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Section 1: Childhood

My father was a man with a deeply rooted, fiery hatred of all injustice… My father’s connection with the great public movements of the day – the first Reform Bill, the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery, and the Free Trade movement – gave me very early an interest in public questions and in the history of the country.

The love of justice was a passion with him. Probably I have inherited this passion. When my father spoke to us, his children, of the great wrong of slavery, I have felt his powerful frame tremble and his voice would break. He told us sad stories of the hideous wrong inflicted on negro men and women. I say women, for I think their lot was particularly horrible, for they were almost invariably forced to minister to the worst passions of their masters, or be persecuted and die.

I asked my governess why God had made slaves, and I was promptly sent to bed. Oh, how I hated the nurses and governesses, and I stood at the gates of my home and envied the little village children. They were free. They had liberty… The village children could run about as they liked and did not seem to be troubled by those superior persons, nurses and governesses. I went to the nearest railway station and tried to buy a ticket. Needless to say, I was stopped, but I had gone so far that I could not return that night, and I spent it alone at a station inn. After that, lest I should infect my sisters with my spirit of insubordination, I was kept in solitary confinement for three or four days, and then sent away to school.

My mother bore thirteen children, of whom five died in infancy. My youngest brother was born seventeen years after me. Those were the days of large families. I never heard my mother make any complaint about this excessive childbearing. She accepted it with complete surrender and even with satisfaction.

As children we were all taken to Church as soon as we could walk and we had to sit very still indeed, because if not, we would be slapped afterwards. When we were older we had to remember and repeat the text at dinner-time, and if we failed to do this we were set to learn pieces of Scripture by heart.

My mother was a small, bird-like woman, rather pretty, with dark hair and eyes, and a clear complexion, her slim girlish figure well set off by the pretty frocks, and she liked to wear on Sundays. She could sing like a lark, and at times was perfectly charming. But her temper was so uncertain that we lived in constant fear of an outbreak, which often lasted several days.

My father always seemed to me one of nature’s gentlemen. He had a gentle, kindly temper, was independent without being aggressive, and neither feared the rich nor despised the poor. His only weakness was his submission to my mother’s temper, which grew worse with the advent of each child. She would fall into violent passions about the merest trifles and drive us all out of the house for hours; sometimes we would have to spend the night in the barn sleeping on the hay. My father seemed totally unable to combat these storms, or even to protect us. He was always the first to leave the house when they broke out, and the last to return.

My grandmother had a board on the bed and a little chain machine that she could work for the long seams. You never saw such beautiful stitching in all your life… And the window overlooked the main road in Brierfield. And she’d look out – look at a costume, and sit down and cut it out on this board – she couldn’t move her legs. And my mother had to lift her out of bed onto a blanket.

It was a custom of my father and mother to make the round of our bedrooms every night before going themselves to bed. When they entered my room that night I was still awake, but for some reason I chose to pretend I was asleep. My father bent over me, shielding the candle flame with his big hand. I cannot know exactly what I thought was in his mind as he gazed down at me, but I heard him say, somewhat sadly, "What a pity she wasn’t born a lad."

My first hot impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that I didn’t want to be a boy, but I lay still and heard my parents’ footsteps pass on toward the next child’s bed. I thought about my father’s remark for many days afterward… It was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior to women, and that women accepted this situation. I found this view of things difficult to reconcile with the fact that both my father and my mother were advocates of women having the vote.

The picture now in my mind of those Manchester days is of the library, with flowered gold-and-brown paper and book-lined walls. Mother reading, writing or sewing on one side of the big, glowing fire. Father at the other side, deep in a book. He stretches out his fine sensitive hand, now and again, to show that he is thinking of us all and enjoying our companionship. We schoolchildren had leave to do our homework at the big table and suddenly one or another would ask: ‘Father, what is such and such?’ or ‘Who was so

and so?’ He was roused at once. Books were taken from the shelves, references and authorities were shown. The subjected was illuminated in all its ramifications.

My father is still part of me still. He imparted to me so much of his own nature that as long as his blood is still flowing in my veins, I feel he is still alive. He was a born rebel… The closest bond between my father and me was his passionate love of justice, which I inherited from him. So long as there existed within the realm of his personal knowledge any wronged individual my father could not rest inactive. My mother thought he went too far; and perhaps he did… He was often in the bad books of people in authority who believed in the status quo, and wanted peace at any price.

When the morning newspaper brought the unexpected news of my first arrest in the Suffrage Movement, my father reacted to it in precisely the same way as I should have reacted had our positions been reversed. He was proud that a child of his hand not hesitated to make a stand for the extension of democratic liberty. Later that morning he was met by one of his colleagues on the Bench with expressions of sympathy. "Sympathy, my dear fellow," he replied, "I don’t need sympathy. Give me your congratulations! I’m the proudest man in England!’

My mother was a wonderful woman. Her theory was: See the best in anyone and the worse will gradually fall away. Be kind to others, tolerant and sympathetic. We were never allowed in her hearing to say either unkind things about others or to abuse others in any way… She was ever ready to lend a patient ear to other people’s troubles, while at the same time showing a remarkable fortitude in her own.

Our home-life was happy. Our one trouble was that we had to retire much earlier than the other children of the village… I can still see our home with its bright, roaring rosy fire, and all the children, including myself, sitting on the window-sill watching the lights of the cotton factory, a few miles away, gradually going out. Those lights were our signal to retire… On Sunday evenings mother read us stories. They all seemed to be about London life among the poor.

Students came to consult him on every sort of matter – personal troubles and problems,

as well as difficulties in their work. I used sometimes to be curled up, unobserved, on the deep window seat in the study, half-hidden by the heavy curtains, when they came to talk to him. He made them talk; ‘sort out’ their problems. He said once: ‘You can’t give anybody advice as to what he should do. That is his freedom, and his responsibility. But you can help him to set out the pieces, so that he can see what his choice is.’

No one can have had a happier childhood than myself, brought up, with a younger brother and sister, in a large, old-fashioned, country house. In my youth I shared every advantage with my brother equally – from love and affection to the best possible education and opportunities, and the critical but unstinted encouragement which to the young is like sunshine to a plant.

My mother became an energetic cyclist, rebuked by her neighbours for showing inches of extremely pretty feet and ankles; regarded as highly indecorous. It was not only to the ankles that the neighbours objected. My parents were Liberals… at that period as much hated and distrusted by the gentry as Communists are today, and regarded as traitors to their class. In consequence they boycotted them… I suspect this boycott threw my energetic mother even more fervently into good works amongst the villagers, where, in the days before the welfare state, poverty was widespread.

They used to pin things on my back… pinned on ‘suffragette’ or ‘socialist. One of my teachers… Miss Moser… says, ‘Who’s put that on Mary? Come out here! Who’s put it on?’ And none of them spoke – it was a big class. ‘That’s done it… into the schoolmaster, and you know what sort of cane he’s got.’ Miss Moser was quite friendly with my mother… Miss Cliff was friendly too… They were in the suffrage movement; they used to come to our home for meetings. So they stuck up for me.

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