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Rites of Passage

By LEE CHILD

Objectively I was one of the luckiest humans ever born. In 1954, Britain was a stable postwar liberal democracy, at peace, with a cradle-to-grave welfare system that worked efficiently, with all dread diseases conquered, with full employment for our parents, with free and excellent education from the age of 5 for just as long as we merited it.

We had no bombs falling on our houses, and no knocks on our doors in the middle of the night. No previous generation ever had all of that, not in all of history, and standards have eroded since. We were very lucky.

But it was very boring. Britain was gray, exhausted, physically ruined and financially crippled. The factories were humming, but everything went for export. We needed foreign currency to pay down monstrous war debt. Domestic life was pinched and austere.

Not that we knew. We didn’t miss what we’d never had. Worse for us was a kind of mental and emotional deadness that we felt all around. There was nothing left for us. There was nothing in the future. It was all in the past. History was over. Britain’s finest hour had been 1940, and now the clock was slowly winding down.

Even then, I didn’t argue about the finest hour. Britain’s defiant peril in 1940 is rightly legendary.

My father was then 16, listening to Churchill on the radio, heading inexorably for the army, sitting across the room from my one-legged grandfather, from the first war. My mother was 14, a schoolgirl near an industrial city, told to listen for planes and get under the table.

They survived, with millions of others, young and free, but the sustained six-year emotional thunderclap they had endured left them weary and exhausted. The war and its winning (with a little help here and there, they would sometimes grudgingly admit) were both a horror and an achievement unlikely ever to be paralleled, ever again, and therefore anything that came by afterward was necessarily an anticlimax.

We couldn’t argue, but it was depressing. The results of our historic privilege were starting to show. We were growing up healthy and energetic and restless. There was a sense of a capacity among young British people.

Our parents generally resented it, feeling quite rightly that if they hadn’t been preoccupied by, you know, actually staying alive and so on, then maybe they’d have had a capacity, too. And their parents before them. And so forth.

We believed we were being handed unprecedented gifts, but being forbidden to cash them in. Big dreams were discouraged. My parents’ ambition for me, stated over and over as an incentive for me to study hard at my books, was for me to live in a two-family house instead of a rowhouse, and to drive a two-year-old car instead of a five-year-old.

Couldn’t argue. Still can’t. What felt cautious and limited to us must have felt entirely sigh-of-relief natural to them. But it was frustrating. At the age of 8, I was gloomy. I remember wondering if it would ever change. If any of us would ever escape. I thought some would.

But being a somber child, I further wondered how it would feel to see some people escape, but not me. Odds were I’d be left behind. Most of us would be.

Then we all escaped. A weird kind of pressure built up, between the luckiest generation in history and the survivors of its worst catastrophe, so that something had to happen. And it did, opposite in every way to the stakes and fears of 1940, full of joy and love and energy.

The Beatles happened. I was beyond passionate. Finally, something was going on. To us, for us, by us. Something was ours. I was depressed at 8, but I was fine by 9. Four guys had escaped, in the biggest possible way.

I read everything I could. They were playing the Olympia in Paris, staying at the George V hotel. The second-best part of the story was they got a phone call from New York. Which was in itself intensely, unbearably exotic.

The best part of the story was the news conveyed. The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, put down the phone and said, “Boys, you’re No. 1 in America.”

The phrase stuck in my 9-year-old head. Because it was ludicrous. You may as well fly to the moon. But it was true. It had happened. You’re No. 1 in America. Those words became my secret gold standard for the absolute upper limit of you-have-escaped. For the absolute upper limit of yes, it has changed. No. 1 in America: It couldn’t get better than that.

Forty-four years later, I got the same phone call. I was in Chicago, not Paris. My publisher called to tell me for the first time ever my new hardcover was on top of the New York Times best-seller list. The guy knew what to say. He had the same internal database. He said, “You’re No. 1 in America.”

Was that a rite of passage? Not really. It was a lovely, gilded, charmed, privileged loop through an exceptionally fortunate micro-age of history. It was more fun than it’s possible to have. You had to be there. Believe me.

It was also a metaphor for the way the world opened up, such that given safety and unlimited opportunities, then ordinary kids could go real far, and along the way meet other ordinary kids who had gone just as far. My life was a symbol of everyone’s life.

The rite of passage came later, from being tempted to look back and sum up. To assess. To confront the evidence. It was a neat piece of symmetry. It stimulated some observations. Mine was a lucky generation and we did a lot of fun things, and some great things, too.

But did we do enough? Seven years of my free education were at a school 224 years older than the United States. It had all kinds of mottoes in Latin. One said: “Much is expected of those to whom much is given.”

And we were given a lot. Historians will say some of us were the luckiest in all of human evolution’s seven million years. And we blew it, basically. We missed things, and eventually we settled for something short of what we could have had.

Nothing to be done about it now. It’s all in the past. Our history is over. That’s the real rite of passage: knowing that you’ve written and spoken your lines, for better or worse, and now it’s someone else’s play.