A Significant Rite of Passage by Dennis Hamley

You are reading this on my eightieth birthday. Yes, The Big 8. I don't find this easy to believe. Twenty years ago, reaching such a milestone seemed the merest fantasy. Ten years ago I thought it possible but extremely unlikely. And now, here I am. Made it.  I feel fine - actually, I feel about forty - and confidently expect in twenty years' time to get my congratulatory telegram from King William.

It is, I suppose, a sort of Rite of Passage. And of course, such a rite makes one pause and survey. And this survey leads me to a stark cleavage in life which I don't think I'm the only one to experience - the great divide between private happiness and public misery. The first is never a given: we either work for it or it falls into our laps. Or both. The second is always with us - and, I'm hardly alone in thinking, particularly sharply now.

How lucky I am to have the first in spades. Its profound aspects I'll leave because they are too deep for words. I'll just mention some of its symptomatic immediate aspects. My birthday treat this year is a trip to Stratford on Avon to see the RSC's Henry V. I'd rather it were Hamlet or Lear or A Comedy of Errors but that's the way it is. Whatever it is, it will be great. I'm probably starting the car as you read. Last week, my children got the caterers in and gave me a super birthday dinner. Lovely. And now my new book, the first in the Bright Sea, Dark Graves series, is up on Kindle as the third in Joslin Books and  in paperback as well. The first truly new book I've published independently. All these things come together and fill me with contentment.

It's strange how mundane and unexciting producing an ebook has become. Three years ago, the prospect thrilled me with its strangeness and the feelings of power and release it held out. Farewell to the shackles of print, I thought.  Now, in a strange reversion, it's the prospect of a lovely object in its own right (and a Createspace paperback is indeed a rather nice artefact) which is getting my juices going. Back to the future. Kay's lovely Skye skyscape (with added crippled frigate) makes a wonderful cover image, and inside is a professional-looking print job which seems to have manifested itself almost without my noticing. I'm simple-minded enough still to consider that as a small miracle. Why is it though that the paragraph indents in the print version are always spot-on while in the Kindle version they're all over the place? And I didn't do this myself. To do a Kindle version as well is part of the Createspace service. 

Anyway, I'm pleased with the book, The suggestions of Julia and Jan, my nautical beta-readers, have not merely been useful. They have been decisive and my debt is great. And my new private imprint, Joslin Books (which has nothing to do with Blank Page Press), now has three books in it. Nearly a publisher's list.

So those are the latest manifestations of  private happiness. What about the misery bit?

Reaching eighty isn't much cop nowadays. Everybody seems to be doing it, so Albany's words at the end of King Lear don't have the same force as once they did:

The oldest have borne most: we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Trust me though. You will.

But my being eighty specifically now does have a ring of significance about it and it's provided a shape to my life. Seventy years ago today I had my tenth birthday. World War 2 had ended three months before. It had provided the whole of my life experience until then. It has since been a major spring of my imagination and has spawned novels, scores of stories and two pieces of non-fiction, including a history for schools.

My first ten years in fiction

Published first by Scholastic, reissued by Catnip. Hurry. Only four new ones left. But you can have a copy for £400.

Ten years old in 1945. I had no idea how important that date would be. Perhaps my life only started when I was ten and the first part was a sort of self-contained prelude. I was suddenly in a strange new world full of possibilities I had no idea of that at the time. In 1946 I took, along with everybody else, the old Scholarship examination, forerunner of the 11+. The prize was the grammar school. I passed. I wasn't altogether happy about it because the grammar school was old and crumbly while the secondary modern was a late 1930s building which still seemed fire-new contemporary. However to go to grammar school for free symbolised a brave new world of unprecedented opportunity, though I didn't know it at the time.

I hadn't grown up in poverty by any means - this was the soft south so no Jarrow marches for us - but my parents considered themselves solidly working class, although my mother stopped my father having the Daily Worker delivered every morning because it embarrassed her in front of the neighbours. If I thought about the future at all, I presumed it would be more of the same and I would live a life much like my parents'. I remember being thrilled  with the 1945 election result, but really, that was only because Mum and Dad were thrilled as well.  I had no idea that I was about to live through a major social revolution which seemed inevitable and final and would surely liberate us and define our world for ever.

The start of the NHS, the coming of British Rail (though I remember nearly crying over the loss of the LMS, LNER, GWR and SR which had affected my childhood almost as much as the war itself) and the defenestration of the wicked mine owners were events which I thought must be good because they sent my father into such raptures. He was a telephone engineer with the GPO, spent stormy nights on top of telegraph poles and was branch secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union for twenty-five years. When he retired, he was awarded the British Empire Medal, which really pleased him even though he had often railed against honours lists. I told him he should have held out for an MBE because the BEM was just a sop to the lower orders. He agreed, but still took it. No investiture for him though. He got lunch in the Post Office Tower with Ted Short, the Postmaster General in Harold Wilson's first Labour government. He enjoyed it a lot more than going to the palace to see the Queen but I still said the BEM was a ghetto award. I see that Cameron wants to reinstate it. What does that tell us?

Yes, it was a time of hope. The ruling dragons had been slain. Yes, there was a Cold War on but things would surely be all right, wouldn't they? Well, in the end, they were, just about, but they've been replaced by things even more frightening. And the dragons weren't slain after all. They slept for thirty years, then they woke and plotted and now they have reinstated the status quo they never thought to lose in the first place.

At this point, I'd planned a discussion of why this should be so. But I've gone on too long already and besides, I'd probably be saying nothing new so I won't bother.

So the brave new world of opportunity, the revolution which would put society to rights for ever, the time of hope for everybody - all seem to have evaporated. Unfairness defines society again. And there's worse. We are busily and wantonly degrading our beautiful world - crapping in our own nest, if you like - so that it won't be fit for our grandchildren to live in. We have allowed evil, monstrous and in plain view, to thrive and have answered it with criminal dereliction and appalling meanness of spirit. Partly through our own actions, we have set up flashpoints of anger all over the world, any one of which could erupt and start the final human catastrophe, thus beating Gaia to it. At least the Cold War was between just two massed forces, so we knew where the threat came from and were comforted that the most likely sort of disaster would be accidental because the stakes were so high. I watched Dr Strangelove again the other week and shuddered at what might have been.

I think that one of the most important, critical and sane and voices over the last hundred and fifty years was Matthew Arnold's. Culture and Anarchy was published in 1867 and is still a wonderful book about the good society and its enemies. His HMI reports as he travelled the country in 3rd class railway carriages from slum schools to village schools now the lower classes were at last allowed to read and write are still the sanest words I know of about education. Our present rulers would do well to read them, because they show how and why the battle was lost almost before it started, which is what their ancestors probably wanted anyway. And he wrote the most prophetic, profound and modern-seeming poem of the age, which I think stands alongside Yeats's The Second Coming as a cry of warning and dramatises perfectly what I feel about private joy and public misery. Dover Beach. I'm not surprised that Ian MacEwan quotes it in full at the conclusion of Saturday, his own cry of warning.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The man himself.

Don't worry. I'll really enjoy my birthday and then finish some overdue projects in the many years which  will follow. And start some new ones too.