On becoming fifty
George Gale
Last Saturday, at around four o'clock in the morning, (so my mother assured me), I became fifty. I was asleep in my bed at the time and was unconscious of anything untoward happening. The morning when I awoke to it, was sunny and the day remained cheerful and the ensuing partynight also. My brother-in-law (he six weeks my senior) and I held a joint celebration/wake, and both of us received more presents from our friends than at any other anniversary since we were twenty-one. I am marginally fortunate in that most of my close friends are a year or two older than I am, so I did not have to put up with too much nonsense about the ageing process from them.
It will be apparent that becoming fifty, as 'far as the externals of the thing went, was nothing more than the pretext for a party. But I cannot say in all truth that I particularly like the idea of being fifty. I liked becoming twenty-one. I didn't much care for being thirty. Forty I found very unpleasant; and it may have been because I remembered this, that, for some months now, I had been looking forward to my fiftieth birthday with some apprehension and much aversion. In addition,! had been telling myself for the last year or so that a book I have been trying to finish for years would definitely be concluded, for good or ill, before I reached fifty. I was more or less on schedule up to three months ago. I suffered then an interruption in the workin-progress; and I haven't resumed it since. For the past two months I have known that I would not meet my self-imposed deadline; and this knowledge added to the mild gloom with which I anticipated being fifty.
But now that I am actually over the hump, the gloom has gone, my impaired resolution now repairs itself, and I reflect that the ages of man, or at any rate the ages of me, have nothing whatever to do with the decades by which our time is formally marked. There are ages through which we pass; but in my case they are marked by a combination of recollections and discontinuities, and not by birthdays in multiples of ten.
It so happens that my first age, and my second also, were more or less the same as my first two decades. Of my earliest years I have the most vestigial remembrances. very much doubt the literal truths of those who detail their early life. My earliest recollections are indistinguishable from what, pretty early on, I was told I said or did. I remember, however, insisting on being given a lift in my younger brother's pram when aged around four or five; and then being cross at being discovered in it by a jeering child of my own age. That piece of embarrassment is my earliest actual recollection. There are other bits and pieces from around that time: the taste of celery; the smell of a sweet shop; a book my father brought me back from a trip away from home called Fairy Tales from Many Lands, a copy of which to this day I covet, my own long long ago having been flung out; a visit from an unconvincing Santa Claus at my primary school; a Christmas with my cousin John when we awoke the household playing bagatelle at four in the morning; learning good poetry by heart; roller-skating, iceskating, fleeing from the park-keeper; learning to play whist.
That is almost all. I feel no connection with that child. He that child — was given a label and a gas-mask and put on a train from Newcastle to Penrith two days before war began, and on his first day at his new school. Evacuation started off as a fearful excitement; but homesickness soon supervened, reinforced by unpleasant episodes (a fellow-billettee peeing in a shoe of mine, because he couldn't find the chamber pot; the loutish large son of the house, a cobbler aged about twenty and huge with it, making a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to make me play with him in his bed.) With others I then went to a large house between Penrith and Ullswater; and this was better, although I leaned heavily on my asthma whenever it was desirable. I remember a fair bit about all those days, and others back at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle after the war — sixth-form days, argumentative days, nights of reading at Newcastle's Lit. and Phil. society, scholarship-winning days. But although I remember much, I feel scarcely any connection with that youth, and have not done for many years.
The boy who went to Cambridge in 1946 had a longer life than the infant or the schoolboy. He persisted for about twenty years. By this I mean that through my twenties and my thirties I felt myself to be one and the same person, suffering no discontinuity of recollection or of identity. I was no longer the schoolboy. But throughout these years I felt myself to be one,continuous piece, or thread. What is more, throughout these years I felt myself to be young and finding out and deciding what and what not to do. These years of my twenties and thirties had this in common: that I still imagined myself to be an academic who had temporarily entered into journalism but who would in due course, return to his allotted sphere. I racketted around British politics and the world's crises during these twenty years, thinking of myself as an amateur journalist (as indeed in a way I still do), picking up bits and pieces of experience on the way which would, I kidded myself, eventually become useful when I got down to serious, academic work.
In 1969 Hugh Cudlipp had me fired from the Mirror, for reasons which were never disclosed, but which had, I think, to do with a growing divergence between the Mirror's line and that which I was putting forward four days a week in its most prominent col umn. The pretext for my removal was my temerity in asking for a rise, based strictly on productivity and comparability. I fled from Fleet Street to my old college in Cam bridge, they kindly giving me a room and dining rights. I was there for only a few weeks, but this was another discontinuity. Now, when I look back, I can see myself as the same person as the journalist who fled; but the strands which linked him with the undergraduate, cleverer but younger than almost all his contemporaries, had all but been snapped. Now, it requires the greatest effort of willed remembrance to feel myself the same person as he who argued late, in Peterhouse, who read heavily, who rowed quite hard, who drank too much, who wrestled with what he thought was his soul and with what might have been his God, and who stole some golden days in punts and some silver evenings with madrigals and strawberries and girls in frothy dresses.
The most abrupt departure from the expected, the greatest discontinuity had, of course, been that first flight of mine, out of the academic life, into journalism, into love and marriage and parenthood and all within a year of returning to Cambridge from a Spell at Goettingen University, all between — July 1950 and May 1951. Although I thought the break was temporary and the changed circumstances simply part and par cel of the adult life, the break, I now see, was permanent; and now I also know that living is indissolubly circumstantial. So now, When at fifty I look back upon myself, I see the same self who fled to Cambridge in 1969: no discontinuity since then, unless I now am passing through another change; and I remember clearly enough right back to 1950 and the flight from Cambridge. It thus strikes to me that my consciousness of being one and the same person survives one major break, one huge dis continuity; but the second break, the second discontinuity more or less obliterates, except for random recollections, the sense Of identity with the person who exists before the first break, the first discontinuity. As a continuing identity, I take one break in my stride; but each subsequent break reduces me, at one stage removed, from belonging to, or knowing that which I know I have been.
And it is my fancy that somewhat the same kind of process is to be discerned in history, both on the grand scale and within the petty scale in which we live our lives. Even the early Dark Ages may have preserved a sense of identity with that which Preceded the fall of Rome; but by the time we come to the Northumbrian renaissance and the Carolingians, that which was recalled before that break were the Arthurian legends, for instance, and Rome had become a different world entirely. The Italian renaissance and the Reformation likewise referred back, with a sense of continuity despite the change and the actual discontinuities, to the later feudal world and Christendom, but the time of Angles and Saxons, Jutes, Huns, Franks, Normans and Norsemen was unrecognisably remote. When we look back, to the great discontinuities of the French and industrial revolutions, we have no difficulty in linking ourselves with the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Elizabeth and Henry VIII, the Borgia popes and Luther are of our past but not our kind.
And if! look back at the years I have lived through, the pre-war time is utterly remote. I know it by repute and to some extent by recollection; but it is not my time. Wartime used to be part of my time; but I fancy that it, too, is receding fast and is no longer regarded as part of the active tradition of which we feel our day-to-day living to belong. The immediate post-war world was as much a time of discontinuity and change as was the war itself. Since then, there has been a further break, made manifest in the student revolts of 1968 as in the collapse of traditional morality and its replacement by the permissive, disillusioned, disorientated and bewildered society. We see and know ourselves back through this break, this discontinuity, but not beyond the post-war world to the world at war.
Such seem the ages of my life and times as they present themselves to me at fifty and in 1977. It may well be that, in the short term, the world we live in is now moving into another time of change, another small discontinuity involving the rejection of the 'sixties; but if so, this will take time to bring about, and if it does take place (and I fancy it will) it will do so in the 'eighties. As for me, as I observe myself in the mirror, regard my external situation, consider my internal condition, and all in all put two and two together, I discern no impending discontinuity, no intimations of climacteric. It may, however, also be that chapge, discontinuity and decay are all around me but I see it not, and will to see it not. I do not for a moment believe this to be the case, but knowledge of myself and my condition, and experience of my fellow men, causes me to acknowledge that such could be the case.
I trust that those I love I will not cease to love, that those I like I will not cease to like, that my hatreds and dislikes continue to weaken slowly with the years, and that I continue to keep track of, and feel myself to be a continuation of, the young man I was before the discontinuity and change of my last upheaval, back in 1969. For these reasons, I do not want another one, not yet, although I know that if I live long enough another climacteric will come upon me. whether I seek it or not. I hope it is delayed throughout my fifties. Time will tell.
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