To anyone born after 1960, there are few more tedious ways to spend an afternoon than listening to a relative telling you what “we” did in the 1960s. “We took mind-altering drugs to change our consciousness and find other ways of thinking about how to live,” says Jenny Diski in her account of this most controversial decade. “We dropped out of university, fought against any establishment we could find and travelled the world to encounter different traditions of living…we explored sexual freedom and began to think about the political nature of gender roles” — and so on.

Reading those words, my initial reaction was to mutter: what, all of you? Nigel Mansell, for example; was he there at the Roundhouse, joint in hand, his mind struggling to make out the contours of reality? To be fair, Diski eventually concedes the point. What she calls the 1960s, she admits, was confined to a small minority of highly educated young people in London and the big university towns. Most people in the “straight world” never read the Beats, wore white lipstick, or lived in communes, as “we” did.

Despite its title, Diski’s book is, in fact, a memoir, and it works best when she writes about her own life, whether setting up a free school or experiencing the absurdities of radical psychiatric treatment. Oddly, it is supposed to be a volume in the publisher’s Big Ideas series; but, since the 1960s ­counterculture was so solipsistic, perhaps personal reminiscence is the most appropriate way to tackle it. Yet although Diski writes sensitively about her younger self, from her teenage discovery of art-house cinema to her experiences with drugs, much of it feels intensely familiar. How many times, for example, have we read 1960s people bashing the 1950s for “lack of colour”?

But then getting the 1950s wrong is an essential ingredient of these kinds of books. Diski’s “grey” 1950s must have been a different decade from the one that saw the beginning of the affluent society, the birth of television and the advent of rock’n’ roll. And her 1950s, in which books about sex are “banned”, must have been a different decade from the one in which sex manuals sold hundreds of thousands of copies and the Marriage Guidance Council sent out booklets on how to achieve “satisfying orgasm for both”.

Diski does offer some revealing insights. She is good on the excesses of progressive education, and is refreshingly candid about what her generation actually achieved — “no new ideas, no great books or paintings or poetry”. Despite the talk of political radicalism, she confesses that “it’s quite remarkable how little effect we had”. But one reason for that, surely, was her and her old friends’ general indifference to the hopes and values of others. Even now, after admitting that most of her contemporaries led very different lives, Diski can hardly bring herself to mention them. No wonder she was so shocked when they voted for Mrs Thatcher.

The Sixties by Jenny Diski
Profile £10.99 pp143

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