The Memory Chalet Read Online Free PDF Page A

was little evidence in those years of conspicuous consumption. Everyone looked the same and dressed in the same materials: worsted, flannel, or corduroy. People came in modest colors—brown, beige, gray—and lived remarkably similar lives. We schoolchildren accepted uniforms all the more readily because our parents too appeared in sartorial lockstep. In April 1947, the ever-dyspeptic Cyril Connolly wrote of our “drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories. . . . London [is] now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities.”
    Great Britain would eventually emerge from postwar penury—though with less panache and self-confidence than its European neighbors. For anyone whose memories go back no further than the later 1950s, “austerity” is an abstraction. Rationing and restrictions were gone, housing was available: the characteristic bleakness of postwar Britain was lifting. Even the smog was abating, now that coal had been replaced by electricity and cheap fuel oil.
    Curiously, the escapist British cinema of the immediate postwar years— Spring in Park Lane (1948) or Maytime in Mayfair (1949), with Michael Wilding and Anna Neagle—had been replaced by hard-boiled “kitchen sink” dramas star-ring working-class lads played by Albert Finney or Alan Bates in gritty industrial settings: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) or A Kind of Loving (1962). But these films were set in the north, where austerity lingered. Watching them in London was like seeing one’s childhood played back across a time warp: in the south, by 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could assure his listeners that most of them had “never had it so good.” He was right.
     
     
    I don’t think I fully appreciated the impact of those early childhood years until quite recently. Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister from 1945 to 1951, had emerged—like Harry Truman—from the shadow of a charismatic war leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.
    Churchill mockingly described him as a modest man “who has much to be modest about.” But it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history—comparable to the achievements of Lyndon Johnson two decades later but under far less auspicious circumstances. Like Truman, he lived and died parsimoniously—reaping scant material gain from a lifetime of public service. Attlee was an exemplary representative of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reformers: morally serious and a trifle austere. Who among our present leaders could make such a claim—or even understand it?
    Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession: precise, restrained—and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dalí (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing—and cupidity—of Damien Hirst.
    In the arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint: the world of The Bicycle Thief . I recently introduced our twelve-year-old son to François Truffaut’s 1959 classic Les Quatre Cents Coups ( The 400 Blows ). Of a generation raised on a diet of contemporary “message” cinema from The Day After Tomorrow through Avatar , he was stunned: “It’s spare. He does so much with so little.” Quite so. The wealth of resources we apply to entertainment serves only to shield us from the poverty of the product; likewise