I Wonder

In conversation yesterday I reflected that my grandparents’ generation lived through the Second World War. In fact in 3 of my grandparents’ cases, they lived throughout both First and Second World Wars. My youngest grandparent, my father’s mother, was born in 1915, so she at least lived through part of both wars, although she was too young to remember the first at all.

Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. Neither of my grandmothers ever seemed to want to talk about the Second World War. Which is ironic really because when we talk about their generation, we tend to remember them specifically as the generation that lived through the war, rightly so. Yet in both grandmothers’ cases the war was something they didn’t particularly want to talk about.

Both of my parents were born in London in the early months of the war. Both were only 5 when it ended and neither of them had particularly strong memories of it. But their generation was the generation of war babies who got to grow up during the post war austerity of the late 40s and the 1950s. I can’t help thinking about what Sir Billy Connolly once said about the 1950s. He was talking about that period before Rock and Roll hit our shores. And he basically said words to the effect of – I remember the 50s. I was there and it was like living in the Eurovision Song Contest in a school uniform. The world was beige and the music was crap.- I’m guessing he meant Eurovision as it was in its first couple of decades and not as it is now.

I can’t help wondering, in the future, when my grandchildren are grown up and have children and grandchildren of their own, how will they think about our generation, that is, the kids who were born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s. Because looking back, I can’t help feeling just a little bit blessed that I was born when I was. I grew up in a Britain with a functioning NHS, went to a comprehensive school just 2 years after the local authority had ended the 11 plus system that in a lot of ways determined the future course of kids’ lives from some tests they did before they reached puberty, went to a University and not only did not have to pay tuition fees, but got given a grant to support me when I studied. Off the top of my head it’s difficult to think of anything in my lifetime anything like as hard or traumatic as what my parents’ and my grandparents’ generations lived through. There was Covid, certainly, which was unusual and very frightening at the time. Thousands and thousands of people died who should not have died at that time, and it’s easy to forget this as the memory of lockdown recedes into History. Growing up we lived with the fear of nuclear war, but that was just it. We lived with it, it didn’t seem to affect our lives that much. Who knows what they’ll say about us? Time alone will tell.