the perfect birth year

Grossly pornographic photo from Spick magazine, c.1957

I was sitting in an empty pub. Rain lashed down outside. I was dying for a smoke. We only ask for one room, hermetically sealed if you like…The barman, desperate too, agreed with me: ‘You’re fuckin’ right, mate!’ On the bar’s TV we watched Celia Johnson in a cinema with Trevor Howard; all round her are happy smokers, Trevor included, yet Celia never once coughs or flaps smoke away. A different age, I said to the barman, and I’d been alive in it.

Cursing to hell our Roundhead government, I reflect on how lucky I was to have been born in 1935. It seemed to me if you were British, male, bright, your home rural, poor and decent, then 1935 was the perfect birth year.

I was too young to be infected by fear of invasion but not, as the danger passed, by the excitement of seeing searchlights weaving in the night sky and fires burn on the horizon. In Cornwall we were fairly safe from bombs. Rationing kept me healthy. My parents’ main fear now was that my teenage sister would be seduced by an American soldier. I sensed the family tension, and it mixed in with the war reports I began avidly reading in my father’s News Chronicle. We were winning; happy is the boy who can observe the ancient affair between Love and War, safely and with victory in sight. The experience would colour all my adult writing.

I could take advantage of the postwar social conscience by going free to the local Grammar School. My best pal, Barry, failed his eleven-plus, and I remember him sobbing. He was talented too; but it was a grim Sec.Mod. for him. My new school, full of working-class boys, was mediocre, but regularly sent its brightest half-dozen to Oxbridge. At eighteen I applied to almost every Oxford and Cambridge college, including the women-only ones. I took a rather poor pass in English at ‘A’ level, but it didn’t matter: I’d sat the New College, Oxford, exam and they wanted me. They were desperate to take working-class boys.

Today, with my lowly ‘A’ level, I’d be left scrambling for a place at Tesco Value University. Before Oxford I had to do National Service. A blessing in disguise: I learnt Russian at Cambridge. A year older and I might have been fighting in Korea. Soon after, National Service was abolished, so I wouldn't have known Russian or read and translated Pushkin and Akhmatova..

The state paid all my Oxford fees and enough to live on. Mind you, in those days I didn’t drink or smoke, and there were, luckily, no drugs. Thankful for my privileged education, paid for by people like my father, a plasterer, I felt I owed it to them to work hard. My one decadent luxury was an occasional Spick or Span, price 2/6, bought tremblingly at market stalls, showing smily girls lifting their skirts above their stockingtops.

I found those incredibly mild little magazines incredibly exciting. I’m thankful there were no topshelf mags and computer porn. Sex was taboo in my upbringing, though not in a stern, repressive way. It simply wasn’t there. I could therefore feel a ‘holy dread’ towards it; glimpsing it in bullet-bra’d Hollywood bosoms or, when at last I started dating, the triumph of touching a suspendered thigh. Sex was sacred, sinful, dirty –not, thank God, merely recreational.

I’m pleased the girl I first shily explored wasn’t wearing jeans and Doc Martens. Women were gloriously feminine. Swirling or pencil-slim skirts, petticoats, girdles, suspender belts, nylons, high heels… a cornucopia of difference. I feel sorry for the men who missed that glamorous difference. Alright, women today thank God they have missed it, but I’m speaking as a male. It was good to be able to distinguish men from women easily. Sexual politics did not exist; it was just a man and a woman, without Germaine Greer or Andrea Dworkin louring over one’s shoulder. Women hadn’t yet become victims, or at least didn’t act as if they were.

Teaching at a College of Education, I lounged, smoking, in front of a dozen welldressed, unswearing, unstoned young women; ashtrays everywhere. No one coughed. I shared with them the literature I loved. We English tutors believed that if our students left college with a feeling for literature, they’d make decent teachers. It worked. Political correctness didn’t exist; cheerful flirting went on, and no one cried rape when I read them Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’.

Then the demand came for more ‘philosophy of education’, and use of technology. The humanist breadth went, educational jargon flourished. The college itself was closed, in 1977, to save money. I accepted redundancy and took the risk of writing fulltime. When I hear teachers describe the bureaucracy crushing them today, I know I would never have gone into teaching if I were leaving University now.

Wanting to sow my wild oats belatedly, I took advantage of the ‘permissive society’ of the 60s. I hosted and attended wild parties –and could dump the bottles without worrying about the Earth-- before the drink-drive law brought Perrier water. Ageing tempered my behaviour long before AIDS struck terror into a generation.

Financially too, my birth year worked out. I had mortgage tax relief; my children’s higher education was paid for. When I published an unexpected best-seller in 1981, I was helped by Mrs Thatcher’s tax reforms to keep at least some of that once-in-a-lifetime windfall without having to flee abroad. I invested in a self-employed pension scheme while these were still tax-deductible. Now it keeps the increasingly threatening wolf from the door. Mrs T. even brought in Public Lending Rights: God bless you, m’am! I sold my writing archive to Wisconsin University, thankful I could offer rough drafts and notebooks from the primitive era before word processing.

In 1985 I had a serious illness, with stones in both kidneys. Luckily lithotripsy had just been invented, though not yet available on the NHS; and the stones were miracled away in private treatment I could never have afforded a few years earlier. I’m convinced I’d have died from conventional NHS cutting operations, as had happened to my father and uncle.

In my reclining years, I’m enormously grateful for the internet, while still thanking my stars it didn’t exist earlier. I’m glad I know some Latin, which at school bored me; and that richly poetic phrases from the Authorised Version, Cranmer’s prayers and Wesley’s hymns ring in my head, from my being made to go to chapel before Christianity Lite came in. That’s a treasure beyond price. Today’s kids are very deprived.

Yes, a charmed birth year –if you were where I was. I’m too old even to want to go to pubs much anymore. They’ve not yet banned smoking in my home. There’s even Viagra. Lord, Lord, such blessings!