Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
economically, and a bit of stringent regulation of the loan sharks and the credit agencies wouldn’t come amiss right now, along with an agreeable mass civil-disobedience exercise consisting of a refusal to pay back extortionate interest on loans. Oh, and a much higher minimum wage. And a more equitable distribution of income within private companies, and more, much more which we will come to later in this book. But first, how did we get set up like this? What was the process by which we became ready and willing to spunk our meagre incomes paying back a bunch of avaricious wankers like Wonga.com, or that grasping shitehawk company that used to be advertised by the arsetastic TV Countdown kitten, Carol Vorderman? What softened us up to be so easily gulled? And why is it my generation that has succumbed so easily, when my parents and their peers looked on the whole business a little balefully?
By the time I got born in 1960, my parents had risen a little; they were perhaps upper-working class, even teetering on lower-middle. My father was no longer working for the railways, like his brother was still doing and like his father had done before him (they were from Darlington, you understand, a railway town like no other), but now had a job as a clerk working for the Inland Revenue. My mother worked part-time as a secretary in an accountancy firm in Bexleyheath, which was a hell of a step up for her. My dad came from a very respectable, solidly working-class family – chapel, Labour Party, no drinking – in the north-east of England; my mum was from perhaps less obviously reputable stock – orphaned, broken home, evacuated, from Sarf London. But now they were all right, pretty much – now they were doing OK. They had saved for years for the unending pleasures of having me (of which more later), and had moved out of council accommodation and bought their own home, a frowsy 1920s semi-detached house in Bexleyheath. Like 40 per cent of the population in the late 1950s, they had no TV. No telephone either, and no refrigerator, no vacuum cleaner, no car. They did however have a strange, mottled green-and-black washing tub, bought third-hand, which made a noise like Zeus had just seen his VAT bill for the quarter.
But still, they had an inside toilet in a home they owned – both things which my dad’s parents, when they were his age, would have regarded as the apogee of bourgeois luxury. My paternal grandmother, in the early days, had only an outside privy – which I liked, as I hate shitting within earshot of other people, and will sometimes go days without attending the toilet if it’s near other people, out of the sort of nervousness and self-consciousness which I daresay Freud would have found revealing.
All that stuff I mentioned above would come in time, my parents knew, when they could afford it – and so it did: vacuum cleaner in 1961, telephone in 1964, TV in 1965, car in 1966, refrigerator in 1968. Despite the encumbrance of having a vile and demanding child, their standard of living improved with graduated ease; these were the days when incomes really did rise, when to whisper the concept of social mobility was not a trigger for immediate hilarity, or bitter anger. Holidays, once a year, to a cheap Methodist guesthouse someplace – Hastings, Bournemouth, Llandudno – and then maybe a yearly trip to see my dark-clad northern relatives, and what I still feel is my real home, in Middlesbrough and Darlington and Bishop Auckland. So this was, by the standard of the times, a certain wage-slave comfort, hard fought for, collectively and individually, grindingly acquired – and for them a merciful release from the post-war years of austerity. We were still, by the measures of the time, poorish, I suppose, but certainly never crushingly so. There was always enough to eat, even if it was stultifyingly dull food; Christ, I can see my grandmother now, dipping bread and butter into the juice of a tinned fruit salad at tea – a weekly treat – at five on a Sunday, before low church Evensong. But I digress.
I would guess that the maroon Ford Anglia, with its pitiful pseudo-Yank grimacing radiator grille and sharply angled back window and light-grey roof, was almost certainly bought on tick, or something like tick; a loan. Its registration number, 123 MKL, and model, dates it between 1959 and 1962, so it was at least four years old when my mother and father bought it in 1966. (I wanted them to buy a racier Triumph Herald, incidentally, but they wouldn’t listen. Triumphs, my dad averred, break down too often.) Even so, it would have cost a packet, and money was always tight, so I would guess that some sort of HP deal was involved, although I may be wrong about this. Certainly my parents, and particularly my dad, were very sniffy about HP, about borrowing money in general. It was something done by the impecunious, the rash, the cavalier, the shady. OK, the house was bought on tick, but on a respectable sort of tick, they thought – a thirty-year mortgage with a reputable company (which nonetheless fleeced them). As far as borrowing was concerned, it was sort of OK to pay into a holiday club (we didn’t) or a Christmas club (we did), but that was saving for something with your own funds, and not being liable to pay someone back at a rate of interest. Borrowing money was a bit dirty, a bit desperate, and made no economic sense, because you ended forking out so much more. You wanted something, you saved up for it. There was nothing, really, that couldn’t wait a while, often a long while, once you had your food and shelter. And this rather stringent view was shared by a majority of the population at the time; HP was used, in the main, very sparingly, and its demands rested much more lightly on the shoulders of the not-so-well-off. Household debt back in those days rose only slightly during the 1960s and 1970s, rarely creeping above 40 per cent of average income; it was in 1979 that it really took off, like an atomic dildo – which is, uncoincidentally, the year in which my generation got its paws on the credit cards. We are the generation that intended to wait for nothing, and could not see the point in so doing.
Something restrained my parents’ generation, more than simply the fact that credit was less easily come by, and there were no credit cards as such.* Something more intrinsic stopped them, or limited the extent to which they were prepared to get themselves into debt. Look at the slow and painful rate with which those household ‘necessities’, as they would be deemed today, were acquired by my family, and other families like them. They were married, my mum and dad, in 1954; it took them fourteen years to buy a fridge. They were available, these things, and had been mass marketed since the 1920s (and vacuum cleaners for still longer). Partly it is the case that they were not seen as indispensable, because earlier generations had cheerfully done without them: my grandmother still didn’t have a fridge at the time she died, in 1972.
Clearly my parents’ generation was defined not merely by the war, and post-war austerity, but by the privations endured long before then. Most of the goods I detailed above would have been unimaginably expensive in the 1930s, and continued to be so into the 1950s. They came down in price in relative terms, but there was still no compulsion to buy them immediately, nor was there the easy means to do so. And debt meant, in the backs of most people’s minds, and maybe sometimes at the front, ignominy, bankruptcy and – if your memory was long enough – the workhouse. I mean, my mother wanted a fridge, of course she did (although its only use, at the beginning, was to keep milk chilled in hot weather, and in summer to keep crisp the ingredients of those hideous 1960s ‘salads’: tomato cut in half, cos lettuce, spring onion, beetroot out of a jar, slice of ham, acrid salad cream), and would occasionally nag my father about the social embarrassment caused by our lack of one. But in truth there was no real social embarrassment. And more crucially, there was no sense in which she felt she had a right to such consumer durables, as if they were something which should automatically accrue, or be immediately available on demand. It was a case, we all understood, of waiting. Saving and waiting. Waiting fourteen years, in the case of the bloody fridge.
This waiting is the thing my generation no longer does, is no longer cool with. It does not wait for anything. It does not see why it should. Life’s too short, isn’t it? Paradoxically, life was rather shorter back when people did wait – but still they waited.
There’s no question that some of the reasons for this refusal of my generation to defer their gratification are bound up in a greater availability of credit, a greater social acceptance of debt, not to mention continual injunctions from TV fuckpigs to take out loans and buy stuff now, this minute, you slavering mugs. We are all of us rather more affluent in absolute terms, even if the gap between rich and poor has widened obscenely; we can, on the whole, afford more stuff. And it is true too that those devices I mentioned – fridge, vacuum, car, telephone – arrived, in a sense, ahead of the burning need for them. We had no ready meals stuffed full of chemical shit which needed to be chilled, standards of hygiene