The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
To swing or not to swing – the 1960s remembered
How the decade of upheaval felt to those on the fringes of cool
It’s amazing now, watching footage of the Beatles’ last concert in Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back, to see those middle-aged men on the street, wearing hats and carrying furled umbrellas, expostulating in outrage about the noise and the sheer affront of slouching long-haired youth; foolish bobbies in tall helmets, with chin straps, are trying to shut the music down. Something changed forever in an hour. Middle-aged men nowadays weren’t even babies when the Beatles split up; they were children when they first saw David Bowie wearing eye make-up. If ever now they begin expostulating, there’s something self-consciously retro and phoney in it. Nobody expostulates these days with that old 1960s wholeheartedness.
And then again nothing much really changed, inside that hour. Social change is a complicated machinery and mostly, short of an actual revolution, works fairly slowly. Outside of a small set of turned-on, dropped-out, cued-in beautiful people, life in the UK in the 1960s mostly continued, just as if there hadn’t been any change after all, in its day-to-day patterns of behaviour and thinking: class-bound and deferential and conforming and all the rest of it, the decency and the community and the intolerance all tangled up together.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that a deep disaffection percolated through to teenage bedrooms up and down the land. Boys everywhere got their ears pierced and grew their hair; women began to notice that the advantages of the new sexual freedom, and the pill, had so far been mostly for the men.
I was only a child in the 1960s. When I tried to submerge myself in that past though, because I’d decided to set my new novel in 1967, I was surprised to find how much of it I remembered. I couldn’t have been aware of how the tectonic plates of our collective life might be shifting beneath the surface, or that those years would challenge hierarchy and respectability and a stuffy Establishment.
But a child remembers instead, better than an adult, the precise material detail – toys, foods, colours, the lilies of the valley in the garden, the dabs of phosphorescent paint on the ends of the hands of a white plastic bedroom clock, the mysteriously suggestive titles of adult books on a shelf: Eating People is Wrong, The Long Walk, The Sea Hawk, Darkness at Noon. There was a gas geyser with fierce flame in the bathroom of that childhood flat in Bristol where I grew up; codliver oil and malt mixture was spooned out from a brown jar; the single toilet was at the end of a scary passage, with a chain to pull; there was a cut-off plait of my mother’s hair in a drawer, an eked-out bottle of Mitsouko perfume on her dressing table. Like an archaeologist, a child learning to read the world can only begin with things.
And it turns out that, as in archaeology, these material details can richly express the flavour and character of past times. Stories about class and taste and the politics of consumption are locked up inside the aesthetic choices of an era. My parents’ generation rejected the stuffy home furnishings of their more or less petit bourgeois parents: solemn dark-varnished wood which pretended to look like the antiques of the upper classes, the doilies and milk jugs and cake stands brought out for my grandmother’s whist drives, fetishes of respectability – no milk bottles on her table! My grandfather on that side of the family was a travelling salesman in fancy goods (cochineal, almond essence, Christmas crackers). My parents were socialists and my mother furnished our flat at first in Scandinavian style, all wrought iron and linen and earth colours – olive and rust and orange. This was arty, it was purportedly more authentic, it expressed her generation’s impatience with pompous earnestness, and was supposed to bypass snobbery (of course it only created a new kind).
News floated down from London about kinky boots, hemlines, haircuts, pot
Later, partly under the influence of Sergeant Pepper, and Peter Blake who designed the album cover, our tastes morphed into Victoriana. I can actually remember my dad, schoolteacher and jazz trumpeter (trad jazz was revolutionary in the 1950s), bringing home the Sergeant Pepper LP – a surprise because he was careful how he spent his money, and wary of pop music. We were learning to listen and to see in a new way. Old people in our street threw out their Victorian furniture – chairs and trunks and wash stands – into skips or onto bonfires; we rescued it and Mum stripped it down with Nitromors, sanded and polished it. Half the population was busy ripping out the fitted dressers from their kitchens, the other half was busy putting them back in. We went camping in Brittany one summer, and my mother began cooking from Elizabeth David, using garlic and olive oil.
News floated down from London about kinky boots, hemlines, haircuts, pot. A social and cultural revolution began by being disseminated as a style, long before it altered very much structurally. If I try to characterise the social life of my parents’ set in the 1960s and 1970s I’d say that first and foremost it was grounded in mockery, sending things up, finding everything ridiculous. They loved having fun. There’s a delicious daring and carelessness to their sociability, compared to the dullness of their parents’ lives. For a while my aunt and uncle in the Home Counties had more money than we did, and parties at their house were spectacular. The bath was filled with ice and bottles of Veuve du Vernay, and
the party ended with my aunt dancing extravagantly alone, in a white Ossie Clark dress with a rose in her cleavage, to the music from Hair. My mother still wants fun. She was 90 this Christmas and falling about laughing, playing the kazoo game. I think she finds her children, my brother and me, rather inhibited and po-faced.
A lot of hard work went on behind the scenes of the fun. Not only my father’s work – teaching at a secondary modern school in the day, in the evenings playing jazz, or working for an external degree in economics because he hadn’t been to university. My mum worked hard too, sewing for pin money, cooking and decorating, making everything look good on a modest
budget, making herself look good. Outwardly her life appeared very different to her own mother’s (divorced and working in a chocolate factory), or her mother-in-law’s (the cake-stands and whist drives); and in its spirit it was genuinely very different, liberated from their narrow cultural horizon, their narrow politics. And yet much of the actual rhythm of her days closely resembled the same old rhythm of generations of women’s work in the home: childcare, shopping, cooking, washing, ironing. At least there were washing machines. She got her first twin tub in time for her second baby – before that the nappies were boiled on the stove in a pan. Although Mum had been to art college, she would never embark
on her own art until everything else in the house was done – which effectively in those days meant never. Later, when her children were grown, she’d squeeze in a few hours here and there to work on one of her still lifes in pastel.
Women’s lives in the 1960s still revolved around the power of men, in ways that are no doubt shocking now, to the young women of my children’s generation. And because in the 1960s the old sexual moralising was dissolving, and women’s righteousness had fallen out of fashion, there was even an extra pressure on those young wives, to keep themselves attractive and ahead in the competition for their husbands’ attention. It took the 1970s to really spread change
around, and loosen up possibilities for more women – yet my mother never wanted to go out to work, she wanted the freedom and privacy of staying at home.
I suppose you could think of those decades as transitional, in our era’s great reimagining of gender roles and sexual identity. But that’s too shallow; nobody’s life is a way station in a linear march of progress. The 1960s seem so richly suggestive now just because they’re full of contradiction. There’s something inspiring in how cavalierly and provisionally those young ones put together their new lives, poised on the brink of an unknown world.