Changing expectations of age cohorts

Regarding An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James. The book was originally published in 1972, so written in the early 1970s. 45 years ago. The protagonist is a young woman, Cordelia Gray, only twenty-one years old.

That was a marginal sticking point for me early on. There was a good backstory that could, at a stretch explain it, but she seemed awfully well read and knowledgeable for a twenty-one year old, readily identifying second tier Italian Renaissance painters and recognizing stray poetical quotations, etc. But you never know with auto-didacts.

But as I read along, I began to wonder whether my minor discombobulation was less to do with the author unrealistically having a twenty-one year old taking over a failing one-person detective agency and making a go of it and more to do with a temporal dislocation on my part.

We are today, I think, very adjusted to the idea of late adulthood. Twenty-one year olds are routinely referred to as kids and it seems like adulthood has been pushed back into the late twenties or even the early thirties. We have dramatically shifted our adult age scales. Perhaps it is my contemporary perspective being imposed on the earlier reality that creates the tension.

A year or two ago I read Bob Greene's Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War. From the blurb:

When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before--thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world.

Greene's father--a soldier with an infantry division in World War II--often spoke of seeing the man around town. All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane--which he called Enola Gay, after his mother--to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb.

On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before.

DUTY is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world--and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty--lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.

It's a wonderful book. In reading the book though, Tibbets' age startled me. Granted it was war years when many strange things happen, but still. From Wikipedia, Tibbetts was born in 1915:

In February 1942, he became the commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group, which was equipped with the Boeing B-17. In July 1942 the 97th became the first heavy bombardment group to be deployed as part of the Eighth Air Force, and Tibbets became deputy group commander. He flew the lead plane in the first American daylight heavy bomber mission against Occupied Europe on August 17, 1942, and the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe on October 9, 1942. Tibbets was chosen to fly Major General Mark W. Clark and Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Gibraltar. After flying 43 combat missions, he became the assistant for bomber operations on the staff of the Twelfth Air Force.

Tibbets returned to the United States in February 1943 to help with the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. In September 1944, he was appointed the commander of the 509th Composite Group, which would conduct the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A Colonel by twenty-nine, leader of the first heavy bomber strikes (early in the war when casualties were the highest), then the first 100-bomber strike. He was essentially a test pilot for the mold-breaking B-29 but which also was plagued with multiple failures and crashes throughout its development. Then commander of the 509th for its special mission. All by twenty-nine. They grew up young in those days.

In the end, I think twenty-one year old Cordelia Gray is not so much an author pulling a character out of the nursery. Cordelia Gray is a reminder of how long we now keep our kids in the nursery.