There were a lot of pubs in England when I was growing up. It seemed like there were two or three on every corner, with at least one more halfway down the street. Consequently, there were always a few that were so short of customers that they’d turn a blind eye if some of their patrons hadn’t quite reached the legal drinking age. It wasn’t difficult to find out which ones they were, and I began drinking in them when I was in my mid-teens.

They were usually pretty dull and gloomy old places, to be honest, and it took a while to develop a taste for beer. But that wasn’t the point: it was illegal, so it was cool.

I remember going to one such pub with a couple of friends one evening in the mid-sixties. We got pints from the bar and sat around a table, drinking and smoking, chatting and goofing around like fifteen-year-olds do. There was an old guy in a tatty brown overcoat sitting at the next table, scowling at us over his pint. After a while he got up to leave, and stopped on his way past.

“Pah—you kids these days, you don’t know nuffing,” he said. “When I was your age I had to live through a bleedin’ war!” Then out he went, muttering to himself.

It wasn’t uncommon to be on the receiving end of sentiments like that. In fact, when I was younger, if I misbehaved I’d often be chastised for not appreciating the sacrifices my parents had made for me during the war. That was something I was not allowed to forget. And as I grew older, it felt like bit of a rift began to form between the generations—an Us and Them scenario. It became known as The Generation Gap. And sometimes—as happened with the old guy in the pub—there was a degree of resentment involved, as if it was our fault.

The old guy was right, of course. We didn’t know nuffing. We hadn’t lived through a war like he and our parents had. We’d never been woken up by sirens in the middle of the night and had to rush off and hide in shelters or tube stations as an endless barrage of bombs showered down on the buildings above. Neither had we experienced the horrors of the battlefield with bullets flying and comrades falling, nor had to pilot planes full of bombs through clouds of flak in the dead of night.

We’d been spared all that. But our parents hadn’t. They’d had five of the best years of their lives torn from them, and had indeed made immense sacrifices in the name of peace. And they’d been successful. They’d defeated the enemy, and now they were exhausted. Drained. All they wanted was a quiet, peaceful world where they could live simple lives and bring up their children, listen to Vera Lynn and do a spot of gardening.

And we—the children—did, for the most part appreciate the peaceful world they’d created for us, even if it did seem a bit boring. It wasn’t hard to get a sense of what they’d had to live through. Bombed-out buildings were a common sight—it took the country years to get them all cleaned up; there were still thousands of pillboxes everywhere, those squat little concrete bunkers that had been built all along the coast and up and down every river, as our last line of defence in the event of invasion; and it was strictly forbidden to ever touch anything metal you might find washed up on the beach. We appreciated the sacrifices they’d made for us, but we also felt that their new world was a little stodgy, and needed a bit of livening up. So someone invented rock ’n’ roll, the Beatles came along, and the world burst from black and white into glorious colour.

And at the same time, as an added motivation, the Cold War was casting a dark shadow over us—the threat of nuclear annihilation. We grew up in constant fear that some idiot in Washington or Moscow could at any moment push the button and blow us all off the face of the Earth. We had to make the most of our time. So we partied harder, and this seemed to annoy our parents even more. They didn’t like our celebrations, said they were too noisy, said we were being too disrespectful and immoral, and the gap between us widened.

And that was it, really. The Generation Gap. A direct result of War.

Many years later, when I had children of my own, I wondered if they’d be rebellious like me when they reached their teens. I hoped they would. But what would I say to them?

“Pah—you kids these days, you don’t know nuffing. When I was your age I had to live through the sixties. All those Love-ins. All that acid. . .”