archive for a good infant

I first read Landscape for a Good Woman as an undergraduate, and have returned to it every few years since. We had a battered copy at home – part of a collection of dark green Virago volumes. It sat on the shelves alongside Angela Carter, Antonia White, and Nell Dunn. It’s about Carolyn’s 1950s childhood – a childhood of milk and orange juice, a state which taught her that she ‘had a right to exist’ – told alongside her mother’s childhood in Lancashire in the 1920s. From her hungry, tatty early years, Carolyn’s mother learned not the politics of entitlement, but of envy.

In November, I sat across from Carolyn in her kitchen – wooden countertops, grains in mason jars, blue Le Creuset – talking about childhood, mothers, and whether or not children growing up in today’s version of the welfare state will ever feel that right to exist of the milk-and-orange-juice generation. I asked her why she wrote the book – it felt (to me) like a conversation with her mother that she could only have in her mother’s absence. A conversation where the archive took the place of memory, or honesty, or presence. She disagreed. The book, she said, was about getting her childhood out of her: writing it down, putting it somewhere, having it exist as something whole and separate from herself.

So much of the writing on this (now largely dormant) Substack I wrote as the conversations I couldn’t have with my mother. I wanted to work out why my children’s childhood felt so different from mine; if I was parenting differently from her, or if the conditions of parenting had changed. This radio show came largely from fragments of the essays I wrote here, interspliced with interviews, the BBC archive, realised by incredible production work of Eliza Lomas. Now I’ve listened to it, I understand Carolyn: it feels like I’ve created something separate, outside me, from the swirling sleeplessness of my children’s infancy.

So, here it is. Featuring Dr Miriam Stoppard, Stella Creasy, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Playdays, the chaos of my morning school run, and the Playschool that – sadly – closed down last year.