Introduction

Herbert Palmer’s autobiography bears the poetic title The Mistletoe Child (1935), but like JMM and so many men of their generation born into one world, class and social environment but enabled by educational reform and aesthetic inclinations to make the often painful, partial transition into another environment, he could equally well have entitled it ‘Between Two Worlds’. As he explains,

The misfit child Herbert was born into a staunchly Methodist family, his father being a Methodist minister whose profession required him and his family to change communities and regions every three years. As a result, the child grew up constantly out of place in mostly painfully poor working-class areas of Staffordshire and Yorkshire, educated in the local mission school but living amongst the local children, from whom he felt painfully estranged by education, mindset, accent and even physique – they were boisterous and physical, he was painfully thin and sickly until adulthood. Only for a brief period in the Lake District did he find relative comfort in his home and surroundings, but was soon taken from there to be put into the grammar school system, where his comparative poverty left him sidelined. Family poverty prevented him from aspiring to a university education; instead, he matriculated and worked as an unsuccessful local journalist and then an elementary schoolmaster, hating his job and mostly disliking the boys. Humiliated by a sense of both professional and economic failure, he fled to Germany – determined at least to improve his modern languages on the Continent, while escaping what seemed to be a personal and professional dead-end. This hot-headed act of rebellion – a very characteristic one, the child having always swung between moods of apprehensive cautiousness and fear, and wild tantrums and physical violence – proved the making of him. After teaching and wandering in Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark, and gaining an impressive understanding of contemporary educational standards, ethics and praxis, he took a degree at the University of Bonn before planning the ensuing trip – to Russia.