From the Old Country: ‘Alive to Tell the Tale’

Quite apart from the brand-new novels by Jane Austen, the Brontës, even George Eliot, which Mary must have read as they came out, she’d have witnessed, and, I hope, welcomed the introduction of compulsory primary education in the 1870s. She would already have lived through the arrival of the railway in Britain and seen the first photographs. And that’s quite apart from extraordinary political changes that happened all over Europe, from the abolition of slavery to the vast expansion of the British Empire.

I have a painting of her by George Frederic Watts, a well-known Victorian artist of the day. She looks remarkably composed. She had great nephews and nieces who became civil servants and upholders of the Empire. She might even have met Karl Marx and read articles by him, if she visited the nephew who lived on the other side of London who was his friend. I imagine her bewildered by and struggling with innovations just like me.

This is not a competition. I am comforted by the thought that at 93 my difficulties with online banking along most other digital manoeuvres, and with being asked vital health questions on my phone by an automaton, may not be entirely my fault.

The world has always changed. It changed colossally for my three-times great aunt, and it has changed very quickly and thoroughly in my lifetime.

I watch programmes and read articles about Artificial Intelligence, but I don’t know what AI is or what on earth it’s for. Geoffrey Hinton, a so-called “godfather of AI” (there are now several contenders for the title) once brought his tent and slept in our garden. We admired him as a young man able to juggle cherry tomatoes with his mouth. Little did I know that one day, 50 years later, he would be famous for very publicly leaving his position at Google as a warning to the world of what the AI he’d spent his life creating might do to humanity if we weren’t careful. I’m left wondering whether AI has got something to do with juggling tomatoes.

And then there is the political world. I joined the Labour Party in in 1948 when I was 15. I left the party three years ago, though I helped vote it in in 2024. Under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Labour had thrown out several oldish Jewish members who were critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and said so. As the daughter of a Jewish mother, I am also critical of Israel. Even more so now than when I left the Labour Party. We now have a Labour government that supplies Israel with military equipment, and arrests and locks up pro-Palestinian protestors. Three have reached the last, perilous stages of their hunger strike.

I was a child in the Second World War and I didn’t always know what was going on. But I grew up knowing that Hitler and Mussolini and fascism were disastrous and that countries like mine and America could and did welcome people from war and poverty.

No country got it all right, to put it mildly. But those years after the end of the war were impressive for the boldness of the government in this country. The National Health Service was established, offering free health care to the entire nation; comprehensive schools were set up, providing equal opportunity in education, and soon after that the school leaving age was raised to 15. The British Empire was gradually dissolved to become the Commonwealth.

There was still disabling inequality and racism. But slowly, and perhaps somewhat grudgingly, a welfare state was established. Far more young people went to universities. Racism became recognised and abhorred. We joined Europe. We actually invited people from the old empire to come here to live and work.

Perhaps it is inevitable that we glamorise our youth. Perhaps my horrified sense that the world is going backwards, that people are now voting for leaders they know to be inept as well as brutal and corrupt, is no more than an old person’s fond memories of a time when change and improvement seemed at least a possibility.

Polls suggest that the far-right Reform Party of Nigel Farage and his rabble of followers might win a general election in Britain in 2029. Over 30 of the men he was at school with in the 1970s have given details of his all too believable racist and antisemitic bullying, which he has shrugged off, insisting that it was no more than boyish “banter” that they have “misremembered.” It is clear from their testimony that his behaviour towards them was all too memorable.

I don’t need to recite Donald Trump’s lies and felonies to you. I gather that the Washington Post has claimed he made 30,573 “false or misleading claims during his first term” which works out at about 21 lies a day. The real tragedy is that relatively few of either man’s potential voters seem moved by what they know. A Farage government would be disastrous for us, though obviously less catastrophic for the whole world than Trump’s two reigns.

Farage, with his hyena grin and his unpleasant swagger, has no interest in parliament or democracy, and his hastily assembled team of followers has almost no experience of running anything, let alone a country. The Conservative Party committed hara-kiri by choosing Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss to lead them, and they are now a withered version of themselves. And the Labour Party got in on a reduced vote but a big majority and a manifesto remembered, if at all, for its forlorn reliance on vague hopes for change and growth, but no details about how things might change or how economic growth might be achieved.

But I am alive to tell the tale. I’m well looked after by the National Health Service. I swim and read every day, and I have a large, interesting and helpful family. The Green Party and the Liberal Democrat Party are not likely, either of them, to form a government, but they are gaining ground quite rapidly and their voices are heard.

I am currently reading, in Russian, dictionary at hand,  Anton Chekhov’s story, “Ward 6,” which chastises a doctor who is lazily ministering to his patients while smugly smoking, reading his books and occasionally advising his patients to accept their fate with equanimity. Perhaps Chekhov was telling himself something. The doctor fails to recognise the appalling suffering of some of his patients until, eventually, he becomes one of them himself. I bear the story in mind as I watch the world destroying itself from my comfortable armchair.

Jane MillerMore by this author →

Jane Miller writes the  "From the Old Country" column for Barn Raiser.  Born in 1932, Miller lives in London. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old (Virago) and most recently In My Own Time: Thoughts and Afterthoughts (Virago), a collection of her "From the Old Country" columns published in In These Times. Miller, a graduate of Cambridge, first worked in publishing, then as an English teacher in a London comprehensive school and finally as a professor at the London University Institute of Education.