You can't understand Twenties England until you appreciate it was under a cloud of mourning. Nearly everyone was grieving.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Middle age went by while I was mourning for my lost youth.
It's quite an interesting time, the '20s, because the politics of England were changing quite a lot, and the class structure was starting to shift a little.
Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.
I feel like I experienced my 20s in all their glory and all their disastrousness.
I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.
But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
You couldn't pay me enough money to go back to being 20. So many tears; what a nightmare it was. It's much better being older.
Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.
Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.