Recently, a friend showed me some of his father's photographs from his military service in Africa during WW2, and it struck me that many of my generation must have similar collections which, if they were anything like me, they will have pored over as children. Certainly, my own father's album of photographs – collected during his six-year stretch as a despatch rider, from Dunkirk through the Western Desert to Burma, and which I discovered one rainy day when exploring the "spare room", tucked away in a bottom drawer – informed my childish imaginings of what adventures might await me as an adult.
People often talk about the way the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over our post-war generation, but I have to say this possibility never really troubled my young mind: there were no "duck and cover" sessions at my schools, and I grew up in the sunny, fresh-start optimism of an English New Town. Frankly, soldiering looked like good fun to me, an impression reinforced by the fact that these photos were, in the main, the visual equivalent of the letters home they will often have accompanied: "Don't worry, Mum and Dad, see, I'm having a lark with my new mates!" Their fathers, of course, as veterans of WW1, knew better and feared worse.
So I thought I'd polish up yet another old post, one which reflected on the way the prospect of a future war coloured the lives of those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, the so called "baby boomers", the British cohort of whom, as it turned out, were lucky enough to escape any such "adventures" (I know that at least two American readers of this blog were drafted into service in Vietnam).
Scruffy mob of despatch riders, recently returned from Dunkirk
We hear a lot, these days, about "toxic masculinity". I think most of us have an idea of what that means, and many 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 danger 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 toxicity I'd hope we can talk less about essence, and more about dosage and usage. That said, I come from a generation and class whose behaviour was quite heavily policed from a "gender" point of view. I can't speak for my female contemporaries, whose parallel experiences must have been similarly inflexible, 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!" OK, point taken, grandad; you can stop it now.
There was a positive side to this, though. 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 formula, 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 very 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 process of turning silly boys into fully-adult, responsible males – expressed as an aspiration [1] rather than just a statement of biological fact, and cringeworthy as it may sound to some 21st-century ears – is a necessary task; the challenge is to find new ways of preventing silly boys from becoming even sillier men.
A lot of this childhood "toughening up", it strikes me now, was conscious preparation for the Next War (or "the next lot", as my parents would say). 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 some preliminary desensitisation training ASAP. National Service (the requirement for young men to waste two precious youthful years in the armed forces [2]) 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 Lot never came.
Which was confusing. When you've spent your entire childhood playing with toy soldiers, assembling scale models of military aircraft 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, or any other yarn-worthy exploits.
This was also a profound relief, of course, as very few boys of my generation could be entirely naive about the nature of warfare, when the evidence lay all around. Quite apart from the simmering, undiagnosed and untreated post-war PTSD that surrounded us, like a sultry atmosphere threatening thunder, I recall how, aged about seven, 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, boy," 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, often dangerously stupid rites of passage 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 rather too many do still seem permanently stuck in an over-extended adolescence. For some of us, though, this self-invention did also entail a wholesale challenge to the assumptions of previous generations; assumptions about work, politics, and deference, for example, as well as gender roles and sexuality (although later generations seem to have gone a lot further with the latter, while rather neglecting the former). My grandfather – who never cooked a meal, changed a nappy, or did any housework in his entire life – could never really grasp the significance of the length of my hair, the needless scruffiness of my clothes, or my love of suspect, un-masculine things like books, painting, poetry, and music. I wonder, did he ever ask himself whether he had thrown too many worms, or perhaps too few?
Perhaps he did, but I suspect the sad truth is that he had been brought up ("disciplined" is probably a better word) never, ever to question anything above his pay grade, however strange, however brutal, however unfair. Keep your head down; never volunteer; don't snitch; just do what you're told, know your place, and you'll be OK. If you don't, well, then you'll cop it, matey. We have at least, I hope, begun to leave that unquestioning, wolf-pack version of masculinity 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 to be able to pose that question without ever having needed to answer it. My generation, obviously, is now too old to be called upon to fight – for us, the question is now merely rhetorical – but we are not yet too old to require younger generations to consider their position. It is therefore not unreasonable, I suggest, in the present bellicose circumstances to be concerned about the judgement of a generation of political leaders whose closest experience to warfare is likely to have been watching the news on TV or various two-hour movies crackling with harmless special effects, or even just poring over albums of fading photographs of uniformed strangers.
Kipling himself had cause for bitter reflection on the war-mongering folly of old men, and what Wilfred Owen called "the old Lie"; two things for which he had formerly been quite the advocate. His son John had terrible eyesight, sufficient to exclude him from active service in WW1, but Kipling – not wanting his lad to miss out on the excitement – pulled strings to get him a commission in the Irish Guards. John Kipling was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, aged 18, and his body was never found in his father's lifetime.
COMMON FORM
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
A DEAD STATESMAN
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
from "Epitaphs of the War", by Rudyard Kipling
1. Kipling's use of the word "man" here as an honorific term is insuperably 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". It's a shame, though, that we should have become embarrassed by both the word and the idea.
2. Though also an opportunity to acquire valuable skills, whether social, technical, or intellectual: I was taught elementary Russian at secondary school by a teacher who had learned the language at the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL).
