A change of weather

One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’

Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and dramatic of our peacetime history. Society had utterly changed, and a government of extraordinary ambition set an agenda which was to go unchallenged until 1979. It was a period of great deprivation — rationing not only continued, but tightened after the war — and memory tended for decades afterwards to dredge up the horrible occasion of the hard winter of 1947 as a sort of macabre centrepiece to the whole experience. (James Lees-Milne entitled the volume of his diary for the period Caves of Ice; Kingsley Amis, less elegantly but just as sincerely, simply wrote to Philip Larkin, ‘Christ, it’s bleeding cold.’).

As deprivation tends to, it encouraged a mood both of simple pleasures and elaborate fantasy. The characteristic works of art of the period tend to be baroque, extravagant and somewhat less than functional: Dylan Thomas, Roland Emmett, Nancy Mitford, Gormenghast, and the romantically Stygian effects of John Piper. There are, too, the marvellous Ealing comedies and Powell/ Pressburger, which together mined a vein of splendid fantasy never approached before or since in British cinema. When we look at the period’s lasting legacy, its artistic statements, it seems to have defined itself through wished-for opposites, dreams of abundance and lavish spectacle.

Not many historians understand this, but David Kynaston, in this almost implausibly entertaining book, does; understands, too, that history happens to the anonymous individual as well as to the great, and happens in idiosyncratic and unique ways.