I have never been trained to kill large numbers of complete strangers on command. I have never had to improvise unthinking acts of killing to ensure my own survival and the survival of those around me. I have never had to summon up the courage to kill my close friends because that was the better alternative to leaving them alive in their horrifying pain.
And yet our fathers and grandfathers did all those things; and worse. Wilfred Thesiger, Etonian and Oxbridge man, who went on to fight with the SAS during the Second World War, remarked in his memoirs that the more educated the chap, the more capable he seemed to be of immense cruelty on the battlefield.
Recent research has discovered that the average age of the British soldier who landed on Normandy’s beaches at the start of D-Day in 1944 was 36; far older than the US average of 24 years. Recruitment in Britain did not fully get going until after the debacle of Dunkirk, and after the battle-hardened and desperate Polish and Free French airmen who had swelled the ranks of the RAF had won the Battle of Britain, postponing indefinitely the German invasion of the British Isles. That means that in 1941, most soldiers had been just bakers and bankers, tilers and teachers, bus-drivers and businessmen, the everymen on every street and lane in Britain. To have gone from that to war in just a few years is as unimaginable for us as it must have been for them.
These were the fathers-to-be of the post-war generations; in an era before support networks and post-traumatic stress-counselling, what affect did the experience of war have on the families of the returned? Elizabeth Jane Howard has written extensively about this in her fiction; in a recent Guardian interview, she says of her own father, who served:
“I think the trouble for [men like him]...was that if they dared to use their imagination it was too horrible. And that bleeds over into the rest of their lives."
If truth is war’s first casualty, then imagination may be war’s longest-lasting one. Perhaps that was just as well: the war ended because the Russians had more men than the Germans had bullets, and because the Americans had more aircraft than everyone else put together. But, whilst the Second World War made the USA rich, it left Europe and Britain physically and economically ruined: paying back the United States arguably cost Britain its Empire, and definitely delayed its reconstruction and prosperity by decades: there was official food-rationing until 1952; it was no coincidence that the high-rise housing-boom occurred in the early 1970s – for much of the 1950s and 1960s, large parts of British cities were still, literally, bomb-sites.
The enforced gray conformity of the 1950s was a sullen, brooding one, though: the winds of change in other parts of the world, and from other walks of life, were beginning to fan the flames of a new generation’s imagination, one that was not going to take it the way their parents had; things were going to be different: there was going to be a new order, with new ideas, and a new language with which to communicate those ideas. As it has always been, that new language was first heard in the music of the time: that music was rock ’n’ roll.
From the depths of American black music, from Rhythm and Blues and from Jazz and Swing, came something that was taken up by white youth in droves – because of changes in record technology, the children of the war generation were able to listen to something that their parents’ radios were not playing, and they got the energy and raucousness of it. They got the rebellion too: they heard the sounds, and got the picture: the future, to them, was polychromatic.
By the time the old folks woke up to what the kids were up to, it was all too late: the name was sexual enough, but black music in the white suburbs was almost too much for the fabric of society to contain. The market did what it does best, and tried to repackage the culture, or at least put a more respectable face on it: thus were we given Elvis Presley, the Justin Timberlake of his day: a white guy who could sing black. That was acceptable enough to get the stuff on mass radio – which meant the rest of the world suddenly caught fire too.
The ‘60s music scene got going, arguably, when irreverence-specialists like the Beatles were able to convince po-faced Yanks like Bob Dylan that the times may have been a-changin’ because the drugs, like LSD, were getting better. Of course it wasn’t the music that started social change; it was the times, but the music said that it was happening everywhere. As always, at first it was just the world’s gilded youth who had the money and leisure time to tune in, turn on and drop out. And there was a big incentive to drop out if you could: the world was getting faster and more complex, what with the Cold War, and civil rights issues. Politics in the US got really heavy: an increasingly-unpopular foreign war helped radicalize students – new conscription legislation also did not hurt the Stop the War campaign; years of political assassinations and inner-city riots eventually frightened the American non-youth into electing Nixon in 1968. By the time we got to Woodstock, the 1960s was done in the USA:
In the UK, meanwhile, it was barely kicking off. Musically, for want of political revolution, it was leading the world; The Hyde Park Free Festivals, and the Isle of Wight Festivals, had helped establish rock ‘n’ roll as a communal and theatrical experience, and had grounded British rock music with an enormous sense of innovation and experimentation.
And the people who were growing and evolving the music had been the children of those war-ravaged families who had grown up in surly cities, eating bland food; but the colour was in the movies they were seeing and the lives they wanted to live – and it was a life that they didn’t care that their parents didn’t understand; any life was better than the ones they felt that their parents had lived through.
So Ziggy came down from space to a waiting public. Bowie had prophesied his coming some years before:
Lyrics:
It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mommy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
Of course Ziggy Stardust was a science-fiction story; a beautiful escapist story, the telling of which told us more about how we had got here and where we were now, than where we went from there.
We were ready for this Space Oddity: we wanted those clothes and make-up to keep our elders guessing. If the sexual ambiguity made society nervous, then the message was clear enough to us, and could be read in the two cherry-coloured nail-varnished fingers it was sticking up to the past. Throw it all in the air; so much the better for making more sundae-coloured rainbows, and not for making more war. Whatever else we would ever be, we would never again be afraid of our own imaginations. To remind us of this, all we had to do was lean back on our radios and look to the skies.
Ziggy came, did what he had to do, then returned to his own planet. We never forgot. Years later, David Bowie's inspiration is still seen in really the most obvious places:
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