Memories of the future: an essay on hope and fear

These days I’ve been getting into a few arguments. Several times in recent weeks friends have said in exasperated tones: ‘the cost of housing is criminal’, or ‘it’s these oligarchs who are running everything’, or ‘have you seen the numbers of people who are depending on food banks?’. Some have even said ‘there needs to be serious change’, or ‘we need a damn revolution’. But such outbursts are always followed by statements of resignation: ‘ah, but that’s the way it goes, it’s human nature’, or, gazing at the events in Greece and Spain, ‘the British don’t really do that sort of thing’. The arguments have come from my protests against this fatalism.

In the past five years the social tensions in this country have indeed become increasingly extreme, and it seems clear that we face several more years of turbulence. So what kind of moment is this, what is the scale of the shifts that are underway, and is something new beginning to arise?

As individuals and societies we may experience our passage through time as chaotic; any sense of a rationale or guiding hand is inconceivable. However this does not prevent us from attempting to put order into what has happened. We generate biographies and narrate our autobiographies out of a desire to perceive some logic in the past. We research histories and write commentaries in an attempt to draw out patterns. The stories we create are only one version of events, but they can assist us in the reading of the present and influence our role in the making of the future - in being part of an agency of change.

Who, or what, are the agents of change in the current times? It is relatively easy for us to describe these agents in the past, but in the thick of the present it is hard to pick them out. Preconception frames perception. I have preformed ideas of what those agents might look like, but historical images blinker my vision, making it harder for me to observe what is actually underway, and making me feel that the agents of the change I desire are too weak to bring it about. However, just because I cannot see something does not mean it does not exist: it means that I should look harder, search deeper in to how the coming years might unfold.

In trying to think about the next two decades, reflecting on the past seventy-five years can be instructive. Can we make a pattern out of a century of experience in Britain that can guide our thinking?

Reflecting on the histories of earlier generations of my family has given me a different way of exploring these questions. Realising how deeply their lives were affected by moments of epochal change makes the idea of change both more tangible and more personal.

Before and after the war

Morgan James, my partner Jane’s great-uncle, was born in 1902 in Taibach, on the edge of Port Talbot, and, like his father, he worked in the coal mines from the age of fourteen. He was involved in industrial action during the General Strike in 1926. Unemployment in the years that followed drove him to emigrate to America in search of work, with his friend Thomas Howell David. In November 1928, both were certified as ‘Qualified Miners’ in the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania. Morgan applied for US citizenship, but his hope of building a new life was destroyed by a rock fall in Buttonwood No 20 Mine on 24 May 1934, which fractured his pelvis. He was bed-bound for months. Morgan’s mother and brother journeyed to Pennsylvania to bring him home, and he settled back in Taibach, badly disabled, selling toys that he made in a shed at the end of garden.

My father, Richard Marriott, was born in Bishops Stortford, Essex, in 1930.

His father worked in Lloyds Bank in the City, but when he was commissioned into the war effort the family moved to Otley near...