The new freedom

For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’ ‘Am I getting old?’ ‘Oh, no, not you.’ Memory plays us false, and it takes the skill of a sympathetic historian such as Virginia Nicholson to sift the evidence, written and oral, and unfold a story that is both plausible and sound.

I look back to my 1960s life and think how many of us were metaphorically clothed in gold… how we strode through the years enjoying new freedoms, new loves, music, clothes, drugs, opportunities. I have in my time contributed to the myth of unalloyed pleasure, extolling the 1960s for the quickening pace of change, the broadening mood of happiness and hope. But, as another lyricist has it, ‘it ain’t necessarily so’.

Nicholson meets the dilemma head on. There have been fine histories of the decade by David Kynaston, Dominic Sandbrook and Arthur Marwick: all of them footnoted, thorough… and male. In contrast, Jenny Diski’s agonising personal account was poignant and female. Nicholson, too, lets her own presence into the narrative. She was only four when the 1960s began: she was taken to watch the wedding of Princess Margaret on a friend’s television. In those days 79 per cent of the population didn’t have a set. Ten years later, in August 1969, she was a disaffected teenager yearning to attend the ‘biggest open air concert in history’, the Isle of Wight Festival just a short journey from home. ‘How could I be alive at such an amazing time and miss out on all this?’ She asked the question then and she asks the question now.

It is her enthusiasm as much as her scholarship that makes this such a beguiling read, especially for those of us who were there at the time and indeed have shared our recollections.