Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
For I had wandered off from the straight path.
Dante Alighieri
2022
The other night I dreamt about my father. He was stood looking out of a window at our old family home. It was raining and he was watching it fall across the garden. He turned and asked me what I had wanted from him that day shortly before he died. I knew the day he was referring to.
I had been visiting him in the house he and my mother had moved to after we had all left home. My mother had been dead for some years, and I had walked into the kitchen with the intention of broaching a difficult subject. He was stirring some soup in a pan. “What is it?” I’d asked. “Tomato,” he said, without looking up. I said, “I’m just going outside.” As I left he seemed to revive in spirits and said, “Put on a coat, it’s chilly.”
The lawn was no longer close cropped. The borders of shrubs were neglected. For a while I stood looking at the long reach of fields at the end of the garden, the nearby wood dipping down the slope to a row of terraced cottages, and beyond, the church spire on the horizon, rising up into a cloudless sky. He was right, it was cold. By the time I was back inside, he had put out two bowls of soup and some warm bread rolls. We ate in silence.
In my dream, I told him that I had wanted to ask him about the two of us and what had come between us. He had been a father of the postwar generation, his life dedicated to work and supporting his family. And I had been the son he had tried to know but had never been able to understand. We had lived together side by side, hardly touching.
I said: “I thought at the time that you might die soon.” He looked at me, his face as I had known it in life, but more lined and hollower. I knew it would be the last time I saw him.
1963
Each weekday morning our fathers dutifully headed to the local station and took the train to the City of London. Stockbrokers, accountants, solicitors, insurance brokers, former soldiers, they walked briskly along the side of the roads, straight-backed, carrying the daily newspaper and an umbrella. They were out at 7am, as regular as clockwork, before the children were up and preparing for school.
In the evenings our mothers would sometimes drive the family car to the station to meet their husbands. Carriage doors would swing open, and a crowd of dark-suited men stepped out clutching the evening paper to their chests, while behind them the doors slammed shut and the train pulled out of the station.
Home was a square and red-bricked house with a tarmacked driveway, a car in the garage, and a front and back garden in a road of similar functional houses. Inside there were a few, mostly unread books from some half-remembered book club, and a painting or two on the walls. Toys were stored away in the playroom cupboard, and there was a bedroom each for the children. It was a class which understated itself as “comfortably off”. One that valued orderliness and convention, aspiring to its children having the best start in life. If it was invited to list the virtues it lived by, it would look askance, but if pressed might say a sense of duty and loyalty to country and Queen. Above all, it was a social order united in its belief in keeping up appearances.
A bourgeois culture had emerged out of war and the end of empire. The old uniform was stowed away in the bedroom cupboards along with memories of Normandy, Libya, Malaya and Palestine. There was the silver cigarette box on the mantelpiece over the fire, engraved “from your brother officers”, and the odd major here and captain there among the neighbours. The past remained its moral lodestone, now progressively being shaken loose by the new commodities and technologies of modernity. The sacred order of Church was already dead and buried.
The world outside was erupting into our living rooms through television, raising children on Blue Peter, American popular culture and later the war in Vietnam. New consumer brands defined new kinds of status hierarchies, desires and identities: Ski fruit yoghurt, freeze-dried coffee, Camay soap, Findus fish fingers, Coca-Cola for the children’s birthdays, clothes from Marks & Spencer, Radio 1, the Beatles, foreign holidays, wine not beer, and dinner parties at the weekend.
And projected across the Atlantic was the permissive child-rearing of Dr Spock, along with disorientating fashions in clothes, sex and music. Our mothers, excluded from the public world of their husbands, ruled the private dominion of children and housekeeping, nurturing a generation inescapably trapped between the two estranged worlds of home and work. And for the children of the wealthier, lying in wait was the liminal hinterland of boarding schools, privileged and spartan, sloughing off the ascetic inhumanity of their former years, as they struggled to adapt to childhoods of Sindy doll and Action Man. This people, this life, produced me.
By the 1980s, corrupted by Mammon, bewildered by the repudiation of its university-educated children, the officer class of the national economy followed the industrial working class into history. Its children rejected its patrimony, severing it from the future. Its provincialism, lack of erudition, and conservative distaste for politics left it floundering in the backwash of globalisation and a new cosmopolitan bourgeois culture.
1988
A small group of us had gone to hear the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks speak on the politics of identity at the local Labour club. We were all involved in the new radical social movements, and he had captured something that we had not been able to put into words. The politics of identity broke free of the constraint of the old class system. It captured something existential about the kind of lives we might live or wanted to live. It was about overcoming prejudice and the restrictions on self-realisation imposed by the industrial order. And we believed this new cultural revolution wasn’t just about self-assertion, but promised new kinds of communities and solidarities.
As the children of the old bourgeois anda new meritocratic cohort of working-class peers, we were part of the growing professional and managerial class (PMC). Created in the expansion of higher education, the economic function of the PMC was to provide the new kinds of communicative labour in care, information, culture and learning, which were part of the growing service-driven global economy. Its capital was not money but control over valuable cultures and knowledge.
Marx had identified this class and its “labour of superintendence”, caught between worker and capitalist, and then paid it no more attention. In 1941, the political philosopher James Burnham named it the Managerial Class – a class striving for social dominance in the new world of bureaucratic power. And in 1979, the sociologist Alvin Gouldner described it as the New Class. He foresaw in its rapid expansion the best prospects for human emancipation and, at the same time, a new self-serving elite.
We were a new cultural bourgeois freed from the restraints of family and birth once central to national capitalism. Politics had been anathema to the old bourgeois. Our principle was the pursuit of self-realisation. Traditional forms of authority were rejected. Truth was democratised. Moral and cultural judgements were not decided by traditional standards of quality and value but by political ideology and our subjective judgement. Even as we subverted the social norms, privileges and traditions of the old order, we were inaugurating our own domination of the “knowing, the knowledgeable and the insightful”.
We were without economic power and subordinate to the economic elite, imagining ourselves allied to the working class in a struggle against capitalism. Revolutionary Marxism in 101 varieties provided a lodestar. A political counterculture flourished in a surging wave of creativity. Theories of post-structuralism and postmodernism began sweeping through the humanities departments of Western universities, deconstructing the narratives of patriarchy, white society, and heterosexuality.
The 1984 miners’ strike in Britain was an early harbinger that this illusory class alliance would end in a conflict of interests. Miners travelled the country raising funds. Some would be put up in the collective households of young university-educated radicals. The two sides encountered one another across a gulf of benign incomprehension. When the miners’ strike was defeated and the political power of the organised working class broken, the political power of the young radicals of the PMC grew. They abandoned the counterculture and moved into the Labour Party.
Under the New Labour government of 1997 the new bourgeois class took control of the universities, NGOs, cultural institutions and the cultural industries. Its influence spread through the public sector and the institutions, quangos and agencies of the state. Its socially liberal values created a more open and tolerant attitude to sexuality, gender equality, race and immigration. But it was also sharpening new sites of class conflict. It had begun as a critic of social and cultural norms, but was now imposing its own norms on society and becoming their judge and regulator.
By the time New Labour lost the election in 2010, the PMC was the dominant political force inside the party. David Cameron’s new Conservative-led coalition government emulated New Labour by embracing social liberal values. The left and its social liberalism controlled “culture” and the right and its market liberalism controlled the “economy”.
In 2016, the consensus broke whena coalition of the provincial middle class and the ex-industrial working class voted to leave the EU. The liberal cosmopolitan values, form of governance, and economic policies of the PMC were rejected. The radicalism of the cultural bourgeois turned inward, becoming a culture war between progressives and conservatives over whose identities and way of life would dominate future society. It imagined itself the keeper of truth and so the author of social reality. It was the end of an illusion. The Labour Party lost its political mooring and, despite its sweeping victory in 2024, remains estranged from working-class voters.
The new cultural bourgeois grew out of the ferment of the 1960s. It grew into a counter-elite, rejecting prohibition, prejudice and emotional constraint. It opened up opportunities for a broad plurality of people to make lives and identities of their own. In the search for self-realisation nothing was to be forbidden. Only nostalgia was to be denied, as if the searching for home, for affirmation of a life well led would expose our ambivalence about what we had become, free and lost in the dark wood, a world without limits.
2024
In the summer of 1945, when my father was 18, he had joined the army. His father before him had fought in both world wars. His oldest brother had been on the Murmansk convoy run. He was garrisoned in the Free Territory of Trieste, undertook policing in Palestine and fought the communist insurgency in Malaya.
My father entered an adult world defined by discipline and order. He understood his duty and it was the measure of a man to obey. It was a world that did not invite questions nor one which encouraged emotional feeling. Discretion and necessity ruled. The pathway ahead was clear. He would go on to spend his working life with the same firm and raise a large family. I do not think he ever flinched.
I quit university after my first year, disillusioned. I could do what I wanted and nobody, apart from my parents, would be too concerned. I wanted to escape the narrow boundaries of my upbringing and find out what lay beyond. My father had both defined what these were and given me the opportunity to break them. So I spent my working life trying to make sense of the world as I found it.
In doing this, I traduced the values my father lived by. In his turn, he once told me that what I did – the reading, the PhD taking, the book writing – reminded him of a form of torture. We could never find a common meeting point where we could recognise each other and share an understanding. I was battering away at his defences, he refusing entry, so it ended. Yet, in the years since his death, my father became a growing presence, until the past occupied the future, and it was no longer possible to separate what went before from what is to come. Today, he is here, present in a way he never felt to be in our time together, a person I never fully knew, but now indispensable, the better part of me that knows who I am to the end.
[See also: The Renaissance in drawing]
Content from our partners
Related
