We Had it So Good

Everyone (well, maybe not everyone, but almost everyone) has heard of Harold Macmillan’s 1957 boast (or perhaps warning) that ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’.  It must be part of the inspiration for the title of Linda Grant’s latest novel ‘We Had it So Good’ which I have just finished. (This is not to be confused with Dominic Sandbrook’s popular history epic with a  similar title). It is of course about that lucky, selfish generation that went to co college in the 1960s and now rules the world. It is at least an attempt to write about a major, serious subject of our times.

Ms Grant is not my ideal modern novelist.  If I had to say what I liked most, I’d go for Philip Roth’s trilogy (not his other books), William Boyd, Alan Judd (a recent, welcome discovery – why doesn’t he get more attention?) and – to my surprise – A.S. Byatt.  But she is interesting, especially to me. I now know that ms Grant must have been at the University of York round about the time I was there in the early 1970s – as were Greg Dyke, former BBC Director general, Harriet Harman, queen of PC, Helen Dunmore (whose novel about the Siege of Leningrad is extraordinarily good). I can’t recall any of them, except for Greg Dyke, and Harriet Harman says she can’t remember me either, though it was in those days a very small university and I was quite noisy, not always in a good way.

Greg Dyke keeps telling a story about me turning up late for some tutorial saying I’d been busy starting the revolution. I think I know, the (boring, obscure) origin of this fable, namely a lame excuse I offered for being late with an essay after a weekend spent servicing a Bolshevik cell of trade unionists in Scarborough. I wouldn’t have used such a phrase, though – and I am more or less certain that Mr Dyke and I never shared a tutorial group (in those days York University still aspired to this Oxbridge way of teaching). I’ve tried a few times to correct it on ‘Wikipedia’, but someone seems so anxious to have it there that I can’t be bothered any more, and if it makes Greg happy, now he is Chancellor of the University, who am I to mind? I mainly remember him being unfashionably attached to the Labour Party, a body which all true leftists despised by the end of the 1960s, and looking pretty furry.

Who could have thought, as we lazed on the subsidised lawns and strolled round the subsidised lake, that we would all end up as we have?

This is why I was interested in Linda Grant’s book, as it takes as its theme a 1960s student couple who emerge in our era well-off, still married and yet deeply discontented, unfulfilled, baffled by their children and quite lonely. It doesn’t, I might add,  parallel my life, as by the time I got to York I was a puritan Trotskyist, sometimes jeered at as the only person on the campus who didn’t smoke dope, and resolved – having ceased to be a teenager – to stop listening to the popular music that I then thought would fade as my generation grew up. I was already too serious for my own good, and was destined to get even more so.

Of course, they didn’t grow up. Most of them still haven’t, which is why so many of them  hang out at Glastonbury, or in Hyde Park late at night, listening to the screech of tortured metal which they refer to as ‘music’(I won’t risk any exact categories, as people seem to care so much about this. But it’s not J.S. Bach) .  I was lucky in a way, though it was quite hard-bought luck. I’d had my teenage revolt and found it led quickly to squalor and worse.  I’d done what teenagers were expected to do and been dissatisfied.  I’d worked for a living for a bit, done my own laundry and and paid my own rent.  I’d been more or less compelled (thanks to my own earlier folly) to study hard and unsupervised to get the A-levels I needed to make it to university. I had been, at 17, the cause of a serious road accident in which I was also (thank Heaven) the only serious victim. So I had an unusual experience of pain and fear. And I had always known that the moment the University days ended, I would have to earn a living. I could expect no inheritance and very little help.

Now, one of the things that made me read Ms Grant’s book was that I had been astonished by an earlier novel of hers ‘When I lived in Modern Times’. Though she couldn’t possibly have remembered it herself, she seemed to have found out or understood  something about British colonial life in the Mediterranean in the 1940s that I had also absorbed. It’s very hard to communicate , but there’s an effect of the light, of the architecture and the smell in the air which I always get when I’m in Jerusalem, or Nicosia or Gibraltar or – even more so – Malta. I expect I’d find it in Alexandria if I ever managed to get there. It’s a feeling of a time which, as her title suggests, seemed very modern and urgent to those living through it, which was still very much in the age of concrete and motor cars and radios. But, thanks to the abrupt collapse of the British Empire it is now as remote from us as any other archaeological remains. They were modern times, but modern in an old-fashioned, archaic way – an old-fashioned future like thenone envisaged at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Perhaps if the Empire had survived, it would have been the future we actually got.

I suspect I inherited this sensation. I was in Malta for less than a year after my birth, and can’t possibly have any direct memory of the place , though when I go back it seems curiously familiar .

My parents probably had the best years of their lives in Malta, then the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet where my father was stationed from 1949 to 1952. They were spared the privations of rationed Britain. They lived on the nice allowances which officers in HM forces tended to get only when abroad. I assume there were servants.  I know there were pleasant clubs to which they belonged. The luxuries of life were duty free, and the never-resting sea lay at the end of every vista.

I am dimly aware of this in some way that resembled memory, but it isn’t. In the same way, I was once jolted to my core when, during a weekend spent in a warship, I half-woke from sleep to hear a particular phrase in a call on the ship’s public address system, and knew that I *had heard that precise form of words before at some point in my life*.  Yet I also know, with utter certainty, that I hadn’t ever heard it before. The same was so with some of the Naval slang I later heard on board.  I think we do inherit some memories from our parents.

Anyway, this is a cumbersome way of saying that Ms Grant had imagined Tel Aviv in the last days of British Palestine in a way which I found utterly arresting and believable. She had also (in a way I’ve only ever seen matched by John le Carre in his better books, and now by Alan Judd – see above) caught the language and the attitude to life of the British military classes, what they knew, what they didn’t, what they thought of certain types of people and certain ways of thinking. How she did it, I don’t know. 

Some of her dialogue in ‘They had it so good’ is by contrast , unbelievably clunky. There’s a conversation between Oxford undergraduates that makes me wince, so stilted is it.

But by no means all of it is like this.  One passage, in which she describes a child witnessing and slowly understanding the disastrous failure of her parents’ genteel dress-for-dinner holiday hotel, thanks to the British middle class’s cultural revolution in taste,  is so bitterly realistic that it sounds is if it comes from personal experience, though it surely cannot.

She was also writing about Oxford in the years when Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar there – an Oxford I personally remember as a fascinated townie rather than as a university insider. And she has some of it pretty right.

What is in a way most striking about the book is that the central characters assume that taking (and in one case manufacturing) illegal drugs is perfectly normal. They continue to assume this from their student years until their maturity. There is precious little evidence of a stern authoritarian war on drugs in these people’s lives, and their attitude to the subject is such that you’d expect them to be amazed if anyone came between them and their pleasure.

I think this true of modern Britain, and is a large part of what I have been arguing here for years.