‘This memoir,’ wrote social work professor Olive Stevenson in her autobiography, ‘is a particular kind of journey … The journey passes through some very dark places, in my private life and working life (which cannot be separated), and it does not lead to a comfortable resting place’. Every book is a story, with a narrator or narrators, a subject or subjects, and a text; to conclude with a comfortable resting place is often an artefact. Complexity is inherent in the relationship between the person telling the story and both what the story is about and its purpose: to entertain, educate, inspire, galvanise into action, to prove the facts of something. Truth-telling, which sounds such a noble enterprise, is itself the most complex of acts. This book has been a personal and intellectual journey across various terrains: the rocky land of family history, the seductions of cultural legends about people, the convoluted passages and by-ways of different versions of the social: producing descriptions of it, inventing theories about it, making policy to change it. All this is the landscape of my growing up and of my adult work as a social scientist.

The science fiction writer Joanna Russ admits that the content of her books becomes clear to her only in the act of writing them. Starting with something of personal importance to her, she then attempts to follow ‘the four dimensional, misty, half-glimpsed, supercomplicated, overdetermined network in which my first preoccupation is suddenly visible as only one knotted strand’. So it has been with this book. What began as the prompting of memories caused by the intervention of English Heritage in affixing a blue plaque to the wall of my childhood home turned into an excoriation of layers of history and biography, with many deviations and mini-excursions along the way. As I said at the beginning, memory is about identity. We remember what fits with the ideas we have grown about ourselves. To be challenged with reminders of what we’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, is to prompt a powerful struggle for understanding.

The American sociologist C. Wright Mills, who has already appeared in this book, published his The sociological imagination in 1959. I read it five years later, in 1964, the year I left the Blue Plaque House. ‘Blossom and sunshine’ I wrote on the flyleaf under my name.