The Straggler: The Year That Was

NEWS of the death of Jack Profumo the other day had the same effect on me as the scent of a cookie famously had on one of Marcel Proust’s characters. The years fell away, and I was, in imagination, back in the mother country at the time of the Profumo scandal. “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,” observed Philip Larkin. I don’t know about that; but for early British Boomers like myself, a great many other things began in or about that year.

Politics, for example. I had been aware of politics in childhood, but only as a sort of incomprehensible game that adults played. National elections had appeared to me a matter of cars going busily back and forth in our street, each car identifying its party affiliation by either a red or a blue window sticker. We did not often see so many cars, since no one in our street owned one and the street itself led nowhere. These Election Day vehicles belonged to party supporters from better-off neighborhoods. They made themselves available to ferry voters to the polls. We kids sat on our front walls like so many NASCAR fans, watching the cars race to and fro, cheering our parents’ party and hissing at the other. My father, who loathed trade unions and Communists, looked down on the colored races, and thought the country would go better if it were run by a board of successful businessmen, was of course a Labour party voter, and so I cheered the redstickered cars and hissed at the blues. (This was before the colors got reversed by a faulty computer program, or its historyilliterate programmer, in the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign.)

About the Author

John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.

Featured Tags

NEWS of the death of Jack Profumo the other day had the same effect on me as the scent of a cookie famously had on one of Marcel Proust’s characters. The years fell away, and I was, in imagination, back in the mother country at the time of the Profumo scandal. “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,” observed Philip Larkin. I don’t know about that; but for early British Boomers like myself, a great many other things began in or about that year.

Politics, for example. I had been aware of politics in childhood, but only as a sort of incomprehensible game that adults played. National elections had appeared to me a matter of cars going busily back and forth in our street, each car identifying its party affiliation by either a red or a blue window sticker. We did not often see so many cars, since no one in our street owned one and the street itself led nowhere. These Election Day vehicles belonged to party supporters from better-off neighborhoods. They made themselves available to ferry voters to the polls. We kids sat on our front walls like so many NASCAR fans, watching the cars race to and fro, cheering our parents’ party and hissing at the other. My father, who loathed trade unions and Communists, looked down on the colored races, and thought the country would go better if it were run by a board of successful businessmen, was of course a Labour party voter, and so I cheered the redstickered cars and hissed at the blues. (This was before the colors got reversed by a faulty computer program, or its historyilliterate programmer, in the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign.)