In a flurry of self-congratulation built on Carnaby Street and the Beatles, Britain christened itself home of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. This old civilisation became a modish place for sociological study then as well, notably with Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain. There were few dissenting voices in this season of optimism, save the resonant ‘non’ from the president of France across the Channel.
Neither the American journalist and aficionado of arcane rock groups, Joe Queenan, nor the cartoonist and inventor of the Spitting Image puppets, Roger Law, has too solemn an ambition in his account of Britain (and in Law’s case Australia, where he seems to have settled). Queenan Country—an irresistible pun that his surname gifted him, is cumbersomely subtitled A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country. Long married to an English wife, Queenan has often been to Britain, but not for decades on his own. Now, indulging whim and disdaining duties to relatives, he charts an eccentric, private course.
Roger Law’s Still Spitting at Sixty is more concerned to chart a journey in time. His subtitle explains: From the ’60s to My Sixties, a Sort of Autobiography. Both books are stories of long marriages and tolerant spouses. Each is written with a keen eye for the idiosyncrasies of British society, but also with a sympathy for how people accommodate to, and flourish within, them. Queenan, for example, confesses that on first reading Lewis Carroll he encountered ‘a phantasmagoric society populated by lunatics’, only gradually realising that the author was describing Britain rather than Wonderland. Law reflects ruefully of his Spitting Image puppets that he had at least cornered ‘the international market in grotesques’.
His book begins in a similar tone, with the reflection that ‘Eternal Youth simply buckled under the weight of my expectations’. Soon he is back at the beginning, with his birth in 1941 in the secluded Fen country of eastern England. Law found his way to Art School in Cambridge at the time of the flamboyant entries into public life of Peter Cook and David Frost. By the 1960s he was in the capital, though of the contrary opinion that ‘Swinging London, so revered in retrospect, was very slow getting into its stride’. Employed as a cartoonist by The Observer, Law found plentiful freelance work as well. Moving to the Sunday Times led him to judge that its mid-sixties period ‘was the most creative phase in newspapers since the