a watershed not only in my life, but in the shape of this autobiography.
But private lives are embedded in the wider circumstances of history. The most powerful of these was the unexpected good fortune of the age. It crept up on my generation and took us unawares, especially the socialists among