Cambridge was blandly middle class
Will 60. From London. Divorced. Two grown up children.
How are you?
I am content but I’ve not always been. It’s taken a long time. Making a break in my mid fifties from the rut I was in with my marriage was immensely uncomfortable. Those years of transition were quite difficult, but now it's all settled down.
I'm motivated by an internal sense of duty. For example; five years before our separation I said - ‘we can't go on like this, by the time our son is 18 and if our situation hasn’t changed ….’. We didn’t separate over night. We had therapy. We tried. The other pattern I broke out of, which I partly came to realise through therapy, being the first born and the first male, was pleasing my mother and fulfilling her unfulfilled ambitions!
My mother would have been ‘something’ if she'd been born in another time and her mother too. It’s a very matriarchal setup. My mother poured into me her unfulfilled stuff. I went around achieving endlessly almost to fulfil her unspoken ambitions which I could never have done. She said to me a few years ago - I always thought you become a member of the cabinet! Children are these little helpless creatures, they’re like plasticine, consciously and unconsciously soaking it all up. My contentedness is related to my mother's lack of contentedness.
Did you have a nice upbringing? I would say idyllic until the age of 11, then the headmaster from my state primary school put me in for some exams. I ended up getting a free place at a private single sex school. I don't think it suited me. I did well out of it. I was good academically and went on to Cambridge. I didn't enjoy single sex life, I liked the company of women. Cambridge was blandly middle class. I should have made more of it.
My unhappiness came out in my early teens. I had all sorts of things. I got bad migraines. I slept walked a lot. I got bad psoriasis. The social status thing was a problem too because everybody else at the school was the son of a Lawyer, Accountant, Doctor - or CEO. My father was a print worker on Fleet Street. I kind of denied him. When I got to 17, I found it cool to have a blue collar worker, who was on Panorama on a picket line.
I've benefited immensely from social mobility whether that was making me happy is another question.