(This post was first published by The Dabbler in August 2011. I have made minor amendments to the 2011 text)
I’ve never had it: the lightly held, easily tossed-off belief that the past was “simpler” or “more innocent.” And little wonder. I spent most of my childhood obscurely but thoroughly scared; even now, many years later, I find myself disassociating under stress or seeking the means to. Nostalgia doesn’t come free: you need a certain kind of experience. I hadn’t, haven’t had it. Nonetheless, when I was a child I was obsessed with the 1920s and 1930s.
TV costume drama, daytime films on BBC2 and old family photographs gave Robert Graves’s Long Weekend a parallel existence running tantalizingly close to my own. These depictions had a confidence, a smartness and implied safety and politeness to them that gave the period a powerful prevailing imperative: it existed more strongly than we did, as though at any moment it could surge back into being and overwhelm all that had followed it.
A magnifying glass my pre-teenaged self held close up to a magazine picture of a GWR 4-6-0 Star class at Paddington brought me so close up to the photographic dots that I felt I could almost pull them aside like a curtain and step through. (Step through to join the young man who Hardy captures so well in Midnight on the Great Western, stunned by his intense pleasure at travelling to the beautiful city on that matchless line). But the curtain remained, and I remained, looking in.
Sometimes, the photographs look out. There is one, for instance, of terrible clarity, which shows Balliol’s Adam von Trott zu Solz facing a kangaroo court after the 20 July Plot of 1944 (above). He stares back at you, entirely defeated: whatever he’s in, it’s not some lift or elevator he can just step out of. Yet it’s hard to believe that you can’t simply go in there, with a snatch squad, and get him out into the safety of 1976 or 1997.
Not all escapism is nostalgia. And not all nostalgia is false. That faint modern desire – don’t you have it? – to dart back into the shade of pre-Crash 2005 or 2006 had powerful and justified counterparts in 1919 or 1945 and the years immediately after them. Simon Garfield’s astonishing Mass Observation diary compilations of the Second War and Austerity years are packed with moments when people admit to themselves: had we known in advance it would be this bad, the knowledge might have killed us.
There are at least four such black times in living memory or what was recently living memory: the wholesale destruction of British agricultural life following the American Civil War and 1871 Smash, the Great War and 1918 influenza outbreak, the Great Depression, and World War II. Is it still nostalgia when, for vast numbers of people caught up in such events, the safety and ease of the past is straightforward fact?
Regardless of the question, it’s easy to see how the habit of seeing the past as a better place might arise in that way and install itself at the heart of a culture; how it might become a default setting in the thinking of a large chunk of the population. What happens next, though, it seems to me, is entirely political.
Because contemporary expressions of it describe a distinctly political arc. The Hovis “New World Symphony” ad and the L.S. Lowry celebration song “Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs” were 1970s creations from the moment British income equality peaked. The great Miss Marple, Poirot and Sherlock Holmes series, however, let alone Brideshead, began in the 1980s and took the point of view of a quite different part of the population.
And now? The quite different, but both wonderful, Downton Abbey and Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes series presented us with compelling, but troubled and questioning views of the past: it’s not clear from either exactly who in society is entitled to nostalgia, or what that nostalgia, once inspired, is good for. John Simm’s Life On Mars was only tangentally about 1973 at all. It was, above all, and nakedly, about Britain looking back at the Thatcher years and asking what the hell did we do there? with guilt and sorrow implied, and then, in the final episode, having that magnificent silent debate, expressed entirely through hue and colour intensity, about what constitutes a properly felt and experienced life at all.
Which brings me back round again to fear and disassociation, because when they descend, you can’t feel: and you’re aware of the fog around you and the anaesthesia, and at the same time you’re certain that you are only inches away from a parallel existence where all that drops away and you can finally smell the air and feel the ground beneath your feet. Looking at that photograph of the GWR 4-6-0 Star class today, I feel as though there really had been life in there behind the photographic dots when I first leant over it as a child. It’s all gone now.