Graham Swift: Tomorrow

At Sussex there was a university doctor who had the happy name, in the circumstances, of Doctor Pope. Every so often, along with a regular queue of other girls, I’d go along to get my dispensation. I remember another, less eager queue when I was small, to get a polio vaccination. What made that age so new, so different from previous ages, was a little pill: once a day for twenty-one days, then a week off. A bit of science, a bit of social sorcery. It was called the permissive age, but was it the pill that produced the age or the age the pill? Sex must always have been around, our parents must have known how to get it. But had there ever been such a rush of it, a glut of it — as if it had just been discovered specially for us, like gold in the Klondike, in the South Downs? Of course, it hadn’t just been discovered. But we were children of our time, as you are of yours. Though we only understand afterwards, perhaps, what time it is we’re children of.

Doctor Pope was one of those young, fresh doctors, not so long out of medical school, who was only too happy, I think, to have this flow of largely healthy patients, not so much younger than himself and predominantly female, passing through his door. I still see his unpapal, even mock-priestly face. Dark hair, dark eyes, a taste in brightly coloured, unphysicianly ties. Half the girls who went along to him fancied him just a little. He’s one of those minor and incidental figures from the past — one day you’ll find this too — who suddenly float into your head, so that you wonder, where are they now, what are they doing right now? Do they still have that dark hair? Though this same thing can happen, this same sudden looming out of nowhere, with people who can’t be called incidental at all.

Your father slept around and so, thanks to Doctor Pope, did I. Let’s not be exact about who did the most, but let’s give the edge to your father. I was the younger, if only by six months. And, just for the candid record, your father, before he met me and even in those pill-blessed times, always carried a traditional stand-by: the packet of three. You may think this is information that doesn’t particularly concern you. I said to him, “You won’t be needing these.” But your dad had always been — careful.

How it is for you I don’t know. In these mid-1990s, when sixteen is eighteen and when, from all I can tell, what once went on at university now sometimes goes on at school, you’d think you might already be beginners at least. What with all that early knowledge you seemed so glad once to advertise. The facts of life? They’ve simply been in the air you’ve breathed, the common small talk (apparently) of infants, they don’t need special elucidation.

But on the other hand, for all the all-around-you of it these days, schoolgirl pregnancies by the dozen (yes, Kate, I worry), I think there’s sometimes too a weirdly opposite reaction. Why rush into something so patently available? A sort of sex-fatigue before it’s even started, a sort of purity or just stubborn sensibleness. Abstention is the new liberation: is that the way the tide is turning? Sometimes when we refer to those oh-so-wonderful, oh-so-yawn-making 1960s, it’s not just that you make a show of boredom. Sometimes in your eyes there’s the faint hint of a tut-tut. As if you might be about to say to us, a little too late in the day, perhaps: “Oh, grow up.”

There’s a gap of quite a few years between us, as you may have noticed. You’re sixteen, your father’s fifty. But that’s another shift that’s become unremarkable these days. Thirty, thirty-five: that’s no longer a cliff-edge for a woman. Mike says — you’re familiar with his ironical and slightly professorial mode, though it’s not, I’m sure, how he’ll address you tomorrow — that the whole thing is changing, there’s no longer the pressure of brevity, we’ll all reach a hundred, one day, and procreate when we’re fifty. Well. “All other things being equal,” he adds. If there isn’t by then anyway, he says, “some completely new system.” The slightly prophetical mode as well. Once anyway, as we all know, people were lucky to get to forty and there were brides of fourteen. (If not, Kate, of eight.)

I don’t know. The world doesn’t feel to me more relaxed and better adjusted, it has this way of suddenly racing. I don’t know how it feels to you. But what I do know is that at sixteen you’re both virgins. I don’t have the proof and I don’t have your direct confirmations, just intuition. And I don’t think this has anything to do with the world around you and how there’s more time at your disposal and how you can just be cool and calm about everything. It has to do with you, with what you are: Nick and Kate, with that invisible rope straining, and sometimes catching painfully, between you. Little upsets and outbursts, not helped by recent symptoms of parental tension. Now and then a door gets slammed.

I don’t know how tomorrow will affect it. A big snapping of all our ropes? You’re sixteen, you’re eighteen, you’re grown-up and able to handle anything? We’ll find out. Right now it seems to me that you’re as changeable, as suddenly mature then as suddenly childish, as suddenly moody and tetchy then as suddenly brimming with verve and sparkle, as any teenagers. And you’re virgins. It’s a sweet thing, from the outside. Like the sweetness, from the outside, of your inescapable togetherness. And thank God, for the time being, you have each other. You’re virgins, you could say, in another way too.

SUSSEX IN THE SIXTIES: the very phrase like some glistening salad. And Sussex was the place to be, the best, the coolest university in the land. And of course it was the place to be: it was where I met your dad.

I was reading English with history of art. Your father was a student of biology — or biological science, as they called it there. Now I’m one of the directors at Walker and Fitch, and your father’s more than a director, he mainly owns and runs Living World Books, which includes Living World Magazine. How far we’ve come. He’s still in science, in a manner of speaking. That is, he sells it. And now and then, as you may have noticed, he’ll still come over all self-searching and conscience-stricken about having deserted “real” science to become a money-maker. As if there weren’t all those lean years before you arrived when he hardly made any money out of science at all. As if it wasn’t his own decision. And now the irony anyway is that times have changed again, there are big fish around poised to swallow up Living World and your dad’s on the verge of selling up completely. Something else he’s yet to announce.

We had you late in life — with shrewd foresight it may now seem — but the fact is we weren’t to know. Science only became lucrative, it only turned into “popular science,” in your lifetime and your father only emerged as a successful publisher when you were too young to notice.

Was it something to do with you? Quite possibly. It was arguably to do with you that he gave up true science, abandoned biology in the first place. Since that happened long before you were born, you may wonder how you can have affected it either way.

Your dad likes to maintain that his latter-day success is all down to luck, to just happening to be in the right place at the right time. To luck and to his “Uncle” Tim — I’ll come to him later. But I think it was all a little like that contraceptive pill. Which came first: the pill and the science that produced it, or the change in the air that went with it? Science might never have become popular if your dad, among others, hadn’t discovered a gift, a marketing gift, for making it so. And he didn’t just “happen” to be there. He was there for a long and dubious time (I was one of the doubters) before the time was ever right.