What old men wear

Each generation lives in its own world of customs and tastes, carrying on into old age the habits and styles of dress they learnt in their youth. On the few occasions I go to the supermarket in the morning, it is full of the very elderly - people in their 80s and 90s trundling around behind their trolleys. What I notice most are the strange clothes worn by the old men: shapeless fawn jackets, often worn with fawn trousers and shiny black shoes. Some wear hats, flat caps being the most popular. This style of dress is not worn by any other age cohort, and certainly not by those in their 60s, who are usually seen in jeans and trainers and who rarely wear hats. 

This shows the peril of talking about ‘the elderly’ as if they are a single undifferentiated group. It is more true that there is a major cultural divide between those in their 60s and those in their 80s, resulting from the great postwar changes in British society. A man aged 85 would have been born in 1925, would have served in the armed forces in the Second World War (or at least in some war-related occupation), would have been raised at a time when what was once called ‘leisure wear’ was unknown, listened to swing music and crooners when an adolescent (teenagers had not yet been invented), and thought about sex before contraceptive pills were invented. Someone who is 65, by contrast, was born after the War ended, listened to rock music, wore jeans and casual clothes, and met women whose sexual desire was no longer constrained by fear it would lead to an unwanted pregnancy. A man in his 80s became of age fearing death in an actual war. A man in his 60s was raised in peacetime but feared nuclear war.

This is not to suggest that a man in his 60s resembles younger age cohorts. I was born in the suburbs of Birmingham in 1946. As a child, I lived in a world in which virtually no-one owned a car. The roads were therefore empty, and we played in them whenever we were not at school until it got dark. We walked to primary school by ourselves at quite a young age, and came home during the dinner break for a substantial meal cooked by our mothers who did not of course go to work. Children who stayed indoors were a matter of concern to us all. We knew of hardly any children from single-parent families, no-one with skin darker  than our own, and no-one whose first language was not English. The only celebrities were film stars, and television was broadcast for a few hours a day. There were no computers of course, but we read books and comics.

People younger than those of my age live in a world with new fears. There is the unspecific threat of some sort of ecodoom. But local fears are more important, and constrain the lives of children. Their parents are rightly scared of traffic, but also have fantasy fears that the streets are full of murderous paedophiles. Children still play in the street, particularly in quiet towns and villages, but spend much of their time in front of computers and television screens. The clothes they wear seem to designate membership of one or other youth tribe, each associated with a particular kind of music. This seems a more elaborate world than the mods and rockers I remember. Still, none of them wear shapeless fawn jackets.