Today I turn 60. My eldest of four daughters, Jean, is 22. The generation gap seems vast. But how separated are we really? I got a clue when I stumbled on a diary from 1978 when I was the same age as she is now. The first thing I noticed on reading it was how angry I was. There’s a lot of swearing and a particular rage at my lack of job success, as I perceived it (I was a writer on a music weekly and had just been denied an editorship I had been expecting). “I am a fucking failure,” I wrote, bitterly, and perhaps somewhat prematurely.
How ambitious I was. What a burden this felt. The pain of starting out and having no idea where I was going to end up, with nothing behind me (I had no degree, no money). My daughter has a good degree and is in her first job. She, too, is ambitious, and I can understand now from my diaries that this is a mixed blessing. I write of the “terrible doubts” I have that I posses any creative talent or that I will “get anywhere”. Jean, like me at her age, appears overwhelmingly confident – but who can tell what’s underneath?
My daughter’s prospects are very different from mine – she lives in a world more globalised and insecure. Also she confronts the difficulty of continuing to live in her own home town, London, which at her age, for me, was less of a worry. I was already living in a rented flat and three years later had a mortgage on my own place. Jean lives at home and the prospect of home ownership in London must seem remote, particularly as she has student debt on her back as well.
My scribbles record fallings out with friends, struggles with girlfriends, battles with bosses. And as befits a member of the punk generation, there are also a lot of references to boredom – a phenomenon that, with the Millennials, has more or less disappeared. Much of my response to the world was personal as well as generational. I was lugubrious – there is a plaintive quote copied out from Mark Twain, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.”
It was 10 years before I understood I had depression, an illness I could not identify at the time and knew nothing about, a fate that I very much hope my daughter will be spared (and if she isn’t, then at least it is now acknowledged as a reality and problem that can be addressed by medicine).
Illness aside, reading the diary made me understand that being 22 is no picnic. I hope Jean is happier than I was. Because for me, on the whole – a view that would have shocked my 22-year-old self – I prefer being 60.
My ambitions are behind me, and along with them my anxieties. I have enough money, I am buoyed up by the love I have for my children, and the only future I fear is the one that we all face at the end of things. In its distance from the darkness at other end of life, youth is to be envied – but in most other respects, if I’m to believe my earlier, unrealised self, it’s overrated.
One of the few truly positive comments in the diary is on 25 September after a year of bewailing my fate. “At this point,” I write, “thank you God for my parents, who are incredibly wonderful.”
I conclude the entry by promising to make more time for my younger brother, then 11. Through all the whinging and adolescent fury, my family kept me rooted and sane. Unlike me a child of a divorce, Jean is unlikely to feel the same. At least, at 22, for all the bitching and whining, some part of me realised how lucky I was – and how lucky anyone is who has a family behind them, and their good wishes.
