4 Who am I ?

Who am I ?

I am Jessop — Herbert Jessop Sutton, to give my full name — and this is my story. Most biographical or autobiographical works are about super-achievers in one field or another, or about heroes and heroines. I am none of those. I represent the ordinary people, people in the middle of the spectrum, the workers, clerks and middle-managers who contribute most of the taxes to the Treasury. As such, my story should have an appeal to a large segment who also live fairly ordinary, suburban lives. That is a goodly audience!

I suppose I should explain why the subtitle ‘– an ordinary life of a seventy-percenter’? My father once said to me after reading one of my High School Reports, “You are a seventy-percenter”. He said it matter-of-factly and not in any sense putting me down. I knew that he was right. I couldn’t deny it: it was all there in black and white in the records of several years of schooling. It didn’t really consciously affect me throughout my active life but, looking back from the riper age of 74, I clearly see that in aggregate my life indeed has been that of a seventy-percent achiever. Not that I haven’t always tried to give my best, and not that I lack intelligence — I don’t — but that is how life works out.

Dorothy-Anne, my wife, thinks I should never accept for myself the ‘seventy-percenter’ tag but realising and accepting that as true leaves me feeling a lot happier than sitting thinking that I could always have done much better. Nursing bitter memories of failures, wrong decisions, is no joy to anyone.

In purely material terms I suppose the seventy-percenter is to be seen in where my best efforts have landed my wife and me in our retirement — nowhere near a place with the ninety-percenters in this world of fierce competition for means, resources and status.

Strangely — but perhaps not so strangely — I probably could not have handled more prominence or more of this world’s goods. I have attained to just what is good for me although I would have liked to have done more for my wife and children. But, no regrets — I am what I am by the grace of the Lord. I perceive that the course my life takes is determined by the decisions I take and those decisions are determined in part by my personality-type, and my personality-type is determined in part by my genes and in part by my early home-culture, all of it moderated at all stages by what and how I believe – the Grace given to me. That will come out in the course of my writing for this history.

Some decades ago, I came across this piece in Proverbs in the Bible:

“Two things have I desired of Thee;

deny me them not before I die:

Remove from me vanity and lies:

give me neither poverty nor riches;

feed me food convenient for me:

Lest I be full, and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord?

or lest I be poor and take the name of my God in vain.”

I came across that and thought to myself (I guess): “Wow! He knows who I am! God has made provision for the seventy-percenters of this world!” The prayer came naturally to me.