Stop hankering for the fantasy of a golden age
Nostalgia, vividly expressed in the cause-we-shall-not-mention-here, has become fashionable among Britain’s double-breasted classes. Yet my hackles rise each time I hear Winston Churchill’s name brandished aloft, almost always spuriously. Earning my living from the exploration of history dispels any hankering to inhabit the past, in war or peace, good times or bad.
Some of our family’s men, in old age, used to talk nonsense about what wartime fun they had, but the women never did. Separations; squalor; ghastly food; the gloom of six years’ blackouts interspersed with stabs of terror were the lot of tens of millions, even those fortunate enough to be spared from battlefields or enemy occupation.
A powerful observation, valid not merely about 1939-45 but for all conflicts, was made by a Norwegian resistance hero named Knut Lier-Hansen, who wrote in 1948: “Though wars bring adventures that stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.” Perish the delusion that we could have more fun flying Spitfires.
As for peaceful times, some enthusiasts for Poldark, Jane Austen, Miss Marple and Call the Midwife fantasise that it might be jollier to live in one of those eras than in Maytime. Yet the rural world of Jane Austen and her characters was stultifyingly dreary, formal, confining.
A stark passage in Claire Tomalin’s biography of the novelist describes how genteel women were obliged to wash the rags they used as tampons, to shield such sordid objects from the notice of servants. Among humbler 19th-century rural folk, the incest that bred “village idiots” was endemic, along with chronic diseases and grinding poverty. As for probity, consider a passage in George Eliot’s Silas Marner. All the old miser’s neighbours, she wrote, knew about his hidden hoard of gold, and more than a few yearned to steal it. If they did so, however, they would have no way to spend the money without leaving the village, “an idea as remote to them as a balloon journey”. In other words, it was not thievery that bothered those peasants but merely the difficulty of getting away with it....
In more recent times, despite rising incomes the Fifties were pretty wretched. A sense of anticlimax, of having won the war but lost the Empire, suffused the country. With hindsight, it seems less extraordinary that Anthony Eden invaded Egypt in 1956 than that so many Tories applauded, enthusing about the salutary effects of “teaching the gyppos a lesson”. Never trust any politician who promises to “put the Great back into Britain” by duffing up some foreigners....