Old prejudices died hard. When a group of West Germans arrived on holiday in England in October 1975, they were stunned to find their hotelier taking down their food order as ‘two eggs mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads’. And when they asked him to stop mentioning the war, he retorted, ‘You started it … You invaded Poland’, and finally snapped, ‘Who won the bloody war, anyway?’ Of course Basil Fawlty set out with decent intentions; at the beginning of Fawlty Towers’ most famous episode, he admonishes the suspicious Major: ‘Forgive and forget, Major. God knows how, the bastards.’ And even when suffering from concussion, he does his best: ‘All in the Market together, old differences forgotten, and no need at all to mention the war.’57
But then how could he possibly forget it, given its ubiquity in British cultural life in the 1970s? Even in the year of Britain’s accession to the EEC, millions of people were being treated to the gigantic (if excellent) documentary series The World at War every week on ITV. On the BBC, meanwhile, series like Dad’s Army, Colditz and Secret Army attracted more than 10 million viewers a week and spanned almost the entire decade, re-creating a lost golden age when Britain mattered in the world and had prevailed against overwhelming odds in a clear-cut struggle of good against evil. In Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett never shuts up about the ‘bloody Huns’; in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Terry Collier loves to moan about his German ex-wife; in Rising Damp, Rigsby is never happier than when recounting how he got his ‘war wound’ in the North African desert. And with boys’ comics like Victor, Tiger and Commando wallowing in war nostalgia and anti-German feeling, it was no wonder that in 1974 only 13 per cent of the population said they liked Germans, with the majority describing them as ‘violent, lacking in tolerance, and unfriendly’ – and hostility being strongest among the young.58
But the incident that revealed most about British attitudes to Europe concerned another project close to Heath’s heart: the long-discussed dream of building a tunnel under the Channel to link the French coast with his native Kent. In March 1973 the government announced plans to build the Channel Tunnel, issuing a White Paper which observed that ‘Britain is no long economically or socially an island’. A few weeks later, Heath and Pompidou finalized the deal, and in December the Channel Tunnel Bill passed its Second Reading by 18 votes. But when Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street, he could hardly wait to kick the idea into touch. ‘An island is an island,’ Barbara Castle wrote in her diary after the Cabinet had agreed to drop the scheme, ‘and should not be violated. Certainly I am convinced that the building of a tunnel would do something profound to the national attitude – and not certainly for the better.’ In July 1977, Bernard Donoughue made the mistake of mentioning the tunnel scheme as a possible answer to unemployment in the construction industry. ‘This would be the worst thing that could ever happen to Britain,’ Peter Shore said angrily, jumping to his feet and ‘waving his arms … How old was I? Did I not remember 1940? We would be invaded by Germans coming through the tunnel.’ Donoughue thought he was ‘quite mad’. But Shore’s was not a minority view: despite all Heath’s efforts, despite all the foreign holidays and Continental ready meals, Britain in the mid-1970s remained a deeply inward-looking society, suspicious of foreigners and hostile to the outside world. In the final analysis, most people would probably have agreed with the words of Alan Clark, who idly remarked to Dennis Skinner in the Commons tea-room queue one day: ‘I’d rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of fucking foreigners.’59
5
The Green Death
Our ancestors made machines and the machines destroyed the earth, causing earthquakes and volcanoes that killed men by the hundreds of thousands. That is why the Spirits decreed that the making of machines was an abomination.
– John Christopher, The Prince in Waiting (1970)
Imagine when the holocaust comes and these places are all deserted and there are thistles growing on the motorway … and there’s grass growing over the jukebox … and honeysuckle coming out of the espresso, yeah … and tadpoles swimming in the ladies.
– Steven Poliakoff, Strawberry Fields (1977)
For Howard and Barbara Kirk, the academic couple at the centre of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man (1975), life should be perfect. They live in a renovated Georgian terraced house in the south-coast university town of Watermouth. Their walls are lined with books and African masks; their shelves overflow with bottles of wine. Their kitchen is a temple to the organic fashions of the day, full of French casseroles and earthenware dishes; ‘the long table is scrubbed pine, the shelves on the walls are pine, there are pine cabinets, and pine and rush chairs, and rush matting on the floors’. As a fashionable sociology lecturer and media don, Howard is the darling of the town’s left-wing party circuit, while Barbara is ‘a cordon bleu cook, an expert in children’s literature, a tireless promoter of new causes’. They even look ‘the way new people do look’: Howard with his Zapata moustache, white sweatshirts, ‘hairy loose waistcoats’ and ‘pyjama-style blue jeans’; Barbara with her ‘frizzled yellow hair’, green eyeshadow and long kaftan dresses that show off the fact she is not wearing a bra. They are busy, popular, fashionable people, at the cutting edge of cultural life. And yet they are always looking back to the past, to the undelivered promise of the 1960s, to an unfulfilled ‘hazy dream’ of ‘expanded minds, equal dealings, erotic satisfactions, beyond the frame of reality, beyond the limits of the senses’. ‘Do you remember,’ Barbara asks her husband, ‘when things were all wide open and free, and we were all doing something and the revolution was next week? And we were under thirty and we could trust us?’ ‘It’s still like that,’ Howard protests. ‘Is it really like that?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you think people have got tired?’1
Laments for the lost promise of the 1960s were a common theme of bohemian life during the age of stagflation. By the time Malcolm Bradbury wrote his brilliant satirical novel, the emblematic boutiques of Swinging London had conceded defeat in the face of surging rents and recession, while the underground press, once associated with so many idealistic dreams, had largely collapsed amid plummeting circulation and bitter factional infighting. Radicals liked to claim that the counterculture had been broken by the ‘establishment’, citing the Oz obscenity trial in the summer of 1971, when the underground paper’s three editors were briefly imprisoned and had their hair forcibly cropped after being prosecuted for showing Rupert Bear in various pornographic poses. A year later, when a group of anarchists were found guilty of the Angry Brigade bombings, which had targeted banks, embassies, shops and the house of the Home Secretary, Robert Carr, it did seem that the state had crushed the spirit of rebellion. But the truth was that even without those landmark trials, the counterculture was doomed, as its look and style were appropriated by mainstream enterprises and its rebellious energy drained away in the economic crisis of the early 1970s. As early as January 1971, John Lennon gloomily told an interviewer:
The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same except that there is a lot of middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes and Kenneth Tynan’s making a fortune out of the word ‘fuck’. The same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything, it’s exactly the same. They hyped the kids and the generation.
We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game, nothing’s really changed … The dream is over. It’s just the same only I’m thirty and a lot of people have got long hair, that’s all.2
Lennon was a bitter man, but his sentiments were not unusual. ‘The feeling of community that was about to emerge three years ago has shattered and split,’ wrote the radical activists Edward Barker and Mick Farren in 1972. ‘Flower power’s failure’, they concluded, proved that society was ‘not even prepared to tolerate the existence of any minori
ty who attempted to live according to other principles, no matter how peaceful or self-contained their culture might be’. A tiny minority, like the Angry Brigade, reacted by falling for the supposed glamour and efficacy of violence, like their far more effective and dangerous international comrades in the Baader–Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades. But most turned inwards, whether wry and wistful or sour and disillusioned. And while some historians argue that the early 1970s were ‘the real Sixties’, it did not seem like that at the time. What had once called itself the ‘underground community’ broke up; as one writer puts it, ‘squatters became home-owners; local activists became adventure playground leaders; utopians joined the Labour Party’. Certainly by 1972, with the underground press in ruins, the counterculture was effectively dead. When police broke up the illegal Free Festival in Windsor Great Park in August 1974, arresting 220 people amid scenes akin to a pitched battle, many saw it as the requiem mass for an era of freedom and experimentation. ‘The Isle of Wight, Glastonbury, these were the great manifestations of the alternative culture of love, dope, sounds, macrobiotic food, tripping, instinctive anarchism, youth, the new life-style,’ wrote the jazz musician George Melly in an obituary for the 1960s in the Observer a few days later. ‘The last bastion of all that was that free festival in Windsor last week and … the law moved in with truncheons and shut the whole thing down … My spirit mourned for Windsor, the pathetic and perhaps the last manifestation of peace and love.’3
Perhaps the best barometer of the changing mood was the theatre. Where once radical playwrights, inspired by the likes of Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Kenneth Tynan, had looked forward to a brave new world, they now looked back in anger. As the critic Michael Billington puts it, in the early 1970s ‘there was a sense of hopes dashed, of things winding down, of individual lives confronting intractable problems’, so that the abiding themes of the new generation were ‘disappointment, disillusion and a pervasive sense of despair’. In Trevor Griffiths’ play The Party, which opened at the National Theatre just after the announcement of the three-day week in December 1973, a group of revolutionary socialists plan the way forward during the Paris disturbances of May 1968; yet all the time, we know that there will be no revolution, that the future does not lie with the radical left, that their dreams will turn to ashes. Howard Brenton’s play Weapons of Happiness (1976) makes a similar point: when a group of well-meaning radicals stage a sit-in at a London crisps factory, their naive utopianism comes over as reckless and self-indulgent rather than brave or admirable. And in his friend David Hare’s play Teeth ’n’ Smiles (1975), suggestively set in the last year of the 1960s, a radical rock band see their dreams literally go up in smoke after a farcical gig at a university ball, their idealism deflated by sharp reality. ‘The fringe has failed,’ Brenton observed in 1974. ‘Its failure was that of the whole dream of an “alternative culture” … The truth is that there’s only one society – that you can’t escape the world you live in. Reality is remorseless. No one can leave.’4
And yet across the national landscape – from the communes of mid-Wales to the antique shops of Camden Lock, from the squats of Notting Hill to the Victorian enclaves of university towns across the country – the 1960s had left a deep impression. Like Howard and Barbara Kirk, most of the young men and women who had seen themselves as bohemians or freethinkers in the late 1960s ended up older, wiser, mildly disillusioned but still fiercely idealistic residents of what might be called the counterculture belt, in the leafy streets of gentrifying urban villages, in run-down Georgian squares, in renovated Victorian townhouses and Edwardian garden flats. In 1974, the journalist Mary Ingham, who as a girl had expected to be married with children by her mid-twenties, found herself, aged 27, still sharing a shabby flat with a group of university friends in a dilapidated Regency crescent overlooking a park. One of her flatmates had gone back to university, two worked in publishing, another was a polytechnic lecturer and the fifth worked for a homeless charity. They lived in amiable squalor ‘among books and pieces of flowered pottery’; they argued late at night about ‘entry to the Common Market, Marxist politics, astrology’; they mingled with ‘fringe theatre actors and media people at noisy parties overflowing with wine, garlic bread and vegetarian delights’; they went to encounter-sessions with feminists and social workers in their ‘platform-sole boots, long peasant dresses and baggy trousers’.5
At that very moment, Jonathan Raban was observing the lives of his neighbours in the scruffy yet increasingly upmarket neighbourhoods of north and west London, a world of Japanese lampshades, white paint and stripped-pine stereo systems. ‘Here children play with chunky all-wood Abbatt toys,’ he noted; ‘here girl-wives grill anaemic escalopes of veal; everyone takes the Guardian.’ They worked in ‘journalism, publishing, TV’; they ‘cooked out of raggy Elizabeth David Penguins’, smoked pot, listened to Pink Floyd and earnestly discussed R. D. Laing and Michel Foucault. Visiting Ceres, a macrobiotic restaurant on Portobello Road, he imagined the life of one of ‘the girls who drift about the store, filling wire baskets with soya beans, miso and wakame seaweed’: her seriousness, her narcissism, her sense of ‘inner virtue’ and her ‘latent violence’. In her room, he thought, she might drink honey and grape juice and eat brown rice. On her shelves, he imagined the rows of paperbacks: Slaughterhouse 5, Steppenwolf, The Macrobiotic Way, The I-Ching, the poems of Rod McKuen and Leonard Cohen, and ‘Louis MacNeice’s coffee table book on astrology (an awkward Christmas present from her father)’. And if she read a newspaper, of course it would be the Guardian, which later caught the tone of semi-bohemian middle-class life so well in Posy Simmonds’s cartoon of Wendy Weber, the well-meaning feminist former nurse, now married to a bearded polytechnic lecturer called George. They wear ‘soft, frayed, patched, ethnic, woolly comfortable old clothes’; they eat lentil curries and vegetarian quiches; they drink expensive wines from Marks & Spencer. As a sociologist told Punch in 1977, theirs was the world of muesli and au pairs, discussion groups and nut salad, ‘wholemeal bread, encounter therapy, finger painting, dabbling in the occult, nudity’.6
And while they no longer demonstrated about Vietnam, as they had as students in the late 1960s, there were plenty of brave causes left. In the middle-class dinner party described in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Middle Ground (1980), a group of lecturers and journalists talk over the cheese of ‘the simple life, of communes in Wales, of modern technology and solar heating, of Wordsworth and the romantics, of nature and Rousseau’. They were the kind of people who subscribed to The Ecologist and joined Friends of the Earth, who read The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down, who called public meetings to stop the extension of the M3 or the development of Covent Garden. A decade before, writing about the Festival of Britain, Michael Frayn had captured the world of the ‘radical middle classes – the do-gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian, and the Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC … who look out from the lush pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass’. He called them the Herbivores. And never had the name seemed more fitting than in the early 1970s, the years when green was good and small was beautiful.7
In 1971, the Yorkshire Post gave its annual award for non-fiction to a title that must have struck fear into the souls of all who read it. Written by the science journalist Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Doomsday Book begins ominously with a long quotation from the Book of Revelation. On the very next page, Taylor warns his readers that mankind is facing an ‘eventual population crash’, an ‘apocalypse’ that will probably wipe out a third of humanity. Thanks to ‘crowding, pollution and a disturbed balance of nature’, the planet itself is at risk. The land has been over-farmed, the seas have been over-fished, the air is full of chemicals, and ‘Spaceship Earth’, with its fragile crust of land and thin band of atmosphere, is on the brink of collapse. The temperature is steadil
y rising; the icecaps are melting, the seas are rising, and as man releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so the planet is getting hotter and hotter. Even more worrying than global warming, however, is the threat of global cooling: scientists are already warning that the Earth stands on the brink of an ice age, and the distinguished British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a drop of 4 ºF by 1975 and ‘the start of a new ice age well before 1980’. But the time has long since passed for arguments about numbers. The priority, Taylor argues, is ‘to stabilize world population growth’. Britain should adopt the ‘realistic target’ of halving its population in fifty years, aiming for 30 million people in 2030. ‘Man’, he concludes, ‘has reached a turning point in his history.’8
With its apocalyptic tone, scattershot approach and wild warnings of a coming ice age, Taylor’s book was a quintessential product of the early 1970s. But although environmentalism is often thought to have been born in the age of oil shocks, coal strikes and communes, the truth is that Britain’s green movement has a long history. The first society to protect ‘Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths’ was founded as far back as 1865, while the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Fauna Preservation Society, the Metropolitan and Public Gardens Association and the Camping Club were all founded between 1880 and 1910, during the heyday of late Victorian and Edwardian conservationism. And although the twentieth century is often seen as the century of the city and the car, groups like the Ramblers’ Association, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the Pure Rivers Society were set up in the 1930s, the Attlee government set up the Nature Conservancy, the first agency dedicated to protecting wildlife, in 1949, and more than 200 local societies dedicated to the environment had been established by the late 1950s.
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 24
