History- It's You

We think of history as being an exact science.

And I suppose in some ways, it can be. Archaeology is an exact science.

But the past itself, the way we generally look at it, is through the resonance of human experience.

I just got back from visiting my grandmother in the home. I find it relatively easy to converse with my grandmother. She's an open minded person in a way, perhaps, my own parents aren't. And I think that's mainly because she realises something that they haven't realised.

The gulf of history. The gulf of time and experience. She knows that the life I grew up with, the life that has been my everyday experience is one she does not share. She doesn't expect there to be shared values.

Modern life means that it is easier for myself and a Malaysian to see things from a similar angle than it is for our parents to find common ground with us. It's not culture that provides the real difference any more, it's time. The generation gap. Our parents have not realised how great the gulf is that separates us from them, greater even than that which separates them from their own parents. Our grandparents have, and they try to understand.

The pace of change. It ties you almost to your decade of birth.

My grandmother's teenage world was incomprehensible to us. No Nirvana, no furtive teenage sex, no cider, no pot.

My grandmother was born in 1922, nine days before the Dail ratified the Anglo-Irish treaty.
She grew up in a world where children really did walk the streets of Athlone barefoot. Where the average household kept guns, where rival paramilitary groups paraded with them in the street, where she was the eldest of seven children, and only five made it to adulthood and they weren't even a poor family.

Where girls who even kissed the boys were liable to be carted off to the Magdalen homes to be reformed.

Even the radio only came in 1936. De Valera's waspish tones on a handful of receivers, but even Dublin was a far off place, reached in a crock of rusty old iron, puffing its way past fields where farmers and their horsedrawn ploughs lived a life barely improved upon that of the survivors of the famine the island could never forget.

A world dominated by the power of the church and the shadow of the gun.

My grandmother remembers 1936. When the boys in their shiny shirts paraded through Athlone, rifles on their shoulders, off to fight for freedom and Holy Catholic Ireland. And they were cheered. They were cheered.
Athlone was a Blueshirt town.

She could not know then, no one could, that they day would come when Athlone kept quiet about the contribution it had made to the Spanish civil war.

Because history would frown on the choice it had made.

That is her Ireland. She lived Irish history. Angela's Ashes, that was her Ireland.

And her youth, her days of courting? The Blitz, wounded airmen, the relative freedom of even wartime blackout England as against the rigid censorship of the homeland. Dancing, alcohol, parties, meeting soldiers at dances- all so very innocent, we say.

But that's why I like my Gran. She's no fool. She doesn't think it was all that innocent, not really. She understands that we're the same people now that we were then. She understands, in a way our parents don't yet, that growing up in a different history, is like growing up in a different culture. She doesn't understand the world of today, she's a foreigner in it, but that doesn't mean she despises it. And that's admirable, I think.



Because my Gran doesn't even really remember Elvis. Certainly hasn't a clue who the Beatles were. She'd stopped keeping up with the times by then.

Fifties Britain, there weren't the mod cons. Washing clothes, meant washing clothes, not sticking them in machines. No supermarket, so doing a weeks shopping was a mission in its own right.
Life was less convenient. You had your fun, then got married in your late twenties and settled down to grey drudgery.

The politicians she remembers are Anthony Eden and Nye Bevan.

And those to me are historical characters.

But it makes me think.

Because when I talk to someone even seven years younger than me, there is still a slight generation gap.

When I watched Bond films as a child, there WAS an 'evil empire'. Say Romania to me, I still think of secret police and people disappearing at 3AM. Because when I first asked what the Iron curtain was, I was told about all these funny sounding places where life was lived in a constant state of fear.

Margaret Thatcher to me isn't a figure of history, until I was twelve she was the only PM I knew. When I was a child the royal family was still the model family.

None of these things are so for a twenty three year old. Hungary is just the country next to Austria. They don't look at the map and see where the Iron curtain used to be, as I do. To them, divorce and scandal are normal where the royal family is concerned.

And music. To me there is still a certain distinguishing line between the music that used to play in your head as a child, the music that existed in the todays of your past and the music which was always past to you. John Lennon is someone I discovered, but I can remember actually seeing Toyah on Top of the Pops.

And the other things you forget. You look back at eighties TV and think how DIFFERENT it all was. You forget that you were alive then, this is history you lived in.

And yet it seems as far off to someone just that little bit younger, as far off as those things you firmly consign to history, because you don't remember them.
Like the Vietnam war.

But I remember how hard it was as a child to dial a phone number- I had to be taught how to use that complex, irritating device that was the rotary phone.
Can someone of twenty three really understand that at age seven, it took me about five minutes to dial my mother?

That little items we take for granted, weren't the norm.

We had a fridge, but no freezer. No dish washer.

And it amuses me to look back at all those things my Dad swore blind we'd never get. Things that were a waste of time- things that turned people into the living dead. The video recorder, the home computer. TV was bad enough, actually just going and getting films without waiting for them to come on, that was a slippery slope. And computer games, really, he had no time for them.

I wonder if he remembers, as he plays Desert Storm on his wall sized plasma screen TV, standing next to the shelves and shelves of DVDs.

I doubt he does.

Someone seven years younger than me cannot remember that it's not so very long ago you could turn on the TV at 3AM and just get a blank screen on two out of the only four channels available. And the other two just had education programmes for schools.

That even when I was at uni, hardly anyone had a mobile phone.

Social shifts too. I was a teenager when they were pushing through the change in legislation to lower the age of homosexual consent from 21 to 18. And as a teenager, I thought the idea disgusting. I never thought that one day not only would there be an equal age of consent, but how much homosexuality would have moved into the mainstream- and that I myself would approve.

I went to school in a class where it was still whispered 'Her parents are divorced' never mind if they weren't even married. Admittedly, I went to a Catholic school so it perhaps wasn't representative, but I imagine that today, even in a Catholic primary school, these things don't matter.

The sum of your experience does make a huge difference. I don't actually believe time speeds up as you get older- it's just that each year itself becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your total memory. It creates an illusion. In time your total experience grows so individual parts get less and less. Time was when President of America could only really meant Ronald Reagan. Now I've lived through three others, and a fourth is about to join my memory.

The day to day experience of a schoolchild is becoming something further and further from my comprehension; soon, school-life will be something culturally inaccessible to me. It probably already is. How can I understand a school life where kids have mobile phones and I pods?

I bounced around Class One singing 'Cry just a little bit' by Shaking Stevens. I played with Transformers. I played Granny's Garden on the school's ONLY BBC Micro.

I watched the fall of the Berlin wall on TV, but still couldn't grasp the idea of a united Germany. United Germanys were things we went to war against. The two Germanies were, and always had been different countries- to me.



I was a voter myself before I ever saw a Labour government voted in.

I can remember the early days of Dance Music and the E-revolution.

I bought Music for a Jilted Generation the day it came out.

Yet I don't remember John Lennon's death, or the Falklands war.

It's history. It's the experiences you lived through, the shared societal experiences that shaped your values.

Our parents don't quite get us, because they don't see we were born when the social changes they lived through; the sixties, the ending of segregation in America, the sexual revolution, it was already history when we came to be.

And they look in horror at our equivalents.
And we'll misunderstand our children too.

Because though our generation don't think gay people should be discriminated against, we remember that they were. Our children won't. They'll know it once happened, once. But they won't remember it.

And they will challenge barriers in our tolerance, will accept changes which will shock us.

The internet will be something that always existed. The Soviet Union as historical as Hitler, perhaps the War on Terror looked back on by them as our generation see Vietnam.

It is the generation gap now, the gap in memory and experience.

When race, gender and sexuality have gone as divisive barriers between us, the pace of social change now erects a new one.

The barriers of comprehension. The new identifier; What do you remember? What experiences shaped you?

Because it no longer matters your creed, or your colour, or your gender, the things that unite us far exceed what divides us.

But our memories, that's what now divides us.

Because all those other things, we now discover, matter far less when we thought.
But when you were born, that does.

We are not divided into nations, but generations.