Page 49 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

4 Narrating the self

Introduction

We lived in a tiny little village with a dead end, you had to turn right
to get to the village, and it had the river at the bottom, [. . .] so quite a
few holidaymakers and things . . . And then there was just a little village
school which only had about 50 children altogether, maybe. Which is
actually closed down now. So we just went there, and I think probably
all the time I was at school, you know, it was quite a sort of idyllic little
set-up in a way, sort of playing with kids in the village, and we had a
lot of freedom from when we were really, really young, and then out
on bikes and things when we were eight for half the day, and stuff like
that. And then I just, I don’t know, I presume I took the 11-plus and I
obviously failed, I’m sure I must have taken the 11-plus at that time, so
I just went on to my local high school. Which was just two miles away.
So once again, that was sort of very local.
(Sally, Interview 22)
In the above extract, Sally began telling me a version of her life story. This
was a long and involved account, and it largely unfolded without prompt-
ing. Her opening had all the drama of a well-crafted story, beginning with a
dramatic flourish, which set up one of the major themes of her account, that
of escape: ‘we lived in a tiny little village with a dead end’. She was drawing
me into the story of how she managed the transportation from this ‘tiny little
village’ to London where the narration took place. Sally set up a particular
relationship to the past in this opening. She placed the events firmly in the
past – even the school no longer exists – and she took the position of analys-
ing and passing judgement on it: ‘it was quite a sort of idyllic little set-up in
a way’. The ambiguity of the qualification of ‘in a way’ again suggests that
there was a story to be told. At the same time, she showed how distanced
she was from the events. She cannot remember whether or not she took,
or passed or failed, her 11-plus – something that would have presumably