Mother and Me: A Cold War Boyhood

by Roy Kershaw (Kershaw Publications, £9.99)

RECENTLY, a number of books have hit the shelves by individuals who grew up in communist households. 

Cathartically giving vent to their recriminations, the likes of Alexei Sayle and David Aaronovitch have used their parents as a lucrative cash cow by ridiculing and patronising their beliefs while at the same time servicing the Establishment’s anti-communist narrative. 

Kershaw’s memoir is of a different calibre. He grew up in the post-war period in Colne, a typical small Lancashire textile town, as a working-class boy whose parents were active communists. His father, a leading light in the local Co-operative Society, becomes a trade union official, while his mother works most of her life on the looms in a textile factory. 

Kershaw himself never adopts his parents’ politics, nor does he become a member of the Communist Party, but he respects their commitment, belief in justice, socialism and the betterment of the human condition. He praises their internationalism and fondly recalls listening to recordings of Paul Robeson and singing along to the strains of Joe Hill or the Red Flag.

But he also recalls how harrowing for his parents were events like the death of Stalin, the Hungarian uprising or the Vietnam war.

Much of the book, in some ways reminiscent of William Woodruff’s The Road to Nab End, is about his boyhood in Colne.

But his fraught relationship with his mother is never far away. She is very possessive and controlling, so that throughout his life he is continually attempting to evade her suffocating protectiveness. 

His early forays to the local clubs and dance halls, dating girls, enjoying rock music and drinking is how he relishes his precious independence and Kershaw brings the era of the ’50s and ’60s vividly alive, though sometimes the unexpected and seemingly unnecessary jumps in the chronology can be disconcerting. His coming of age is described in vignettes which, though full of early hopes, are also beset by fears which are alleviated in the fun of being a child and a teenager during a time of progressive social change. 

This is a biography which offers an endearing portrait of the period, seen through the eyes of a northern lad. And it’s marked by a personal honesty summed up by the epitaph to his mother, in which he states: “You never forced your political beliefs on us but by your example made sure we had a social conscience. We could not ask for more.”

Review by John Green