Interview from “Fathers and Sons” by Christine Williams.
Published by HarperCollins, 1996.
Michael Wilding, writer
A former professor of english in Sydney, Michael Wilding grew up in
Worcester in England with working class parents who wanted him to
better himself through education. Aged fifty two, he has no natural
children, but he stepfathers a grown daughter. He seemed to
maintain a bond with his father through the adversity of great
divergence of values, partly out of an admiration for his father's
strength in the face of hardship and a sheer determination to be loved
for his own achievement as a writer.
Michael Wilding: I can remember being told my grandfather had died,
and my awareness of death when I was about seven on my way to
school, but I don't remember any specific early memory of my father.
What I can remember was that he worked as an iron moulder which
was a physically hard and dirty job, and my mother hated those
aspects of it. He'd come home in clothes covered in the soot of the foundry; so for her, in that
English context, this was a manual job and a dirty job on the bottom of the scale.
Christine Williams: What was her background?
Michael Wilding: They were domestic servants. Her father was head groom to a brewing lord. It
was a working class background, but very conservative because the domestic servants of the
aristocracy took their employers’ values. Whereas my father's family were iron moulders, who were
the aristocracy of labour in the English class structure, because they held a skill, a craft. In my
grandfather's day the iron moulders used to go to work in top hats.
My grandfather came out to Australia, to the Darling Downs, in 1908, to try to get away from the
foundry. He and my grandmother lived in a humpy, working on someone's farm, and my father got
malaria, and as a result, suffered malaria attacks all his life. They only lasted there six months and
went home. Then my grandfather went to Canada on his own, and didn't stick it and went back. My
grandfather had actually been born in America because his father had run away from a village as a
boy after the schoolteacher was brought in to beat him. He got a job on a boat and jumped ship in
America and travelled around the country. This is the family myth: he saw the Carnegie riots where
the troops gunned down the strikers; he was a hobo; and in Ohio he married a girl from the next
village in the Midlands, so he came back. He was an iron moulder and then my grandfather was,
and my father, in the tradition of those class divisions within the working class.
CW: Still, to your mother it wasn't...
MW: It was a dirty job.
CW: And she had to do the washing?
MW: Yeah, most of it. Although I think my father washed his own clothes. One of my father's
favourite books, and he was very literate, was Sons and Lovers, which had all those class conflicts
within the family, and we were re-enacting it. [Laughing].
CW: And you didn't realise that until you read the book as an adolescent?
MW: Yes. When I read it I saw it, sure. I also remember one time early in my life when he was at
home from being badly burnt on his hands from the molten iron, and the boss came by. I
remember my father calling him 'Sir'. That here was someone he had to call 'Sir' struck me at the
time.
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Interview from “Fathers and Sons” – Michael Wilding, writer
CW: Obviously there's a strong political element in your interpretation of the memories
now which must have been latent then. But what about memories of simple activities?
MW: Well we used to do a lot of walks around the country. My father and mother, my sister who
was four years younger than me, and myself. Walking by the river Severn, going swimming in the
river. My father swam and taught me to swim. He was very physical and athletic, and I wasn't. He
was a good cricketer.
CW: Did you feel a lack ...?
MW: Sure. I was hopeless at most sports, I couldn't coordinate at all.
CW: Didn't he teach you?
MW: Oh, he tried. [Laugh] He'd throw cricket balls at me and I'd try to catch them. I was hopeless.
So this was always one of those things - I was failing in that area - I was no good at games. And
he was good at them.
CW: So you felt a failure.
MW: Yes, failing in that. But there again - he read a lot, his father read a lot. My grandfather took
days off work to read Walter Scott novels, and so on. My father was always telling me to read
school yarns, Talbot Baines Reid, some of those late C19th public school stories. But all those
stories had the intellectual, the swot, who was standing outside of the games culture, observing in
resentment or hostility. Even up to the early PG Wodehouse stories, who had the good sportsman
character Mike (which is my name) and also Psmith, the intellectual. So the books I was
encouraged to read had this dialectical polarisation. It was a complexity, in that I identified with the
'other' character.
CW: What was your father's view of your sports inactivity?
MW: Well he used to say I should go out and play games and not sit reading books all the time.
On the other hand, since his family was very committed to reading, there was an ambivalence. He
used to take me to cricket games at Worcester, a beautiful cricket ground overlooking the river with
the cathedral behind. That's where the visiting Test match teams open their season. He loved to
watch cricket and I hated it. It was torture sitting there all Saturday afternoon for hours. [Laugh]
So we didn't actually relate. I was bored and resentful.
CW: Was he angry with you about this disinterest in sport?
MW: No. I got a scholarship to the local grammar school which then had a prep department, so I
was there from the age of eight, and it had the sporting ethos, so I was always on the outside in
that structure. I think I was a disappointment to him, because he used to like playing tennis and
cricket. I felt it.
CW: Who encouraged you in scholarship more, your father or you mother?
MW: Both. My father's brother and sisters went to university and teachers' college. As a boy my
father was ill at the time of the scholarship exams, so he left school at twelve, worked on his
grandfather's farm, and became an iron moulder at thirteen. He died when he was eighty two of
emphysema, clearly from the foundry. When I was young I was always conscious of the way that
he was the eldest child who had to work and missed those educational opportunities. His sisters
became teachers and his younger brother became a clergyman and began to publish his sermons
and other thoughts when I was aged ten.
CW: But you were also conscious that although he missed out there he had a very good
mind?
MW: Yes. But my mother was also determined that I wouldn't end up in the foundry. I only ever
went there once as a child. He hated it. It was like an inferno set in a dark, gloomy building. They
didn't want me to go anywhere near it.
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Interview from “Fathers and Sons” – Michael Wilding, writer
CW: Did your father take an interest in your homework, did he test your spelling, that sort
of thing?
MW: No, they left me alone. I was pretty reasonably motivated. The story is that when I was at the
little local village school they persuaded me to take the scholarship exam for the grammar school
by telling me I'd get longer holidays there. [Laugh] That's the story of my life - become an academic
and you only teach half the year. So they were encouraging, but he didn't have the expertise to
help with homework. He had a sister who taught French so she helped me. They believed in
education as a means of bettering yourself.
CW: In one of your stories, 'Reading the Signs', you write about being told that you didn't
do too badly 'for an iron moulder's son'.
MW: That was actually said to me at Oxford by the careers adviser in a quite unselfconscious way
- these unconscious insults! I was horrified.
CW: You felt that really strongly though even earlier in your schooling ... a sense of shame
about your father's occupation?
MW: Oh sure, I felt it even more strongly at school with the kids at the very old grammar school I
attended which was provincial bourgeois. The kids in the A-stream were mostly white-collar; the
lower class kids tended to be in the lower stream. There was a strong sense of class which is
endemic to Britain.
CW: You wrote once about crossing out 'profession' on a school form, and
writing 'iron moulder'. What did you mean by that?
MW: The way to success if you were in the working-class in England was to deny and obscure
your past. If you pretended to be something else, and take on other values, you could do very well.
So it was a matter for me of saying 'I'm not going to reject that past'.
CW: In one story you wrote, though, a story based on a memory from your
school years, you were ashamed of your father's work.
MW: At school, absolutely. To see my father cycling home when the whole model of the school
was white-collar, was embarrassing for a twelve year old. Later I tried to consciously get over it and
cycle home with him.
CW: In that story you wrote that the father was furious but didn't mention it.
MW: I could hear him talking to my mother but it never came up specifically.
CW: Do you think he was a sensitive man?
MW: Oh yes, very.
CW: What makes you think that?
MW: I don't know, just intuition.
CW: How did you get on with your father during your teenage years?
MW: Oh we argued the whole time ...[Laugh] ... over bizarre things. His family were fundamental
Christians, Plymouth Brethren and then Seventh Day Adventists, and he rejected that because
he'd had a terrible childhood under their narrow-minded values. But he inherited that strict
puritanical outlook. Once I turned seventeen I used to go down the pub and he was very repressive
about sexual morality and alcohol.
CW: That caused conflict then?
MW: Yes I'd go out and get pissed and stagger through the house. It was a problem. He wasn't a
teetotaller exactly. We'd have a bottle of sherry at Christmas or something, but basically he came
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Interview from “Fathers and Sons” – Michael Wilding, writer
from that tradition that saw alcohol as a destructive influence on the working class. That's how the
family that my mother's father had worked for, had made their money, from exploiting the
proletariat and becoming brewing lords.
CW: And he would say this to you?
MW: Yes. The other source of conflict was the political, you see. Because for all this class thing
he basically had no sympathy with the trade unions. He thought that union organisers were people
who couldn't do the job, scoundrels exploiting the system for their own ends ... and he could have
been right. [Laugh] He didn't have much time for Labor politicians, and I was taking on this Leftist
position. And then to complicate it, he married late and he worked from the age of thirteen and the
way he saw to get out of the trap he was in was to invest in the stock market. He was a very
complex person. So he'd ride home from work at night in filthy, sootladen clothes with a copy of
The Financial Times sticking out of his pocket. That was our daily paper, and Investors' Chronicle
was the weekly. You know he had a very good mind, and he devoted his spare energy to looking at
the stock market. And he did very well; he managed to save a lot of money so that, after his death,
when my mother had a stroke, by selling the house and using his investments, we were able to pay
for the nursing home she went to.
So as an adolescent I took on that basic Leftist position that capitalism is evil and stocks and
shares are exploiting the proletariat and here was my father investing, and we had some terrible
arguments about that.
CW: Meanwhile was he paying your University fees?
MW: No, I had a scholarship which he had to top up, and one year he refused to top it up by fifty
quid, or something. At that point he'd done his back in and the foundry was going bust and, aged
about sixty, he had to find a job working as a packer in a warehouse. So we'd argue about the Tory
Party, and this went on right up until the end: did Nixon know about what was on the tapes, for
instance. And he started to realise that I wasn't totally wrong about many of these things. He
conceded.
CW: How did the relationship go after you came out to Australia at the age of twenty one?
MW: It was always fraught, you know. I was teaching at Sydney Uni and began to write reviews
for The Bulletin. So I bought my parents a subscription and my father was horrified at 'all the filth
you had to review'. They were very strict. Then when I sent them my first book, again he was
horrified - my father wrote me a heavy letter about the sanctity of marriage. The book was a shock
to him. Even right at the end of his life with The Paraguayan Experiment, which I dedicated to my
parents - when I was over in Britain visiting, I came home one day and they were gloomy about it,
and there was some sexual passage in it - I can't imagine which part - which had obviously upset
him. They were basically English puritan. So I couldn't bridge that area. But on the other hand our
contact was productive, in that he used to enjoy having an argument. He loved the intellectual
challenge of talking it through ... the way he would bale up a clergyman.
CW: Did he love you?
MW: Yes, I'm sure he did. After it's all too late you realise these things, yes.
CW: There may not have been a means to bridge the gap, but there wasn't actually a
breach, in that you kept on sending material ... ?
MW: We kept in touch. There were times when I nearly didn't bother. When I first came to
Australia, I thought, 'Shall I piss off and never write again?', as, it turns out, my great uncle did. He
went out for a drink one day and never came back; he left his wife and children. 'Marvellous,' I
said; 'disgraceful,' said my father.
CW: But you didn't break contact... for your mother's sake or your father's?
MW: For both. I thought my father had a really rough deal; they both did. But for him, having lost
that chance of education, and in a job that wasn't terribly well paid. This was what drove me to the
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Interview from “Fathers and Sons” – Michael Wilding, writer
Left, to his horror. And my mother was even more horrified because she was more deeply
conservative. She always said my father was too soft-hearted.
CW: How did you observe that he was?
MW: I didn't observe it. I always found him a paternal disciplinarian.
CW: How were you disciplined?
MW: I'd be chased up the stairs and I'd lock the door in his face.
CW: Were you belted or strapped?
MW: No, not in a formal way. I'd be slapped if I didn't dodge out of the way. He used a moral
psychological discipline.
CW: Was there another father model for you which caused you to go down the political
path you took?
MW: Not really. My English master was influential. My father's brother was a Congregational
clergyman and author and he was kind of Labour, so there was that possible model. My father was
republican - anti-monarchy and anti-aristocracy - but he was really a Thatcherite, in that he
believed you could make your own individuality. He bought the monetarist philosophy for a while
when it became fashionable. But in the last ten years of his life he got out of the stock market
because he realised it was run on insider trading. He was an individualist.
CW: Well he gave that to you and you built on it with this Left view.
MW: Yes I felt the class system when I was growing up.
CW: Let's go back to when you were about fourteen. Did your father tell you the facts of
life?
MW: Oh my father never talked to me about that. There was a total taboo on sexuality - it was too
embarrassing to talk about. I just picked it up at school, at the cricket ground, amongst those of us
who were no good at the game and would skulk about beside the oval.
CW: Which brings us back to this question of your failure at athleticism. You wrote a story
about cutting down some fir trees as a young man?
MW: Yes, the year I finished University my parents moved to a house in the country and one of
the first things my father wanted to do was cut down a row of fir trees which was sucking up the
nutrients from the soil, so that he could plant his vegetable patch. The story is about hacking down
these trees while I was suffering from a dreadful hangover. I was nauseous but I did my best.
Again I had to prove that I could do it.
CW: You would keep on trying, though, wouldn't you?
MW: Ah yes. I don't give up. They haven't defeated me yet. One thing the Wildings have is
determination. My father's side.
CW: Do you look like your father?
MW: Yes, a strong nose and chin. But I'm also like my mother. They're more musical, into joy and
parlour games and dancing. My father's family were into purity; they were the seekers after truth,
and they were literary.
CW: What jobs did your father set you as a boy?
MW: We grew all our own vegetables. Through the war we had an allotment, and then a big block
of land. We grew potatoes, peas, marrows, sprouts, runner beans, turnips, beetroot. So I had to
weed and plant at the weekend. I had to pick the beans and raspberries and gooseberries at
night, and shell peas. It used to drive me mad. It was a chore and I just wanted to be reading
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Interview from “Fathers and Sons” – Michael Wilding, writer
Biggles, not digging potatoes. But as an adult I was quite glad because I got quite a good vege
garden going for a while.
When I was young we lived right on the edge of the city so there were fields around us. You could
walk about a mile down to the river. I shared a canoe with a friend.
CW: What activities did you share with your father?
MW: Oh terrible things like going out to get manure for the garden. It was deeply humiliating but
we needed this for the compost. We'd carry buckets of sheep manure on the handlebars of our
bikes. And we'd go cycling through the streets, and schoolfriends and girls from the private schools
would see us. Later when I was about fourteen, we got a car and we'd fill up the boot with firewood
or manure, and that wasn't so humiliating because it was hidden from sight. It was a sort of
scavenging life. I value it now but as a susceptible teenage kid you're a bit touchy about it.
CW: A lot of people did it, though. You weren't alone. You didn't notice others?
MW: No, they were all doing it. But you keep your eyes down, you don't
look at anybody. [Laugh].
But as far as activities shared with my father, basically, we'd go on walks,
we'd go on drives in the country, and I'd work in the garden.
CW: What about the war? You were born in 1942, so you were still very young by the time it
ended, but do you have any memories of that period?
MW: My father was in a reserve occupation so wasn’t on active service. I don't have any
memories, but the story I'm told is that I ran down the avenue and across the main road in front of
a row of tanks, presumably in some early anti-war gesture. [Laugh]. When there were the aircraft
flying over, I would run up the garden path and hide. But later, I took up aircraft spotting, so that
whenever an aircraft came over I'd run out and identify the number. I'd try to write down the
number of every aeroplane that ever existed, and then after television was introduced, there was
the big debate, if you saw one on television whether that really counted, or you saw a plane
fuselage being transported by truck, whether that was a real plane you could count as having been
seen. A conceptual problem. [Laugh]. Before the war my uncle had aircraft cards, and after the war
I'd go to church rummage sales and buy books on aircraft. There were real scarcities of these
collectables at that time. I went train spotting a couple of times, but that never interested me.
Aircraft were another matter.
CW: So thinking back to your childhood, how would you describe what sort of man your
father was?
MW: Well, he liked books. This is where my love of literature came from. He used to take me
down to the library. When he retired he read all through Dickens and Scott, and it was terrible for
me, because he'd read so much more than I had. I was merely teaching literature. He'd ask me
about a book, and I'd say, 'Oh, I haven't read that one'. He'd talk in terms which people who enjoy
books talk, and here was I in a specialised ... He'd talk character and plot and I'd talk academic
talk, I don't know what it is. I'd talk nonsense. It used to worry me. At the end of his life we had
more contact.
CW: Were you in England when he died?
MW: No, I saw him about three months before he died. It was depressing, because he had so little
energy. We'd talk, or we'd argue; he was always very glad to. And the week of his funeral The
Paraguyan Experiment came out. The book deals with English working class idealists, so I
thought, "It's not about Balmain sex, at least I can show them this book". He read it; but every
writer I know has problems with their parents reading their work. That's the way it is.
CW: When he died, did you feel regrets about your relationship with him?
MW: Oh sure I felt regrets, that things could have been made clearer, and I could have been nicer
at times. Obviously you go through all that. He had a long life, and there were opportunities to
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share, but one may have missed them. It's that English sort of thing where it's very hard to feel
terribly close; it's just inhibition and repression. It was also one of those families where you never
know quite what they want you to do. They were very hands-off, I wasn't pushed, so you're always
trying to justify yourself some way, but you don't really know what's expected of you. And I went
through those years when my interest and ambitions were not within my father's value systems.
I've think I've become more like him since his death. When you reach maturity it's too late. When
you are dealing with your parents you're still quite young and you're basically involved in your own
libido, ego, and ambitions.
CW: And looking down the generations, you have no son?
MW: No, I have a stepdaughter but I've never had any wish to have children. I think very early on,
the idea of being born to die horrified me, and I think my writing is a big factor. The idea of being
committed to my writing, not being a sound person, a responsible person to care about kids. My
own father was very caring and responsible. I just didn't think I could ever.
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