Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle

You soldiered on, you didn’t moan, you made the best of things, put a smile on your face – all that stiff-upper-lip bollocks you hear about from the Second World War: the corner shop with its sign saying ‘Still open for business!’ despite the fact that, consequent to the previous night’s air raid, the shop no longer existed; the milkman delivering his wares to a non-existent street; the searing fires, the rubble, the dust, the dead bodies and the vision of your own imminent death fizzing away, just beyond the edge of your eyesight. Against such a daily backdrop your own concerns, your upheavals, your petty miseries, your hardships, counted for less than nothing. There is something almost fascistic, as well as wholly glorious, in the extent to which personal concerns were put aside – there’s a war to be won, others are suffering more than me, and so on. Oh, for sure, it was not entirely like that during the war years – there were strikes, there was looting, there was an anger that the rich had it much easier and still thronged in the Café Royal of an evening getting pissed and eating rather nicer food than everyone else. But rancour was not the dominant state of mind, or does not seem to have been; mostly, people really did just get on with stuff and kept the complaints to a minimum. There was an awareness that the thing they were in, this war, was bigger than any individual.

      Hell, you know all about the Second World War: your TV channels are full of it, there is a seemingly insatiable public desire to squeeze every last detail out of its now desiccated entrails. Turn on your TV on any night of the week and I’ll wager that Hitler will be making an appearance somewhere, shouting at lots of people or making his famous camp little salute, or doing that jaunty dance he did when he was really happy. Adolf is by some margin Great Britain’s favourite character from history, for his madness, his comedy value, his dire threat, his convenient embodiment of untrammelled, Continental, evil.

      Other countries, and especially the poor Germans, are puzzled by our perpetual gloating, our revelling in the immense, hideous tragedy of World War II, sixty-nine years after it ended. Indeed, after sixty-nine years of unremitting national decline, they would quietly point out. They suspect that we are so interested, so avid for stories of heroism, because we won. And that’s partly correct; but it’s much more than that. I think we look back on the war with fondness, and even envy, because the British people then are thought to have behaved, by and large, in an exemplary manner; there was selflessness, sacrifice, resilience and, of course, a berserk sort of stoicism. I think we enjoy thinking of ourselves behaving in an exemplary manner. It matters little as to whether that exemplary behaviour, back in those grim days, was sort of the only option available. Whatever, that modest predisposition somehow stuck with the generation that endured it all.

      They did not speak much of the war, my mother and father, but its deprivations undoubtedly shaped them. I heard a little from my mother about being evacuated, and how her family’s house in Bermondsey was flattened and they were resettled in the rather more pleasant East Dulwich – something which, my mother said, ensured that her own father retained forever a soft spot for Hermann Goering and his brave pilots. From my father there was very little, although he once told me how he and most of the crew on his MTB much preferred Germans to Belgians, and Belgians to the ghastly French – as I mentioned back at the start of this book.

      But the war lies deep within the minds of all those who lived through it; in the case of my mother and father, as in many others of that generation, it manifested itself as a refusal to make a fuss, to become upset or inflamed, to complain, to whine – not least because since the war there has not been so very much to whine about, all things considered. Perhaps it made them too quiescent and undemanding of others, but that’s a pleasant contrast to how we are now, the generation that followed them. I mean, with the best will in the world, you wouldn’t call us ‘stoic’, would you? You wouldn’t accuse us of being slow to complain, of being resilient, of subordinating our own inconveniences for the greater benefit of others, would you? These are generalisations, of course; I’m sure it is true that my parents’ generation had its percentage of whining halfwits, just as today some of us may show a little reserve, and dignity, and fortitude. What I mean is that these are not the things that immediately come to mind when you think of how we are now. Something different comes to mind.

      Take one of our big concerns these days, now that we no longer have the V2s raining down, or the shadow of the Bomb hovering above us: obesity. Being very, very, fat. That is what gets us worked up today.

      You may remember the newspapers being full of a story about a girl in South Wales who had to have the front of her house knocked down because she was too fat to get downstairs, or indeed shift her enormous arse out of bed. They had pictures of this poor lass, and she was indeed fucking gargantuan, like a crude cartoon of a very fat person, an enormous sallow mound of blubber and e-numbers and carbohydrates and compacted shit. The earliest reports put her weight at sixty-three stone, although this was later revised down to a svelte fifty-five stone. Obviously one felt sorry for her, lying there as the demolition men and the paramedics went about their work – but the thing that grated was the constant insistence from her friends and from herself that she wouldn’t have got this fat if she had been helped