“Old men forget,” they say; but this is not the universal condition of mankind. Children forget, because they live for the day, for tomorrow, for next week’s party; for them the days that have passed are dead, fallen leaves from the tree of life. Young men and women forget, because their eyes are on the future, their momentum is forward, from bow wave to wake the foam of their passage subsides into oblivion. It is when ambition dwindles and the future prospect shortens that thoughts turn back, and old men remember. Although at 80 I still feel a forward thrust and have aspirations yet to fulfil, ever more real becomes the remembrance of things past.
The reminiscences of the elderly can be boring to everyone except their contemporaries, who, as they seem to listen, are recalling their own. My father’s naughty children would sometimes head him off from anecdotage by chanting his alleged stock preface—“When I was out in Bakerganj in eighteen ninety eight.” Nevertheless, I end my story with some thoughts promoted by a question which often needles my mind: were the good times better, or the bad times worse, in bygone days, than the good times or the bad times of latter years?
That is a question one can ask about one’s own experience, or the experience of a nation, or of the world of man. The way of answering is different in the first case from the others. In personal life, the pains of childhood—pains of grief, of loss, failure, injury, punishment, humiliation—are perhaps the sharpest, though not the longest-lasting; for a child has not learnt stoicism or patience or the lesson that a present calamity becomes a past good story. Pleasure is keenest in young maturity, when physical powers and sensations are at their height, when hope and energy are masters of disappointment and obstruction. The joys of love and marriage, of the birth of children, are unique and unsurpassed. Jealousies, frustrations, overburden and external pressures are offsets in middle years. Later life brings many peculiar pleasures as well as its peculiar pains—pleasures of achievement, of extended family love, of long-lasting friendships.
For myself, I do not know that any period of my life has been more consistently happy than my old age, luckily with little yet of the illness and weakness that afflict declining years, though with the inevitable sorrow of losing, one after another, so many friends, some older, some younger. Of course, throughout one’s life there have been worries, anxieties, disappointments, quarrels, griefs. But if you fly in every weather you must expect some turbulence. If you can’t take the rough passages with the smooth, you do better to stay on the ground. If you dread the strains and stresses of marriage and family life you can remain alone and enjoy if you can the pleasures of solitude. If you do not climb you cannot fall. If you have no ambitions you will escape disappointment. If you have no faith you will suffer no doubt.
Such, with its twists and turns, is the cycle of one man’s life. It is impossible, as a rule, to say whether it gets better or worse; for each phase is different and incomparable with others earlier or later. Some people grow happier, others more miserable. Materially, its changes can be measured, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, but, in my recollection at least, the curve of material prosperity has borne little relation to the curve of happiness. Three times I have suffered a halving of my income in real terms, or worse: by degrees in World War Two, and twice by changes of occupation, but without incurring any serious wound to contentment. Happiness, though scarred if money is short, does not depend on money. When Ivison Macadam and I called on the multi-millionaire Sir Abe Bailey at his mansion in Bryanston Square, he responded to Ivison’s hearty greeting, “How are you, Sir Abe?” in these memorable words: “I’ve never been richer and I’ve never been more unhappy.” Sir Simon Marks (as he then was) once said very much the same to my wife.
If a man has stayed fond of life through four-fifths of a century it follows that he must have adjusted without too much difficulty to all the changes that have transformed the surrounding world in all that time. Those changes have been immense: in economic standards and expectations, in mechanical and electronic invention, in medical knowledge and social welfare, in comprehension of the universe, in communications (not least in public awareness of happenings all over the world), in public and private behaviour and in many other ways.
To encapsulate in a single scene the changes that have overtaken British society in the course of a lifetime you could do worse than visit the departure area of a busy international airport, say Heathrow or, better, Gatwick, on a summer morning. Hundreds of men, women and children are about the business of travel to foreign parts, checking in, taking care of offspring, spending in the duty-free shop or the bar, waiting for their planes’ departure to be announced on an ever-changing electronic screen. All this would have been not only impossible, but inconceivable, when I was a child. Both the aeroplanes themselves and the cars and coaches that brought many of the travellers here are products of the mechanical revolution, based on the internal combustion engine, which had then only just begun and was not to alter the lives of the generality of people for another decade. Beyond that, the whole exercise of mass air transport depends essentially on the second material transformation of one lifetime, the electronic revolution, without which neither could the huge aeroplanes fly, nor could their air-space be controlled, nor could the complex communications of the airport itself be operated.
But there has been a more profound change than was wrought directly by the mechanical and electronic revolutions. These people who are making their way to Spain or Greece or America or other countries of the wide world are of all sorts and conditions. Many of them are on package holidays to the southern sun and sea. Others are young or otherwise economical people flying cheaply across the Atlantic to visit friends, or just to see the world. At Heathrow, more than at Gatwick, many are on business journeys, some flying to Australia, Japan or other distant countries. These no doubt have their travel expenses paid, and among the rest are some relatively rich who in former days would have travelled first-class on the Blue Train or the Titanic. But the mass of air travellers are paying their own way from limited incomes. Yet they are of all economic and social classes.
By the way they speak and behave you can tell that many of them belong to what used to be called, in a more stratified society, and is still called by socialists seeking to perpetuate class-consciousness, the working class. That many such people can and do afford to spend their family holidays in Benidorm or Ipsos rather than Blackpool or Margate is evidence—if any were needed—of the immense rise in the standard of living in Britain and other Western countries in this century, especially since World War Two. And among the travellers to more distant places—Miami or Melbourne—there are many whose parents or grandparents would not have dreamt of such journeys, except as poor emigrants.
The phenomenon thus displayed, however, goes much deeper than economic advancement, deeper than the change from the days of struggle for the ‘docker’s tanner’, a fraction of present-day wages, earned without holiday pay or pension rights or, of course, redundancy money. A rise in real incomes brings a progression, from more to better of the same sort of consumption, then from needs to comforts, and thereafter to a surplus which allows wider and wider options. Spending options are the mark of release from poverty. What more striking exhibit of economic emancipation could there be than weekly wage-earners taking their families by air for holidays on the Mediterranean, or young men and women of the same economic class flying across the Atlantic for around 100 pounds?
Among the better-off travellers, social origins are much more mixed than would have been those of first-class passengers by train to Paris or by transatlantic liner. In Britain at least, the ladder of opportunity has been scaled by ever-increasing numbers. When I was a boy, there was as conspicuously an upper class in industry and finance, as there was in social life. To some extent there still is, but the demarcation is fading. Chaps from Eton and Christ Church share a social as well as a commercial life with fellow executives or professionals from state schools and polytechnics.
In business, as in travel, all are one. Classes can no more be distinguished by their dress than they can by their ability to spend money. The neat business suit, or the jeans and T-shirt, are common to all, according to what they are doing or where they are going.
The social mixing has been projected internationally. Many of those air travellers are foreigners—business people or returning tourists—or Asians or Africans, these usually more exclusive and reserved in public behaviour than white people. Our British tourists will join with foreigners in bistros and tavernas, on beaches or in discotheques. Language is of course a barrier, but people do scramble over it.
Music is a bond across frontiers. The pop group and the sound cassette are universal and classless. I confess I find contemporary band music nasty—boringly repetitive in tune and lyric, void of musical sensibility, noisy, violent, vulgar, stupid. But I remember that in my youth conventional people regarded what we now call classical jazz (fondly recalled by the death of its great exponents like Duke Ellington) as sounds from the jungle, a hideous perversion of the young. In about 1965 a distinguished American lawyer, with whom my wife and I were dining in New York said much the same (substituting slums for jungle) about the Beatles, then all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic. “We like to think of England as a civilised, cultivated country; how can you export such pernicious rubbish?” He was shocked when I mildly replied, “I rather like the Beatles.” In fact the Beatles’ songs were a cultural landmark, folk music from the pubs and back streets, a sign of the upward filtration of culture which not only in popular music but also in speech, in clothes, in television programmes and personal conduct has been a conspicuous contraflow to the traditional downward drift from the rich and educated through the middle ranks to the poor and unlettered.
Has all this made the world more united, more peaceable, more mutually understanding? In time, perhaps, it will do so, but the present answer is, sadly, no. The great disaster of the twentieth century has been the intensification of nationalism, armed with weapons of ever-increasing fearfulness and often using brutal violence in terrorism as well as in open war.
I say “nationalism” because I do not believe that ideological or inter-racial conflicts would so threaten the world were they not harnessed to national, or nationalist, sentiments and structures. The Soviet Union is seen by many people in the West as simply an engine of communist revolution; but we would no more fear communism from the East than we fear it from our own midst were it not harnessed to the power structure of the Russian National State. Soviet Russia behaves as Russia has behaved in the past and will behave in the future, as a still-expanding continental empire, suspicious and enclosed, having limited access to the oceans and fearful of attack across its open frontiers, especially—in the light of history—by or through Central Europe. And in the presently turbulent areas of the world—the Middle East, Central America, south and south-east Asia—it is plain that national or nationalistic ambitions, rivalries, strategies and revolts are the heart of the matter, hitched as they often are to the patronage of major powers, themselves pursuing the interests of nation states.
Militant nationalism was certainly a masterful force when I was a boy: German expansionism, Irish revolt, Balkan unrest, were among its menacing expressions nearest to Britain. But on the global scene its menace was tempered by the enforced peak within the European empires, by the balance of power in Europe, by the isolationism of the United States, and by the concept of common civilisation. The Kaiser’s Germany might be building battleships and submarines to confront the Royal Navy, but many British students went to German universities, and the Rhineland was as frequented by British tourists as the isles of Greece. Do Americans go, just in search of higher education, to Russian universities today, or vice versa; or do Westerners spend their holidays as freely on the Black Sea as they do on the Mediterranean. Can you travel throughout the world on such a single document as my first passport, which said, “We, George Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Baron Ravensdale ... a Member of His Majesty’s Privy Council, request and require—” National barriers to personal movement are now far more numerous, more obstructive, more fraught with inquisition and restraint, both on going in and on coming out.
There was terrorism, too, in my early days, some directed against British authority in Ireland, India and elsewhere. I was four years old when bomb-throwing anarchists were the quarry of the notorious “Sidney Street siege.” In continental Europe there was much more, especially in the unstable Austro-Hungarian empire. But it was spasmodic, ill-directed and amateur, perpetrated mostly by small cells or fanatical individuals; it was nothing like the thousands-strong organisations of today, such as the IRA or the PLO, nor was it espoused by Governments like those of Libya, Iran, Bulgaria or El Salvador; nor was it directed, as a rule, against ordinary people going about their business, like the Harrods bombing or the atrocities of the Bader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigade; nor did it have weapons of mass destruction in its potential armoury.
So the world has become a more dangerous, more hostile, more rigidly divided place in which to live. It is not nuclear power that has made it so. The nuclear balance of “mutually assured destruction” has been indeed a force against major war. The Kaiser’s navy, the Imperial Russian armies, were created to be used, and being there for use were used; only a madman would create and accumulate nuclear armaments for the purpose of using them against an enemy similarly armed, or a client of such an enemy. There are a lot of madmen around, but probably none in high places quite as mad as that.
And how little the nuclear arms race affects our ordinary lives, except by depriving people, in the East as well as the West, of all those additions to the standards of living and welfare on which the multi-billion military budgets might rather have been spent! Military preparations and action, in my experience, impinge less on the lives and conduct of civilians in non-communist countries anyway, than they did in the early 1900s.
Their massive scale in money and mechanism has not prevented a rise in the standards of material consumption and amenity that would have been unimaginable to our grandfathers. In Edwardian times, the rich were certainly very rich, but the poor were very poor indeed. An English agricultural labourer in steady employment lived in a cramped cottage without light or piped water, depended on harvest money for clothing for his family, and ate butcher’s meat twice a year, at Michaelmas and Christmas, if he was lucky. The unemployed, the old and penniless, shivered and hungered in the grim shadow of the workhouse. The middle classes, sustained by a stable currency, were not too badly off, but their expectations were modest and their luxuries very few, unless you count domestic service. So it is in many ways a far better world into which my grandchildren have been born, though less solid, more demanding, more unsettled, more hazardous, than the world of my childhood.
I am not a pessimist, quite the opposite. The Western world may be passing through a bad period in some ways—among them excessive libertarianism and its consequences, from juvenile drug-taking, a form of suicide, to easy abortion, a form of murder, and its reactionary counterpart, arrogant fundamentalism. But if you can’t help floating on this murky tide you don’t have to drown in it. Its casualties are different from competitive society’s casualties of the past; its opportunities are different too, and much more worthy.
The human mind, like the human body, is extraordinarily resilient and adaptable: the great majority of people adjust to new conditions without too much pain. Those new conditions today include the danger of nuclear destruction, but I believe it to be remote, and its very menace is self-defeating. It may take a generation or two for the world’s political system to cage the dragon that scientists and militarists have let loose, but it will be done. It is the next fore-shadowed phase, in which nuclear defence destabilises nuclear deterrence, that is the most immediately alarming.
Perhaps because my life has been linked with institutions that have survived through centuries of war, revolution, social upheaval, economic misery, tyranny and corruption, alternating with periods of relative honesty, peace and prosperity—public schools, Oxford colleges, ancient City livery companies, the Church of England—I see our own times as but a phase in an endless cycle of human experience, a phase that will inevitably give way to another, and then again to others, in some ways better, in some ways worse, through which the world of man is passing and will pass. The huge acceleration of change in the twentieth century has made the present phase as exciting as it has been turbulent. While I am content to leave its successor to generations that follow me, I regret that I shall not see the twenty-first century for myself.
After my father’s death I found among his papers a letter from the Master of Balliol, (AD Lindsay), evidently replying to a question about my prospects, in which he said that I seemed to be set upon becoming a journalist. That was very perspicacious of the Master; for I recollect no such aspiration while I was an undergraduate, destined as I supposed I was for the Civil Service. I did indeed spend two-thirds of my working life in journalism, from dogsbody on The Economist to editor of The Annual Register. Why so many ambitious and clever young men and women should want to become journalists is an interesting question. When friends asked me to advise their sons, nephews or godsons who were aiming at careers in the Press my initial response was Punch’s famous advice to those about to marry: “Don’t.” Why do you want to be a journalist, I would ask, and if they answered, as they often did, “I like writing,” I would say: “you should realise that until a journalist gets a long way up, and often even then, he spends only a very small fraction of his time on writing: the rest goes on sub-editing, reading documents, figuring, pursuing, waiting, listening, note-taking, talking, telephoning, travelling, leaving out far more than goes in. A journalist’s life is one of uncertainty and frustration.” He needs, for satisfaction in his job, a special kind of temperament: a wide range of interest, a thirst for varied experience, a love of all that is new, a craving to be in the swim of events even as a watchful minnow, flexibility and resilience.
Created from a nineteenth or early twentieth century text by Athelstane E-Texts