Now we are 61; a reflection

I first started this blog back in the summer of 2019 with little thought except that it was to be, broadly, a nostalgic blog about the past, whether it be a very personal aspect of the past like the three Peanuts strips that formed the theme of the first post, or the history of popular train travel that was covered in a subsequent one. Think perhaps something along the lines of Michael Bywater's hilarious, if now perhaps somewhat dated, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost And Where Did It Go?. It never really occurred to me that I might need to become a bit more 'meta', to delve a bit deeper into what this yearning for the past was, and why some of us feel the need to do it. I soon abandoned the blog as life took over with its remorseless agenda, and the allure of the past served more to taunt than to comfort.

Six years later and the world has changed, and of course for me change is rarely all good. Loss has accumulated over those six years, people have left us, the colour of the world has acquired some darker tones, we have had a pandemic terrible in its consequences and a global lurch towards authoritarianism that is making that low dishonest decade of the 1930's appear far more current than we would ever have expected or wanted it to be.

I feel now, six years closer to the end of my life, a really rather urgent need to revisit this blog and the belief that it is likely to be my most lasting legacy, modest as it is. But I feel I can't do so without some attempt to articulate exactly what it is I yearn for when I think of the past; what is my idea of nostalgia, whence this terrible, unending ache that I seem to share with so few others of my acquaintance? So, here I am again and this time it's personal.

I think that fundamentally there are two types of nostalgia, and I suffer from both, and it is often difficult to disentangle the two. There is personal nostalgia, and there is, beyond that and connected to it by ties that are sometimes firm and sometimes almost invisible, what I would call cultural nostalgia.

Personal nostalgia is I think universal. There is not one of us who doesn't, from time to time, hear a song or watch a film that takes them back to a time in their lives that makes them smile in retrospect; seemingly happier perhaps, safer, simpler. This kind of nostalgia is nearly always perfectly harmless, a temporary retreat into fond memories that will, when we resurface, make us stronger and better able to continue with our tasks of the day. And I think we normally don't kid ourselves when we indulge this kind of retrospection. We know that things were not perfect in the past. We are conscious of the difficulties, of the regrets and the hurts that we experienced, but we smile and we briefly long for that time nonetheless.

I am very conscious of the disconnect between my own warm rememberings of my childhood and the reality. I grew up in an environment of severe deprivation and it could be very hard, although until my teenage years the hardship was tempered by the fact that I had little to compare it with, all of the people I knew coming from a similar background. As a historian I know that we have to be wary of the yearning for a golden age that most seem to feel in every age. And there are the old cliches with which we are all so familiar: "We had nothing but we were happy". I remember watching the film Spend Spend Spend about the life of Viv Nicholson, who won a fortune on the football pools in 1961 and proceeded to spend the lot in short order. The film ended with her return to her old house, and the voiceover said "I had some hard times in that house. Bloody hard times. They were the best times of my life". It was the sort of statement that would make us conflicted nowadays. It's a cliche of course, and the sort of thing that can be used by mischievous politicians to demonstrate that what the poor need is not more money. At the same time it is a reminder that increasing prosperity, for individuals as for civilisations, leads to increasing complexity, which can feel overwhelming. As we feel life has become overly complex, we yearn for the simple.

My own ability to derive comfort and warm feelings, in retrospect, from times when I was often very unhappy, has led me to think about the impulses behind that kind of nostalgia, and I have identified three very real considerations behind what might seem a perverse celebration of childhood deprivation:

1. I was, of course, a child. What that meant was that there were people around me whose job it was to buffer me from the worst that life had to offer, to try to make me feel better when I was sad or afraid or insecure. Those people had their own challenges of course, but I was fortunate in that my parents tried their best in spite of their difficulties, and the result was a childhood in which there was at least some space for me to explore my childhood despite the encroachments of harsh economic realities, and I had siblings who did more than their fair share to make my life bearable. These people have now, of course, mostly gone.

2. I felt I understood the world. This feeds into the cultural nostalgia that follows, but childhood for me, as for most, was one of certainties, most of which stayed with me for a remarkably long time. They have, in succession, fallen away, leaving me increasingly unsure and perplexed by a world that changes every day. To quote one of my A Level set books, Cyril Tourneur's Revengers Tragedy, "I see now that there is nothing certain in mortality but mortality".

3. Again, I was a child. What this means in terms of daily experience is that every experience was new and vivid. Every song, every film, every book, impacted upon me in a way that none will in future. As a Napoleon-obsessive I can still remember walking into Bradford's central library some time in 1978 and being completely overwhelmed by the fact that there was a whole shelf of books about the campaigns of Napoleon. There will never in my life be an experience like that again.

As most readers will probably have understood by now, I have some very profound autistic traits despite my never having been diagnosed. My interest in history is much more an obsession than a mere hobby. When I was about 15 I took one of those little vocab books from school and proceeded to fill it with regnal lists - Roman/Byzantine/Holy Roman Emperors, Popes, Kings of England/Britain/France, Visogothic/Frankish/Vandal kings, Ottoman Sultans, Abbasid Caliphs - and then memorise them by constant reading and repetition. I think I must have looked like one of the young Muslim scholars one sees sometimes in stories on the TV about madrassahs, rocking back and forth slightly as they memorise verses from the Quoran. It reached the point where my brother Mike and I used to play a game called Name That Pope, where Mike would give a year during the Middle Ages and I would say who was Pope in that year. I recognise now that complete knowledge of the regnal lists was my way of trying to control my own little part of a chaotic world and thereby insulate myself from the uncertainties and insecurities of life. This resistance and fear of change I think made me much more likely to cling to an idealised and unchanging image of the past.

The second type of nostalgia is what might be called a cultural one, longing for an idealised historical past in which the corruption of modernity has yet to appear. This carries even more serious dangers than the personal kind. We know that there are those on the political Right who hanker after an imagined age when their ideal of an exclusive and hierarchical society held sway, when there were few or no non-white faces and women knew their place. It is important to stress that this golden age is a chimera, it never existed, and should it somehow be made to exist now it would be a dreary place indeed. But the idea of a happier time never experienced, or only as a child, is one that I can only share. Perhaps I first encountered it when reading collections of the old Magnet comics in Evered Avenue Library, where Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton and the Famous Five would spend endless hours fishing in the Sark, on quiet sunny afternoons when time would all but stand still until the time came for the return to the old school for supper and calling over. Or perhaps when reading those old poems at school, the nostalgia infused poems of John Betjeman's 'sweet uneventful countryside' or Edward Thomas's vignettes of Edwardian country life.

The most puzzling thing about the two types of nostalgia in my case is that although there is an overlap in the periods, they are not coterminous. My personal nostalgia is for a time that begins at my earliest memories, declines sharply after my going up to Oxford in 1982, and all but ends with my graduation in 1985 as adulthood and the search for employment and conformity makes a noisy entrance. The period of wider nostalgia begins earlier, not with the Edwardians of course, the imminence of the horror that was the Great War makes nostalgia for that period impossible, but not much later; it continues through the Second World War, all those old war films and the sense, whatever the reality, of a shared commitment to a struggle against a genuinely appalling foe, and reaches its peak in those postwar decades of growing equality that the Thatcherites decried as 'creeping socialism'. Only to end with the demise of the postwar consensus and the 'dreadful daylight' of what we now know as neoliberalism. The yearning is for something slow, quiet, seemingly kinder, even when I know this was not always so.

For I know without a doubt that the cultural touchstones that anchor this yearning are not real. There was never a school experience like that of the Remove at Greyfriars any more than there was a perfect solitude to Edward Thomas's 'loops over the Downs', but it doesn't matter. We can fondly envisage such things when sunk in our twenty first century reality of constant noise, crowds of people, impatient drivers pushing their way through an unforgiving hectic torrent of metal and fumes; the near impossibility of finding a place for solitude and reflection where one can't hear the distant roar of traffic, so constant one scarcely knows it is there, or feel the buzz of the phone in one's pocket as another email arrives, another stranger writes something needlessly obnoxious about you on a social media post. For me, a kid growing up in the heart of urban Liverpool, this idea of an idealised past comes together with that of an idealised childhood of a sort that I felt I could glimpse, if never quite experience, through my books; I recently, when reading Sam Leith's history of childrens' literature, The Haunted Wood, came across le mot juste for this intersection. When discussing the themes of Edwardian childrens' writing, he comments:

The flavour of mysticism in [Kenneth Grahame] was one that spoke to the other anxieties of the age: urbanisation, commerce, clock-time and the onward push of modernity...Here was a mysticism of the natural world, of a rural England associated with an idealised childhood untainted by all these things. It's a world in which the dreary timetabled duties of adulthood need not impinge, a world in which, per Peter Pan's impassioned outburst, you can 'always be a little boy and have fun'.

I would perhaps change that last bit to 'always be a little boy and read books about Napoleon'.

There is, further, an element in my own nostalgia that I can only describe as phantastical. Looking back at my childhood I can scarcely help but see it as a haunted one. I never saw a ghost or had anything like a supernatural experience - unlike my old Mum who claimed to have seen many a spirit and to have the unwanted gift of being able to see dead people - and yet I always felt aware that there might be fiends in the furrows, even when walking along 1970s suburban Liverpool streets. What made the sense of haunting more potent still as I aged was that I didn't feel that it was ghosts that were doing the haunting, so much as changing people. That the figures populating my past were people who, if still alive, had since changed so utterly with age that in my memories they feel long dead. This has given my childhood memories a patina of unreality that has made a deep dive into my past feel as much like a plunge into myth as a mere stroll back into memory. It has inclined me to embrace folklore and has perhaps helped to drive my fondness for ghost stories and horror films; to paraphrase a quote I heard in a recent film, when reading a book I prefer a light that is bright enough that I won't damage my eyesight, but not so sharp that it will dispel all the shadows from the corner of my vision.

And I have explored with interest the concept of Hauntology, with its idea of lost futures, as it appears to posit a recent past that is in some sense prelapsarian and related to the present in a way that is more complicated than the merely temporal. This accords very closely with my own political views of a world that appeared to be becoming ever more liberal and egalitarian until the end of the 1970s, when it was overtaken by the rise of neoliberalism, with the result, as we know now, of a world of massive inequality, human financial and emotional impoverishment on a massive scale, and environmental collapse.

I feel I have tried my best here to explain some of the thoughts that drive my own deep obsession and sympathy with the past, and hopefully some of these thoughts will be not unfamiliar with those who share some of my proclivities. There is one last thing to make understood, and that is that I make no apologies, and feel no shame, for my obsession with the past. I have no doubt that psychologists would regard it as unhealthy, or that almost everyone I know will regard it as perverse and unfashionable, but so be it. If you are someone who embraces the much healthier way of living for the moment then have at it and be welcome. I will continue to take my comfort where I know I can, and at 61, on what I consider to be some way along the home stretch, I suspect it's too late to change very much even if I cared to.

With the next post I aim to dial back this philosophical tone and go back to talking about stuff from the past. Stay tuned!