False securities ...

For a post war generation then uncharted territory was new. We had been brought up in an environment of certainties. War and depression had plagued the first fifty years of the twentieth century and now we were in an age of reconstruction where each generation would benefit from the effort of the previous through economic growth. The horrors of war had been replaced by a cold war with rules that allowed its battles to be fought in less developed countries than our own whilst we felt the impact hardly at all.

Family life and security had been restored after the disruption of War and “normalcy” meant reverting to the family values we thought we once had even if that meant exercising a little creative imagination.

All of this constructed for the post war generation a sense of false security sheltering us from the fast changing world around us and so we became inwardly directed on our own personal needs rather than outwardly directed to change in the wider world. It was only a matter of time before that world caught up with us and when it did then it was a different world with new problems and agendas.