This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

 The past is supposed to be another country, a place where they do things differently. By way of various cultural forms it’s also a place that can be visited — for edification, amusement or sometimes more pernicious reasons. These two books by David Kirby and Robyn Hitchcock are effectively debriefs from two such time trips, the equivalent of two albums’ worth of their authors’ holiday snaps. 

One focuses its attention upon everyday life in Britain during 1947, whilst the other tracks the life of a single British person up to and through the calendar year of 1967. What do these two staycations tell us about those “other countries”, and do they shed any light on the Britain we now inhabit?

One of the very earliest histories of our people, usually attributed to the 9th-century monk Nennius, features in its authorial preface the line, “I have made a heap of everything I have found.” In much the same spirit, David Kirby’s Britain, 1947: Hope Amidst Hardship is a compendious gazetteer of events and vox pops: much of its idiosyncratic colour is drawn from anonymous testimonies in the contemporary Mass Observation Archive, with more coming from literature, film and the local and national press. 

Rather closer to home than Nennius, this is also the strategy behind the ongoing multi-volume chronicle of Britain’s history from 1945 to 1979 entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem by David Kynaston, alongside whom Kirby must stand as something of a sorcerer’s apprentice. (Indeed the master gives him a generous pat on the book’s back cover.) 

But Kirby — in 1947 a small boy — differs from Kynaston in proffering additional titbits from his own personal experience. For instance, shortly before his demobbed father was due to return home after serving in Palestine, Kirby confides, “I have a strong memory of my mother putting on a special pair of stockings, then of waiting with her at the bus stop.”

I welcomed such anecdotal matter, partly because the bigger postwar picture has been so exhaustively drawn before. (Great chunks of the economy taken into public ownership, founding of a comprehensive system of health and social security, working-class communal life reaching its zenith with trade union membership topping nine million, etc.) And Kirby’s source material tends to flesh out rather than challenge or modify the consensual perspective.

But as an emeritus professor of Modern History, he’s unafraid to leaven the facts with the odd potential debating riff, as in “the British state finds in remembrance of the fallen its sole national coming together, a curious mixture of mourning and military parades” — though for a large part of our population a sodden Glastonbury may nowadays provide an alternative.

I found my own pulse quickening particularly as I read: “There were in the late 1940s hundreds of thousands of men in Great Britain who had killed other human beings in two world wars. They had dropped bombs, fired projectiles, shot and stabbed armed men and unarmed civilians, men, women and children, at the behest of a state that still decreed and carried out the death penalty for murder.” This was a holiday snap I hadn’t quite expected — an aerial view, as it were, which somehow brought added sharpness to the finer detail.

Anyone looking for further “different ways of doing things” eight decades ago, when Britain “ran on coal” (as opposed to today’s cappuccinos?), will not be disappointed. I for one now grasp what lay behind an abiding film image from this period — that of electric irons plugged into overhead light sockets — namely, the paucity of British homes’ power outlets. 

There is also, reassuringly or otherwise, an air of plus ça change. “Labour’s breakthrough was hailed in left-wing circles as a people’s victory, a sign of a determination to sweep away an inefficient and morally bankrupt old order of decline and decay and replace it with a better, more ‘moral’ world” — that’s Kirby’s take on the climactic postwar election, but he could as well have been describing July 2024. 

Similar familiarities would probably show up a little further on, in 1953 — the year in which novelist L.P. Hartley made his “another country” remark. It is also the birth year of our second author, Robyn Hitchcock. 

For his slim memoir, written and edited on his phone, Hitchcock has however zeroed in on the year when he turned 14. The full title 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left has a rite-of-passage vibe to it; and he duly claims that his awakening to music at that time, his first year as a boarder at Winchester College, gave him not only a lifeline but also, eventually, a livelihood — albeit as a singer-songwriter who by his own admission has “never been anywhere near the Top Twenty”. 

In outlining his career’s most formative year, he writes a lot about daily life at public school, intermittently in the form of fantasies about adult members of staff. (“Some of the characters in the narrative are more real than others” is perhaps an unnecessary line in the acknowledgements.) Lindsay Anderson’s satirical 1968 film If … gave me as much information on this subject as I’ll ever be likely to need; the appetites of others may remain unsated. 

Meanwhile Kirby-esque glimpses of the wider late-1960s British social scene are necessarily incidental, though through a shared allegiance to the unbridled new music — even within his small sealed Winchester world — Hitchcock was becoming part of an international, if still largely virtual, community of the like-minded.

Yet his relentlessly downbeat appraisals of himself, and of life in general, can be unsettling. Given to occasional bouts of destruction, exhibiting “most of the symptoms of Asperger’s” and with knotty parental relationships, Hitchcock frequently cuts a forlorn figure. “Maybe it’s too much to ask,” he muses, haunted by his own privilege, “for my parents to pay the Second World War veteran teachers of Winchester College to teach us about futility.”

His own arty father, Raymond Hitchcock, was another veteran, sustaining a long-term shrapnel wound in France in 1944. I wanted to hear more on him. We learn in passing that after 1967 he made a killing from selling the film rights to a novel he’d just started writing. Wikipedia identifies this as Percy, a 1971 comedy-drama about the first penis transplant, and the first X-rated film I watched in a cinema — just to get an early listen to its soundtrack by The Kinks (honest, sir).

Hitchcock doesn’t quite deliver on his title: his reasons for failing to leave 1967 rather escaped me. That year’s psychedelic music (Beatles, Pink Floyd, Incredible String Band) spoke to him and to some extent he’s been involved in a one-way conversation with it ever since. Maybe it wasn’t so much the music that mattered as the time in his life when he heard it? 

But one feels relieved that it appealed to him so strongly, if only as an art form he would go on to use to “encase my own take on human hell”. 

“It was twenty years ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play,” sang The Beatles, over and over, on Hitchcock’s gramophone in 1967. Which takes us back to 1947, Kirby’s year, and the shadow of a war in which, mercifully, neither author had to fight. 

Born sooner, both would doubtless have served with as much gallantry and/or stoicism as any member of the “Greatest Generation”. As writers, both reveal themselves to be modest and decent, maybe the type Kirby has in mind when he says that during the serious financial crisis of the summer of 1947, “on the whole the populace simply kept calm and carried on” — as mostly it does today, whilst the wingnuts make all their clamour. 

In a distinctively British way, too, both authors underline their workaday origins, what with Kirby’s grandfather having to make do for “most of his working life with no indoor lavatory” and Hitchcock tracing his lineage back to Forest of Dean ironmongers (an echo of the Sky TV-deprivation endured by a more recent Winchester alumnus, Rishi Sunak). 

Viewed from the camera angles employed by these two men, there’s little for us as a nation to be ashamed of. The Rolling Stones aren’t noticeably present in 1967, but Keith Richards once called the protean Mick Jagger “a nice bunch of guys”. Might Britain similarly be called a nice bunch of countries? Less in the sense of its component territories than in our current state incorporating all those “other countries” it has been in the past — running through Kirby’s unbeaten Britain of 1947 and Hitchcock’s uninhibited Britain of 1967 before preparing itself, one hopes, to take in a newly unbroken Britain of 2027 and beyond.