'Oh dear,' she said, 'I am so sorry about your father. Yes, luckily I can do it. Who is coming? — wait, I'll get a pencil.'
He gave her the names over the telephone, while she wrote them down.
They were the names of people with whom he had been associated in a dozen different ways, ever since the war ended: it seemed now as if the war had been an instrument to shake out patterns of people who would work and act together — or against each other, for the rest of their lives. They had not known about this process while it was happening, but that was when 'the Old Guard' had been formed. The phrase was a joke of course, and for family use: he certainly would never use it to Walter, Bill, Mona and the rest — they would be hurt by it. Carrie had said one day, reporting a telephone calclass="underline" 'I didn't get his name, but it sounded like on of the Old Guard.'
These names appeared continually together on dozens, hundreds, of letterheads, appeals, protests, petitions: if you saw one name, you could assume the others. Yet their backgrounds had been very different, of all classes, countries, even races. Some had been communists, some had fought communism. They were Labour and Liberal, vegetarian and pacifist, feeders of orphaned children, builders of villages in Africa and India, rescuers of refugees and survivors of natural and man-made calamities. They were journalists and editors, actors and writers, film-makers and trade unionists. They wrote books on subjects like Unemployment in the Highlands and The Future of Technology. They sat on councils and committees and the boards of semi-charitable organizations, they were Town Councillors, Members of Parliament, creators of documentary film programmes. They had taken the same stands on Korea and Kenya, on Cyprus and Suez, on Hungary and the Congo, on Nigeria, the Deep South and Brazil, on South Africa and Rhodesia and Ireland and Vietnam and... and now they were sharing opinions and emotions on the nine million refugees from Bangladesh.
Once, when they had come together to express a view, it had been a minority view, and to get what they believed publicized had sometimes been difficult or impossible. Now something had happened which not all of them had understood: when they expressed themselves about this or that, it was happening more and more often that their views were identical with conventional views put forward freely by majorities everywhere. Once they had been armed with aggressive optimistic views about society, about how to change it; now they forecast calamity, failed to prevent calamity, and then worked to minimize calamity.
This view of the Old Guard had been presented to Jack by his son, the chip off the old block.
When Jack had finished the list of names, Mona said: 'Surely we can do better than that?' and he said, apologetically (why, when it was not his fault?): 'I think a lot of people are feeling that the media are doing it for us.'
Then he decided to ring his son, who had not yet heard about his grandfather. To reach Joseph was not easy, since he worked for a variety of 'underground' organizations, slept in many places, might even be out of the country.
At last Jack rang Elizabeth, who was already at her place of work, heard where Joseph was likely to be, and finally reached his son. On hearing that his grandfather was dead, Joseph said: 'Oh that's bad, I am sorry.' On being asked if he and his friends 'with nothing better to do' would like to join the Twenty-Four-Hour Fast, he said: 'But haven't you been reading the newspapers?' Jack did not want to say that he had not read them enough to know what his son's programme was likely to be, but it turned out that 'all of us' were organizing a Protest March for that Sunday.
In his son's briskness, modified because of the death, Jack heard his own youth speaking, and a sense of justice made him sound apologetic towards his son. He felt, too, the start of exhaustion. This was because his effort to be fair made it necessary to resurrect his own youth as he talked to Joseph, and it took the energy that in fantasy he would be using to bring Joseph around to see his point of view: he had recently been indulging fantasies of confronting Joseph with: 'Look, I have something of great importance to say, can you let me have an hour or two?' He was on the point of saying this now, but Joseph said: 'I have to rush off, I'm sorry, see you, give my love to everyone.'
He knew exactly what he wanted to say, not only to his son — to his own youthful self — but to the entire generation, or, rather, to that part of it which was political, the political youth. What he felt was, he knew, paradoxicaclass="underline" it was because his son was so much like him that he felt he had no son, no heir. What he wanted was for his son to carry on from himself, from where, he Jack, stood now: to be his continuation.
It was not that his youthful self had been, was conceited, crude, inexperienced, intolerant: he knew very well that his own middle-aged capacities of tact, and the rest were not much more than the oil these same qualities — not much changed — used to get their own way; he wasn't one to admire middle-aged blandness, expertise.
What he could not endure was that his son, all of them, would have to make the identical journey he and his contemporaries had made, to learn lessons exactly as if they had never been learned before.
Here, at precisely this point, was the famous 'generation gap' here it had always been. It was not that the young were unlike their parents, that they blazed new trails, thought new thoughts, displayed new forms of courage: on the contrary, they behaved exactly like their parents, thought as they had — and, exactly like their parents, could not listen to this simple message: that it had all been done before.
It was this that was so depressing, and which caused the dryness of only just achieved tolerance on the part of the middle-aged towards 'the youth' — who, as they had to 'experiment' were the only good they had, or could expect, in their lives.
But this time the 'gap' was much worse because a new kind of despair had entered into the consciousness of mankind: things were too desperate, the future of humanity depended on, humanity being able to achieve new forms of intelligence, of being able to learn from experience. That humanity was unable to learn form experience was written there for everyone to see, since the new generation of the intelligent and consciously active youth behaved identically with every generation before them.
This endless cycle, of young people able to come to maturity only in making themselves into a caste which had to despise and dismiss their parents, insisting pointlessly on making their own discoveries — it was, quite simply, uneconomic. The world could not afford it.
Every middle-aged person (exactly as his or her parents had done) swallowed the disappointment of looking at all the intelligence and bravery of their Children being absorbed in — repetition, which would end, inevitably, in them turning into the Old Guard. Would, that is, if Calamity did not strike first. Which everybody knew now it was going to.
Watching his son and his friends was like watching laboratory animals unable to behave in any way other than that to which they had been trained — as he had done, as the Old Guard had done... At this point in the fantasy, his son having accepted or at least listened to all this, Jack went on to what was really his main point. What was worst of all was that 'the youth' had not learned, were repeating, the old story of socialist recrimination and division. Looking back over his time — and, after all, recently he had had plenty of time to do just this, and was not that important, that a man had reached quiet water after such a buffeting and a racing an could think and reflect? — he could see one main message. This was that the reason for the failure of socialism to achieve what it could was obvious: that some process, some mechanism, was at work which made it inevitable that every political movement had to splinter and divide, then divide again and again, into smaller groups, sects, parties, each one dominated, at least temporarily, by some strong figure, some hero, or father, or guru figure, each abusing and insulting the other. If there had been a united socialist movement, not only in his time — which he saw as that since the Second World War — but in the time before that, and the epoch before that, and before that, there would have been a socialist Britain long ago.