In Praise of Modern Britain

A landmark birthday’s coming up for Brian Viner

SIXTY. It’s such a solid and useful figure: the number of seconds in a minute, of minutes in an hour, the national speed limit on single-carriageway A-roads, and, of course, the highest score on a dartboard that can be achieved with a single dart.

It is also the number of years that I will attain this autumn – a landmark of mighty personal resonance because it was the age my father was when he died, way back in 1976. He expired suddenly, just two weeks past his 60th birthday. So my own 60th is bound to ignite lots of memories of him, and of my long-ago boyhood.

As I approach my threescore years, I find myself reflecting on the land I arrived in and the one I live in now. Technically it’s the same place, but the author L.P. Hartley wasn’t being fanciful when he wrote that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

A few weeks ago, I showed one of my children an old postcard of the main shopping street in Southport, the Lancashire seaside town (until it was rudely shunted into Merseyside) in which I grew up. The card dated from the mid-1960s, well into my life span, but he looked at it as if he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a top-hatted William Ewart Gladstone crossing the road.

In truth, I could understand why. The world depicted in that picture bore literally no resemblance to the one we inhabit now. There was a policeman in a helmet directing cars that looked like museum pieces and, on the pavement, a couple of women in drab headscarves wheeling huge Silver Cross prams past the Kardomah Café.

For a moment or two I had a rush of nostalgia for an England long gone, but then it dawned on me that this England, the England of 2021, is in so many ways a better place to live than that version of 1961 and the rest of my childhood years.

It might seem counter-intuitive to say so, flying against the popular inclination to believe that things were so much better in the old days. Some things were, undoubtedly. But the food was terrible, communications were lousy, and at grammar school I don’t remember corporal punishment being remotely good for me. It hurt.

Sexism was everywhere. Homosexuality was illegal. Racism was enshrined even in TV comedy. The class system was rigid and unbreakable. And, oh, the cigarettes! Everybody smoked all the time.

I realise that it’s as fashionable now to stick a hob-nailed boot into the 1960s as it is, well, to wear hob-nailed boots. Weren’t the Sixties supposed to swing? Maybe they did, in and around Carnaby Street.

That’s where the likes of Michael Caine and Twiggy embodied a new working-class swagger, a so-called meritocracy, but precious little of it rippled out into the provinces. John Betjeman had written his famously acerbic poem Slough years earlier, but those killer lines: “Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, tinned minds, tinned breath”, still applied three decades later, and not only to that benighted Berkshire town.

By contrast, look at us now. People still bang on about our supposedly hidebound class system, but I was born into the Britain of the Lady Chatterley trial, when a barrister solemnly asked a jury whether D.H. Lawrence’s racy story was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read”. In that context, Britain in my 60th year has turned into a meritocracy.

Consider the job opportunities available to young people now, and think also of Britain’s remarkable leisure facilities, our food and drink options, the extraordinary revolution wrought by technology, how we can buy almost anything with the click of a button and have it delivered the next day. You might not think of that as progress, but I do. We’re healthier now, our teeth have improved, we eat better and live longer.

There is another social chasm between the country I knew as a child and the one I live in today, and it brings me back to my dear old dad. Sixty looked different then. He wore brown polyester cardigans and shirts with cufflinks. He had one of those furry Cossack hats he wore in the cold, and certainly never pulled on a pair of jeans. He also listened to Duke Ellington records, while I listened to Slade.

Sixty in those days was so much older than it is now. Now, I let my children direct me to bands and films they like. Occasionally, they let me return the compliment. We sixtysomethings are down with the kids, though, of course, I don’t discount the possibility that the kids wish we weren’t.

“For a moment or two I had a rush of nostalgia for an England long gone”