My generation had to make its own luck

LIKE you, perhaps, I am fed up with being told that I have been ‘lucky’, like the rest of my generation which is now past retirement age or approaching it.

We didn’t know it then and we don’t believe it now. We simply worked hard with longer working hours and enjoyed the fruits of our labour.

Universities And Science Minister David Willetts has devoted one of his brains to arguing how those born between 1945 and 1965 got a particularly ‘unfair’ advantage in life by ‘concentrating wealth in the hands of their own generation’.

But Willetts’s charge has quickly broadened to say that we oldsters in general were lucky and are now cossetted.

We understand the grim arithmetic of having to pay off the monster debts the Government has inherited — not that the Tories complained much about official spending then, often demanding more. But we marvel at the idea that we somehow enjoyed an unfair advantage.

Early memories of our ‘ luck’ are about rationing, which went on until the early 1950s and long after most countries had abolished it. We celebrated like mad when we could actually buy chocolate off ration.

We paid through the nose as adults to establish much of the current infrastructure now taken for granted by Willetts and his fellow moaners.

Like most of those born in the 1930s and 1940s, I had no university spell, least of all any ‘gap year’. My father saved enough and, with my small scholarship, sent me to a boarding school.

Like other schools of that time, it did not preach that we were owed a living. Whining was particularly abhorred and the phrase ‘brace up, Alexander’ springs to my mind when I showed any inclination to grumble.

My higher education was in the University of Life, unlike the ridiculously large proportion of the supposedly ‘ unlucky’ younger generation, which sees a degree as an entitlement.

Like so many others I tried my hand at several things, including an engineering apprenticeship (dull and demanding) before a job in the organisation and methods department of an ice-cream giant.

If you think that was ‘luck’, you should try recording the sales of ice cream vans all round Leicestershire, as I had to. When Walls fired me, my search for work was constantly rejected because I had no university education.

Lucky? I stumbled somehow into journalism. And, anxious to make money, I did a second virtually fulltime job in journalism — involving rushed journeys by Tube between offices, there being no computers on which to file your copy then. You, the current generation, do not know how lucky you are.

AS FOR oppressive taxation which is generally (and properly) complained of now, it was no easier then. If you had any income from your savings, Chancellor Denis Healey grabbed an extra 15 per cent as well as his income tax top rate of 83 per cent. Saving any money was hard for us, the ‘fortunate’ generation.

Inflation also savaged the savings of our ‘lucky’ generation. Ted Heath was our nemesis, setting off a wave of rising prices which at one point hit 27 per cent.

So we were in luck, were we? Willetts, born in 1956, was not even in work by then. As for buying your own home — which is now somehow seen as grabbing the assets of the younger generation — to get a mortgage we had to show building societies we were reliable savers. So much for our good fortune.

Today’s generation also enjoys the fruits of technology. It has its mobile phones and gadgets which we thought of only as science fiction.

Times may be harsh for the young, with severe unemployment dominating the headlines. But when you contemplate the influx of Continental Europeans so ready to work, you have to wonder.