A Multidisciplinary Experiment with Autoethnography
This picture-essay is about a conversation I had in December 2021 with my father. It forms a building block in my experimental multidisciplinary PhD research at Kingston University, which explores the structural socio-political and economic role of the institution of the family in Britain. In my research, I’m taking a historical materialist approach to representations of the family as a site of complex psychological and intergenerational trauma and the material roots of sexuality/gender oppression. My research bridges English Literature, Creative Writing, Life Writing and Visual Text/Art.
Water and Dust consists of:
- a linked series of art works based on the conversation presented as a slideshow
- an exploratory written essay about the conversation and reflecting my creative, emotional and intellectual response
- several illustrative free-floating archival and personal family photographs scattered through the written material
- a facsimile of my notes made during and after the conversation
My father, John Field, has given permission for me to share this material.
‘The Conversation’ slideshow
USING AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
Encouraged by my colleague Pippa Lang, a PhD researcher and musician at the Kingston School of Art, I am looking at the methodology of autoethnography. Autoethnography is a qualitative method through which the researcher explores societies and communities by starting by reflecting on their own experience and moving outwards through social relationships and experiences to explore the cultural, historical and socio-political meaning of that experience. This is my first foray into autoethnography and I’ve begun to orientate myself in this methodology by seeking out some working definitions and principles.
In his 2021 book Essentials of Autoethnography (published by the American Psychological Association), Christopher N. Poulos offers the following introductory definition:
‘Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of academic writing that draws on and analyses or interprets the lived experience of the author and connects researcher insights to self-identity, cultural rules and resources, communication practices, traditions, premises, symbols, rules, shared meanings, emotions, values, and larger social, cultural, and political issues.’
The seminal 2015 book Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Method by Tony E. Adams, Stacey Holman Jones and Carolyn Ellis (published by Oxford University Press) grounds the method in a social-justice terrain. The following introductory passage from the book provides a vivid and succinct summary of the uses and powers of autoethnography as:
‘A qualitative research method that: 1) uses a researcher’s personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences; 2) acknowledges and values a researcher’s relationships with others; 3) uses deep and careful self-reflection—typically referred to as “reflexivity”—to name and interrogate the intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political; 4) Shows people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles; 5) balances intellectual and methodological rigor, emotion, and creativity; and 6) strives for social justice and to make life better.’
HIS STORY
I aim to narrativize, expose and problematise social relationships that are, in everyday life, culturally more ‘felt’ than thought about, and frequently represented as natural, normal, and inevitable, such as the interactions, attachments and expectations between parents and children. Even in academic and political discourses, the institution of the family is frequently essentialised and normalised as a natural constellation problematised by social forces, rather than historicised as a material construct.
In using personal experiences as starting points for opening enquiry on social and historical questions, autoethnography may offer a method for me to unpick seams of story illuminating intergenerational trauma and dislocation, glimpsing hidden or suppressed experiences, and confronts the ways in which the changing face of Britain’s industrial-military complex plays out in ‘the relational context of family systems’ (The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: When Children Bear their Fathers’ Traumatic Past, Solomon and Zerach, Science Direct, 2020).
My dad’s stories depicted in the images in this essay focus on his early life on the then new St. Helier housing estate on the Carshalton/Mitcham border in south London and draw on his memories of the traumatic experience of WW2 with its bombings and social upheavals. That the experiences were traumatic seem self-evident to me and yet, to my dad they resonate more with associations arising from the normalisation and sentimentalisation of life during ‘wartime’. (The multiple and continuous experiences of Britain’s ‘wartimes’ since 1945 are frequently erased by the centrality of the WW2 as a hegemonic experience in national consciousness.) Moreover, Dad’s stories of his dad’s air-raid rescue work, and the mechanisms of war on the St Helier, his evacuation stories, and separation from his father, embody affection and nostalgia. The pain, fear and sorrow the stories represent are refracted through those idealised cultural references and familial connection.
THE POETICS OF SNEEZING
Intergenerational trauma, that is, the trauma experienced by the children, grandchildren and descendants of trauma survivors, is the subject of a burgeoning wave of scientific and academic research considering DNA, genetics, epigenetics, society, biology, history, culture, life narratives and poetics. I am often struck by the (seemingly) purely biological traits I share with my dad, some of which were also shared his dad such as myopia, sneezing attacks and digestive problems. A 2014 article by Declan Devakumar et al in BMC Medicine addresses the health effects of war/conflict trauma and its
‘…consequences across generations and potential harms to the health of children yet to be born… Conflict-driven harms are transmitted through a complex permissive environment that includes biological, cultural and economic factors, and feedback loops between sources of harm and weaknesses in individual and societal resilience to them….’
This photo-essay works to draw together the poetic, social, biological and psychological matters that are bound together in the stories my dad has told me about his dad during WW2. This written material is intended to act as a critical container for the art I have produced in response. The artwork draws on observations my dad made and stories he told during a conversation we had on zoom on the afternoon of Christmas Eve 2021. I’d just found out I would have to self-isolate and so couldn’t visit, so I suggested a zoom chat.
HOW DAD AND I GOT TO HAVE OUR CONVERSATION
My dad relies on his wife to access zoom, so I was viewing them both via her iPad which was propped up on the table in front of them. Dad was sitting in his comfortable armchair where he watches television. His wife moved from the arm of his chair to kneeling on the floor and standing by the window. When I talk to my dad, his wife is there, and this triangulated dynamic is a factor in my relationship with my father.
I have carried out minimal historical research for this photo essay, so it is more of a personal historical document about class, with large questions raised about society, the built environment, the welfare state, telecommunications, imperialist war, family ideology, gender roles. I have the option to explore these questions further. Properly, autoethnography within a historical materialist framework would, I imagine, incorporate an exacting scientific research component – however I have yet to discover how other Marxists have already used this methodology.
BEING A FOREIGNER AND A LISTENER TO MY FATHER
A significant portion of the relationship between my father and me is practised through my listening. He once told me I am ‘a good listener’. In his nineties, and affected by memory difficulties, especially wordfinding, he continues to look to me as a listener, and fixes me into a listening role by occupying time and space we share with talking.
In this role I have a multi-layered experience as:
- Firstborn daughter, loyal and faithful, giving him the attention he desires, feeling more accepted/enjoyed/loved when I perform this role, but nevertheless vulnerable and disappointed when the attention is not returned.
- Academically minded, creative, politically active, and cultural producer, the first person in the extended family to attend university (1978-81), mysteriously informed and potentially threatening. I have a sense that there could be fear of what I might come out with.
- Independent, female, queer and therefore loved but loathed. The fact of my bisexuality is ignored, my friendships tiptoed around as though they are unexploded bombs. I have no partner so my sexuality is an abstraction. My resistance to oppression, war and exploitation confounds and unnerves. Perhaps my dad feels he has to be on ‘best behaviour’ or that he is walking on eggshells.
- Holding a longstanding frustration at feeling unheard and unseen. However this is now counterposed and mitigated with the need to adapt to memory symptoms and put into practice techniques from the SPECAL method, ironically in a continuation of my need/role to listen and understand.
- A double function of being a ‘vessel’. In the first sense, as a listener, I am a receptacle into which my dad can put his memories and stories, and know they are received and respected. The second sense is about my creative practice. I feel moved to take notes while he speaks, so as to create a record of what he is saying. I want to capture his phraseology and the content of his stories. However, my taking notes appears to draw away my attention, because I am looking down. He may not understand why I would want to make a record, and the forms and methods I use to channel, relate and express are foreign to him. Perhaps I am perceived as a kind of memory-vulture. Perhaps I am one.
- A translator. As a cultural, political and expressive ‘foreigner’, I employ several languages for listening, receiving, recording and then making my own communications, to relate and relay these stories within my creative, political and academic communities.
FATHER TO FATHER TO DAUGHTER
A compelling thread within Dad’s stories is his affection and respect for his father. My father self-educated in the post-war period, having left school to go out to work at 14 and gone through National Service in the RAF, and built a career in technical communications and publications. His family of origin was working class, under significant financial pressure, and until they were offered a new three-bedroomed terraced house on the Carshalton side of the London County Council’s St Helier Estate in 1936, occupied slum housing in Battersea. The new house had a bath in the kitchen that was covered with a lid when not in use and served as a bench. Dad has never expressed even the tiniest criticism of his father, to my knowledge. He talks of the skills, qualities and values he admired in his father, remembers happy times helping him with the allotment, chickens, cycle mending and gardening. The parents and five children relied on their own produce for survival.
My dad speaks of his dad working long hours, six days a week, with his bicycle as his only means of transport, exuding kindness, patience, forbearance, love. According to Dad, his dad never complained and was entirely devoted in his love for ‘Mum’, his wife. Even in relating how his dad sometimes took a belt to him, Dad speaks with affection, and acceptance that this had been an act of love. I sometimes wonder whether my dad’s siblings have different perspectives.
My dad has taught me lots of skills such as changing plugs and fuses, digging and other heavy gardening, decorating, basic car maintenance including changing and inflating tyres. I have often been his plumber’s or builder’s mate. He once said to me: ‘I feel like I’m my dad and you’re me!’.
THE FLOWS OF WATER AND DUST
The material reality of my grandfather’s working life is viscerally embodied in my dad’s stories. I find out new details on every telling. This conversation touched on Grandad’s job at Wandsworth Distillery. I knew he had worked there, and travelled by bicycle in all seasons, but didn’t know about his work on the Thames and in the boilers, and the connection to the production of famous gin brands. As Dad described, it, I pictured in my mind waterborne vessels on the river, dipping waterbearing vessels into the murky deeps to collect the precious Thames, and my action as a vessel, receiving and condensing, boiling down, treating, transposing and translating experience through story and drawing. I have taken the story inwards and towards a place of reflection, mirroring and study which I may share with others. In reality, they probably have used pumps and hoses, so perhaps I am more of a pipeline from past to present – and on to future as this piece of work is shared with and, I hope, received, by others. In childhood, I knew Grandad had been a volunteer police constable who didn’t arrest people but helped them. (Special Constables had full police powers, but the War Reserve Police Constables, which he joined, were civilian volunteers and in Mitcham, where he served, part of the Metropolitan Police.)
During the 1960s, on visits as a small child, I remember his police helmet stored up on a dark shelf in the hallway at their home, and having it lifted down so I could hold it and marvel. It was hard, reinforced probably with metal, like steel toecaps. But in this conversation I learned that Grandad had been involved in bomb rescue work and it is with shame that I realise I have never before tried to find out about this. Now, I am prompted to wonder also what political and industrial discussion and perhaps frictions may have arisen between volunteers and professionals. Grandad was a solid Labour supporter. Through Dad’s words about his father coming home covered in dust, I could sense the shocked child seeing his father coated, transformed, perhaps appearing masked and alien. My dad grew up from age 10 to 15 during WW2, so I imagine there was an increasing awareness of the dangers and destructions of the bombing. Dad has spoken of his terrifying times spent in the air-raid shelter in the garden and my lifelong fear of losing my dad is itself coated in the dust of these memories, which I have imagined and suppressed, taking flight from the terror playing out in my own mind from Dad’s accounts. The pebble-dashed air-raid shelter was being used as a coal bunker by the 1960s. Listening to Dad in this conversation I felt shock and sorrow that Grandad had been plunged into such suffering, fear, death, danger and destruction, and perhaps had never spoken of it, or described it. My abiding memory is of him sitting smoking in his armchair and doing the football pools. I could not understand many words that he said. My dad regrets that my sister and I did not really know Grandad. I feel both his and my own regret.
CONNECTION
Public housing in the early years of council housing was sometimes planned with infrastructure, to accommodate and provide for working-class families. Some council estates, especially the cottage garden estates – as the St Helier was – had pubs, laundries, schools, GP surgeries and community halls built into them, and hospitals nearby. The St Helier Hospital was completed in 1938 and its extraordinary art nouveau structure and design are still intact.
My grandparents got a landline telephone around 1972 (paid for by their grown-up children) and I surmise that very few households, if any, on the St Helier Estate would have had a telephone until the late 1950s at least. My own parents didn’t get a telephone in their home until 1966. Before people had their own phones, they had to use bright red public telephone boxes. You told the operator the number you wanted, then pressed Button A to insert coins and speak when connected. Button B would return unused coins. People would have to queue for the phone and as I listened to my dad in this conversation I realised that the phone outside the St Helier Arms would have been in constant use for routine calls and emergencies.
Someone needing to call an ambulance, for instance, would have to shout to everyone in the queue that they needed to make an urgent call. The person in the box would end their call and step out. I reflected on how this would make life more of an everyday experiential commons. Neighbours would know intimate details of your life, and/but know when support or assistance might be needed.
Dad’s mention of the huge water tank at the pub was also new information for me. I realised that the pub wasn’t just a place of leisure, musical culture, games socialising and alcohol consumption, but a gathering place, a place of communication, conference, community action and information. A place where public and private were fused, like the junction of a telephone line. A place where you could and would leave your children outside in most weathers, the older ones minding the babies in their prams, with no questions raised about safeguarding. One of my dad’s early jobs was with the Post Office, as a telecommunications engineer.
ST HELIER AND ME, ONCE REMOVED
The St Helier Estate is like a magnet, or a spider’s web, drawing me in. It’s full of unanswered questions, and political issues which engage me now, as a socialist activist. In the 1990s the EDL began organising on the estate, and my anti-fascist comrades who lived in the area worked on the estate to gather support for anti-racism and demonstrate, in the Trotkyist tradition of the Anti-Nazi League and more recently Unite Against Fascism, that Nazis are not welcome there by confronting them in the streets. This action involved my friend Tina, whom I met at a Socialist Workers Party meeting in 2019. Tina was born and brought up on the St Helier Estate. Her father had moved there following slum clearances at King’s Cross in the late 1930s.
My friend Mary Lynch, whom I met through Wimbledon Women for Peace in 1982, was a midwife at the St Helier hospital. I am currently exploring moving from my home in Peckham, south London, to be nearer to Kingston University. My council home swap searches are frequently bringing up properties on the St Helier Estate. I feel drawn to explore this option, and at the same time feel it as preposterous. It’s as though it is putting out a romantic siren call which I must resist, a promise of belonging which is bogus. My needs will not be met there.
I am trying to pursue a futile family connection. While my uncles, aunts, some cousins, Dad and I have these smooth, youthful cheeks which hold us in kind and make people think we are younger than we really are, in fact there is little common cultural or social ground. My needs will not be met there either. Going to live on the St Helier Estate is a dangerous dream.
While writing this article, and keying in St Helier on google, forgetting to put the word ‘estate’, I was taken aback to find myself looking at photographs of the capital of the island of Jersey, in the English Channel. Now that St Helier has got a very interesting history too…
Postscript: notes from my journal during and after the conversation
