I've been reading
The Little White Horse
(Elizabeth Goudge) to MB recently. Even though the book was already old
when I was reading it, and the Victorian setting long gone, it's much
more distant to her. When I read it, it was less than 30 years old
(published 1947). My grandparents were born at the tail end of the
Victorian era. I knew what most of the words meant, and the idea of
having a jug and bowl of water to wash yourself, a candle in your room, a
fire to warm you, were not alien, just a bit antiquated — my
grandparents had lived like that, and still had an open fire as their
only heating. For MB, the book is nearly 80 years old. No one lives like
that any more. A governess is what you have if your parents are Russian
oligarchs who move around a lot. A candle in your room is because you
want the nice smell, or to be a bit New-Agey, but you could turn the
light on if you just wanted illumination.
It's
not just books. I took a look at my old primary school the other day.
It still has the 'temporary' classrooms installed after World War II.
That was understandable when the war had ended just over 20 years
before. It's not really excusable 60 years later. The two oldest
teachers in the school were war widows/spinsters — First World
War-widows/spinsters. There were still bombed landscapes. A book like
The Silver Sword
(Ian Serraillier) told the story of adults we knew, refugee children
grown-up. Our parents had been evacuees. MB's brother was born longer
after the invasion of Iraq than I was after the Second World War. I was
born closer to the First World War than MB was to the Vietnam War,
closer to the Great Depression than her brother was to the end of the
Cold War.
We
not only have different pasts but different futures. It's terrifying
that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with the full
force of climate change and everything it will bring. But looking back
at my parents' ideas of the future I would see gives me pause for
thought. My father assumed he would leave school and be sent to fight in
the Second World War. They assumed I would grow up into an age of space
travel, flying cars and nuclear war. In fact, I grew up into an era of
Cold War, climate change and everything computerised and stored in the
Cloud.
Perhaps MB's world won't be characterised by being
overheated and flooded and dominated by job-and-culture-wrecking AIs,
but something else completely unanticipated, whether good or bad. The
future has often been predicted, and to some degree moulded, by science
fiction. The geeks who read Asimov and watched Star Trek grew up to be
astrophysicists, software developers, and robotics engineers. If a
biotech and genetics-leaning generation follows from the pandemic, who
knows what future they will bring, and face? It probably won't be
whatever we expect.
Anne Rooney
Out now:
Baby Owl, illustrated by Qu Lan, Oxford University Press, 2023
