Like all the best ideas it had a wicked simplicity. My old friend Mary Ann
Sieghart lighted a few years ago on the concept of the “inner age”. MA
believed that whatever the actual chronological age recorded on our
passports, each of us had a fixed inner age which was a far truer guide to
our character and attitude than a bald measurement of how long we’d been on
the planet. So, MA argued, you could take two vintage journalists, both
great writers, both honoured by the State, both fixed points in their
respective newspapers and tell them apart not by their politics (both were
wisely Tory) but by their inner age. While our own William Rees-Mogg was
born wise, and has been a sage since his teenage years, with an inner age
which ranks alongside George Bernard Shaw, his professional rival Bill
Deedes, even though he was genuinely older in earth years, had a much
younger inner age and always retained the undimmed enthusiasm for the story
of a cub reporter on his first foreign assignment.
So, extrapolating further, Mick Jagger’s inner age has always been 18 and
Katie Derham (even though she looks so girlish) is clearly a steel magnolia
with an inner age somewhere in the late forties. Prince Edward’s inner age
is fiftysomething while Prince Harry will always be 21. Chris Huhne may be
ten years older than Nick Clegg but he’s behaving as though he’s got the
energy of someone with an inner age in his twenties while poor Nick looks
past it before he’s even got it.
MA’s inner age idea was brilliant, so it’s with a proper sense of humility
that I offer my own complementary method of classifying individuals: by
their inner era.
It’s my hunch, and I’d be interested to know what readers think, that almost
everyone has an ideal inner era – an age during which, subject to all the
usual caveats about not being a disease-raddled serf, they would have loved
to live. For some of us Victorian costume dramas are not merely agreeable
ways to while away Sunday evening but enactments of our inner fantasies. To
have lived in the age of Dickens and Thackeray, Gladstone and Disraeli,
Huxley and Wilberforce was to have lived in a time when Britain was the most
vibrant intellectual battlefield in history. And one can see in the way in
which this period entrances figures from A. N. Wilson to Gertrude Himmelfarb
that it’s their inner era. I suspect, given not just Vivienne Westwood’s
wonderfully reactionary new manifesto for the arts, but also her love of
bustles and tartan, that she is a pure Victorian too. And I would argue that
the one thing which unites Baroness Thatcher and Gordon Brown (perhaps the
only thing) is that both are quintessential Victorians. Imagine Gordy in
frock coat and Lady T in full whalebone and you could drop them into Cranford
without a second thought.
The Victorian age is very far from being the only period that entrances the
English mind. It may be fashionable at the moment (given the way people
describe the Brown-Cameron match-up) to divide people into Roundheads and
Cavaliers. But there are some of us who are less interested in the division
between the two and more captivated by the whole 17th-century thing. It’s
not just those (thousands) of members of the Sealed Knot (who include
everyone from the novelist James Delingpole to the man who used to run the
academic side at Sandhurst), who actually go to the trouble of dressing up
in English Civil War kit; it’s also the case that the conflict captivates
thousands of others. Our own Tim Hames and the Telegraph columnist
(and MEP) Dan Hannan both harbour fantasies of serving Oliver Cromwell, as
does Michael Foot, while the age of the Levellers is a lost Eden for Billy
Bragg and Tony Benn and cavalier culture clearly has shaped individuals from
Earl Spencer to Simon Callow.
I think one can pin down most people’s inner era pretty quickly, from J. K.
Rowling (a sort of Wagnerian/Arthurian Middle Ages) to Pete Doherty (the
naughty Nineties of Wilde, Beardsley and Rimbaud). But I have to confess
that I am conflicted, torn between two eras like some tragic character in a
minor H. G. Wells novel.
On the one hand I find myself drawn to the age of Queen Anne, a period of
fierce political partisanship, lent colour and vigour by the enlistment of
literary giants on either side (Pope, Swift and Gay for the Tories, Addison
and Steele for the Whigs). That this period was the moment when Britain was
born as a state and took its place as Europe’s fastest-rising power only
adds to the era’s sense of drama.
It was also a time when political prestige was linked to your alcoholic
intake, but I think I could live with that.
However, even as I find the age of Anne tempting I suspect that my real inner
era is the 1930s. Everything about that decade – the graphic art and
typography of the time, the poetry of Auden and MacNeice, double-breasted
suits and snap-brimmed hats, the films of Gainsborough Studios, the Soho
evoked by Anthony Powell and the Mayfair captured by Evelyn Waugh, the
passion of Hugh MacDiarmid and the charm of Ivor Novello, the journalism of
George Orwell and the political leadership of Eden, Churchill, Duff Cooper
and Bob Boothby – I find seductive.
I know the world we live in now is rich with a promise that could never have
been imagined in the Thirties, as the world grew darker and freedom beat the
retreat. But there is a romance about that time, its culture and its
struggles which pulls at my heart. And there is, I think, in any one who is
curious, in any mind open to imagination, a longing to have lived another
life. And the location of that longing is your inner era. When would yours
be?
Three cheers for the Royal Family show
Watching the fabulous BBC series on the monarchy it was hard to imagine that
the Queen was a teenager in the Thirties and on the throne when Churchill
was Prime Minister. Her stamina is something to behold.
She wasn’t born to rule. It was only when her uncle abdicated, when she was
10, that she was catapulted from a position analogous to Princess Beatrice’s
today to preparation for the throne. But watching her endure daily small
talk, endless formality, being constantly on display and yet always
cheerfully diligent, I could not imagine anyone else discharging those
duties so well.
That she is given to the occasional moment of Martini-dry humour when faced
with the demands of Vanity Fair photographers only adds to her
appeal. She has weaknesses like the rest of us, a sarcastic edge and a
tendency to impatience. But she masters them brilliantly when on duty
because she believes so firmly in the service to which she feels God has
called her.
Why the BBC got its knickers in such a twist about this show, after the
trailer mix-up, is beyond me. Why it has now screened the series without
proper fanfare is beyond perplexing. This series is television of which the
corporation can be proud and, even more, underlines how fortunate we are in
our monarch.
I’ve got a little list
I’m grateful for the many kind suggestions that readers have made about
appropriate antifashion Christmas presents for one’s nearest and dearest. In
a week or two I hope to present a guide to genuinely useful gifts for your
loved one based on your own highly utilitarian and nondirectional
suggestions. I can assure you of one thing about our list: nothing on it
will be pink, bias-cut, caramelised, covered in pastel-coloured leather,
capable of being worn 600ft underwater or grass-fed.
I have always loved the idea of an inner era. My friends and I have often discussed it. I think that we all have romantic ideas about the past and this is a good way of accessing history and fantasy. Although these ideas do spill over into our modern lives. If you look around there are lots of people young and old who dress as if from another time and there are club nights that just play music from the 20's and 30's too. At the moment it is really popular to live as if from anther time which begs the questions what is missing from our present that we think we can find in the past?
Alice Hodgson, London, UK