Lifetime trajectories
For some reason, have recently been musing over a couple of things:
That a time of life my grandmother always seemed to return to, when talking to her grandchildren (or at least me), was her final years at school (top of the top class, great pet of the headmaster) and as a pupil teacher there. It was mentioned (but I don't recall anything like the same detail) a health breakdown (which vague hints to me suggest may have been something like mastoid, which in those days would have been a serious matter) that prevented her from going on to higher education (local redbrick university). A certain amount about her later life, but that was, it seems to me, the period she hearked back to (with additional reminiscences of being rebel youngest daughter).
Given that she was living in an area which was notoriously denuded of its young men during the Great War, because they all joined up in the early months, surely it was notable that she married? (Of her sisters, one remained unmarried and did have a teaching career, the other married an older widower.) Perhaps not to her.
There was a certain amount of medical stuff around her childbirth experiences, including Knowing Better Than The Doctors.
But otherwise, I won't say nothing happened after she was c. 19, but nothing that seemed so vivid many decades later.
This reminded me, in an entirely different social register, of reading somewhere the claim that if a man had been Captain of the School at Eton, no other achievement in his life would ever match it (it might even be someone saying that no other achievements he had accomplished in his life, which, though I don't remember who, were I think being Prime Minister or Viceroy of India or similar, could match up to it).
And it has always struck me as sad if the crowning achievement of one's life happened before one was twenty. This is just as depressing as the thought that one's wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day of one's life.
Indeed, it's sad to think that there might be only one crowning moment, and that's the allocation - when would you like to have it? speak now.
(A couple of weeks ago at the time of the election, I was recalling the time when my class at school were the ones who had to do assembly on election day, and there was a hymn actually recommended for election days 'Once to every man and nation/Comes the moment to decide/In the strife for truth or falsehood/For the good or evil side' - which strikes me as absolutely RONG, RONG, RONG.)
Of course, it may be that the crowning moments that people talk about are the ones that have a narrative or make some kind of story, and that there are other moments which don't have this quality.
But I believe that there are many moments, and they are not necessarily the moments that would be apparent to the external observer. (A moment some considerable while since - late 80s - when I had a sense of rightness just sitting alone in my office sorting some archives.)
At present I am being much inspired by contemplating person whose papers I am currently cataloguing who really didn't become an internationally renowned eminent figure until her 80s and 90s.
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