History of England 1-6

Despite his reputation for diffidence, the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, had a strong and independent mind. He formed a group of men who had that much in common with him, though little else, and neither did they have a great deal in common with each other. Aneurin Bevan, the minister of health and housing, was a Welsh bull with the face of a cherub, gravel in his belly and helium in his heart; the minister for fuel and power was Hugh Gaitskell, his stare one of almost lunatic intensity, as fierce in his centrism as Bevan was in his socialism; there was Hugh Dalton, the new chancellor, of vampiric appearance, loyal soul, brilliant mind and disastrous naivety; Stafford Cripps, his successor, lean and prematurely withered, an austere tribune always licking his upper lip as if to moisten his punishingly ascetic vision. And then there was Attlee himself, small and tight-featured, with a grin that could disarm the most obdurate adversary. Their very dissonance was to prove their glory.

The world was still much as it once was, with Lyons’ Corner Houses and steam trains. Most goods were still rationed, paid for with warm heavy coins. The slump had left its mark, and 7 million houses were without hot water. It was the same old pre-war world, steadily more constricted and diminished. The effect was all the more unusual since the public sector of the country was slowly being populated by ministries, departments, red-brick boxes of officials packed together in computations for the future. In the spring of 1948, 42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate, compared with 19 per cent in 1945. Everyone was locked to the future, except those who were deluged in the dizzying present of jazz and bands. Others were preoccupied with planning to better their families, and even their nation – there was real hope that a more serious-minded consciousness would outweigh frivolity. But as Orwell wrote: ‘Everyone wants, above all, a rest.’

But who had the time to rest? And what was there to sweeten it? ‘Clothing? Not here, mate. Food? Try next door. Fuel? There may be a can nearby. Beer and baccy? No chance.’ The Express announced ‘Meat and Eggs going to be Off next week’, a term widely used deep into the Fifties. One group, however, promised ‘On’, come what may. This was the ‘spiv’, the ringmaster of the wartime underworld. He was a profiteer, of course, but though despised, he was still needed. He was instantly recognizable: a trilby, a pencil moustache and a sloping stride. He could not proclaim his wares in the time-cankered fashion of the street hawker, as his antecedents might, but murmured them in a downward glissade of confidentiality. Behind him would stand his straight man, lending him a patina of respectability, with the available wares in a little box. He was a creature of the twilight, amoral rather than immoral.

In Cecil Day-Lewis’s children’s novel of the post-war years, The Otterbury Incident (1948), the chief villain, Johnny Sharp, is a spiv. Against two plucky bands of boys, themselves rather prone to scavenging, he and his accomplice wage a quietly implacable war. Sharp is softly spoken, slinky in movement and prone to Americanisms. He addresses people as ‘buddy’, another affectation typical of the spiv; but the American influence on the national voice was to outlast the spiv by generations.

After the war, over a quarter of the working population had to be brought back into the fold and retaught the ways of the civilian. Overseas service had trained men and women for combat, but not for the demands of a nation in a state of material haemorrhage. The rigours of austerity, the demands of regular work and the expectations of wives, husbands and sweethearts could prove both bewildering and dismaying. Where was the opulent, cheerful nation they had left? Why were there so many ruins? And what had happened to the courtesy they remembered?

The contraction ‘demob’ has the sting of dismissiveness, and its connotations were ambivalent. On the one hand, such men and women were conquering heroes; on the other, they had escaped much that the civilian had been obliged to endure, and were often reminded of it. More than one returning soldier overheard, ‘There’s one who had a good war!’ Some among them, prisoners of war in particular, could be certain of sympathy and respect. But however they were greeted, there can be little doubt that ‘demobs’ were regarded as a burden. One child of the time remembered her father digging hungrily into the cheese on the dining table and asking her mother whether there was any more. ‘No dear,’ she replied, ‘you’ve just eaten the family’s ration for the week.’ Afterwards ‘he was very quiet’.