Look for the silver lining....

I started school in 1928. Consequently, almost the whole of my school life - primary and secondary - was spent in the Great Depression. The depression did not lift until after the Second World War broke out in 1939. Early in that year, I was working in the Queensland State Department of Labour and Industry to get a little money to help me through my matriculation. (I was paid 23 shillings or $2.30 a week.)

Often mothers with sick children would come to the Department to plead for a few extra shillings. Their husbands were still struggling to find any sort of work. When they found it, it was often hundreds or even a thousand miles away and their earnings were pitifully small. That was in 1939 - ten years after the Great Depression had begun with the crash of the Stock Exchange in New York.

Despite the economic disaster, my school life was happy. Like everyone else, I had my bad days; but I was much happier than many literary and other celebrities who, in their memoirs, "look back in pain and anger" on their time at school. Anthony Trollope, for example, spent many years of discomfort and humiliation at expensive schools which his father, with his chronic financial fecklessness, could not afford. My situation was quite different. To be poverty-stricken among the impoverished - as most of us were during the 1930s - gave us almost a contented feeling of "belonging." I and most of my schoolfellows did not have to consort with the rich and so invite their derision because of our worn and mended clothing and other signs of our chronically straitened circumstances. The young can be especially cruel but we were all poor so we could hardly poke fun at others who, in terms of poverty, were no 'funnier' than ourselves.

Against this background, I cannot remember ever feeling especially poor, although I dreamed of being rich, especially when I went to the cinema and saw how the rich could live. Many, if not most of the films in my school-days were escapist - like 'Brewster's Millions' - or brilliantly fanciful - like such Disney creations as 'Fantasia.'

We sang escapist songs too - songs for the Depression just as there'd been comforting songs for the Great War. Community singing was popular, with great tunes like 'Happy Days are Here Again.' Jerome Kern's 'Look for the Silver Lining', written in 1920, became known to us especially after it was performed by Marilyn Miller in an early 'talkie' film called 'Sally', in 1930.

"Look for the silver lining
When e'er a cloud appears in the blue.
Remember somewhere, the sun is shining
And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you.

A heart, full of joy and gladness
Will always banish sadness and strife
So always look for the silver lining
And try to find the sunny side of life."

People were nicer to each other then. My sister and I used to go fairly regularly to the Saturday afternoon matinee at the Tivoli Theatre, opposite the City Hall in the centre of Brisbane. It had grand shows, especially of Westerns, and grand give-aways which were worth much more than the sixpence we had to pay for the entrance ticket. One day, my elder sister, who was keeper of the Privy Purse, lost our entrance money, so we couldn’t pay for our tickets. She approached someone at the ticket office and explained what had happened, pledging that, if we were allowed to see the show that afternoon, we would bring the money for it the following Saturday. The Tivoli manager was consulted and quickly brushed the problem aside. There was no difficulty - none at all. We would not have to pay the following week. He escorted us personally to our seats; made sure we got our free ice creams and our headdresses to celebrate the film "The Indians are Coming"; and said he hoped we would enjoy the show. We did!!

My primary school life, at Wooloowin State School, ended in December 1935. The next month, King George V died and Edward VIII began his short reign, ending with his abdication in December 1936. We were less than three years away from the outbreak of World War Two and just five years away from Pearl Harbour. Most of those who sat for the State Scholarship examination with me in December 1935 were 13 to 15 years old - just exactly the right age to die, as so many of them did, in future battles around the world.

Almost every boy around my age, at school with me, who was fit, served in one of the armed services during the war. In some ways, we were, physically, a poor lot. Not many of us had too much to eat or had known much luxury of choice in what we did eat. An American Consul in Melbourne, reporting back to Washington, on the quality of potential recruits to the armed forces, said we were a poor, undernourished and unimpressive lot.

Probably we were. Certainly, we were mostly skinny. We had very little surplus fat compared with our equivalents today. On the other hand, sport was as cheap as it was popular and we played a lot of it. I played everything, as often as I ever wanted - virtually for nothing. Although few of us could be gluttons and even fewer could be gourmets, the food we ate was cheap and nutritious. Fruit and vegetables were in plenty at give-away prices. Despite what the American Consul had said, the economy - and the society - produced youngsters who, when the chips were down, showed that they could fight. Teenagers picked up off the streets of Brisbane or Melbourne or other cities around Australia, after Pearl Harbour, proved their fitness by surviving even the torments of such challenging campaigns as that on the Kokoda Track in 1942. They survived and, miraculously, they won when it counted.

We were fortunate in another way. Our lives began in the toughest of environments. We were never deluded into believing that 'the world owes us a living.' Most of us knew we would have to leave school when we turned 14 or not much later. We knew too that, when we left school, we’d have a tough battle to find any sort of job and we might have an even tougher battle to hold on to it - or advance up the ladder. Wages were tiny. My first job as a telegraph messenger, at the age of 15, brought me 19 schillings (nearly $2) a week. My next job, in the State Public Service, yielded 23 shillings; and my third job, at the splendid old Customs House in Petrie Bight in Brisbane, paid 30 shillings ($3) a week - tiny but, marvellously, just enough to cover my board at King’s College when I went to university in 1940. I was then 17.

Long before 1939, we knew that there was going to be war and we knew we’d have to fight in it. In that too, we were perhaps 'fortunate.' We were determined that, when it finished, we would never again have economic depression or war. We worked hard on our plans during the war and, when peace came, just sixty years ago, on 15 August 1945, we began a period in which our dreams of peace and prosperity seemed almost to be coming true. We had the Cold War and, in the sixties, the Vietnam War, but, by and large, from 1945 to 1969, we had what seemed to us like peace and prosperity. We all had jobs. We could all be educated free - even up to university. Wages and salaries were good. We could all buy cars and refrigerators. We could be cured of many diseases that had afflicted us pre-war. By the standards of what we’d started off with, we had, to use Harold Macmillan’s phrase, 'never had it so good.'

So we were lucky. If we weren’t the 'greatest generation', we were, for a while there, the happiest generation. Largely, though not entirely, that was because almost anything had to be better than the Great Depression and World War. The generations that came later - or some of them - started off with a great today and the prospect of an even greater tomorrow. The children who saw the first man walk on the moon must have thought there were no limits to the triumphs and happiness ahead. Afterwards, they may have suffered the sharpest disappointments - much more than my generation ever did.

So how should I sum up my experience of the Great Depression? Early on, I learned some basic values - values that are much more important than prices. I enjoyed the touching equality and mateship that we had as brothers - and sisters - in poverty and, later, in battle; and almost everything that came after had to be better than it was at the start. In so many ways, mine has been, in brief, 'a most fortunate life.'

James, Vienna, Austria

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