*GI: What kind of relationship was there, between cadet membership of a technological cadre (before Sussex) and your family's story?* I was a baby boomer of course, who went up the escalator of mass state-funded education.
I was born in 1946 as soon as my Dad was demobbed from service in a Royal Marine Commando unit in Italy and Yugoslavia - one of the precarious landscapes where the post-war East-West relationship was thrashed out on the ground. He was a smart kid with good school reports who was made to leave school at 13 and go into the mill (a worsted spinning mill) as a hoist operator: 'unskilled'. Being a commando - he volunteered - was a way for him to show (and discover) how technically capable he was, not just a squaddie, not just 'a hand'.
Through my childhood he self-educated himself to become 'a skilled man', from van driving and bus driving, through working in a carpentry-supplies shop and a newsagent shop, to getting employed as a textile instrument maker and eventually working in the (brown-coat, not blue boiler suit, not grey design-ofiice suit) development workshop of a white-goods manufacturer (Dutch multinational, Phillips, making washing machines).
His Dad, a boot mender living on a war-injury pension from 'The Great War', had arrived in the urban-industrial North of England 40 years earlier as a child-migrant from the declining agricultural-artisan economy of East Anglia: *his* dad had been a harness maker in a family of craftworkers.
And his mum was born in a wild-west street of riotous miners next to a pit in South Yorkshire. As miners, they were migrants too (itinerant pit-sinkers). Many kids in the single street of miners' houses died in infancy, minimal sanitation, sewage works next door, horse shit and flies.
My Mum was another migrant, coming to the mill town and 'winding' work in the mill aged thirteen. Her sister was there already, gone to find work in the depression. Her Dad was a trawler fisherman and cook sailing from Grimsby. He'd been born into a family of agricultural land-workers in East Anglia, and in his teens adventurously walked 150 miles to Grimsby to escape the land and his father, and embrace an intense kind of manual labour on the deep sea.
My mum's Mum was the only one who stayed put until her 50s. Her father was a dockside fish handler ('a lumper') and her mother's father had had a ship's chandlerly business: he had emigrated to the world's largest fishing port, from Baltic-coast Germany. But she became a reluctant migrant when her husband left the fishing port as WWII approached, not wishing to fish bombs (German mines) out of the sea again as he had in the preceding war, and joining his daughters in ther mill town; his manual labout was now in the railway goods yard.
It injured him - in the head not, as with my other grandad, in the leg. Both my grandads had been disabled, by their service in the army of military or industrial manual labour. Did I know that? Not until later. In a less obvious way my dad was injured too, by his service in the elite killing units o commanos in the Adriatic. These were silent voices; they said Beware of serving, They must not be trusted. I was 24 before I stepped into working class shoes, became a (wounded?) class warrior. A sniper, a saboteur, a knife killer like my dad?
Anyway . . the fabled social mobility of educated young people, post-WWII, was nothing new: 'economic migrant' was family story. Nevertheless, the welfare-state free education that put wings on my feet all the way from 1951 to 1967 was where my 'community' was founded, not in any geographically located community. 'School' - and the library, and the printed page - was my homeland.
Not quite true. Americanism and design were homelands as well. My Dad instantiated 'makership-designership', always fabricating something, and by the time I was 11 I wanted to be . . an architect. I knew about architecture because I saw house designs (Frak Lloyd Wright ranch-style derivatives) and domestic-industrial tech (Buckminster Fuller service pods) in my Dad's monthly American *Popular Mechanics* magazines (along with deepwater harbours created with atomic bombs, powered exo-skeletons for GIs, flying cars, and barbecue pits), and 'modern' houses were prizes on the backs of conflakes packets.
I mistakenly thought architecture was a tech discipline, chose a tech secondary school (modelled after Germany's technische hochschule, a brief British 'white heat' fashion); and ended up going to a tech university to become a New Renaissance chemical engineer in 1964. Post-Fordism and incipient career had me in their jaws. I escaped the declining mill town like my grandfathers (in the grip of machinofacture) had escaped the declining agricultural labour market of Suffolk.