Of course the press is full today of the commemoration of the 75th. anniversary of “D-day”, and as we prepared dinner together tonight my wife and I were talking about this. She remarked on the obviously engaged involvement of the Queen in the event, and we started to talk about the “generation” that had experienced directly that war.
Although I do have a few vestigial memories of the war these are only curious fragments rather than any consistent evidence of my involvement in the events of that time.* For my parents and those of their age it was very different. My father was in the RAF during the war, and as a young man whose only prior experience had been of life in rural Norfolk he found himself transported suddenly to the Indian Ocean. My mother found herself bringing up two small boys in a hovel of a cottage in the depths of East Anglia.** I have noted often the extent to which, either because they were adventurous or traumatic, the war years came to define a generation….their generation.
The impact of this continued well after the war. I remember that, as a teenager, when my father drove the bus taking us to the Boys’ Brigade camp in the summer, we were taught to sing along to songs that had their origin in the armed forces between 1939 and 1945. Even so, the lack of direct experience of the events of the war meant that there was always something strained about this kind of thing. This was not our generation.
As our conversation wandered on I asked my wife if there was anything that defined our generation in quite the same way. Slightly to the surprise of both of us we agreed that the experience of growing up in the shadow of nuclear weapons had not had the same defining importance. This was despite the fact that I had been a very active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament after going to university. At this point in the conversation I did have a surprising, almost revelatory, moment. For me a truly significant experience had been the Suez crisis of 1956. My world was one defined by the retreat of Empire, often involving a sense of defeat and failure. I am too young to remember the partition of India, but fascinated by my father’s experience I do remember reading my way, perhaps at ten years old, through a multi-volume history of India. Then British imperialism steadily fell apart. I remember the “emergencies” in Malaysia, Cyprus, Kenya.
I believe that for my “generation” (if such a thing exists) this has been an important and defining period of history, although producing quite different responses. I have no sense of nostalgia about an imperial Britain. In fact, it has been my constant complaint that we need to just “get over it” and come to terms with the way the world is these days. Partly, I suppose, for this reason, I have been strongly internationalist, and hotly critical of the Conservative government’s blundering attempts to take the country out of the European Union. There have been others, often older than I am, who still conserve an idealistic image of British history, and who see a “recovery” of “independence” and identity as a primary motivating reason for distancing ourselves from the EU. In my opinion there is a huge element of fantasy about this picture of the possibilities open to us.
It is only as I have been writing that my ideas have taken a sudden and surprising turn, and I have found myself asking whether this sense of a defining historical experience has any detectable resonance at all in my art. Perhaps it does: but that will need to be a story for another occasion.
*I have a memory of searchlights over Norwich during a bombing raid on the city, and effigies of Hitler and Mussolini hung from a lamp-post on the main Norwich-Cromer road.
**There was only an outside toilet, no running water inside the house and no electricity.