In 1942, aged 18, my mother was running for her life with her father, mother and siblings, heading for an air-raid shelter as bombs pulverised Portsmouth, turning the city into “a tomb of darkness” as one diarist recorded. During the war the family were to lose their home twice as the city and its docks became a prime target. My mother was wearing a new coat so when her father ordered everyone to hit the ground, she refused. A bomb splinter gouged one side of her back. A female ambulance driver risked her life to drive my mother to hospital through the raid.
I was born in 1948. My mother and father lived in a bedsit and saved a few shillings a week for her confinement. And then, like millions who had endured six years of war, they had their just rewards. “The destruction is so awful and the people so wonderful, they deserve a better world,” wrote the future Queen Elizabeth to her grandmother, Mary. On 5 July, the NHS was born. It no longer cost a couple dearly to have a baby. I came along a few weeks later, a citizen of the new “cradle to the grave” welfare state. As historian Asa Briggs said: “War has necessitated welfare.”
Doris Lessing arrived in London from South Africa in the year I was born. “No cafes, no good restaurants. Clothes were still ‘austerity’, from the war dismal and ugly,” she wrote. “Everyone was indoors by 10 and the streets were empty… Any conversation tended to drift towards the war like an animal licking a sore place. There was a wariness, a weariness.”
Baby boomers, like me, were born out of – or because of – that weariness. We now make up one in five of the population (more than 12 million). This huge postwar bulge, “the pig in the python”, created by those born in the years between 1944-64, is a permanent irritation to many not least because we are accused of making off with the spoils (one in five is a millionaire while 16% of the UK population lives in relative poverty). Eighty years since the second world war began and 74 years since it ended, we are now moving into our seventies.
Time is running out to reconsider how war shaped not only the lives of our parents but our lives too. At 18, I was part of the so-called swinging 60s, sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, miniskirts, Beatles, sit-ins, women’s lib, protest, anti-establishment – the counter-culture. (The counter-culture combined with consumerism, described by American academic Theodore Roszak as “a resounding market success”).
Thanks to the expansion in higher education, in 1967, I was about to go to a redbrick university, on a full grant and paying no tuition fees. My mother had left school at 14 and became a tailor’s apprentice and, to me, in 1967, she was a lost cause, entombed in domesticity. Then, the arrogance of youth meant she and I belonged to alien (and sometimes hostile) tribes. Only years later did I come to realise how much we had in common: how the experience of war had shaped my aspirations and frustrations and my generation’s rejection of the notions that women and the working class should know their place – just as surely as it had shaped hers.
“British women have proved themselves in this war… they have died at their gun posts,” instructed a US war department booklet given to every soldier entering Britain, equipped with supplies of nylon stockings, fags and chocolate. “When you see a girl in uniform with a bit of ribbon on her tunic, remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.” War, for women in Britain, broke down traditional barriers between the public and the private, the domestic and the “real” world. Women showed guts.
Only in Britain, from 1941, were so many women conscripted; the cage door had opened. In 1939, 5.1 million females were in work. Four years later, that number had swollen to 7.25 million – nine in 10 single women and eight in 10 wives had a wage packet. Even earlier, my mum had become one of the 2,000 women a week who enlisted, in her case in the newly established Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Posted to Yorkshire, she left her father’s house as “a mobile woman”, independent, for the very first time. Much to the consternation of the trade unions, women took over what had previously been regarded as out of bounds for “the weaker sex”, highly skilled “men’s work”, including 300,000 jobs in the explosives and chemical industries and half a million posts in the engineering and metal industries. John G Winant, US ambassador to London, said: “This war, more than any other war in history, is a woman’s war.”
Working-class women had always needed to work but before the war more than a million had been employed as “domestics”. Now they were in the male labour force. Mona Marshall, a nursemaid turned steelworker, said: “The war made me stand on my own two feet.” Ellen McCulloch, a women’s officer at the TGWU, said in 1942 of her members: “They began to realise that they weren’t second-class citizens.”
War also exposed, for all to see, inequality. Women earned half the male wage. In 1943, in the Rolls-Royce factory in Hillington near Glasgow, women went on strike. They earned 43 shillings a week, the men 30 shillings more. Backed by the men, they won – wages were paid according to the job, not gender.
“It is impossible to confront a common condition before you have recognised it,” feminist Sheila Rowbotham was to write in 1973, about women waking up to the position they were in. “You can’t begin to find your own power until you have consciously recognised your non-power.”
War and national reconstruction meant women had been let out of the home but only on temporary licence to fulfil “masculine” duties. But once out, some at least began to perceive that the problems they faced weren’t down to their “natural” inferiority but the system itself. That awareness set off ripples that created a tidal wave in the sixties.
Dislocation is a theme of all wars. In Britain in the second world war, mothers left home for work; men went to the front; children in London were evacuated. “They call this spring, mum,” one child wrote to his mother from the countryside, “and they have one down here every year.”
In the sixties, we chanted “Make Love Not War”. In the war, they were making love. The number of illegitimate babies tripled to 16.1 per thousand in 1945. War forced men, women and children out of their comfort zone – gender, geography (between 1939-45 there were almost 35m changes of addresses in England and Wales) and class contributed to a kaleidoscope of new experiences and nobody knew where the pattern would settle – except that it had to be better than the squalor, poverty and social injustice that had prevailed before the war.
Then came the Valium of the fifties when the position of women appeared to regress. They were told to go back home; nurseries were closed. But something had irreversibly changed. Women were carving out a different existence and so too, willingly or not, did the two million men returning from the forces.
“In place of the traditional working-class husband as mean with his money as he was callous in sex, forcing unwanted babies on his wife, has come a man who wheels the pram on Saturday morning,” wrote Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, egging the pudding a touch, in their study of London’s Bethnal Green.
Wages rose (as did inflation), hire purchase – “the never-never” – arrived and ensured that “a ‘care free kitchen’, was awash with products to keep ‘the little lady’ amused”. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1958’s The Affluent Society described what we now have again, “private affluence, public squalor”. In Britain the Conservatives built houses but also created new estates that were deserts not neighbourhoods.
As we lived in fear of the H-bomb and annihilation, influential child psychologist John Bowlby insisted that a good mother stayed at home with her child. However, while in 1931 10% of married women were in work, that rose sharply to 21% in 1951 and 47% in 1972. My mother became a gifted, but unqualified teacher, and I saw her at her happiest, if not without maternal guilt. “It’s particularly difficult to be a woman just at present,” said a character in Rosamund Lehmann’s 1953 book, The Echoing Grove. “One feels so transitional and fluctuating… so I suppose do men.”
Money, opportunity (albeit delivered by the carnage of war) and access to education remoulded the working class – as did the advent of the teenager, the stripling baby boomer, who had plenty left over from a “good” wage after handing over their keep to mam to invest in mod, teddy boy or rocker gear. The civil rights, anti-authoritarian, liberal, permissive (though not as permissive as the myths have it) attitudes that heralded the sixties were rooted in the experiences of war, the affluence of the fifties and full employment. “Tune in, turn on, drop out” had the insurance that there was always a job waiting when flower power waned.
At the beginning of the sixties too, the prewar deference – diluted in the second world war as the inequities of the class system were laid bare – translated into a cultural and intellectual acceptance of the working class. For the first time, people from my parents’ backgrounds saw their working class-lives mirrored in plays, television, books and Coronation Street, watched by my mother, always the stoic, until just before her 90th birthday. Out went plots set in house parties and country estates, in came Arthur Seaton as the bicycle worker in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. “The air crackled with a new energy,” said Stan Barstow, author of A Kind of Loving.
Nineteen-year-old Shelagh Delaney, a theatre usher, wrote a “kitchen sink” play, A Taste of Honey, that wonderfully tells the story of Jo, a 17-year-old working-class girl from Salford having a mixed-race “bastard” baby, befriended by a gay man (at a time when homosexuality was illegal). Delaney’s targets were poverty, homophobia, misogyny and racism. The programme notes for the original production said of Delaney: “She is the antithesis of London’s ‘angry young men’. She knows what she is angry about.”
In John Osborn’s Look Back in Anger, Jimmy, the sweet stall holder and weekend intellectual, rages at his posh wife, Alice. She tells her father, a retired colonel: “You’re hurt because everything has changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it.”
“The scorn which the angry young men hurled at the establishment was a class resentment but one devoid of any class consciousness,” feminist Lynne Segal writes perceptively in Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy. In the decades that followed, shaped by race riots, feminism, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and the collapse of heavy industry and trade unionism, working-class solidarity appeared to fracture. The rise of what’s now called identity politics began.
In 1961, sociologist Ferdynand Zweig noted presciently: “Working-class life finds itself on the move towards new middle-class values and middle-class existence… the change can only be described as… the development of new aspirations and cravings.” My mother’s ambition was to move up the social ladder when that was still possible.
Today, paradoxically, middle class by education and income, I anchor myself in the working class. And I’m not alone. In 2016, an Oxford University survey found that the majority of Britons called themselves working class. Nostalgia? Or a yearning for more than looking after number one?
From the Blitz to Brexit is a tenuous thread but it is visible. The decades since 1939 have been conflicting and contradictory. In 1968, student and feminist Mary Ingham records in her diary: “Why am I not happy and married with two kids? Why am I aimlessly wasting away?” Individualism and austerity have shifted blame from a profoundly unequal and unjust society, widely acknowledged in the war, to character failings.
We have moved from criticism of the systemic to the personal. But in tribute to my parents’ memory, I do believe that what existed at the heart of the people’s war still continues. Namely, a hope that in collective effort, under the banner of freedom and fairness, something better can be built.
