This article is a preview from the Spring 2019 edition of New Humanist
Like many people I’ve met who actually remember the Second World War, children’s author Alan Garner (born 1934) has no desire to return to those days. As a young boy growing up in Cheshire, he remembers the constant fear of bombing raids and absorbed a child’s deep and specific terror that Hitler wanted to kill him personally. He had a plan for what he would do if the Germans broke into his house.
“I find nostalgia one of the most poisonous words in the English language,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2018. “When I was living in that time I heard adults talking about the good old days and now they are talking about the good old days. It is a complete romantic fabrication.”
I thought of Garner’s words as parliamentary chaos about the Brexit deal dominated the news. Mark Francois, the pro-leave MP (born 1965) staged a stunt on the BBC News channel, tearing up a letter written by the German CEO of Airbus warning about the risk of moving factories abroad. In doing so, Francois claimed he was like his dad – who fought at D-Day – in standing up to German bullies. The same week, BBC News voxpopped a trio of what looked liked 60-somethings – too young to remember rationing, which ended in 1954 – about supermarkets’ warning of food shortages in the case of a No Deal departure. All were blasé about the prospect. One mused about the value of “eating seasonally”. Another said warnings were mere “scaremongering”, continuing: “It would do the country good to do without for a while, make them appreciate what they’ve had.”
Garner said “the point of getting out of bed in the morning is to bring about the future and that’s why I loathe nostalgia.” But in that spirit of bringing about a better future, I’ve been wondering if nostalgia can have positive uses.
In a kind of experiment, whenever a fond old memory of childhood or my early 20s surfaces, I very consciously interrogate its presence and its timing and what might be lurking beneath. Take for instance my affection, often discussed with my university students, for poring over the daily newspaper, which I kept in a stack in my bedroom as a teenager in the 1980s. Or over favourite pop stars’ album sleeve notes. My nostalgia for old analogue methods of consumption reveals a legitimate concern about how digital overload of “free” content has eroded young people’s ability to absorb and get deep pleasure from music and literature. How do we ever get to the end of an online newspaper? It’s made me recommend to my students that they buy a physical paper at least once a month, to experience the satisfaction of a curated, finite read.
Other nostalgic memories trip a wire to something darker. One came from reading Tracey Thorn’s recent memoir Another Planet, about her teenage years in a commuter village, similar to mine. I recognised, sometimes almost word for word, the diary entries she kept – lists of what she wore to parties: “straight skirt, shirt, belt and stilettos”. The same jokey deployment of exclamation marks about cheeky boys following her and her girlfriends. But lurking between the lines, in jokey comments, was a written record of much older boys and men pursuing 13-year-old girls. In my case, it was a music teacher’s husband who tried to get young girls into his house alone. We warned each other, but never our parents. It was our own problem. No one was watching out for us.
The use of this memory has been to reassess risk for modern children and teenagers. For all the new anxieties about online grooming, I am genuinely glad that modern child protection policies exist. My fond memories are now tempered by anxiety for what might have happened, and what did happen to others.
And then there is the unique nostalgia for the early independence of one’s 20s. Reaping the fruit of our mothers’ battles in the 1970s, we entered the workplace flashing our corporate lanyards like FBI agent Dana Scully in The X-Files. What is the use of feeling nostalgic for my optimism then? Partly to recapture the spirit of those days, when I felt I was equal, as I battle now for equal pay like many of my sisters. There’s a power in seeing now what I didn’t know was lurking beneath those joyful early-career years – a naive assumption that women were being paid fairly because we seemed to be taking up equal positions in the workplace. I see powerful uses in certain forms of nostalgia that are not entirely at odds with Alan Garner’s sentiments. Bottle those happy memories, even if they were based on false assumptions. Examine them, and release their lessons to bring about a better future.
