Generation Home

A Tribe of Women Who Will

Generation Who?

In the week I discovered Generation Jones was a thing, it was suggested to me by Jo that the British equivalent might be Generation Baldrick. Despite my utter devotion to my peasant roots, and my proud boast that I am, indeed, 100% Baldrick, I don’t think that quite covers it.

I am Generation Waspi.  WASPIs are women born in Britain between the years of 1950 and 1960 who were disproportionately affected by the equalisation and later extension of the pensionable age in this country. You can find out more about how it affects us, here.

To be clear, my financial life is such a pig pen, even had the Government awarded my State Pension at 60, I would not have been able to retire, but that’s not really the point. Or not all of it.

I’m not really even talking about money, as much as about the delusion that our world was in any way safe, secure or even predictable.

A Beautiful Decade

I was born into a country still recovering from war and austerity, fifteen years after the end of World War Two, and only five years after the end of rationing.  I was born in a city (the most wonderful city in the world), which had suffered unimaginable (to me) destruction, pain, and poverty in that conflict.

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As a result, my earliest recalled days were lived in the bright positivity of the 1960s. I grew up believing that the natural progression was onward and upward, that every new year would bring wonderful, startling new inventions and brilliant bright ideas.  

Formica tables with plastic covered chairs adorned our kitchen, and Findus Crispy Pancakes and Vesta Curries were on the menu. What could possibly go wrong? 

Our mothers had come from and through various circles of hell through the war and before it, and for some, change was slow. Despite my own parents’ enlightened views on their relationships both with each other and with me, I still lived next door to a house where Sam would take his belt to my friends Joy and Karen after a night down at the Working Mens’ Club, and I’m not entirely sure he didn’t land his wife the occasional blow. My parents heartily disapproved, but in no way felt entitled or enabled to do anything about it, it was just what it was.

The direction of travel was all one way though, and even my mother would be allowed to go out to work, as a school cook, when I was eleven, and off to the Grammar School. Returning to her profession and true love of hairdressing was of course out of the question - I’m not sure why - but she was out of the house and earning some ‘pin money’.

She would retire at 60 - five years ahead of her husband - receive a satisfactory pension from the glorious post-war welfare state, and settle to enjoy a few years in the garden, with the odd holiday, and the peaceful routine of the seasons she had known from childhood.

Things, as we were to sing twenty eight years later, with stars in our eyes and hope in our hearts, could only get better. Only that, as it turns out, just wasn’t true, was it?

A Half Century Later

There is no need for me to recap here the torrid terrors of the last few years, we all get it, we’ve lived it, and no amount of formica tables (to think we thought that plastic was the blessing, not the curse) or Findus Crispy Pancakes will ever make things better again.  The damage to our communities is of the kind that grit, determination, and a generation of hardworking tradesmen can never rebuild as they rebuilt my beloved Coventry. We broke from the inside. Our hearts are hollowed out.

That promise of an armchair and a cuppa between pruning the roses and volunteering with the WRVS or the British Legion was equalised with the men folk in 1995, and in 2007 they decided we were all living too long to support this, and it extended again. Currently, I theoretically retire at sixty-seven. To be fair, I am only too well aware of relatives who have lived a quarter century beyond retirement, and, having gleefully defrauded the tax man out of their due contributions at every opportunity throughout their working lives, now lay a heavy burden on the NHS and other services. I do get that we can’t afford to support everyone who had the nowse to spend their nest egg on a mega cruise and a tour of New Zealand, and then come home and claim bennies, for three decades or more. Nevertheless, I was raised with an expectation, and some clear dates and numbers, and they all faded and became as nothing.

I’ve chosen, at 63, and with the small, valuable privilege of the income of a slightly younger, and incredibly hard working husband, to press on another five years at least, ten if I can, building my own way to increase funds, clear debt, build a bit of a nest egg, and, at the same time, create a home we are glad to live in, which sustains and nurtures us, provides for us and gives us joy.

Currently , that is a mid terrace house on the edge of town, and a rented field back in the village. We can’t at this time see any path to anything more bucolic or integrated. People like us, the rural poor of our age, those who loved the land but did not hold the deeds, are now by and large unable to get to live in that wholistic, contented, stay-at-home-and-harm no-one way, which would, in fact, go a long way to healing the planet.¹

Since we don’t wish to participate in the race for perpetual growth, all we can do is limit our own consumption,  and since the Lord tells us how He wants us to love him, and love our neighbour - to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him², that also currently looks like building up my VA work enough to heal our finances and keep us safe, whilst trying to keep Neil’s business solid, providing a good service, in the face of a fearsome cost of living crisis.

For me, the imperative is time and space to keep writing, and keep nurturing a home environment ever more important to us, not only as we grow older and need our home comforts more, but as the reality of continued expansion, and the damage it has caused and continues to cause to creation, is put in context. Wendell Berry’s succinct condemnation of American expansionism applies as well to our own:

One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search – which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the last century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves – no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice. That is too simply put. It is substantially true, however, as a description of the dominant tendency in American history. The temptation, once that has been said, is to ascend altogether into rhetoric and inveigh equally against all our forebears and all present holders of office. To be just, however, it is necessary to remember that there has been another tendency: the tendency to stay put, to say, ‘No farther. This is the place.’ So far, this has been the weaker tendency, less glamorous, certainly less successful. It is also the older of these tendencies, having been the dominant one among the Indians.

The simple rituals of our goats’ milk, of home made bread, and hand knit socks, are so intrinsic to a life well led, I must protect the time and space we need to keep doing those things. If we do not learn to settle in our place, and create  for ourselves the benison of a peaceful life for our later years, as my darling Great Aunt Maud did, then it is absolutely and unequivocally clear - no-one else now will.

The World of Virtual Work

Often, as I daily interact with others on support groups, trying to build Virtual Assistant businesses, I unconsciously envisage a woman, just like me - only to be reminded that I am old enough to be at least mother to most of them. I fear losing work to ageism, and consider cutting my grizzled mane, and colouring it young. Zoom meetings can be callous.

Conversely, many of my peers on my Grammar School’s Alumni Facebook group are enjoying wealthy retirements, having properly taken advantage of the free university education, lifelong career prospects, and final salary pensions which did exist for my generation - if only you made the ‘right’ decisions.

Most of the girls I’m with in the VA chat room are working around late night feeds, play dates, and school pick ups. I am a woman out of time.

The Welfare State Reclaimed

We WASPI women were sold a pup. The pension, the date of our retirement, the future perfect, all are just minor betrayals, compared with the really big one. 

Things can not only get better. They can get worse, and worse, and worse, and when they do, you can be called upon to step backwards, into a legacy which was maybe a thing of pride, but is now a very real burden.

I believe in a life well lived, in place. I believe it can hold us together, as families, as women, as bearers of our own history. I have no choice but to believe that even if, like me, you have insufficient funds, and insufficient years left to fix that, a great deal can be achieved if only you will make the very, very,  best of where you are, and can declare, ‘No farther. This is the place’.

Maybe, if my little blip on the  generational spectrum has really earned a name, it is neither Jones, nor Baldrick, nor Waspi. Maybe we are the generation who will relearn the peace of the seasons, the quiet satisfaction of our own hearths. Maybe we will write letters to each other, and share our simple joys. Maybe we will slowly start to heal the wounds inflicted on creation, and learn to wait upon our God.

Maybe, we are Generation Home.

1. If you would like to gain insight into how rural poverty and housing affect the prettier and more desirable areas of the United Kingdom, read Catrina Davies’ ‘Homesick - Why I Live in a Shed’.

2. Micah 6:8