Soon after VE day, Pete Towhshend and I were born 12 days apart in Chiswick, now a distinctly up market part of west London. So when he sang about his generation, he was talkin' 'bout mine too. Those of us that are still around are mostly now either retired from paid employment or close to that desirable state. In another thirty years or so, we will nearly all be history, the few survivors being brought out for public show from time to time as relics of a bygone but interesting time.
What is a generation? Historians have struggled to capture generational experience. It is certainly something to do with the common experience of living in a particular time and place at a particular age. The exact nature of these experiences is difficult to identify and of course individual circumstances are always significant; but as an example I suspect that most people of my age grew up, in England at least, with a clear understanding that the War was a historical event of great significance in the experience of those who had lived through it - and that meant our parents. We all regularly heard the term pre-war and knew what it signified. If you could not quite buy two stone of monkey nuts then and still get change out of a farthing as Tony Capstick once suggested, it was still clear that pre-war, the depression, fascism and the aftermath of the Great War notwithstanding , was a kind of pristine golden age uncorrupted by flashy materialism and moral deterioration. The reaction (mostly men's) in the Second World War to American soldiers - overpaid, over sexed and over 'ere - was an example of the misgivings felt by some when faced with what was both unusual and, even worse, was the way of the future. Did those of us growing up in the fifties internalize those misgivings? Did they interact with the excitement we felt about American music, movies and style to create the oddly dissonant attitude so many of us carry towards the United States? Because of when we were born and what we heard about as children, do we carry with us a degree of awareness of what had gone before that gradually was to diminish for future generations? Did this combine with an ongoing experience of taking on the new and different make us distinct and perhaps historically unique? Is our generational self obsession so extreme that it proves the point of our exceptionalism. When Pete wrote that 'people try to put us down' just who exactly was us?
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Interestingly, I was just recently reflecting on how Otylka (also born in 1945) is so much a product of the time she was born in, and that despite not having any deep interest in politics, she is quite passionate when talking about history as she has lived through it. She definitely internalized much of her parents' experience as working class people who left Czechoslovakia after the Depression to make a living in France/Germany (her mother as a domestic servant and her father as a miner) and then returned home after the end of the war, to resettle in the area previously heavily populated by Sudeten Germans.
Czechs similarly consider the between-the-war period as a golden age that was shattered after the rise of fascism, and the country still is not entirely sure what to make of all the events that are tied to the war (including the deportation of Sudeten Germans, the rise of the Communist party, the Communist revolution in 1948 and belonging to the world of the Eastern Bloc, rather than the West). Certainly, you Baby-boomers grew up in a unique and fascinating time...
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