The most boring thing an old man might say to me when I was young: “You don’t know you’re born. You lot have it easy.”
My father grew up in a world in which he was better off in each successive decade than in the one before it.
He had lived through two World Wars, as a small child who presumably took little notice of the first one, though psychologists say you can be influenced for life by events in those infant years.
He was seven years old when border posts went up just yards from his home. I can remember being seven, the building sites we played on in Riverdale, so presumably he remembered that for the rest of his life, too. He lived through the depression of the hungry Thirties and, for some reason he never fully explained, retained from that period a gripe against farmers.