My grandfather died before I was born, while still a relatively young man, of a heart attack, in his bed. My grandmother woke up, leaned over to offer tea, and there he lay, dead. Then again, she always maintained that the boy she married never returned from Dunkirk. Her dashing Jack The Lad came back from war a ghost of his former self. His hands shook, his nerves were shot. My mother remembers an extreme gentleness, and a morbid fear of loud noises - balloons were banned at birthday parties. In all, the war killed his friends, broke his spirit, and probably shortened his life by years if not decades. I think that merits a poppy or two, don't you?
Paper flowers and sentimental news coverage once a year, don't add up to much, but they could be more than future generations could hope for. You'd have to be insane, or a politician chasing votes, not to hate and fear war. However, the fact remains that organised bloodshed seems to dignify an era like nothing else. Had my grandparents lived, they might have been surprised to find themselves part of what is, in effect, the last generation of credible pensioners - the final wave of old people that society can be half-bothered to care about and honour. My grandparents might also have been enraged by all the hypocrisy. We might ignore and despise the elderly as a matter of course - raising their pensions in insulting pennies, letting them freeze to death in winter, and scribbling 'Do Not Resuscitate' on their medical notes - but that doesn't mean we don't enjoy a good blub on Remembrance Sunday.
You could see all this in the reaction to the May Day protests. The anger at the images of the graffiti-daubed Cenotaph. The disgust at the vision of the statue of Winston Churchill with a turf mohawk. Student beer is a terrible thing, to be sure, but there didn't seem to be much lasting harm done. Personally, I couldn't help laughing at the mohawk prank. The Cenotaph, though, was a different matter - but what do you expect from toff teenage anarchists, doubtless descended from breadroll-throwing 80s Hoorays? Even the former soldier who defaced the Churchill statue was keen to distance himself from the vandalism at the Cenotaph. It's one thing to dribble red paint over wartime premiers, quite another to mess with the Unknown Soldier, who was doubtless an alright geezer even an anti-capitalist could quite imagine sharing a pint with.
We seem to get choked up about our Blitz-elderly the same way we get teary eyed about the 1966 World Cup win. Scanning the media, what happened on May Day was variously: 'A disgrace to the memory of those who died for their country'; 'An affront to a generation who fought for democracy'; 'A shameful indictment of our changing times'. This present generation of war-literate pensioners obviously represents something special, historic, and romantic to the public. Usually, old people matter so little, politicians are too busy chasing the sexy 'yoof vote' to bother to suck up to them. This situation only seems to change when there's a righteously patriotic editorial or photo opportunity to be had. Then, old soldiers and dears are wheeled out to shake their heads sorrowfully for the benefit of the cameras, before being spirited away to be ignored until next time they are needed.
All of which makes you wonder what will happen when these conveniently 'credible' pensioners die off. Who and what will symbolise good, decent Great Britain then? For, whichever way you look at it, the media is going to have a hard time talking up the post-war decades. The 60s? 'They suffered so that we could have Mary Quant'. The 80s? 'They lived through Negative Equity'. The 90s? 'The Unknown Bridget Jones'. It doesn't quite work, does it?
It would seem that without a World War to lend dignity, gravitas, and a sense of community, any generation is doomed to be remembered as fractured, pointless, even unsexy. Men seem to feel this keenly. It certainly says something that every boyfriend I've ever had has been obsessed by one fragment of wartime history or another. You name it, I've sat with a beau watching a documentary about it. Or more to the point, sat watching him watching it.
Maybe this is what Jeremy Paxman, and all those other alpha media males, were really talking about not so long ago when they bemoaned the fact that a war had never come along to test their mettle. There we were thinking they were sulking because they'd never got the chance to handle anything more dangerous than an outside broadcast, but maybe they sincerely felt that their generation had been cheated out of a sense of history. Compared to our wartime old, the generations of pensioners to come promise to have no credibility whatsoever, and will probably be written off by the young and strong as a bunch of self-interested bums not worth the Zimmers they're stumbling around on. It's scary enough to grow old, scarier still to grow old without generational credibility.
