Sharing those Golding moments of a glorious past
Their children, David and Judy, may have been victimised by the absorption of their parents in one another, but they were not neglected or mistreated except, perhaps (and it is a perhaps that even Judy Golding herself admits as a qualification) by an absence of emotional loyalty.
Her book is designed, wisely, as a memoir; the critical biography has already been taken care of by John Carey (2009) and this publication coincides with the centenary of William Golding’s birth in England in 1911.
Although she suggests that this memoir is an attempt to understand why her father became a writer, and at the same time to examine the influence parents have on the lives of their children, Judy Golding Carver can’t help but see what happens when these two queries are combined. The simplicity of Carver’s prose is misleading. She is dealing with complex issues and in examining her own remembered childhood and that of her brother David she is also, and perhaps most powerfully, exploring the childhood of her father as the hinterland which fed such novels as The Lord of the Flies (as iconic an English book as The Catcher in the Rye was in America and elsewhere). It also led to his outbursts of savage, sudden verbal rages.
This usually dutiful daughter weaves these drunken tirades into the connectivity of events and creativity, seeing how her father could pocket the experience of others. As a child she desired little more than his approval and did her best, even to struggles with classical Greek to which he was devoted, to win his often grudging praise.
Without ever overstating her case she notes the family tensions which while rarely dominating were always resonating under the floorboards — themselves often bitterly cold — of several different houses. Her father’s love of music, his reckless devotion to sea-faring in which he exposed wife, children and friends to avoidable dangers, his reluctant consciousness of spirituality and his even more reluctant and well-hidden love for his own father Alec all filter through these pages as a kind of evidence which never makes up a whole pattern.
Judy Carver’s little trick of changing tense in order to change atmosphere or implication is a subtle but powerful device: it keeps you reading. Both son and daughter suffered while their mother seemed immune; she could have eased their pain which, for David Golding, may have accelerated mental problems which persist today. Uncertainty was part of life, part of its delight, part of its devastation; as the children of a bored school-teacher and his beautiful and talented wife they lived frugally enough to be entertained by the change in their fortunes as the books found a public, the writer found fame and fortune (Booker 1980, Nobel 1983) and, as the end of this appealing and intelligent book makes clear, at least one of the children of these lovers found she could forgive.
