The War That Never Happened

We hear a lot, these days, about "toxic masculinity". I think most of us know what that means, and most of us agree there's a genuine problem in there somewhere that needs addressing. I'm sure if I had been born female I'd be very wary of men, and our capacity for careless harm. Or, if born gay, our capacity for quite deliberate harm. But toxic femininity is a problem, too. As is toxic anything, come to that. The difficulty is that the description "toxic X" easily tips over into the prescription "X is toxic". But a poisonous substance can be useful in measured quantities – indeed, some are highly beneficial and in daily domestic use – just as benign substances become deadly in overabundant and inappropriate application (when drowning in Malmsey wine, for example). So, when it comes to matters of gender I'd hope we can talk less about essence, and more about dosage.

That said, I come from a generation and class whose gender was quite heavily policed. I can't speak for my female contemporaries, whose experience must have been similar, but to grow up in the 1950s and 60s was to be quite clear about what big boys did and didn't do. Not crying was the least of it: a boy who cried in front of his peers hadn't even made it to basic training in masculinity. Suppressing the urge to cry quite quickly became a hardwired reflex, not least because a certain level of cruelty was deemed appropriate in the raising of male children. As a mild example, my grandfather – who was "illegitimate" and had grown up in a Liverpool orphanage in the 1890s, immediately followed by service in WW1, and therefore knew a thing or two about harsh upbringing – discovered that I was afraid of earthworms. So, with the best of intentions, he decided to tackle this weakness head on: he would throw worms at me when digging in the garden. "What, are you a girl?" he would snarl, "Only girls are afraid of worms!" Point taken, grandad.

There was a positive side to this, too. Twice at primary school I suffered accidental injuries that required hospital treatment, but even at that tender age I knew that the essential thing was, in that Baden Powell-ish expression, to "grin and bear it", even as I stared at a painfully dislocated thumb, now positioned midway across my palm. I confess that to be praised to my father by my fearsome headmaster as a brave little chap made my heart sing; I resolved that, although I might be small, a certain fearlessness would be my thing. Boys, I suspect, are particularly susceptible to this kind of Spartanisation; Kipling's poem "If‒" is its manifesto. We may, rightly, be skeptical about the values of "patriarchy" today, but the idea of becoming a fully-adult, responsible male as an aspiration [1] rather than a statement of biological fact – cringeworthy as it may sound to some 21st-century ears – lies at the root of much that has been positive in our culture.

A lot of this childhood "toughening up", it strikes me now, was preparation for the Next War. Not unreasonably: several previous generations of my family, like most others, had seen extensive military service at the sharp end of war. It seemed entirely probable, when I was born in 1954, that I, too, would find myself involuntarily conscripted into some brutal conflict, and I imagine it seemed quite sensible to start basic training ASAP. National Service (the requirement for young men to waste two precious youthful years in the armed forces) was still very much a reality – National Servicemen saw combat of varying intensities in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, and Korea – but thankfully this came to an end around 1960. For young Britons born after 1939, the Next War never came.

Which was confusing. When you've spent your entire childhood playing with toy soldiers, assembling scale models of fighters and bombers from plastic kits, and conducting running skirmishes and ambushes in woods, fields, and streets armed with replica weaponry, not to mention reading weekly tales of romanticised wartime heroism in various boys' comics, it comes as something of an anticlimax to realise you will never be tested under fire, or given the chance to have "a good war", as the expression goes. For you, there will be no parachutes behind enemy lines, no beach-head landings, no aerial heroics. Which, of course, was also a profound relief, as very few boys of my generation could be entirely naive about the nature of warfare, when the evidence lay all around. I recall how, aged about seven, very early one morning I had glimpsed the ruined face of the milkman, the one who delivered our daily pints under cover of the hours of darkness, and for whom my father always left a generous Christmas "box". "That's how war really is, son," Dad had said, "It's not like it is in the comics. Getting shot at with real bullets and having bombs dropped on you is no fun at all."

So we boomer boys had to invent our own thrills, and come up with new ways of emerging into adulthood, without going through the vigorous wash-cycle of war. And a lot of fun it was, too, in the main, although some did fall by the wayside, and a few do seem permanently stuck in an over-extended adolescence. For many, though, this self-invention entailed a wholesale challenge to the assumptions of most previous generations; assumptions about, for example, gender roles and gender relations. My grandfather – who never cooked a meal, changed a nappy, or did any housework in his entire life – could never quite grasp the significance of the length of my hair, the needless scruffiness of my clothes, or my love of suspect things like books, poetry, and music. I wonder, did he ever ask himself whether he had thrown a few too many worms, or perhaps too few? Perhaps, but I suspect the sad truth is that he had been brought up never, ever to question anything above his pay grade, however strange, however brutal, however unfair. Keep your head down; never volunteer; don't snitch; do what you're told. Or else. We have, I hope, left that behind us for good. As someone once said, suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? So far, we in Britain have been fortunate enough to pose that question, without ever having been called upon to answer it.

1. Kipling's use of the word "man" here as an honorific term is problematic for many ("you'll be a Man, my son"). The Yiddish word mensch perhaps better conveys the idea, but would render the poem as bathetically hilarious as would substituting "gent", "toff", or "diamond geezer".