Fifty Decisions (which have shaped my life).
by Toby Payne-Cook
Preface
“Aristocratic genealogy may seem a quaint preoccupation, but the idea behind it rests upon a universally relevant concern: irrespective of the status details of our families, each of us is the recipient of a large and complex emotional inheritance that is decisive in who we are and how we will behave. Furthermore, and at huge cost, we mostly lack any real sense of what this powerful inheritance might be doing to our judgement.”
Alain de Botton – The School of Life, 2019
“Your life has been shaped by decisions – by all the dozens of conscious major decisions you have made yourself, by all the millions of minor ones, and by all the billions and billions of entirely unconsidered ones. It has also been shaped by the decisions of others, as you may be gratefully or only too painfully aware.”
Michael Frayn – The Human Touch, 2006
I like lists. Favourite albums. Places. Books. Gigs. Influential people. But this is no ordinary list. This is a summation of the fifty decisions that have shaped my life, written to celebrate and reflect on my first fifty years on the planet. I often ponder how similar I would be if an identical genetic template grew up in a very different climate, with considerably less affluence and social privilege, with different schooling, qualifications and life experience. How different would I be?
One of my favourite films is the wonderful, ‘It’s a wonderful life,’ starring James Stewart as George Bailey. The premise of that infamous tear-jerker is that our lives and our decisions not only affect our immediate life but also have a reciprocal effect on the lives of many others – hopefully in a predominantly positive way. We, typically, spend between 70 or 80 years living a conscious life that touches and leaves it mark on many other lives; with little pause for thought or contemplation. We are trapped inside this thing called the self, our (probably false) perception of ourselves. Our view of the self shifts throughout our lives: our 5, 15, 25, 45 and 75, almost completely different both inside and out. Would our 15 relate to our 45, our 25 to our 75? Our future is uncertain while our past travels with us, playing a huge part in the trajectory of our lives. How much would a different childhood home, different school, different A level choices, different friends, different hobbies and different work environments have on our experience and perspective of life?
Choosing my list has been cathartic and insightful; each decision making possible many more decisions – some big and many small – and, looking back, making me ponder what could have been if a different decision had been made at the time.
It is my hope that the indulgent reflections herein trigger your own self-analysis and help you to explain to yourself the roots of your love life, politics, religion, interests, character, profession(s), values, musical taste and sense of purpose.
I am cognisant of the bias within my reflections. That all these decisions have some nostalgic value to me, that my memory does not tell the complete truth, that my mind cunningly reprocesses information to fit my version of my life story. The perspectives of nearly fifty me are skewed and corrupted by my episodic recollections of the past; my current family relationships embellishing, over-analysing or leading me to misinterpret events and their consequences from not only my past but the past of my nearest and dearest.
While Michael Frayn’s and Alain de Botton’s words may have spurred me to write this book about the decisions that have sculpted my life; the book is also a vehicle to explore the human condition.
As a second career teacher of now nearly seven years I am exposed to parents, children and teachers who – I believe – have self-preservationist and socially conditioned views about the importance of teachers, schools and education to young peoples’ lives. When I am confronted with a class full of children, only really a handful seem to fully subscribe to what it is teachers and schools are trying to do. Most are treading water, ticking a box, passing the time, doing it because society says they have to. We somehow manage to make most of the most mentioned in the previous sentence conform to our school structures, the subjects we deem it important to teach them, the exams they sit, the national testing, the league tables, the data is king, the over-scientism and under-artism of everything. It all ends up being normal, because being normal and belonging to the normalcy of everything has become important in the modern world. You can deviate privately but our public, professional personas have become so normalised we have all become rather similar, rather dull, rather caught in a trap, there’s no turning back.
Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains – Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Parenting young children and teaching pre-adolescent children is terrifying when you think about it. Everything adults do, say and teach has the potential to be imprinted on their minds. And an awful lot of what most adults (including me some of the time, I’m sure) say, do, think and teach is wrong. Pre-adolescent children accept and rarely question anything. They totally accept the status quo and are unbelievably compliant: delightful, delicate and highly dependent sponges. They are impressionable. Their lives are blissfully innocent. They live in ignorant bliss of the harsh realities of modern global capitalism, or extreme poverty, or of anything going on beyond their own, tiny, over-protected, frequently mollycoddled existence. We control them. We entrench them. Sometimes we indulge them. Occasionally we spoil them. They rarely transcend that entrenchment.
Recently (November 2019), I have been teaching a little bit about variation, inheritance, genes and DNA to an immature yet bright Year 7 cohort (aged 11 – 12). I was surprised to find that a few children have difficulty in separating their inherited features and traits from their childhood experience with their parents. Some genuinely thought (and I’m not entirely sure I convinced them otherwise) that their parents’ wealth, politics, interests and religion were part of their inheritance rather than their environment.
The premise of this book suggests that our experiences, specifically the decisions which lead to – or prevented – certain experiences, shape our lives more than the features and traits encoded within our DNA. As our understanding of genetics, biotechnology, epigenetics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience increase exponentially, it seems that the interplay between nature (our genes) and nurture (our environment) is key. I will never know whether my traits of extraversion, openness and partial agreeableness were sitting there in my genes waiting to be expressed when the right conditions came, or whether endless time spent with my parents, mostly my Mum, enabled, implanted and developed those traits. It is fairly hard to separate the two, if we grew up in a happy and stable home with our biological parents.
Undoubtedly, more than any other species, our upbringing makes us who we are and plays a huge part in what we become. Calves, lambs and foals can walk within minutes of birth. All we can do is suck, scream and shit for our first few weeks and months! We are so heavily dependent upon our parents for so long, it is impossible to conclude anything else other than our first few years of development are absolutely crucial to the story of ourselves.
I will veer into both amateur genetics and amateur psychology throughout the book but I hope that my pseudo-intellectual deviations don’t detract too much from the significance of the decisions discussed within. I may have had no choice about many of the early decisions in this book, and those early decisions may have had a deeper, subliminal effect on subsequent, more independent, decisions but I am about to make a very important decision. I have decided that it is now time to stop writing this introduction.
She was 29, down from London; staying with her parents over the Easter weekend in 1971. Richard and Phyllis had recently retired from suburban Kent to her maternal grandparents’ former home in Devon. She was six years into a long affair with her boss: a married man, married – back then – to his 2nd wife; nine years into an exclusive Chelsea gift shop girl’s life. Devon was, perhaps, a temporary escape from this stale situation. A week in the fresh, soporific air; infused with the therapeutic sound of crashing Atlantic waves. A week of reminiscing about childhood holidays; about her early childhood, evacuated down here in the war. A week of being fussed over by Mummy. She was the youngest of three children; almost an only child. Her sister was seven years older and married at twenty-three. Big brother was thirty-nine, married with three children and busy as a Conservative politician, the member of parliament for St Ives and the Isles of Scilly in Cornwall. Fond of her six nephews and nieces, we can assume that her biological clock was ticking. But today she was playing golf; mixed foursomes at the Royal North Devon, the oldest links course in England, with a man, a lifelong bachelor; a man who would become a brilliant Godfather to me.
He was 53, a former Cambridge blue and scratch golfer. He was secretary of the golf club and head green keeper too. He was working that day. In the evenings, he was shacked up in a flat in Westward Ho! with his lover of several years, having separated from his second wife, seven years earlier in 1964. He was born in 1917, the son of a Devon vicar, two elder sisters and one younger. He went to Lancing College then on to Cambridge University to read history. Played a lot of sport. Messed around. Kicked out. Went to Wye Agricultural College. Then the war, Lt Col in the Royal Artillery aged only 24. Italy and North Africa. Grim. He never really spoke about it after that. You don’t glorify war. I learnt that from him. He married an actress during the war. Had two boys. In 1946 he was looking for farms; his first wife and the boys’ mother killed herself. Sisters helped out. A nanny. They moved to Devon. Married. Bought a farm in 1949. A pioneering and much respected farmer still remembered by the village elders today. Three more children. Bought a manor house in 1961. Experimented with progressive farming methods, took his finger off the pulse. Drank and smoked a lot. Played a lot of golf. A bit of a player, we think. Stopped farming in 1964, and left his wife too. In 1969 he became secretary and head green keeper of the Royal North Devon Golf Club.
The golfers, including her, had just left the 5th green and were heading towards the 6th tee, looking North. The best vista on the course, two miles of golden sand bombarded by 3000 miles of unforgiving Atlantic surfer dude waves to the west; the gently undulating Northam burrows to the east; the windswept and rapidly eroding sixth, seventh, and eighth fairways clinging to sand dunes in front of them; the imposing church tower of Northam, two miles away and up a hill, looking over the bay from behind.
She was playing well. The golf was of a good quality. My future Godfather, a very competitive golfer, was happy with his partner’s performance.
He appeared as she approached the 6th tee. He’d seen that she was playing that day. He handed her an envelope. There was a brief exchange and he returned back towards the golf club, over a mile away. She opened the envelope and read the note.
Her golf spiralled downhill. Her mind spiralled. Her heart raced. She was giddy with love.
His decision to write the note and then to pass it to her catalysed a spontaneous, life-changing, and ultimately life-creating decision. She didn’t want an affair. Nor did he.
Shortly after that fateful day, she returned to London and terminated her affair, her job and her London life. He, too, terminated his affair.
They vowed to marry. And to have children. A month later, they were looking for a place to live in rural North Devon, a place to raise a family, a place to make love, a place to make me.
* * *
With hindsight, my parents’ spontaneous decision to begin a romantic liaison until death parted them is almost completely unfathomable. My father had five children aged 27 to 15, he was twenty-four years older than my Mum and most of his personal farming and family riches had been blown on manor houses, ambitious agricultural projects, inventions, school fees, cars, cigarettes and whisky. My gregarious mother – in her own words – moved straight out of the King’s Road in Chelsea, London and into some isolated farming hinterland in the middle of nowhere. It was unconventional, to say the least.
The decision to hand over the note on the 6th tee triggered their loving relationship. Just over six months later, at some point in November 1971, as a consequence of their love, my father ejaculated approximately 300 million sperm into my mother. One of them, on one particular day, somewhere in the middle of my mother’s erratic and unpredictable menstrual cycle, made it to her egg cell.
Twenty-three chromosomes made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) from the Toby sperm fused with twenty-three inside the Toby egg, to create my unique Toby genetic code. As I am human, like you reading this, the vast majority of that code is identical to yours. This is one of the great misconceptions about genetics and DNA – in reality our human DNA is what makes us all so similar; the differences we attribute to our genes, a mere blip hidden in the mire of this magnificent, massive and multifarious molecule of life.
My DNA – just like yours – codes for the proteins which enable the structure and function of my body; my two arms, my legs, my reproductive organs, my heart, my spinal cord, my brain, my skin adorned with its several million hair follicles, the ossicles in my middle ear, the amylase enzyme in my saliva; the insulin synthesized in my pancreatic cells; the endless proteins involved in my complex metabolic pathways; the production of myoglobin in muscle cells; the antibodies in my immune system.
Of course it also codes for the proteins that determine my eye colour, my blood group, my ear lobes, my height, my bulbous nose, my pre-senile baldness, my inability to roll my tongue. More complicatedly, and still relatively mysteriously, combinations of genes or the expression (or inexpression) thereof may code for my intellectual propensity, my extraversion, my sense of humour, my suboptimal co-ordination, my creative thinking, my numeracy, my love of food, my relative lack of inclination towards exercise and the insufferable amplitude of my overactive vocal cords at full power.
My father’s decision (before he became my biological father) to hand that love letter to my mother (before she became my biological mother) ultimately led to the creation of me. It was, undoubtedly, the most critical of the fifty decisions discussed in this book, for without it there would have been no me for the other forty-nine decisions to shape, sculpt and skew my partially constant, yet shape-shifting character.
That really is the point of this book. Decision number one led to my biological synthesis. It catalysed the multiple possibilities of me. But it didn’t make me me. The making of me, whatever and whoever me is, came much later.
But what is me? Is my me the same as your you when that you refers to me? Is your you version of me different for lots of different you? When did my me become me? When we stop to think about this there really is no me; not a constant – and certainly not a consistent – one anyway. The question which fascinates me increasingly, is how much of me is pre-determined in those genes? In that random sperm meeting that specific egg of those two parents? If I was raised by adopted parents, in a different country with a very different climate, amongst a different sequence of siblings and a very different education system how different would or could 50 year old me be?
While it has been tempting to think of nature (our inherited genes) and our nurture (how we are raised as a child) as separate influences on our adult beings, we are beginning to understand the complex interplay between our genetics and our environments. For example did my mother’s incessant conversation with me throughout my childhood trigger my extraversion, or did the expression of an “extravert gene” in early childhood trigger my mother’s conversational manner with me, thus exacerbating my innate extraversion further?
As a teacher, I am aware of the subliminal belief amongst many of my peers that what we do in the classroom makes a huge difference to peoples’ lives. It is without doubt a potentially important part of children’s developing emotional and intellectual architecture, but is it only ever working with a genetically pre-determined set of cognitive propensities? I suspect so. I suspect we have varying amounts of intellectual propensity and cognitive potential coded in our genes. But I also suspect that that propensity can be triggered, enhanced and optimised throughout our lives just as it could – alternatively – be hindered, stifled or suppressed.
So, really, that monumental yet seemingly insignificant decision near the 6th tee at the Royal North Devon golf club led to two life changing moments:
1) The biosynthesis of my genetic code stored in that original, solitary zygote.
2) The parents who raised and nurtured me.
Now might be a good time to quote Phillip Larkin.
This be the verse by Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early a you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
So not only was my character layered upon my genetic template by the way my parents behaved around me, the way they spoke to me, guided me, supported me, disciplined me, ignored me, loved me and nourished me but I was inculcated in all their beliefs, their interests, their work habits; their rituals and idiosyncrasies, their anxieties, their passions, their strengths and their flaws, their prejudices, their friends, the leftovers from their rare yet elaborate dinner parties, their arguments; their depression; their politics, their religion – or dormancy thereof, their family histories, their family tensions and politics; their death.
This was – or is – our normal. Many people think of their upbringing as normal, as stable, as the only way it can be. Many never question their own family weirdness, never consider the fact that there is no normal. Until of course you meet your in laws and realise either quite how normal – or weird – your own childhood was!
It is only through starting to write this book that I have fully considered the impact other’s choices, especially those of our parents, have upon us. It was not until decision number 15 of 50, when I was 16 years old, that I made an independent decision that would have some bearing upon the trajectory of my life.
* * *
In each chapter, one for each of the fifty key decisions which shaped my life, there are three sections. The first describes, or recounts, the original context and moment of the decision. The second, and generally longest, section analyses the implications of that decision and any other important decisions it enabled. In the third and final section of each chapter – this one – I will consider potential alternative scenarios if the original decision had not been made.
In this case, the final section will be rather brief – for I would not exist. But what of my parents had they not become my parents, had he not handed her that note?
My father, I suspect, would have continued to drink too much, smoke too much and would have not experienced the joy and contentment that his third family brought him. Equally, he may not have experienced the financial stress of raising two more children and running a small family business. His alternative trajectory may have triggered an earlier, or later, death.
My mother may have never had children. She was a brilliant mother to young, adolescent and grieving children, a loving wife and nurse to a dying husband, a brilliant daughter to elderly parents. She may not have been so close to hand to care for her paralysed mother or dying father; the purpose and focus that being a wife and mother brought her may have never enriched her life. She would not have been widowed aged 46. The most gregarious, extravert and outrageous person I know may not have spent so long living alone in a ramshackle farmhouse in an isolated and isolating rural enclave in North Devon, with all its unintended consequences…
CREducATE 