John born 1906, moved to Yorkshire at age 6.

"For generations the Wolfendens had lived up on the Lancashire border." John born in Wiltshire, Swindon -- his father had moved there, "breaking away from a close-knit family of seven children"
said FATHER of JOHN WOLFENDEN was Registrar of the Swibdon Technical College, but "returned to the West Riding to a job in the Education Department at the County Hall in Wakefield." He "steadily moved up the office ladder" and had "a remarkable career for a boy who left school at twelve to become a 'part-timer'." - a "remarkable man, in a quiet, soft-spoken, God-fearing way. He had his flashes of temper, but his family, his work, and his chapel were his full life." - later, "a writer of short stories in West Yorkshire dialect"
the MOTHER of JOHN WOLFENDEN: "very different." Her parents (the MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS of JOHN) died before John was born, "but I knew her two brother and younger sister." She was "pretty, elegant, and tasteful. She dressed very well, on what must have been minute expenditure... She certainly had what were called social ambitions, and she was sensitive enough to model her behavior accordingly. My father never ceased to be proud of her. I doubt if she enjoyed the return to Yorkshire as much as he did." (page 1-2) [Commentary: my own grandparents (60-70s, so about 50 years later) had a similar dynamic, both wives forfeiting more education for the husband to continue -- paternally, the wife was the major factor in the move south, but maternally the husband's job determined location.]
the MATERNAL GRANDFATHER of JOHN : "had a greengrocer's shop in a suburb of Halifax" (pg 1)

The family could not easily afford railway fares when they lived distant from the greater Wolfenden clan.

grew up in one of those British townhouses that are all squished together (but end of the line)

Real class mobility in education from the start -- parents had no "formal schooling worth mentioning" but John attended what seems to have been a series of well-to-do schools and is one of three in a cohort to attempt, & obtain, scholarship - Lady Elizabeth Hastings - still around?

"Cambridge was a fate worse than death, like Lancashire." - pg 26

pg 27 "There was one pitfall about having an Oxford scholarship in the bag as early in the academic year as November. There was the whole of the rest of the school year to live through until the foloowing July. In the 1970s there is no problem: there are VSO and CSV and any number of other ways of occupying, with pleasure and rapid increase in maturity, a God-given interval of six or nine months at that stage. Fifty years ago there were no such opportunities." "It took me three separate competatuve examinations to collect enough money to face a university carreer without cost to my parents." - Akroyd Scholarship and City Major Scholarship

page 48 first mention of Jeremy: talks about how Washington DC is a disginuished and beautiful city, "Subsequent visits have done nothing to dim or diminish the first impression of outward serenity — not even the one my wife and I paid nearly forty years later for the funeral of our elder son who had died there."

page 57: "One of the bravest things I ever did was to teach him to drive a car: he had an unnerving faith in the efficacy of prayer."