A Serpent's Tooth

1970

[I was sure I had published this post some while ago, but it seems to have remained in draft. So here it is. Apologies if my posts sometimes move too far into personal territory for some of you, but this was never intended to be an exclusively photographic blog, more as an outlet for my urge to write about *something* most days, which may explain its longevity. Other blogs are available, of course, although fewer by the day. BTW, are blogs "social media", do you think? I didn't think so, but I was twitted by a friend for declaring in a previous post that I rejected all social media ("says the man who writes a blog...")].

In a footnote to a previous post, I said that I regretted not having given my parents the pleasure of witnessing at least one of the four graduation ceremonies I have been entitled to attend; but as I've always had non-conformist leanings I didn't feel inclined to go to any of them, so neither could they. With hindsight, it does seem churlish to have denied them this little rite of passage; I was, after all, the first member of our family to go to university, and they were, not unreasonably, proud of this achievement, however vicarious. Their lives were not over-burdened with causes for celebration – quite the reverse, in fact – and I am sorry, now, when I think of the many such hurts I must have caused them, either deliberately or unthinkingly. It's a sad fact that the dark side of following the impulses of non-conformity is the trail of confusion, disappointment, and pain left in one's wake. An instinctive contrarian is never an easy person to love, or to believe yourself loved by.

It wasn't just me, of course. I don't suppose anyone's relationship with their parents has ever been straightforward, but the so-called "generation gap" was a real and very acute phenomenon in those thirty post-war years; mainly because life before and after WW2 in Britain was so utterly different for "ordinary" people. It must have been a decidedly mixed blessing for one generation of lower- and middle-income parents – the last generation to have been denied the opportunity to extend their free schooling beyond the age of 14, and also the last (we trust) to be forced to give up prime youthful years for the tedium and danger of wartime service [1]  – to witness the cornucopia of cost-free opportunities and cheap consumerist delights showered on the very next generation, their offspring. Within the same four family walls there had to co-exist the inheritors of a pre-1945 worldview – lives that were marked by penny-pinching, frustrated ambitions, and a reluctant deference within tightly-constrained horizons – and the beneficiaries of the post-1945 welfare state settlement, which was especially generous for the academically-able. Hundreds of thousands of us, born in those "baby boomer" years, grew up taking for granted heady new opportunities to go anywhere and do anything, provided you had some foggy idea of what "anything" or where "anywhere" might be, which could be as vague as living on state benefits and starting a skiffle group, or as precise as becoming a doctor.

It was a recipe for misunderstanding and conflict. To a younger generation encouraged to dare to dream of the sort of exciting and colourful lives previously the preserve of the wealthy and bohemian, the financial caution and deference to authority of their elders seemed like personality failings, rather than the result of the systematic deprivation by social class they actually were. Many parents of these entitled brats – mine included, I have to admit, once I had embarked on adolescence – had to endure mockery and ingratitude. Their attempts to guide their children safely through a minefield of dangerous new choices were perceived as a deliberate cramping of style, or a failure to understand and embrace the new liberties. As King Lear lamented, "how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

Another factor in the gulf of mutual understanding between generations was the degree of compartmentalisation in many young lives. There were so many things your parents couldn't or wouldn't approve of or understand; or at least this was what you assumed. I always envied, but could never emulate, those friends who took a "take me as I am or chuck me out" attitude to their family: at an earlier age than most they grew their hair, "experimented" with recreational drugs, had sex, left school, and abandoned any safe career plans for a precarious life as, say, a musician (or, more likely, someone who sat around stoned all day listening to music). Don't like it? Tough: this is who I am! Like most, though, I was too timid for such aggressive self-assertion and, besides, most of us liked our parents enough not to want to hurt them that much. So we maintained and juggled multiple lives and identities that had to be kept strictly separate, at times like an explosive chemical mix, at others like a stage farce. If I'm honest, at least one component in my desire not to go to a degree ceremony accompanied by my parents was to avoid any breach in my carefully compartmentalised life that might result.

You might think that a more brutal version of the truth would be that, seen from my newly-acquired perspective in one of the highest ivory-tower pinnacles of British higher education, I had simply become ashamed of my parents. That was not the case, though: my parents had been embarrassing me ever since I was aged about ten. I'm not sure why. It was not that I was an inherently snobbish little boy; I think it was more that they had begun to seem inauthentic to me (not a word I or anyone in my family would have used then, of course), never quite comfortable in their new skins as aspiring lower-middle-class office-workers.

I didn't know then that, on both sides, my grandparents had been raised in extreme poverty, but I think I sensed from them a deep apprehension that the new prosperity of the 1960s might be fake and temporary, a cheap plastic version of the real thing, a gloss-painted sheet of hardboard tacked over a filthy, draughty fireplace. That people like us no longer knew our place, and weren't prepared to shovel shit any more, literally or metaphorically, must have seemed dangerously hubristic. But, lacking words like "inauthentic" or "hubris" to safely package up such uncomfortable, ill-defined feelings meant that they became free-floating familial sense-data instead, like a sort of pervasive hum or smell, easily picked up on by a smart, sensitive kid. Most of the time I actually wished we were more like our solidly working-class neighbours, not less, and could abandon any pretensions to somehow deserving better than our actual circumstances.

This propensity to inverted snobbery seems to have been common among my contemporaries of all social strata, and may help to explain our attraction to the grungier aspects of youth counterculture. My parents could never understand my taste for the ragged and the scruffy. I think they would have understood perfectly if I had become some preening, clothes-mad Mod, spending an office-worker's wage on tailored suits and fancy shoes. Dad had been a bit of a dandy in his day, a semi-pro drummer and jazz enthusiast, taking style notes from Italy and the USA. But, as it was, he and I nearly came to blows over a greatcoat I once brought home from an army surplus store. It was the height of anti-fashion at the time (this would have been 1969, I think), but it never occurred to me that he might resent the presence of an item he'd been obliged to lug around for much of his six years of military service.

So that "Greatest Generation" tag that emerged a few years ago is probably pure baby-boomer guilt, I think. It's hardly a label anyone of that age would have chosen for themselves: boastful self-aggrandisement was never their style. Sure, we may have mocked your post-war suburban quietism, sneered at your timid tastes and aspirations, upset you with our rejection of institutions and rites of passage like marriage and graduation ceremonies, angered you with our political posturing, and baffled you with our dressing-up box fashions and taste for dressing down. But, listen: World War Two? Well done, you! You guys only went and saved the world... Great job, Greatest Generation!  But now you're dead, and we are old, and mocked in our turn. "OK boomer...", "Who ate all the pies?", "Where's my job for life with a pension?", and all that. Kids, eh?

How sharper than a serpent's tooth, you might think. But, oddly, a good many of our own children seem still to like us, despite everything. Some, so I hear, are even happy to remain at home well into their thirties; how strange is that? I endured years of self-sufficient squalor to avoid precisely that fate. True, a cynic might question whether this means that we boomers have succeeded or failed as a generation of parents, but the measures and metrics of parenting are pretty vague and variable at the best of times. Although in our own case, obviously, I can say without qualification that success has been the indisputable outcome, ever since that bright April day when we stood contemplating this first curious and unignorable new arrival into our house, and realised with mounting trepidation that he came without an instruction manual, just as they always have, and probably always will.

And I hope when you grow up, one day you'll see
Your parents are people, and that's all we can be
Loudon Wainwright III, "Your Mother and I"

2012 & 2016

1. The full six-stretch in my father's case, a despatch rider: from Dunkirk to Burma via North Africa, finally arriving home in London on VE Day. My mother also served in the ATS as an anti-aircraft battery sergeant 1942-5.

NOTE: I am away all this coming week in a part of Wales where both WiFi and a phone signal are mere rumours. I'll moderate any comments when I return to Southampton.