The sixties in England were synonymous with the Beatles and so-called ‘Swinging London.’ But to those of a more reflective disposition, it was a time of gradual post-imperial economic decline. While standards of living had increased slightly since the war, foreign competition and a failure to adjust to a new world order was crippling the nation’s ability to pay its way. Britain, it was said, had lost an empire’s trading advantages, but had not yet found a new role. The Industrial Revolution may have begun in Britain, but rival economies soon supplanted her. An outdated geography text used in my Grade 9 class in Ottawa in 1964 called Britain the ‘workshop of the world.’ That title now belongs to China, no longer even to the United States. British shipbuilding, aircraft and motor vehicle manufacturing, to cite but a few businesses, moved offshore, unemployment rose alarmingly, old industries like the famous Staffordshire potteries eventually went out of business, and the Pacific nations were now in the ascendant. The armed forces, especially the Royal Navy, were scaled back, ships broken up, and my first girlfriend Anne’s father, a former Royal Navy officer, moved to Ottawa from Portsmouth, one of many such casualties. Germany had benefited immensely from the Marshall Plan, but as a ‘victor’ in 1945, Britain, with her worn, underfinanced industries, did not. In 1970, Britain’s application to ‘join’ the European Common Market was grudgingly approved by Brussels, but by 2020, Brexit had brought an end to the European experiment. When we left England, in October 1963, it was as emigrants from one country to entry as immigrants to another, exchanging a temperate island climate for a continental one of extremes in “the true north.” The shock was considerable. It was also the end of my ‘storied’ childhood, as I was now a teenager and had to put away childish things, but at the same time it would also prove to be a continuation of a life story still in the unfolding today, 60 years later…
‘Life can only be understood by looking backward, but it must be lived looking forward’ –Soren Kierkegaard, Danish theologian (1813-1855)
