The Baby Boomer Generation (21 page)

Throughout the 1990s, the streets of Britain were plagued with unrest and disorder. We started the decade with the worrying problem of NHS ambulance crews taking industrial action over pay and conditions at a time when the threat of IRA terrorist attacks hung over our daily lives. The industrial action began back in September 1989 and went on for six long months until a pay agreement was finally reached and the ambulance crews returned to normal working hours in March 1990. In that same year, retail shops around the country were reporting that sales were at their lowest level since 1980 and the CBI confirmed that Britain was once more in recession. Unemployment was rising sharply and a demonstrable mood of unrest was again evident. The now-familiar sight of disorder and rioting returned to our streets in the early 1990s, especially in London with the famous Poll Tax riots, which only ended when the new prime minister, John Major, announced in April 1991 that the much-hated Community Charge (Poll Tax) was to be abolished and replaced with a new Council Tax in 1993.

There were a large number of terrorist atrocities during the 1990s; various individual fanatics and organisations carried out dozens of terrorist bombings in mainland Britain and in Northern Ireland, killing scores of innocent people and injuring hundreds more.

Ignoring problems with the housing market, inflation and high interest rates of the early-1990s, the average standard of living in Britain during the 1990s was quite high and it was light years away from the lifestyle we experienced back in the post-war austere Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. We now enjoyed possessions and a way of life that was beyond anything imaginable to us forty years earlier. Things that we now took for granted were in fact luxuries but we no longer regarded them as such. The passage of time had turned televisions, telephones, stereos, fridges and domestic freezers into essential household items that we now thought we could not live without. Certainly, the younger generations could not imagine what it was like to live without these items. Each year the choice of luxury goods got bigger and there was now a huge variety of lifestyle-enhancing products and services available to us. We were bombarded with adverts and promotional literature every minute of our waking days. From adverts on hoardings to junk mail, television campaigns to nuisance phone calls; it seemed as though every company in the world was canvassing our business and teasing the money from our pockets.

Having no money was a minor hurdle to overcome because the banks, credit card companies and other moneylenders were falling over themselves to lend us as much as we wanted. If your credit card was already spent up to its limit you could just get another one, or two, or three. In fact, consumerism and money lending was getting out of hand; it seemed as though nothing was beyond reach and anyone could get credit in one form or another. People were collecting credit cards like we used to collect cigarette cards back in the 1950s, in bundles. We stuffed them into special credit card wallets that had lots of individual pouches to hold them all – and of course we paid for these special wallets using one of our credit cards. In every retail park around the country you would see carpet and furniture stores offering interest-free credit with nothing to pay for the first year and then payments spread over three or four years. The furnishings would wear out before they were paid for. Sales staff accosted us in large department stores offering us special discounts if we filled in an application form for one of their own-brand credit cards there and then. It seemed impossible for us to avoid credit. It was being rammed down our throats all of the time. This was difficult for most strong-minded people to deal with but almost impossible for the weak, especially the hard up and vulnerable. From the latest mobile phones to holiday homes in the sun, we wanted as many luxury items as we could get to make our lifestyles better and better. However, to maintain this high standard of living we needed a regular source of income and so it was more important than ever for us to keep our jobs, and even find ways to earn more money doing second jobs, working longer hours or gaining promotion. The desire to have nice homes, motorcars and holidays was greater than it had ever been, as was the pressure to finance them.

At work, the culture of working long hours began in the 1980s but it picked up a pace in the 1990s as we became even more fearful of any fall in income. Many of us turned into workaholics, not necessarily because of an insurmountable workload but often just to be seen as hardworking and thereby protect our jobs. The traditional 9–5 culture in office jobs was disappearing, as were lunch breaks and being home for tea at 6.00 p.m. Often, although office workers and managers were being paid to work a 9–5 day, they were in fact working much longer hours at the office and many were even taking work home. This relatively new form of work ethic was infectious and it was becoming the norm for workers to work longer hours for no extra money. It was turning into a contest between work colleagues as to who could stay latest in the office and who could get there first in the morning. By the late 1990s, a quarter of workers in Britain were working more than forty-five hours a week. Employers revelled in the benefits of this new culture and many now expected office workers to take on extra workloads and work longer hours without being paid for it. Companies began building this extra resource into their calculations when assessing staffing levels. Office workers didn't realise it but they were actually adding to the risk of losing their jobs through redundancy because employers could now make do with fewer staff members. This created an unhealthily competitive atmosphere in offices with everyone trying to impress the boss with their willingness to work harder and for longer, even giving up holiday time to put in more hours and meet deadlines. This new culture meant that people were now living to work rather than working to live. The 1990s lifestyle we craved came at a tremendous cost to anyone caught up in this workaholic madness, and the trend was gaining in pace. There seemed to be no way of stopping it. If you were fortunate enough to have a good and well-paid job then you had to work hard to hold onto it. These days of must-have goods and easy credit facilities significantly increased the number of bills we had to pay each month and few of us were debt free. Families were often reliant upon the income from two wage earners, and women with young children were finding it hard to fit into the culture of working long hours; somehow, they had to find ways to maintain a reasonable standard of family life while managing the increasing demands of their working life. The more senior their job, the harder it was and they became increasingly reliant on others to care for their children while they put in the extra hours at work.

The culture of hard work and long hours meant that employers could keep staffing levels lean, but this only worked if everyone was suitably qualified and they all pulled their weight. Consequently, employers were becoming more discerning in their choice of employees. By now, in the main, it was our generation of baby boomers who were the employers and we were not finding it easy to track down suitable job applicants, especially when looking for young employees. Despite the supposed increasing standards of education it was surprisingly difficult to find suitably well-educated young people to fill jobs. In the early 1960s, the number of students in higher education hovered around 200,000, about 5% of the UK school population. By the mid-1990s, 1.6 million young people were in higher education; about 14% of the UK school population, and the numbers were heading upwards. Doubts were being raised as to how so many students could be clever enough to get into higher education. Had teaching standards really improved that much? Were young people brighter than they used to be? In 1992, John Major's Conservative government had made it possible for the old-style polytechnics to become new universities and so almost overnight, students who were previously not good enough to get into a university found themselves attending one of the new ex-polytechnic universities. People were also questioning whether the authorities were dumbing down modern-day examinations to ease the way for more students to enter university, keeping them off the dole and out of the unemployment figures. It was puzzling how so many graduates could leave university with a degree, expecting to get a good job, when they lacked the basic skills of spelling and simple arithmetic; many were unable to compose a letter because they had such a poor grasp of English grammar and some were only able to speak in a series of grunts. Increasing numbers of employers were distrusting modern-day qualifications and setting their own tests for job applicants.

It was in the 1990s, as 40-somethings, that many of us began to show the first signs of aging, and it wasn't just that policemen were looking younger as we got older. We pioneers of the so-called 1960s ‘permissive society' were quietly maturing and most of us accepted the fact that we were no longer the social revolutionaries we once were. Whole new generations had grown up behind us and the world had moved on. Social attitudes had changed a lot in twenty-five years and we, the once carefree rebels of the 1960s, were finding ourselves shocked at how much youth rebelliousness, drug use and sexual freedom had escalated over the years. We began to moan about bad manners and lack of respect, and we despaired at the amount of graffiti we saw daubed on buildings everywhere we went. It was becoming unfashionable to say ‘please' and ‘thank you' or to hold the door open for someone else to pass through; people stopped forming queues at bus stops and the common courtesy of giving up one's seat for an old person or a pregnant women seemed to be abandoned altogether. The media blamed the liberal 1960s generation for the collapse in traditional values and perhaps they were right; after all, it was our generation that let the genie out of the bottle and broken all of the time-honoured rules. However, as 1960s teenagers, for as much as we sought to break with conventionality, we did maintain a reasonable standard of good manners and although we thought that anyone over the age of 40 was ‘past it' and close to ‘knocking on heaven's door', we did have respect for our elders and there was certainly no evidence of old people being mugged in the street. Since the 1960s, there has been a noticeable decline in standards of behaviour and as we moved through the 1990s there was no sign that things were getting any better.

A few years had now passed since we first began to admit that our fitness levels were not what they used to be, and despite the promising advertising slogan, ‘Philosan fortifies the over forties,' we found that health supplements didn't actually roll back the years. The picture we saw in the mirror each morning wasn't quite as perfect as it had once been – lo and behold, another decade had gone by and many of us baby boomers were creeping ever closer to the big 5-O landmark. Yes, we would soon be 50-somethings and not quite as fabulous anymore. We were already developing some of the typical tell-tale signs of aging. Products like Sanatogen and Steradent now infiltrated our bathroom cabinets. We were becoming more aware of our health and some of us were even monitoring our own blood pressures and heart rates. We no longer burned off the calories as easily as we used to and so we began to watch our weight more carefully, avoiding fatty foods that were loaded with cholesterol. We moaned about the quality of modern-day newspaper print, refusing to accept the fact that our eyesight was failing and we needed to purchase some reading glasses. The smokers among us took to chewing gum as they desperately tried to kick the smoking habit and some were using the recently invented nicotine patches that promised to help overcome the craving to smoke. In the 1970s and 1980s it had become acceptable for young men to wear make-up and to colour their hair in the name of fashion, but in the 1990s those once young men were finding their natural hair colour turning to grey and they were now colouring their hair to preserve their youthful looks. The fashionable tints of the past were no longer of interest to aging baby boomer men. They were now using more functional male hair-colouring products like Grecian 2000. Meanwhile, the women were dieting like mad and heading back to the gym in a desperate attempt to regain their trim 1960s figures. We may by then have been starting to show signs of aging but we had one thing going for us and that was the fact that we were the most youthful generation of 40-somethings there had ever been and we were determined not to turn into replicas of our grandparents. We were once the ultramodern generation of the 1960s and although more than two decades had passed since then, most of us still felt young at heart. We might have been fast-approaching 50 and a bit knackered but we weren't ready to give up wearing the t-shirts and jeans of our youth. The clues of our middle age were all around us but still we refused to accept the label. By now, some of us had grandchildren of our own but that didn't mean we had to take on the appearance of being old fogies. We had no intention of growing old gracefully as our grandparents had done – there would be no grey cardigans and slippers for us. Okay, so we were no longer going out to all-night raves in draughty warehouses and head banging to the sounds of drum'n'bass. Yes, we did by now prefer to be locked inside our cosy homes rediscovering the simple joy of Ovaltine at bedtime. That didn't mean we were getting old – we were just maturing nicely, accepting the fact that for us discothèques were a thing of the past and that night-time was a time for sleeping.