The Experience of the Older Generation
(address to Bootham School Nov.1963)
When I’m talking to people in their teens and trying to get them to understand my thoughts, I often wonder what they think of the experiences of the adults from whom they are expected to learn: their parents and teachers, and the elderly folk to whom they sometimes have to listen. Does our experience communicate anything to the young or do we seem like people who do not speak a common language, people who do not derive authority from their experience but are merely encumbered by it – carrying it around like a burden that will not let them speak freely and freshly.
Just lately I have paused a little to think about my own experiences, challenged by two things: one of them Remembrance Day when we are asked to think of those who have died in the two great conflicts of this century, the other my arrival at my 60 birthday, which feels as though it ought to be a milestone on the way from being middle aged to elderly. When you are tremendously busy and finding life as full of interest as ever and when you still have the energy to go on, you don’t think of yourself growing old and it’s not often that you feel ready to sit back and reflect. Wisdom and experience seem to lie ahead, not to be in the past.
But when I did start remembering, I at once thought of myself as a teenager during the First World War, living through years of sadness and oppression. I was at a grammar school in London, a day boy walking to and fro between home and school, a serious boy with great ambition and a strong- almost too strong - sense of responsibility to my home and the world. My school was in large grounds in south west London and next to, beyond a high wall there was one of the largest army hospitals, established in the building grounds of what had been a girls school. To that hospital, along the road from Victoria Station, past the entrance to the school, and indeed sometimes through the school grounds, came the ambulances crawling slowly with their burden of wounded and mutilated men. Front line surgery was primitive or non existent in the First World War and a very large proportion of wounded men were transferred to hospital ships, brought to England and distributed to hospital. We were made aware of the aftermath of the great battles by the increasing stream of ambulances and every day we saw the recovering soldiers in hospital blue, minus arms or legs or blinded as they looked over the fence or came through to watch boys playing or listen to the sound of their voices.
Death was very near during those years. A boy in his teens is often a sensitive creature in spite behind all his noisy, coarse, jocular behavior is often a deeply sensitive creature and I know that my life was permanently marked by that experience. During that First World War we were aware that even from the point of view of those who a accepted war there was an appalling and stupid inexcusable waste of life. Stupid leaders, unable to adapt their minds to a new kind of warfare, pushed men on in tens of thousands into situations in which they could only die dumbly, blindly, senselessly. Hundreds of thousands died in the Battle of the Somme most of them not killed by bullets but drowned in mud. A million men from Britain died in world war one four times as many as in the Second World War. I knew it in our London street. Boys a little older than I suddenly appeared in khaki, conscripted into the army. They were not given much training, all too soon they were saying waving good bye as their train mo their troop train moved out of Victoria or Waterloo, waving good bye and singing sentimental songs to keep their minds off the hell to which they were destined. It was often only a few weeks later that one saw the messenger boy come with a telegram to a house opposite or a letter higher up or lower down, a woman coming to the door and reading it. A son killed. Then the drawing down of blinds to signify grief and death. We saw this happen time after time in our little street of jammed together houses, until it seemed that youth was utterly doomed. Three times the messenger boy came to one house. All the sons were dead. And it seemed only yesterday that our younger ones were cheeking them getting cuffed in return.
I had an insatiable appetite for finding out everything and because I was a me in the Society of Friends and my father was active in political circles, I had plenty of opportunity. I watched the grave and anxious faces of the adults sand listened to their conversation. By the time I was fourteen I knew all about the frightful scourge that had swept through the army, syphilis and the great labour camps behind the lines of men who were withdrawn because of this disease. I knew about the tribunals established to try conscientious objectors and the hypocrisy of the old men making money out of war, who sent young men to prison because they refused to fight. I knew about the stupid young women who taunted young men in civilian clothes and presented them with white feathers as symbols of cowardice.
Alongside this growing awareness of evil marching through the world, the ordinary life of a school boy went on. In a way I lived two lives and in one of them I cracked schoolboy jokes, enjoyed Latin and French and Chemistry and hated History, once took a hat trick and once scored the winning try.
The war blundered to an end
I learned a lot about human nature. I once stood on the edge of a crazy crowd gathering round a baker’s shop with a German name over the door. I heard a mu threatening murmur run through the crowd, rising as the frightened harmless owner shut and locked the door. A stone crashed through the window and the mass of patriotic citizens surged forward and looted the shop.
The war blundered to an end. For those of us who had any insight there was no sense of triumph only tired relief. And it was not the end of death for the world was attacked by the most devastating plague it had even known, influenzal pneumonia, perhaps originating in the insanitary trenches and feeding on a debilitated population. It came in two great waves, attacking both the weak and the strong. The influenza weakened their resistance and the pneumonia killed them. As I walked home from school I saw not ambulances but funerals sometimes only a few hundred yards apart. My father died in the second wave. He came home one day looking flushed; in three or four days he was dead. That terrible plague, sweeping all over the world, killed far more than did the war. Tens of millions died in India alone.
Between the two waves of this epidemic I went to college. Those were not very happy years. I played a good deal of tennis I rowed in a college eight I thought myself very important studying chemistry and making frightful smells in an organic laboratory. But that period from the end of the war up to 1929 saw the rise and fall of idealism. We saw the League of Nations, which was to have been the beginning of world co-operation, become a thieves kitchen which Nations tried to exploit for their solely for their own ends. It was a period of steady disillusionment. It was possible to enjoy life, to find great interest in ones work and to be intensely active, but it wasn’t possible any longer to believe in Progress. You could begin to teach, to get married and have children of your own, all of which I did - but ones personal happiness could no longer be supported by any optimism about the world. And there was a very serious and a new and very serious lesson waiting for us: the collapse of western economic the western economic structure in the course of a day or two in 1929. We learned that our whole economic structure was fundamentally unstable, it rested on nothing stronger than people’s the state of mind – or confidence. If investors lost confidence of a small section of people. If investors lost confidence and wanted to recall the money they had lent, a panic resulted and everything collapsed. Within a short time there were 10 million unemployed in the U.S. and two million in this country. Factories closed down, traders and shopkeepers went out of business, men collected in silent and miserable queues outside the Labour Exchanges to wait for the dole or the odd job which might or might not turn up. Boys knew what it was to grow up from their teens into adulthood without ever having a job. Skilled men sat on their hunkers in their doorways, feeling unwanted and cast out by society. They were less than things. If a conscientious employer managed to hold his business together to keep his men employed he could do it only by undercutting another a rival firm and putting its men out of work.
In a way this was a worse shock than the war. In a war, at least a nation holds together, tries to make everyone feel that he matters. But in the early thirties the opposite happened. The nation was divided in two: those who still had work and who mattered, and those who were unemployed, cast on a human scrap heap. But precisely because this was a new kind of shock it was the beginning of a new kind of thinking. It was not so much a turning point as the recognition that this was the point towards which we had been moving. We began to meet the unemployed, to make schemes to help them, not charity, but productive schemes to enable them to help themselves. The more intelligent unemployed met with teachers, social workers, clergymen, university people, philosophers, economists to try to understand what had happened to the world. We began to take serious interest in Russia, to ask why a Communist state never suffered from unemployment, why an apparently godless political philosophy was able to feed their hungry and clothe the naked while the largest so called free and Christian country hadn’t even got a system of unemployment insurance and had to cope with its 10 million unemployed by charity. We began to think of people as persons and though we still thought of political systems and tried to plan a new world, we knew that only one thing mattered, there was only one true purpose for that organizations should serve: the enriching of our lives as persons, living in relationship and in community.
This period of the middle thirties I look back on as a period of intense activity. We helped to turn over new land and make it grow food, we distributed clothing, we arranged systems of barter between one group and another, we even thought and argued for only of chartering a ship, to bring surplus food from the far ends of the world. And we met for week end conferences and thought not only with intensity but with a feeling of light breaking into a dark clouded world.
It was not only a dark clouded world, but a darkening one. Hitler has achieved control of Germany, Jews were being herded into concentration camps and the few who escaped to Britain brought stories of terrible and inhuman tortures cruelty, degradation and torture that were beyond anything that we had ever imagined possible. One was thinking Against this background our thinking about the world had to acknowledge evil as a tremendous positive active force. Evil as we saw it now was not just the absence of good, it was not just primitive or animal, it was the deliberate repudiation of the best that humanity has striven for, the black denial of what Christianity meant in human relationships. We turned on our radios, tuned in to German stations and listened with terrified fascination to the hysterical screams of Adolf Hitler and the equally hysterical response of his vast crowds. We went to the cinema and watched the news reals, watched the neurotic sadistic Himmler review the strutting ranks of black shirted, black booted storm troops - men reduced to the impersonality of soldier ants, and dressed to look like them.
We saw it beginning to come to our own country - Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marching through London recruited from the dregs among the irresponsible unemployed, thugs and prizefighters, housed in barracks and coming out in battalions to march threateningly through London in their black shirts. We saw them attack questioners at their meetings, ordinary people hit over the head or smashed in their mouths with knuckledusters, thrown down the steps of the meeting halls and we saw the British police often stand by and let it happen; even worse, they sometimes attacked and drove away the people who went to protest against this attack on our British standards of fair play and decency. We knew that evil could raise its head and frighten people into submission and cooperation not only in Germany but anywhere and right in our midst.
These people we were associated with were politically conscious people who knew Europe through and through who knew what was happening who kept the slender life lines open by which a few Jews and political refugees escaped from the terror in Germany and Austria. These would quickly turn up in our midst after terrifying adventures and we had to find money and jobs for them. It was the beginning.
Then came the beginning of Spanish Civil war. Those of us who had no political illusions knew that this was the real beginning of World War Two. The reactionary A mildly socialist democratic government had been democratically elected in Spain. The army and reactionary forces attacked it, encouraged, alas by the Spanish Catholic Church which in Spain was too much involved in land ownership and had compromised too much with Mammon. Hitler and Mussolini provided troops and aircraft, making this Civil war a deliberate training ground for their forces the greater war to come. Italian and German aircraft wiped out Spanish towns. The horror of Guernica completely undefended on market day when suddenly attacked and destroyed on market day when all the people were on the streets, was recorded and symbolized in Picasso’s famous picture. We knew then the shape of things to come. The British government did nothing, not because it was pacifist but because it was corrupted by compromise; it was more afraid of communism than of Nazism and too many of its supporters were prepared to shake hands with Hitler in order to save big business. But many young people, especially students, intellectuals, artists, poets, rushed to join the International Brigade, travel across France and found their way into Spain, meeting the imported Italian armies, fighting there in miscellaneous uniforms and with miscellaneous weapons and sometimes achieving miracles of resistance, even temporary victories, in face of troops fully equipped and supported by aircraft.
I said poets, and this was a time when poets and their work came specially before us. Auden, Isherwood, Day Lewis, Spender
Archive Reference PP/KCB 6/6/4 document 18