5 June 1940

J B Priestley read his first "Postcript" after the 9 o'clock news.

"I wonder how many of you feel as I do about this great Battle and evacuation of Dunkirk. The news of it came as a series of surprises and shocks, followed by equally astonishing new waves of hope. It was all, from beginning to end, unexpected. And yet now that it's over, and we can look back on it, doesn't it seem to you to have an inevitable air about it - as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and seen a chapter headed "Dunkirk" - and perhaps seen too a picture of the troops on the beach waiting to embark?

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What strikes me about it is how typically English it is. Nothing, I feel, could be more English both in its beginning and its end, its folly and its grandeur. We have gone sadly wrong like this before, and here and now we must resolve never, never to do it again. What began as a miserable blunder, a catalogue of misfortunes ended as an epic of gallantry.

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We have a queer habit - and you can see it running through our history - of conjuring up such transformations. And to my mind what was most characteristically English about it was the part played not by the warships but by the little pleasure-steamers. We've known them and laughed at them, these fussy little steamers, all our lives. These 'Brighton Belles' and 'Brighton Queens' left that innocent foolish world of theirs to sail into the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines, torpedoes, machine-gun fire - to rescue our soldiers.

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But now - look - this little steamer, like all her brave and battered sisters, is immortal. She'll go sailing proudly down the years in the epic of Dunkirk. And our great grand-children, when they learn how we began this War by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious."

Well, JB's children were alive then, so his grandchildren would probably have been born in the 50s or 60s, which means that his great grandchildren would be in school now. I can't see their children learning about Dunkirk somehow.

I tried a thesis out on Moretben once: that my generation, those of us born between about 1945 and 1960, is as affected by the Second World War as was our parents', mainly because of the effect on our parents. We were taught: to eat everything up; not to complain about not having things; to think that things could be much worse; to face up to adversity; to thank God for and enjoy small mercies; not to waste things. All amid an expectation that we would be called up to fight in a new World War, we imbibed the values that had carried our parents through the Second.

Perhaps it's one reason for our drifting: we weren't called on, as our parents were, to make the sacrifices that they made, and therefore find it difficult to insist on imposing on our children the values and customs that our parents felt justified in imposing on us. The mess that happened in the 70s and 80s is therefore our fault: we didn't stand up to the awful changes we knew were wrong, instead bending like grass in the wind, and allowing the Enemy to secure a foothold. We lost our nerve.

J B Priestley knew, on 5 June 1940, that the war would be won, and girded himself to play his part; he knew what war was: he had been in the trenches twenty five years earlier. Sixty-seven years later, what should we do?