‘You’re old enough and ugly enough to walk for yourself.’
Michael Orchard, 75, had a little trouble remembering his earliest memory; although finally decided upon “the most important.”
The particular memory was from when he was roughly three and a half. He grew up in North London, and his family home was at the top of a very steep hill. One day his mother was pushing him up the hill in a Silvercross pram – “the Rolls Royce of perambulators” – when she became tired and impatient. She stopped pushing and said, “you’re old enough and ugly enough to walk for yourself.”
Orchard remembered his mother as a fierce woman, reasoning that “she was a feminist so maybe it was part of that.” His grandmother was too a feminist, wearing corduroy trousers at a time when no woman was ever seen in them. Orchard described her as a “revolutionary eccentric,” a woman who was clearly at the forefront of changing times and acceptable ways of behaving.
Orchard, unmarried and without children, is a retired maths teacher who now lives in Bournemouth. He studied at the arts school in Bournemouth for five years and then taught art for a “matter of months” before switching to mathematics. Of having no children, he said that he sometimes felt like some of his pupils were like his own children, although “some were really rotten.”
