THE DUNKIRK MYTH NEVER TOLD OUR REAL STORY
David Aaronovitch
JULY 20 2017
BY JANUARY EVEN Britain should be Churchilled out. In June it was Brian Cox’s turn to shake his wattles as the Greatest Briton in the movie Churchill, and in the new year Gary Oldman will discover new jowls as the lead in Darkest Hour. In between you can have your senses blitzed by Dunkirk, which opens tomorrow and which I saw in preview earlier in the week. Stranded men, gallant Spitfire pilots, small boats, wobbly (but ultimately firm) chins and some bars from Elgar. The movie ends with Churchill’s “fight on the beaches” speech, and it seemed to me by the end that 1940 was not just our finest hour, it has increasingly become our only hour.
I think this matters because the overwhelming nature of this, our national myth, has an effect on the decisions we make. My evidence for this is largely impressionistic, but you can’t have incontrovertible stats every week.
During and after the referendum last year I spoke to a number of voters on either side of the big question. Naturally some people talked about immigration or the economy, but more important in the conversation of many of the Leave voters was an idea of Britain as they imagined it had once been. In the past this Britain had run itself and had been in hock to no one. It hadn’t depended on anyone else and no outsider had told it what to do.
It was easy for me to recognise this image. It is Dad’s Army and Goodnight Sweetheart, a myth of ourselves alone, unencumbered at the last by foreign weakness, forced back on to our own reservoirs of steadfastness and discovering a capacity to innovate.
By “myth” I don’t mean that all of this is untrue. The Dunkirk evacuation was something of a miracle and the fall of France left Britain existentially exposed, yet we prevailed. But what preceded Dunkirk was not just the unhappy policy of appeasement, supported in its day by a plurality of British voters, but nine months of a war conducted for the most part with stunning incompetence. In the immediate aftermath of Dunkirk, far from the “well done!” the returning soldiers get in the movie, Mass Observation reported that civilian morale in many places was at rock bottom.
There is one other aspect of the finest hour myth that is more pernicious than all the others. And it was given an odd illustration this week in the Adonis affair. If you recall, Lord Adonis gave a controversial interview to The House magazine. Viewed historically, he said, leaving the EU was a gigantic national strategic decision. It was right up there with “decolonisation in the 1950s and 60s and appeasement in the 1930s”. Then he added: “We got it right on decolonisation; we got it wrong on appeasement”.
The reaction was predictable. Iain Duncan Smith, for example, was double a’d (astonished and appalled) that Adonis “should have selected such a comparison, given all the appalling violence and death that Hitler visited on Europe and the rest of the world”.
It is an irritating feature of the age that even our leaders no longer understand the difference between an analogy and a comparison, let alone an equation. But then I suppose that if everyone did, much social media and some radio programmes would collapse for lack of outrage.
But what intrigued me was the entire absence of objection to one half of the Adonis analogy: decolonisation. It was 50 per cent of his examples, and no one mentioned it. Just as, on Tuesday, we passed the 70th anniversary of royal assent being given to the Indian Independence Act, and if anyone talked about it, then I’m a Nicobar islander. That day in 1947 was the day the Queen’s dad declared himself no longer to be the Emperor of India. It had been on the stamps, it had been on the coins, and then it was gone. Seventy years ago this June Lord Mountbatten had abruptly announced the date for independence and the setting up of India and Pakistan, for August 15. The maps weren’t even ready, but the British authorities withdrew and tens of millions of people began migrating to either side of the new borders. Maybe a million died. No Harry Styles film.
But in the preceding eight years 190,000 Indians had died, were wounded or were captured in the service of the British Empire, from Burma to Italy and North Africa.
So we were never alone. Not even in the period between independence and our joining the EEC. From Ghana in 1957 to Brunei in 1984, and taking in places like Malta and the Maldives along the way, we divested ourselves, necessarily, of our great global obligations. For centuries in some cases we had manipulated our global reach to serve our own interests and now this was ending.
Yet, culturally, you would never guess it now. You know those odd early scenes in The Crown involving verandas and black people? Empire. We managed to get through six series of aristocratic doings in Downton Abbey, set at empire’s zenith, practically without mention of it. The era of empire, when we were not a defiant, self-sufficient island (as we never were) has been whitewashed over as surely as the frescoes in a Puritan church makeover.
After seeing the film I took this to my daughters for generational comparison. And received a secondary shock. Neither of the two older ones — both graduates and both historically literate — knew what Dunkirk was. I was double a’d. Cue a Govian outburst about schools and the history curriculum?
Wait. I realised that I hadn’t been taught about Dunkirk either. But I didn’t have to be: my childhood and adolescence was suffused with the finest hour. My first German words I learnt half a decade before I was taught the language at school. They were Gott im Himmel, Donner und Blitzen, Achtung, Spitfeuer! And “For you, Englander, the war is over.” I made Hurricanes, threw grenades into pillboxes and shot down Heinkels. When I was 16, Battle of Britain topped the film charts for 14 weeks. Our parents had all been there, just as no one’s seemed to have been part of the empire. After all, how do you explain a small group of white people ruling over a very large number of black and brown ones?
And, despite the Winston flurry, I think Dunkirk may be passing too; the last knockings of a myth of containment that has both sustained us and held us back. What will replace it is much harder to imagine. Something possibly much more fragmented: a Scots myth, a London 2012 diversity myth or, I fear, a negative myth of inevitable national decline.
Whatever it is, it’ll be something that is not susceptible to pedagogy, but will be created by popular culture itself. We will note it, but we can’t easily create it.
MY CAREER’S IN REVERSE AND I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER
Emma Duncan
JULY 22 2017
THERE ARE MANY disadvantages to middle age. There are the little folds of skin that appear around your armpit and suggest, gently at first but increasingly insistently, that your sleeveless dresses’ days are numbered. There is your keys’ annoying habit of migrating from wherever you last put them to somewhere you’re absolutely sure you didn’t, or at least you would be sure if you were certain of anything at all that had happened in the past two minutes. And there is the creeping realisation that, although you can’t actually face doing the sums, the time since you started at university is probably longer than the time until you’re dead.
But there is a lot to be said for being aware of your own mortality. The sound of death’s hooves thundering towards you focuses the mind wonderfully. You start realising that time is precious, so you should use it wisely, doing less of the stuff that you don’t like doing and more of the stuff that you do. For me, that means spending less time with people I feel I ought to see and more with those whose company I genuinely enjoy during my leisure hours. And in terms of my career, it means going back to the shop floor.
I set out to be a journalist 30 years ago because I thought it would be interesting snuffling round the world finding stuff out and writing it down. I spent some years reporting in Britain and some scurrying around the world, and I enjoyed it all enormously. After a decade on the shop floor, I was offered more money to take a promotion to an editor’s job. Instead of reporting and writing myself I had to get other people to do it, to improve their work if they weren’t very good and hire new people if they were awful.
In time I acquired a
house, two husbands and three children (not all at once), so the money came in handy. I also enjoyed some of the perks of power, like getting invited to parties by people who thought I might be useful to know, and being listened to in meetings. But I missed the snuffling round and writing stuff down.
Now I’ve decided to go back to where I started. At the beginning of next year I’m returning to the shop floor. I’m giving up editing 1843 magazine and I’m going to be a reporter again on The Economist, its sister title. I’ll be taking a pay cut and there are other downsides: I’ll get invited to fewer parties, people won’t listen to me in meetings and I’ll get told what to do by people 20 years younger than me. But I reckon it’ll be fine. My life is less expensive than it used to be because the house is nearly paid for, the husbands are long gone and the children are peeling off. (One of them is even getting married, which could be pricey, except that he is male: tradition dictates that the bride’s parents pay for the wedding, and when it is convenient I am a staunch traditionalist.)
I no longer want to go to networky parties, because I’m not scrabbling up the career ladder any more, and the people who actually like me will still invite me round. It doesn’t much matter if people don’t listen to me in meetings since I’m planning to skip lots of them, and even though whippersnappers will be ordering me around I’ll do as I’m told because I’ll be having fun — doing the real stuff of journalism, the stuff that attracted me to the profession in the first place. My career will acquire the shape of a bell-curve: I am on the downward slope, sliding cheerfully towards senescence.
I don’t pretend that I’m doing this for anything other than entirely selfish reasons. As it happens, though, my new trajectory is highly socially responsible.
The traditional idea of how people’s careers should work is unsustainable. We can no longer expect our jobs to provide us with a long, straight, upward progression to a peak of earnings and status from which we plummet, clutching a fat pension, into a bed of dahlias that we spend the next couple of decades tending. An ageing society and lower returns to capital mean that the fat pensions are mostly gone, so we are going to have to keep working for far longer than our parents did. We can’t cling on to well-paid management jobs, because there aren’t enough of them, and anyway organisations need to give management jobs to younger people. So older people need to move out or down.
That’s not just what the economy requires. It’s good for older people too. As they get freed up from responsibility at home they can shuffle off responsibility at work, get pickier about what they do and swap money and power for freedom and job satisfaction.
Among my contemporaries I’m in the vanguard but I’m not alone. Friends are pursuing variants of the bell-curve. A couple have left big companies to set up on their own, touting their skills as freelancers. Lucy Kellaway, a columnist at the Financial Times, is returning to the shop floor but in a new profession: she is training to become a teacher and has started an organisation called Now Teach, which has persuaded an impressive bunch of similarly successful middle-aged professionals to do the same. They’ll earn less but will get a new lease of life while doing something socially useful.
For this trend to spread, rules and expectations need to change. The bell-curve career requires workers, employers and government to be more flexible than they are now. A host of regulations get in the way, from the small — the requirement that, in order to train as a teacher, you produce exam certificates that have long been lost in the mists of time — to the large — the laws designed to protect employees. At present an employer who offers an employee a new role at lower pay, for instance, may be guilty of constructive dismissal. Such protections may sound good for workers but they’re not: they make it likelier that employers will get rid of older workers altogether, instead of finding new ways to deploy them.
But the main thing that needs to change is our expectations about how our working lives will pan out. In the first stage we’ll be scrambling up our careers. In the second stage we’ll be on peak earnings and peak power. In the third we’ll have less of both money and power and also less responsibility, more fun and more freedom. Join me on the downward slide: it’s going to be fun.
PUPPY LOVE
Caitlin Moran
JULY 22 2017
“I HAVE ALWAYS been a dog person,” people say. “You just are, aren’t you? You’re either born a dog person, or not.” Sometimes, that’s not true.
We were dog people, and then we were not dog people.
Our first dog was, scientifically, the best dog in the world — Christmas. “I called her Christmas, so you could have Christmas every day,” Dad explained, mistily.
She was half-collie, half-spaniel — round as a barrel, silky, black with a honey and clover face and bib. She was as gentle and warm as Sunday morning. I would lie on my back, in front of the fire, reading a book, with her as a pillow under my head. When it snowed, we threw snowballs for her to catch: she would leap, catch them, then look endlessly surprised as they exploded into snowflakes in her mouth. She loved the sea, she would run into it, wriggle in the waves, drink it (gravel, tiny crabs and all) and then vomit it up as the Volkswagen headed out of Aberystwyth. She was the dog, the very dog — the best dog. She was a gentle, sure, ambient hum that made every day seem better. We were dog people, then.
When she died, aged 17 — worn out, curled up in her basket with her head on her paws; like a puppy again — my father sat on the back step with her and wept. I’d only ever seen him cry twice before: the first when his mother died, and the second, when John Lennon was shot. Those were the things you could cry about, as a man, then. Mums. Beatles. Dogs.
We buried Christmas under the apple tree, our hair full of falling blossom. We mourned for months. The house felt empty, without a dog. There was no … pivot. My parents promised another dog. “And this one — this one will be yours,” they told me.
I was 13. I was ready for my own dog. I was ready for a personal best friend, in dog form. I wanted another spaniely dog because spaniels are the best dogs. They are gentle and merry, and their ears look like they have long, luxurious hair, and I had long luxurious hair, and I loved all other things with long, luxurious hair: mammoths, Cavaliers, the Beatles.
But, in those days, you didn’t get to choose what type of dog you got. How dogs happen is that your dad goes to the pub, talks to some people and then, a week later, he comes home with whatever dog fate — the other men in the pub — hand you.
Saffron was a German shepherd. “A pure breed!” my dad said, delightedly. She’d been rejected from police-dog training for reasons my father glossed over, as he led her into the house.
A German shepherd was not the right dog for us. At least, not this one.
“She’s a bit … nervy,” he said, as Saffron peed all over the hall carpet, then ran up the garden and cowered under a tree.
Her recent life history was vague, but I could tell it had involved trauma, and eating things out of a bin. When I went to retrieve her from under the tree, I could see half a butter wrapper, poking out of her bum. I fashioned tongs out of two sticks, and pulled it out. It was Country Life. I never ate Country Life butter again.
Dad decided the best way to “settle” Saffron’s nerves was to get her pregnant. “Puppies will sort her,” he said. As my mother had had eight children, and hadn’t peed on the hall carpet recently, we couldn’t argue with his logic. Next time he came back from the pub he brought Max, another German shepherd, who had also been rejected from the police training scheme, over “psychological issues”. Who knows what was happening in the West Midlands police’s dog training scheme at the time, but it seemed to be producing a stream of reject dogs who behaved as if they’d served a disturbing tour of duty in Vietnam.
Max was, from day one, an angry dog, a huge beast, primarily the colour of cheap, glossy pine furniture. His mouth was particularly horrible — slobbery but also crusty — and he seemed untrainable, to a family used to gentle spaniel cro
sses. He got constant ear infections that made the house stink, and made him even angrier. Every evening, we would have to put drops in his ears while he tried to bite us. It was like living with an unhappy, pained bear.
You can tell much about a family by their personal lexicons: words only they use. We had the word “savving”, short for “savaging”.
If you took Max for a walk, he would “sav” — bark, snarl, strain endlessly at his leash until he choked. My mother was pregnant and my father disabled, so it was down to us children to walk Max — burning with shame as he “savved” at every passing person, dog, cat and car — twice a day. Everyone on the estate hated us. I totally understood why.
“Do you sometimes wish Max would die?” my sister Caz whispered one day. “Not in a bad way. But just … fall asleep?”
“Yes,” I replied. It was our biggest secret.
“They’re your dogs,” Dad would say. “Just give them a thump.” That was how they trained dogs, when he was young. You rubbed their noses in their poo, and left their poo in the road, where it fell. There were no doggie treats or poo bags back then.
But we did not want to hit the dogs, and so we went back to our rooms, to draw pictures of spaniels, and cry.
When Max got Saffron pregnant — a distressing day: eight children watching two dogs mating, in the garden, and then becoming hysterical with fear when they couldn’t separate and howled at each other for half an hour — the puppies seemed to make her even more nervy, and Max even more angry. You know, like sometimes happens with humans, when they have children.
The house was now full of dogs and puppies and parents and children, all of them making each other unhappy. When they got to eight weeks old, we sold the puppies, for £60 each. They paid for another caravan holiday, in Wales. While we were there, Max got loose in a field of pregnant sheep, and chased them for half an hour, as we screamed his name endlessly. The farmer caught him and threatened “to put an axe through his head”. It was deeply traumatic. It was fair enough.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 30