Polly Toynbee searches in vain for one working-class ancestor

Polly Toynbee’s fascinating, multi-generational memoir comes with a caveat to a Spectator reviewer. While her book is written with ‘self-conscious awareness’, Toynbee predicts, with a cautionary wag of the finger, that it will be reviewed in publications where ‘introspection is inconvenient’.

Not a page goes by without a reference to the iniquities of class, accent, snobbery or patriarchal dominance

Of course, introspection drives her narrative. Toynbee, a self-confessed ‘silver-spooner’, was born into a family of towering academic and literary influencers who, while enjoying connections and lifestyles as posh as they come, almost consistently resisted and campaigned against conservative elitism and privilege. As with all families, these ‘crusty old relations’ contain two stories: the personal, emotional and psychological, and the context that predates our birth as it ‘travels up and down the social scale’. What is more, Toynbee asserts, most of us die twice: corporeal demise followed by the fog of forgottenness.

Her radical ancestors appear intact, with their wit, disapproval, passion, charisma, anger and sometimes, as with her ‘obnoxious’ snobbish grandmother Rosalind, extreme unpleasantness. Nor do money, property, cleverness and social conscience offer immunity to alcoholism, suicide, betrayal, infidelity, neglect and guilt, all of which recur throughout this epic pageant.

Toynbee’s distinguished historian grandfather Arnold Toynbee was still spoken of with awe when I was growing up. A generation further back on her mother’s side, Toynbee’s hero, the Australian-born classical scholar Gilbert Murray, instrumental in establishing the League of Nations, translated Henry IV: Part 2 into Greek, remained teetotal, had a beautiful speaking voice and was a useless parent to his five children, including the ‘old monster’ Rosalind. Another great-grandfather was an indefatigable social reformer before being incarcerated for almost 40 years after a terrifying descent into insanity.

In later years, the party was joined by the glamour of the communist Jessica Mitford and her dashing husband Esmond Romilly.