My wife
earnestly instructs Chinese restaurants to deliver in cardboard cartons. My
children are depressingly knowledgeable about climate change. Ours is an
environmental family: by their standards, I am a prelapsarian relic from the
age of ecological innocence. But who traipses through the apartment switching
off lights and checking for leaking faucets? Who favors make-do-and-mend in an
era of instant replacement? Who recycles leftovers and carefully preserves old
wrapping paper? My sons nudge their friends: Dad grew up in poverty. Not at
all, I correct them: I grew up in austerity.
After the
war everything was in short supply. Churchill had mortgaged Great Britain and
bankrupted the Treasury in order to defeat Hitler. Clothes were rationed until
1949, cheap and simple “utility furniture” until 1952, food until
1954. The rules were briefly suspended for the coronation of Elizabeth, in June
1953: everyone was allowed one extra pound of sugar and four ounces of
margarine. But this exercise in supererogatory generosity served only to
underscore the dreary regime of daily life.
To a
child, rationing was part of the natural order. Indeed, long after the practice
ceased, my mother convinced me that “sweets” (candy) were still
restricted. When I protested that school friends appeared to have unlimited
access to the stuff, she explained disapprovingly that their parents must be on
the black market. Her story was all the more credible because the legacy of war
was ever-present. London was pockmarked with bomb sites: where once there had
been houses, streets, railway yards, or warehouses there were now large
roped-off areas of dirt, usually with a dip in the middle where the bomb had
fallen. By the early 1950s unexploded ordnance had been mostly cleared and bomb
sites—though off-limits—were no longer dangerous. But these
impromptu play spaces were irresistible for small boys.
Rationing
and subsidies meant that the bare necessities of life were accessible to all.
Courtesy of the postwar Labour government, children were entitled to a range of
healthful products: free milk but also concentrated orange juice and cod-liver
oil—obtainable only in pharmacies after you established your identity.
The orange juice came in rectangular, medicine-like glass bottles and I have never
quite lost the association. Even today, a large glassful prompts in me a
sublimated pang of guilt: better not drink it all at once. Of cod-liver oil,
urged upon housewives and mothers by benevolently intrusive authorities, the
less said the better.
We were
fortunate to lease an apartment above the hairdressing shop where my parents
worked, but many of my friends lived in substandard or temporary housing. Every
British government from 1945 through the mid-1960s committed itself to
large-scale public housing schemes: all fell short. In the early 1950s,
thousands of Londoners still lived in “prefabs”: urban trailer
parks for the homeless, ostensibly temporary but often lasting for years.
Postwar
guidelines for new housing were minimalist: three-bedroom houses were to
comprise at least nine hundred square feet of living space—about the size
of a spacious one-bedroom apartment in contemporary Manhattan. Looking back,
these homes seem not merely pokey, but chilly and underfurnished. At the time,
there were long waiting lists: owned and managed by local authorities, such
houses were intensely desirable.
The air
over the capital resembled a bad day in Beijing; coal was the fuel of
choice—cheap, abundant, and domestically produced. Smog was a perennial
hazard: I recall leaning out of the car window, my face enveloped in a dense
yellow haze, instructing my father on his distance from the curb—you
could literally not see beyond an arm’s length ahead of you and the smell
was awful. But everyone “muddled through together”: Dunkirk and the
Blitz were freely invoked without a hint of irony to illustrate a sense of
national grit and Londoners’ capacity to “take
it”—first Hitler, now this.
I grew up at least as familiar with World War I as with the one that
had just ended. Veterans, memorials, and invocations abounded; but the
ostentatious patriotism of contemporary American bellicosity was altogether
absent. War, too, was austere: I had two uncles who fought with
Montgomery’s Eighth Army from Africa through Italy and there was nothing
nostalgic or triumphalist in their accounts of shortage, error, and
incompetence. Arrogant music hall evocations of empire—
We don’t want to fight them, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the
money too!
—had
been replaced by the wartime radio lament of Vera Lynn: We’ll meet again, don’t know where,
don’t know when. Even in the afterglow of victory, things
would never be the same.
Reiterated
references to the recent past established a bridge between my parents’
generation and my own. The world of the 1930s was with us still: George
Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier,
J.B. Priestley’s Angel
Pavement, and Arnold Bennett’s The Grim Smile of the Five Towns all spoke to an England
very much present. Wherever you looked, there were affectionate allusions to
imperial glory—India was “lost” a few months after I was
born. Biscuit tins, pencil holders, schoolbooks, and cinema newsreels reminded
us of who we were and what we had achieved. “We” is no mere
grammatical convention: when Humphrey Jennings produced a documentary to
celebrate the 1951 Festival of Britain, he called it Family Portrait. The family might have fallen on hard times,
but we were all in it together.
It was
this “togetherness” that made tolerable the characteristic
shortages and grayness of postwar Britain. Of course, we weren’t really a family: if we were, then the
wrong members—as Orwell had once noted—were still in charge. All
the same, since the war the rich kept a prudently low profile. There was little
evidence in those years of conspicuous consumption. Everyone looked the same
and dressed in the same materials: worsted, flannel, or corduroy. People came
in modest colors—brown, beige, gray—and lived remarkably similar
lives. We schoolchildren accepted uniforms all the more readily because our
parents too appeared in sartorial lockstep. In April 1947, the ever-dyspeptic
Cyril Connolly wrote of our “drab clothes, our ration books and murder
stories…. London [is] now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of
great cities.”
Great
Britain would eventually emerge from postwar penury—though with less
panache and self-confidence than its European neighbors. For anyone whose
memories go back no further than the later 1950s, “austerity” is an
abstraction. Rationing and restrictions were gone, housing was available: the
characteristic bleakness of postwar Britain was lifting. Even the smog was
abating, now that coal had been replaced by electricity and cheap
fuel oil.
Curiously,
the escapist British cinema of the immediate postwar years—Spring in Park Lane (1948) or Maytime in Mayfair (1949), with Michael
Wilding and Anna Neagle—had been replaced by hard-boiled “kitchen
sink” dramas starring working-class lads played by Albert Finney or Alan
Bates in gritty industrial settings: Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning (1960) or A
Kind of Loving (1962). But these films were set in the north, where
austerity lingered. Watching them in London was like seeing one’s
childhood played back across a time warp: in the south, by 1957, the
Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could assure his listeners that
most of them had “never had it so good.” He was right.
I don’t think I fully appreciated the impact of those early
childhood years until quite recently. Looking back from our present vantage
point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would
welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition: it
aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister from 1945
to 1951, had emerged—like Harry Truman—from the shadow of a
charismatic war leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.
Churchill
mockingly described him as a modest man “who has much to be modest
about.” But it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in
modern British history—comparable to the achievements of Lyndon Johnson
two decades later but under far less auspicious circumstances. Like Truman, he
lived and died parsimoniously—reaping scant material gain from a lifetime
of public service. Attlee was an exemplary representative of the great age of
middle-class Edwardian reformers: morally serious and a trifle austere. Who
among our present leaders could make such a claim—or even
understand it?
Moral
seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it
when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of
political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too
has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR
as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the
profession: precise, restrained—and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might
aspire to the heights of Salvador Dalí (and believe himself complimented by the
comparison), Tony Blair to the standing—and cupidity—of
Damien Hirst.
In the
arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint:
the world of The Bicycle Thief. I
recently introduced our twelve-year-old son to François Truffaut’s 1959
classic Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows). Of a generation raised on
a diet of contemporary “message” cinema from The Day After Tomorrow through Avatar, he was stunned: “It’s
spare. He does so much with so little.” Quite so. The wealth of resources
we apply to entertainment serves only to shield us from the poverty of the
product; likewise in politics, where ceaseless chatter and grandiloquent
rhetoric mask a yawning emptiness.
The
opposite of austerity is not prosperity but luxe
et volupté. We have substituted endless commerce for public purpose,
and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders. Sixty years after Churchill
could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war
president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his
rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of
September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of
community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we
deserve from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn
to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be
in order.
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