Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
broom would suffice. People did not travel very far in the ordinary scheme of things – the first motorway in Britain opened as late as 1959, and the roads were slow – and in any case there was, until 1964 and that blank-faced vandal Beeching, a comprehensive if somewhat unreliable and laborious rail service. And, of course, what was the use of a telephone until everyone you knew had one? So, desirable these things may have been, but not vital. Of those modern consumer durables I mentioned, the only one for which there was an immediate demand was the television, which is why, by the beginning of the 1960s, more than three quarters of British households owned one. Lucky, lucky, British people.
But there are two or three other reasons, less frequently considered, for this marked difference in the approach between the generations, the willingness to wait and the need to have it all now. The retreat of religion, which I bored you with earlier, is partly implicated, for example. The importance of Max Weber’s notion of a Protestant work ethic has maybe been overstated as a reason why Protestant northern Europe soared ahead of its bone-idle Roman Catholic southern half in the nineteenth century, and had itself a lovely industrial revolution of its own. I have never been hugely convinced that the British working classes, any more than those in Prussia or Denmark, were convinced, in themselves, that religious salvation lay through the path of bloody hard relentless work all of your life, until you died. They may have been told that, but I doubt they believed it. Even the fucking Danes could not be that stupid.
But the other, less familiar, side of Weber’s analysis may have some truth to it. Deferred gratification, for example, was a consequence of the non-conformist tradition of self-flagellating denial; the notion that there was something inherently good in not having nice stuff, or not doing nice stuff, that immersing oneself in pleasure, and in the acquisition of things, was a somehow decadent and indecent thing to do. Sacrifice now, reward in heaven. We have no deferred gratification any more; it is as arcane and extinct as the dire wolf and the 78rpm acetate disc and the Empire; it has no force, or resonance, within our land. Children are no longer told that they must ‘do without’ – unless it is because the piece of tat they are hankering after is beyond their parents’ immediate budget; in other words, there is no ideological or moral reason why you shouldn’t have everything now, if you can afford it: go ahead, fill your fucking boots, where’s the crime, etc. Such indulgence, to my mother and father, seemed obscene. There had to be a modesty of aspiration, a limit to the ambitions of acquisitiveness; it was wrong, horribly wrong, to ask for stuff – if you were diligent, stuff would come to you only after the waiting, after the waiting, after the waiting – after the world had turned a little further on its dumb axis, after the days had traipsed through, with their heads bowed, single file, and when everything was good and ready.
But that’s not all, because the other imprecation of non-conformist Christian socialism, and of that work ethic and its injunction to save, was the responsibility each of us had to society, to our fellow men. Saving, for example, was not simply something one did for one’s own sake, or for the promise of salvation, but because there was something inherently good for society in it. So too the notion of hard work. Work hard and save, and society will benefit. Somehow. Don’t ask me how. Merely that it was deeply ingrained, the self-denial: to splash out on something was to feel guilty. All of those imprecations from the Methodist Church against spending and drinking and gambling were made partly for the benefit of the individual, and partly for the benefit of society. You knew you had a responsibility to society.
I bought my first flat when I was twenty-seven years old, a one-bed in a mock-Georgian block on Peckham Rye, South London. So far as I remember, I’d saved fuck-all – maybe a grand or so in total. Saving seemed a somewhat tiresome thing to do, especially when, that year, I had to pay for the holiday in Bali. My dad gave me a thousand quid, and so I had a 95 per cent mortgage, secured with a £2,200 deposit. My father thought this was an absurd arrangement – to him it was almost beyond belief that anyone would be stupid enough to advance a person of my moral disreputability such an amount of money on such slender evidence. In any case, I was too young to own a property. How old should I be, then? ‘Old enough that you’ve got your finances sorted by yourself,’ my father replied with a hint of acid. The money he gave me, though, was just sitting in some account, doing nothing except growing; he spent nothing, on anything. They didn’t, that generation. More fool them.
But his misgivings were deeper than that, I knew. Because also, unvoiced, was the suspicion that the owning a flat thing was being entered into for other reasons: I’d met a girl, a lovely girl called Sue, and this was to be our flat. My father had his doubts – not about Sue, whom he liked very much, but about my commitment to this thing, setting up home. It seemed to have been undertaken terribly lightly. He had watched, with some disgust, the joyless procession of the conniving victims of my serial monogamy, in and out of his house for weekend visits; hell, he’d had to wash the sheets. And he needed to alter his Christmas-card list every year, crossing out ‘Lucy’ and replacing it with ‘Sharon’, and then with ‘Jane’, and so on, finding it hard to keep track and not enjoying trying to do so. ‘Aren’t you with Lucy any more?’ he would ask, not having heard her mentioned for some while. ‘Sort of yes and no,’ I would stammeringly reply, attempting to encapsulate in that phrase the month or two of furious deceit and infidelity which had just taken place. ‘It’s just that things are a bit complicated at the moment,’ I added on one occasion, when his enquiries pressed in more tightly down the phone. ‘They’re only complicated if you make them so,’ he replied.
But no, it seemed to us the right time to buy a place, me and Sue. To buy a place, to get on the ladder. You had to get on the ladder, back in the 1980s – everyone had to get on the fucking ladder, and then cling on for dear life. All of our friends were getting on the ladder – the ones in the south, who had jobs. It was our right to get on the ladder too, then. And not just have the place of our own, but have it furnished immediately: washing machine, fridge, bed, matt-black table, geometric rug. All of that, NOW, please. Fourteen years? We could just about wait fourteen days, and a little grumpily at that. My mum used to tell me that when they first bought that house in Bexleyheath they sat in deckchairs in the living room because they couldn’t afford a three-piece suite. I’m not sure if I believed her or not. They bought the three-piece suite just before I was born, and it went in the ‘front room’ and nobody was allowed to sit on it, except at Christmas for a bit, when the southern rellies came round, and the neighbours, and the vicar. You were allowed to sit on it then. By the day after Boxing Day the room was closed off again. They had that suite – a virulent red wool, ribbed and boxy and probably very chic now – for sixteen years.
My dad would ring from time to time to see how we were getting on in our new flat, now we were on the ladder. He would be preternaturally concerned about stuff like boilers and maintenance charges and double glazing. My replies were always pretty blithe, uninterested, delivered sometimes with the suspicion of impatience. He asked me on one occasion, a couple of weeks after we’d moved in, if we had a sofa yet. I told him we didn’t have a sofa – instead we’d bought ourselves a futon.
‘What’s a futon?’ he asked.
‘Well, Dad, it’s a sort of wooden platform, on top of which you lay a very densely stuffed thin mattress. It’s from Japan. Ours is black and white.’
There was a complete silence at the other end of the line. It went on for ages, to the extent that I thought we had been cut off. ‘Dad? Dad? …’
‘Rod,’ he broke in, sounding incredibly sad, ‘why don’t you live in the fucking real world?’
* Well, there was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1962, followed by American Express a year later. Barclaycard started in 1966, Access in 1972. Take-up was slow in those early years.
4
A house for ninety-seven down,
And once a week for half a crown,
For twenty years.
I