Personally speaking: Alf Young

Published on Tuesday 27 December 2011 00:00

IN 2011 I became the oldest surviving member of our family’s branch of the Young line. In April my Uncle Jim, well into his 92nd year, died peacefully one morning.

He had been with us, just weeks before, standing in the Cowshed at Cappielow, watching his beloved Greenock Morton draw 2-2 with Falkirk.

We still stand where Jim first took me, in the early 1950s, to watch the Ton. I think of it as our spot. With my uncle and his pals, I watched as then-owner Hal Stewart brought players like Danish goalkeeper, Erik Sorensen, in from mainland Europe. By the mid-1960s, in some of my term breaks from university, I drove vans for local bakers, Aulds. I even got to deliver Mr Sorensen’s morning rolls.

After that I drifted away from watching my local team. But when my own two sons, Ewan and Jamie, began to get interested in the game in the 1990s, we started going to matches in Greenock again. Uncle Jim – and his son, another Jim – had never been away. Now he’s finally gone I’ve been reflecting on what legacy his generation passed on to me. And what I, as the eldest in the next generation of Youngs, will have passed on down the line when my time is up.

Uncle Jim was one of the beneficiaries of the great post-war settlement that brought brand new industries, many of them foreign-owned, to Scotland. Having served in the RAF during the war and survived the siege of Malta, he was one of the first six staff recruited by IBM when they opened their brand new factory in Greenock’s Spango Valley in 1951. He worked with Big Blue until he retired in the 1980s.

Jim and his two brothers, Alf and Craig, never tasted higher education. Family circumstances made that impossible. They gained school certificates galore. But money was very tight and university then was for the privileged few. For all of them the church became their alternative seat of learning. However all three retained a belief that educational opportunity beyond school should not bypass their offspring.

As the first of my generation of Youngs, I was encouraged to embrace what they had missed out on. I went to university, as did my brother and our cousins. We baby-boomers have profited mightily from the sacrifices our parents made to give us a better start in life. We’ve had better jobs, lived in bigger houses and seen a world of cheap travel and instant digital communication open up to us. Now, with our enhanced longevity, we can draw our pensions and watch as politicians, conscious of the power of the grey vote, shower us with other perks of old age.

But, as this cataclysmic year has unfolded, where the young increasingly struggle to get jobs that match their qualifications, can’t afford their own homes and have diminishing prospects of a good pension when they grow old, shouldn’t we in the boomer generation be confronting ourselves with an increasingly awkward question?

Western capitalism is in dire straits, thanks to our growing indebtedness as individuals and sovereign states. We’ve consumed far more than was good for us and discovered, in the process, that material plenty is no guarantor of a shared sense of wellbeing. And man-made climate change has rendered our environment more and more fragile for generations to come. Is the hefty price of our good times now falling on the shoulders of the next generation? In short, is our boom turning into their bust?

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