THE OPENER / ANDREW TUCK
Some sunny day
This week Dame Vera Lynn died at the age of 103 (see Friday’s Monocle Minute). To anyone outside the UK, or those who are just too young to know, she was the singer whose hits encapsulated the fears and hopes of families and military personnel during the Second World War. And her song “We’ll Meet Again” has become woven into the British psyche, referenced again and again as a siren of optimism and of love and friendship put on hold – just for now, just until this sticky moment has passed. But she wasn’t just the “forces’ sweetheart”. If you grew up in the UK in the 1960s or 1970s, you would see her on chat shows or performing on Saturday night variety programmes (weekends were definitely not rocking on TV back then).
When you look back at your childhood – whenever that was – from an increasingly distant vantage point, you see it in sharper and sharper relief. My parents had listened to Vera Lynn in the moment – my dad as a soldier. Of course, as a kid, this all just seemed a lot of ancient history.
But now, as I look back on that world from here, I realise how much my childhood was shaped by events that happened to other people; my parents’ thrift (socks darned), self-sufficiency (they never had a credit card) and diet (there was always a corner of the garden left for growing vegetables). And that feeling is even sharper for many of my contemporaries in London whose family names tell of displacement, exile and terror as their families sought refuge in the Second World War.
The ways in which these tremors of history work was also made clear this week while binge-watching the documentary series Chasing the Moon, which charts the space race between the Soviet Union and the US, culminating in the first moon landing. The initial echo from history is that both nations’ space programmes were aided and shaped in the early years by scientists from Nazi Germany – in the US by Wernher von Braun; he made the Nasa programme what it was.
And then, when space exploration lost its lustre and tens of thousands of scientists and researchers were sent packing, many of them headed off to start the technology and computing firms that have left the US in pole position in this race ever since. Again, while this “space generation” knew that they were living through an historical gear shift, it would be another 20 or 30 years before they really understood how this had helped to mould them.
So trying to understand right now how this moment in history will shape people’s lives is tricky. Writing for Monocle, economist Daniel Kahneman gives an even earlier example of history’s aftershocks. “People who lived through the Great Depression were affected for the rest of their lives,” he writes. “It changed their attitudes to chance, to events, to control and to money. They were financially more cautious and less trusting of the future. They knew the unthinkable could happen. This pandemic is different to the Great Depression but it will not be forgotten quickly.”
Sorry kids, but it might only be as the grey hairs multiply that you will get to see what today’s history will do to you.
In last Saturday’s Weekend Edition, I wrote about the street singalong that happens every Thursday in my neighbourhood, led by William Spaulding, chorus director of the Royal Opera House. This week he was accompanied by a member of the chorus who, as a tribute to Vera Lynn, paused proceedings to sing “We’ll Meet Again”. Surrounded by the houses, with the tree canopy acting as a makeshift opera-house roof, her voice gave echo to the past. But as you looked around and saw kids dancing and people of every age and background listening and singing along (how do people in their twenties know the words?), she also gave voice to hopes for a better future – whatever that turns out to be.