A couple of years ago, almost, I went to visit an old friend in Cambridge. It was a warm summer day, and as was our custom, we had bought some snacks, a chilled bottle and a couple of plastic glasses so that we could picnic on the Backs, behind Trinity College, on a section of the grounds that only alumni and their guests could tread. Cambridge is very careful, and vigilant, about who can walk on the grass.
So I was somewhat discomfited to see, on the sward in front of King’s College, a village of tents in bright colours, with signs proclaiming, you know, the usual. It was a real “in my day” moment: in my day, if you’d put a tent up, even one that looks like a mushroom from a book for toddlers, on the front lawn of King’s you’d have been shot. I found it depressing for all the usual reasons but I also couldn’t help feeling a rare twinge of pity for the tourists who had come from all the corners of the earth to see one of the most beautiful aspects this country has to offer, and see it turned into a mini-Glastonbury.
For that was what it was, really: just as the festival is a chance for the children of the wealthy to play at being wandering, roofless hippies, so here, the children of the privileged were able to play at being Gazans bombed out of their homes.
However. Before I condemn these students out of hand I have to remember what I was like at their age; and for an embarrassingly long time afterwards. Let us go back to St Patrick’s Day, 1982, and a Cambridge pub called the Cow and Calf. This was a pub I patronised because few students went there, and certainly not the students I despised the most: the posh, braying sporty types who gave the lie to the notion that Cambridge was a haven for the intellectually superior. No, the Cow and Calf was an Irish pub, and in those days that was something very, very different to the reality those words conjure now.
It would, perhaps, be more accurate to call it an Irish Republican pub; an IRA pub even. Now at the time – I was 18 – I harboured strong sympathies for the Republican cause. I thought that a great injustice had been done to the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. It seemed very straightforward. And the bombings and the killings perpetrated by the IRA? I blanked them, or said that the IRA were no worse than the thugs of the UDF.
You might think you can see where I’m going with this. Anyway, the Cow and Calf poured the best Guinness in town, there was no argument about that, and their jukebox had all the rebel songs which I would put on … why? To show that I was one of the lads? That I wasn’t to be confused with other students? To belong?
That St Patrick’s night I had many, many Guinnesses. At the end of the evening they went round with a big bowl of shamrocks which you were meant to stick in your lapel. I was so drunk that I thought it was some kind of friendly salad, picked out a few leaves, and ate them.
The point here is not to draw any parallels between the Northern Ireland Problems and the situation in Gaza. The point here is to show how ignorant I was. I was the product of an elite school, and was now an Exhibitioner (almost as good as a Scholar) at the finest college in the finest university in the world: and I knew nothing.
When you are young, you think you know things but you don’t. What you really go on are feelings, and you have plenty of those and to spare. Many of those revolve around the idea of injustice, the child’s vivid – and often correct – notion of what is and what isn’t fair. And I was confident I was on the right side of history, although that phrase hadn’t been hackneyed to death back then.
In 1979, I had marched for the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism. Who could conceivably be in favour of Nazism and Racism? To be on the Left was good; therefore the further Left one was, the better you were.
I have to say that this attitude survived in me for a shamefully long time. There were even vestiges of it when I heard that Jeremy Corbyn had somehow managed to get on the ballot for the Labour leadership. “Golly,” I thought, “a real left-winger leading the Labour Party. Of course they’ll never let him win.” But win he did, and we all know how that turned out.
So it is not so much the young I worry about when I hear them parroting the usual slogans. They know no better. It is their elders, who have no excuse.
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