Homage to Gaia Read Online Free PDF

chance to reach her potential, she was bitter and resentful. As the eldest of a large family, she had, when a child, to take full responsibility for her younger siblings. The bitterest blow for her came when she won a rare scholarship from her primary school in Islington to a grammar school. She could not take it because the family needed her earning power at thirteen to survive. Instead of an enlightened education that was, she thought, her due, she spent her days in a pickle factory sticking labels on the jars. She graduated to another menial job in the Middlesex County Council, but her intelligence liberated her for a brief period in the First World War, when the male employees went to feed that vast human mincing machine of the trenches.
    Grandfather March was a skilled craftsman, a bookbinder, so skilled indeed that Winchester Cathedral chose to exhibit one of the books he bound. The family came from somewhere near Dagenham in Essex. I often wondered if they were Jewish: my great-grandmother’s name was King and March could have once been Marx. They had many Jewish characteristics, including a love of music and an unnatural skill at card games. Great-grandfather March was a sergeant in the mounted police, hardly a Jewish occupation, but maybe things were different then. The family fortunes improved when my grandfather took a job with the Cockerel Press at Ewell in Surrey. The village of Ewell was then at the borders of the London conurbation and effectively in the countryside. Here my mother, who commuted to work by train, met my father, who travelled on the same train to the South Metropolitan Gasworks at Vauxhall. They fell into a long, intense, but unrequited love. My mother told how they walked and sat in Nonsuch Park at Ewell and held hands; that was the limit of their physical contact. My father was then in his mid-30s but married and with two children. His wife had been committed to a lunatic asylum after the birth of their second child when she developed a malign post-partum depression. In the early 20 th century, extra marital liaisons met with stern disapproval, even among the rich. In the lower classes, there was an overwhelming sanctimonious righteousness about adultery, whatever the circumstances; it was a sin, and sins were worse than crimes. The cruel dogma of those times kept my father celibate but he was fortunate to have my Grandmother March’s approval and the unfulfilled relationship between my mother and father continued until 1914, when his first wife died and they were able to marry.
    My father was too old by then, about his mid-40s, either to be a volunteer or later a conscript for the war and with both of them working and living in a flat in Mandalay Road, Clapham, they had a happy start to their marriage. My father had a natural appreciation of the beauty of artefacts, as well as of natural things, and he developed an intense feeling for paintings. My mother had a passion for classical music. Their life during the First World War in London must have been idyllic, for they were in love and fulfilled by all that that great city had to offer. There was negligible bombing in the first war so that life in London went on more or less as usual, except for food and material shortages. I have no idea what method of contraception they used. They never talked on such intimate subjects, not even years later. I onlyknow that whatever it was, it failed in November 1918. The last thing my mother wanted then was a child. I was born close to 2 pm in the afternoon of July 26, 1919, during a thunderstorm and at my grandmother’s house in Letchworth Garden City, which is about 30 miles north of London. Pregnancy and the return of men from the war put an end to my mother’s employment with the Middlesex County Council.
    My mother and father then chose to take on a risky venture. They rented a shop on Brixton Hill and opened it as the Brixton Hill Galleries. Between the two wars, Brixton retained remnants of the