BRYAN MAGEE knows that his mother never loved him. When he was born she rejected him: “I’ve given birth to an idiot. Take him away,” she said. Throughout his childhood she slapped him on the face and was indifferent to him. All that he learnt to live with, but it is her betrayals that still rankle: the time she reneged on her promise to buy him a violin, her opposition to him having piano lessons — a stand from which she had nothing to gain. He is 73, she is long dead, and still he turns her deceit over in his mind with bewilderment.

Magee, of course, did not turn out to be an idiot. He has taught philosophy at Oxford and has done much to popularise it on television and through his books. He has been a Labour and then a Social Democrat MP, and a prominent member of the arts establishment. And now he has written a memoir of his childhood during the 1930s in Hoxton, East London. Poverty, crime and drunkenness were endemic, and he lived on the streets where the opportunities for play, mischief and fighting were endless.

Inevitably his references to his mother form a powerful emotional subtext. Is it a breach of convention to acknowledge that you didn’t like a parent? Magee’s openness has sometimes shocked people, he says, but he reasons that as there are plenty of unpleasant people in the world, there can be nothing peculiar about being the child of one of them. Anyway, his life has not been blighted, he maintains.

Set against the 21st century’s insistence that neglect and abuse cause damage, this is remarkable. In many ways it is evidently true, too — when we meet near his Oxford flat he is cheerful, erudite and courteous, with no obvious sharp edges, and there is no disputing his successes. But this does not mean that he emerged unscathed, and that was apparent even when he was an insouciant street kid up to no good in Hoxton market.

His mother, Cathleen, the daughter of a drunken and violent father and an alcoholic mother, grew up in Newcastle. At 14 she ran away from home and caught the train to King’s Cross. She married Fred Magee, a shopkeeper, for security, their son believes. Fred had an attractive personality, and she was beautiful.

“But she kept telling him, and us, ever after that she regretted marrying, and that she regretted having my sister and me,” says Magee. “My mother’s sin towards me was not so much active hostility, but coldness. My chief memory is not of somebody being angry and hitting me, though she did from time to time, but of something glacial, utterly unfeeling. She did once say to somebody that she had never loved anybody, and that fitted in with everything I knew about her.

She would often say, when talking about popular entertainment, that all this talk about love is nonsense, piddle, why do people go on about love? It was clear that love was an emotion she neither felt nor understood.

“But I thought of myself as happy because most of the time I was away from her. I was frightened of her, I avoided her. She would say ‘Go out, I don’t want to see you again until it’s dark’. And off I would go.”

Cathleen had no sense of responsibility, no affection, and she trusted no one. She was amoral, Magee believes, and prone to violence: there were furious rows, she threw crockery at her husband, and once threatened to stab him with a carving knife. If she learnt that her son had been in trouble at school, she hit him again. When he grew out of his clothes she hit him, and she always hit him in the face — bang. “An explosion of anger,” he calls it now.

She mocked him publicly; he learnt to defend himself through sarcasm. She was, he writes, “as near to being a person without feelings as I have ever come across outside institutions that cater for disturbed personalities”. The effect on him was that he wanted to disappear: “A feeling of radical insecurity about my own existence, a feeling of not daring to exist, became central to my personality.”

There were other signs that something was wrong. He went through a short stage of defecating on the concrete floor of the lavatory; he threw his tortoise Joey in the air; at night he awoke in tears, to the consternation of his father, who tried to persuade him to articulate his grief. Magee was unable to explain.

Indeed his father and grandfather, both of whom he adored, were his salvation. Both shopkeepers working on the other side of the family’s kitchen door, they were always around: “My father was my god. Just being with him made me happy.”

He also shared his father’s enjoyment of seeking and finding experiences: musical, theatrical, sporting. Clearly this was partly inherited, but he suspects that it also stems from his mother’s rejection of him, and regards it as a positive consequence of her neglect.