2. When we were very young: 1950–56
Decades have their own characters. We know what we mean when we talk of the Roaring Twenties or the Swinging Sixties, however simplistic these descriptions are. And anyone who was there knows what I mean by the frustrated fifties.
Until the start of the fifties, the immediate excitement of the postwar years, the victory over the Nazis and the sheer boldness and effrontery of what Clement Attlee's government did between 1945 and 1951, made a reasonable substitute for the things that were prohibited by postwar austerity: choice, colour and the instincts of youth. But after Attlee fell in 1951, Britain had the austerity without the excitement.
The excitement and radicalism that carried Attlee to power in 1945 were spent. The Communist Party of Great Britain, whose two seats in the 1945 election were such a powerful signal of the desire for change, was decisively swept out of Parliament in 1950. The fifties, at least until 1956, were buttoned-down and conformist. The baby boomers' earliest years were lived in an atmosphere of repression that made a lasting effect on them, even when, years later, they thought they had shaken it off. Those who are too young to remember them find it hard to imagine a world in which it was illegal to buy Lady Chatterley's Lover, to get an abortion, to have a homosexual relationship, or to stage a play without first obtaining permission from the Lord Chamberlain. It had, said Dennis Potter, who grew up in the fifties, a 'great greyness', a 'feeling of the flatness and bleakness of everyday England'.
Patriotism enjoyed an Indian summer between 1951 and 1956, for it had been in slow decline during the twenties and thirties. The first six years of the decade were the last years in which people used terms like 'patriotism' and 'proud to be British'. Britain's empire was a source of pride. Even though India had been given her independence in 1947, fifties schoolchildren could still be shown a map of the world with the Empire coloured in red, making red the dominant colour. It was still the empire upon which the sun never set. Rudyard Kipling's poetry enjoyed a modest revival – he was seen as the poet of empire, and his later, darker work tended to be ignored. I remember an English master reading Gunga Din to my class in a great vibrant voice:
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din…
It was just before mass immigration redefined Britishness: the country was still overwhelmingly white, and the black and brown people who populated the Empire were still, as Kipling called them, 'the White Man's burden':
Your new-caught sullen people
Half devil and half child.
It seemed natural to Britons in the first half of the fifties that their country should decide who was, and who was not, fitted to govern far-flung parts of the world of which we knew little. The 1953 coup in Iran, which overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and replaced him with the cruel and tyrannical Shah, was engineered by Britain and the USA; it has, of course, brought nothing but trouble to the baby boomer generation in government in the twenty-first century, for it led to the rise of militant Islam and the present clerical regime.
With patriotism went respect and deference. Ordinary people may have thought their country powerful, but they did not expect to share in that power. You didn't argue with what were, without any irony, called your 'elders and betters'. 'Things aren't that bad, and even if they are, there's nothing we can do about it,' says a young man about to go and fight in Suez, in John Osborne's 1957 play The Entertainer. And of course they were that bad: the young man was killed in a useless, immoral war which he and his friends would not have dreamed of questioning. His elders and betters condemned him to a pointless death. No wonder Osborne, in Look Back in Anger, called it a world in which 'nobody thinks, nobody cares.' And if they did think and care, they were sure they were wasting their time, because ordinary people could not change anything.
The death of King George VI in 1953 was greeted in humble homes with the sort of grief that even the death of his father George V in 1936 had not occasioned. Greg Dyke, who was brought up in Hayes, in west London, wrote fifty years later:
For my parents the King represented something special because of the symbolic role he played in the East End of London during the Second World War. On the day of the King's funeral they both went to stand by the railway bridge in nearby Southall as the train carrying his body to Windsor passed by. They thought it important that they pay their respects and I can remember to this day my dad leaving in his best suit and trilby hat and my mother in her best dress. They were dressed to the nines just to stand by a railway bridge. This was still the age of respect.[1]
The humble Dyke family of Hayes were not alone. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Opposition Leader Clement Attlee both wept tears of real grief when they heard about the death of their sovereign. But while the highest in the land may have shared the Dykes' grief, they did not share their deference. Class and money bought exemption from the most repressive features of the decade. Members of the upper classes in the fifties could get a safe abortion, although the poor and the middle-class had to take their chances among the illegal backstreet abortionists. The upper classes could carry on affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual, but the middle and working classes could not. The rich could get a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, or a rapid divorce. The point of the ban on Lawrence's book really was, as the crown lawyer in the Lady Chatterley case put it, that it was not a book you might wish your wife or servant to read.
For the fifties were remarkably tolerant about the peccadilloes of the celebrity, political and upper classes, so long as these were conducted discreetly. It was well known in political circles that Harold Macmillan's wife, Lady Dorothy Macmillan, the daughter of a duke, had for years had an extra-marital affair with Macmillan's fellow Conservative MP Robert Boothby, and the fourth and youngest of the Macmillan children, Sarah, born in 1930, was biologically Boothby's child. In a middle-class family, this would have been an intolerable embarrassment. But in the circles in which they moved, it does not seem to have affected the way in which Macmillan, Boothby or Lady Dorothy were regarded, and was no obstacle to Macmillan becoming Prime Minister as 1957 opened.
Britain's most respected actor, Laurence Olivier, was probably conducting affairs with both Noel Coward and Danny Kaye, and, although they were not reported in newspapers, they were widely rumoured. The Labour MP Tom Driberg's many homosexual affairs were the subject of tolerant jokes among his parliamentary colleagues, none of whom seems to have thought of using them against him. Yet among the middle classes it was an age of extraordinary reticence about sex. The sixties did not invent liberalism, but they did democratise it.
The early fifties were a time, I suspect – there is no way this can be proved – when more people married as virgins than at almost any other time, before or since, for its prudery was new. Compared with the fifties, the two decades between the world wars had been years of joyful sexual liberation. Prudery came with austerity, and rationing, and bad cooking. The wedding-night meal for Ian McEwan's newlyweds in his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach, set in the early fifties, begins with 'a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry' while 'in the corridor, in silver dishes on candle-heated plate warmers, waited slices of long-ago roasted beef in a thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.' With a flourish, Edward gives Florence his sticky cherry, and she eats it flirtatiously. 'If only eating a sticky cherry was all that was required.' For the real dread is not the meal, bad as it is, but the nameless horror that she knows is supposed to follow it.
Edward and Florence were 'young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.' Of course the subsequent coupling is so complete a disaster that it taints their love and destroys their lives.
My mother, who was twenty in 1929, used to say that the sixties generation acted as though it had invented sex. Her scabrous thirties jokes were far too improper for the buttoned-down fifties, and it was only she, who was capable of being a very genteelly improper lady, who still told them – which is why almost nobody apart from me now knows the Little Audrey jokes, whose punchline always began: 'Little Audrey laughed and laughed.' Here's a sample:
The newly married couple in the hotel didn't come down to breakfast and people nudged each other. They didn't come down to lunch and people started to look puzzled. They didn't come down to supper and people started to worry. But little Audrey laughed and laughed. She knew who'd put glue in the Vaseline.
The reason the sixties thought it had invented sex was that in the fifties nobody spoke about it.
*
The class system, like deference and prudery, had an Indian summer in the early fifties. In September 1955 Nancy Mitford, in an article for Encounter magazine, defined 'U' and 'non-U', asserting the distinction between the upper and upper middle classes on the one hand, and the middle classes on the other. It was the same snobbish distinction that Harold Nicolson voiced when he talked about his horror of lower middle-class gentility, of 'bedintness'. John Betjeman, very much a man of the upper middle class, joined in the mockery of lower middle-class gentility in his 1954 poem 'How To Get On In Society':
Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.
Requisites (such a prudish lower middle-class euphemism), cruets, cutlets with frills on, a fake open fire – it was enough to send Mitford or Nicolson rushing for sanctuary to the ancestral home of an aristocratic friend.
The much-mocked middle class felt impelled to try to keep up appearances. 'I definitely think of myself as middle class,' a woman civil servant told Mass Observation at the start of the decade.
I had a typical middle-class education (small private school and secondary school). I have a middle-class job and I live in a middle-class district. But none of these things would make me middle-class in themselves. If I had been clever enough to get a higher post or profession, or rebellious enough to choose a more attractive manual job, I should not thereby have changed my class… Income has something to do with it but it is not the deciding factor,[2]
Class, she seems to be saying, is indefinable, but absolute. You know what class you are, and that's all there is to it. Other Mass Observation quotes from the period, from people of all classes, confirm this. Middle-class men and women talked openly of 'servants' and even the phrase 'below stairs' still meant something. They did not keep servants, as they might have done between the wars, but they still talked as though one day, when the war had been forgotten and the welfare state had withered away, they might have them once again.
The class system was back with a vengeance, and the baby boomers were never able to defeat it. Most of them, whether from a right-wing standpoint or a left-wing one, claimed they were building a classless society, but they were doing nothing of the kind. They all knew what class they were born into, and what class they became, and whether they were moving up or down in the class system, and they still do. In the sixties, it became a little easier to move between the classes, and people no longer talked openly about it. The middle classes (though not the upper classes) became ashamed of it. Class was open in the early fifties. Since then, it has become a dirty little secret. Nice people, who in the fifties would have put requisites in their toilets and frills on their cutlets, in the sixties started to avoid all mention of class.
People even dressed according to their class. Dress in the early fifties was dull and grey: partly because of the war and austerity, partly because there were few consumer choices, and partly because of the spirit of the times. 'Short back and sides,' a man would say as he walked into the barber, and it would have been unmanly to say anything else. If he was middle-class he wore a grey suit, baggy trousers with turnups, white shirt and a tie, Brylcreemed his hair and thought himself lucky to have the chance. There was a fashion rebellion of sorts: the first recorded use of the phrase 'Teddy boy' was in March 1954. But Teddy Boys were in and of the working class, and demonised by the press in much the same way that 'hoodie' is now.[3] In public schools and universities, tweed jackets and grey flannel trousers adorned even the most radical male torso.
Wartime food rationing persisted until 1954. Few people went hungry but there was not a lot of food about, and most of it was of poor quality and badly cooked. The baby boomers' childhood diet was adequate, but uninteresting. The only take-aways were fish and chips. Sweets were on ration. 'Waste not want not,' the grownups would say as they tried to coax the last little bit of soggy cabbage into us. Like most of my generation, I knew nothing different, and I was never hungry, though I grew very bored with food. The big treat of my early childhood – and everyone who was a child in the early fifties remembers it with pleasure – was a packet of crisps with a little blue bag of salt in it. You dug around for your salt bag, which was simply a piece of blue paper twisted shut; you untwisted it, and sprayed it on the crisps. Ready salted crisps never matched it.
We grew to like the food we were served, because there was nothing better. To this day I will guiltily buy a loaf of white processed bread or a pork pie, and try to hide the contraband comestible from my disapproving family. Grownup baby boomers, with sophisticated culinary tastes, are still secretly children of the bland and boring fifties.
The spirit of the times was spirit. Alcohol was the drug of choice, and it was drunk discreetly, as befits a buttoned-down generation, but deeply, as befits a frustrated one. Alcohol consumption was much greater in the fifties than it has been for most of the postwar period. 'Pink gin' (gin with a few drops of angostura bitters shaken into it) was really a way of gentrifying neat gin – 'mother's ruin' – and respectable ladies guzzled it daintily. Winston Churchill, who became Prime Minister for the second time in 1951 at the age of seventy-seven, was still regularly consuming a bottle of white wine with breakfast, followed by a flow of wine, whisky and brandy throughout the day. Hitler had called him a depraved drunk. Today he would be called an alcoholic, and he would be drummed out of public life long before he rose to be Prime Minister.
Descriptions of mammoth drinking sessions figure large in fifties literature, two of the most memorable being in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and John Braine's Room at the Top. It mirrored their authors: Amis, John Osborne and many others drank what today would seem prodigious amounts, and a typical entry in Evelyn Waugh's diary reads: 'Tuesday, a drunken day; lunched at Beefsteak… Drinking in White's most of the afternoon. Then to Beefsteak where I got drunk… Then to St James's for another bottle of champagne.'[4]
Northerners spent their holidays in Blackpool, and southerners spread themselves along the Essex coast, or, for a special adventure, went to the West Country. My family usually went to the Essex sailing town of Burnham-on-Crouch. My parents could not sail, but they would have liked to, so I mostly watched the estuary, and badgered to be taken yet again to nearby Maldon, where there was a pond with paddle boats, and a swimming lake, and a stall selling candy floss. Foreign travel was out for all but the rich, because of currency restrictions.
Partly for that reason, it was a society that today would seem incredibly inward-looking. People had travelled, if at all, within the Empire, not to Europe or America. Peter Hitchens, the son of a naval commander who had been posted all over the world, puts it this way:
They understood the world in a different way from us. They were far less continental. My father, who spoke Spanish, travelled widely in South America, visited Murmansk and Archangel, lived in Ceylon, Malta and the now-forgotten Chinese treaty port of Wei Hai Wei, rarely set foot upon the European continent, never went to the USA and never visited Germany… In the same way as many Americans never leave the territory of their nation, which is also an empire, prewar Britons lived within the pink bits.[5]
The baby boomers, who think of themselves as international and cosmopolitan, grew up in a world that was just the reverse, and that rather distrusted Johnny Foreigner. They were at once in awe of internationalism and afraid of it. The very word 'cosmopolitan' conjured up images of greasy Mediterranean folk who were not to be trusted. Just a decade earlier, at the start of the war, the word 'cosmopolitan' had been annexed by anti-Semites as a euphemism for 'Jew'. We baby boomers like to think of ourselves as a cosmopolitan generation, and we pretend that when we describe a place as 'horribly white' we mean it as an insult, but we are closer to our parents than we think.
*
Intolerant as they were, the fifties were very tolerant of sadistic and sexually abusive teachers, and this remained true well into the sixties. People knew what was going on in some of the dreadful religious establishments of the period (more of this in Chapter Five) but it never seemed to occur to anyone that anything should be done about it.
They were also tolerant of violence against both women and children, and of bullying and abusive sexual relationships. The cinema image of a dominant male, pulling a struggling woman towards him and stifling her protests with a long, hard kiss until she melted in his arms, was a staple of the time. One of the first West End shows I ever saw was a massively successful musical called Salad Days, which opened in 1954, in which the boyfriend puts his disobedient girlfriend across his knee and spanks her, and we are invited to laugh at her humiliation and discomfiture. She, after a little sulking and pouting, realises that she deserved her punishment, and (naturally) melts into his forgiving arms.
The fifties were tolerant of racism, too. It was a world where I heard my father (who had been one of Britain's top fascists in the thirties), in a roomful of some of the most respectable people in Hertfordshire, talk of seeing a 'big buck nigger' in the street. No one in the room protested. But they would have been horrified if he had said 'fuck'.
His audience would have been members of the small Roman Catholic community in and around Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire. They were decent, pious, lower middle-class fifties folk, kind but easily shocked. They were not people in front of whom you could express doubts about God or His Holy Catholic Church. To them, the Pope and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster could do no wrong, and neither could Father Brendan Fox, our parish priest.
A cheerful Galway man, Father Brendan had been educated by the Irish Jesuits and trained for the priesthood in Normandy, where he had acquired a taste for fine red wine and calvados, tastes that could not be easily satisfied in Rickmansworth in the early fifties. Father Brendan dutifully visited all his flock and drank the endless cups of tea they made for him, but he visited us more often than most because my father gave him wine instead.
I saw his flock mostly at Mass on Sunday, the men in grey suits with baggy trousers, spotlessly clean white shirts, and ties, the women in flowered dresses and hats (a woman was not supposed to enter the church with her hair uncovered). Among them were the Creeks, who lived near us: we were at one end of Croxley Green, half a mile or so out of the small town of Rickmansworth, and they were at the other end. They had two daughters. The older one went to school with me. Her slightly younger sister, Hilary Creek, went to Watford Grammar School, a couple of miles away, and in the early seventies served a long prison sentence as a member of the Angry Brigade, which had carried out a series of bombings. Given the state of the fifties in which she and I grew up, perhaps it is understandable that the baby boomers grew to despise anyone older than they were, and that folk like Hilary Creek, from comfortable but limited middle-class homes, might have been filled with inchoate rage about the things the fifties cheerfully tolerated, and the things they would not tolerate.
*
Fifty years after the start of the fifties, in 2000, the New Statesman ran an editorial headlined 'Lest we forget: 1950s were awful', which listed the miseries of the decade and expressed wonder that baby boomers in the political and intellectual elites seem to want to return there. How is it that the baby boomers rejected everything that was mean and dictatorial and warlike and pious and God-bothering about the fifties; rejected the idea that those in charge must know best; rejected the assumption that age knew best; rejected hierarchical schooling, uniforms, the class system and the supremacy of wealth; and, years later, sought to recreate them for their children?
Partly, of course, it is because we became middle-aged and complacent. But it is also because we made a dreadful mistake. We thought the fifties were repressive because they were the domain of earlier generations. So as we became middle-aged, the one idea we clung to was the nonsense that if something is new, it must necessarily be better, more humane and more progressive than that which is old.
It was all rubbish. The fifties were repressive because they were the fifties. They were repressive because the postwar years were an age of austerity. Until 1951, that austerity had at least been relieved by a political adventure, the adventure of the Attlee settlement; but that adventure was over.
The fifties were repressive because people were clinging to crumbling certainties – that Britain was a great nation and its empire a great civilising force in the world; that the British class system was ordained by nature and both right and indestructible; that God, King and Country deserved respect and loyalty; that the white man had a mission to civilise the world.
Had the baby boomers looked about them in the fifties, they might have seen the generation born just before them – let us call them the war babies, born during and just before the war – battling quietly for a more tolerant world; and they might have realised that they had not invented tolerance and liberalism. The war babies had already done so.
Unlike the baby boomers, most of the war babies had to do national service. Despite – or in some cases, because of – this crash course in conformism, it became a freethinking generation which paved the way for the freedoms of the sixties. It showed a sense of liberation in a buttoned-down decade.
National service was itself radicalising, for it meant that the war babies knew what they were fighting. 'Frightened and humiliated by systematic bullying, we cut strange figures in those days, with our shorn hair and baggy uniforms,' wrote John Turner, who started his national service in 1956 (and spent much of his subsequent career in the army's public relations department).
The day began with reveille at 6 a.m. to the accompaniment of shouted obscenities from the NCOs… We were marched everywhere 'at the double'. Going to meals with our drinking mugs containing our knife, fork and spoon in one hand behind our back was always good for a laugh for our tormentors, as someone always dropped a cutlery item and was roundly abused…[6]
It was the war babies who knew that this was not good enough, and they showed a spark of healthy rebelliousness. In 1953 the famous actor John Gielgud was arrested for importuning young men in a public lavatory. Terrified and suicidal, he wanted to pull out of N. C. Hunter's play A Day by the Sea, which was due to open a few days later. Gielgud was persuaded by his friends to go ahead with the play, but on the first night at London's Haymarket Theatre, when his cue came, he stood in the wings, paralysed with fear, until his co-star Sybil Thorndike came to get him, and led him on stage. And then the audience stood and applauded for several minutes in an impromptu show of solidarity.
Yet just a few days later, Malcolm Sargent came backstage to see Sybil Thorndike, and declined to meet Gielgud, saying: 'I don't think I can; you see, I mix with royalty.'[7]
It was the war baby generation that caused the first rumblings of rebellion against the racism and homophobia that had until then been casual, unquestioned presences in British national life, as the Empire Windrush generation of black people began to settle and look for work. Those who were middle-aged in the fifties never saw the need to rename Agatha Christie's book Ten Little Niggers as Ten Little Indians, nor understood what the fuss was about when the Black and White Minstrels first hit television screens, and black people objected to white men in blackface singing in the way that black men were commonly (and erroneously) supposed to sing. The fuss made my father apoplectic; he loved the Black and White Minstrels just as they were. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but if I shut my eyes I hear him growling, 'Political correctness gone mad.' Of course he cannot have said anything of the kind – that idiotic phrase was not current until decades after his death – but that was the spirit of it.
His generation did not understand. But the war baby generation – they understood. The war baby generation went to the theatre and saw that it would not do. Fifties London theatre offered mostly innocuous light comedies, and elegant, beautifully crafted plays from the likes of Terence Rattigan. In August 1954, when Salad Days opened in the West End, the Evening Standard drama critic Milton Shulman wrote that it would be enjoyed by 'an aunt, an uncle and some fond relatives of the cast'. Nonetheless, it became one of the most successful British musicals ever.
It was during the early fifties that theatre ceased to be the preserve of the middle-aged and the upper classes, a revolution that paved the way for John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. That revolution began with the unlikely figure of actor Brian Rix, an impresario of farces, who worked out that there was a new kind of audience to be won: the coach trade – local clubs or pubs putting together sufficient people to earn a discount at the box office. In 1950 he produced, at the Whitehall Theatre, the first Whitehall farce, naturally about the war. It was called Reluctant Heroes, and showed the downtrodden proletarian private soldier giving the officer class its comeuppance – exactly the opposite message from The Chiltern Hundreds, which had been so popular in 1948. The formula sustained Rix and his theatre for years. The same trade as the one Rix relied on also sustained Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, which opened in 1952. It is still running.
The baby boomers were too young to go to the theatre, or care about a great actor hounded almost to suicide for his sexual preferences, or about a notice on a flat for rent that said, 'No coloureds, no Irish'. But the war baby generation – they cared. It was the war baby generation, not the baby boomer generation, who built the culture of rebellion. Bob Dylan, that sixties icon, always disliked being called a child of the sixties, for it was not accurate: the fifties made him, he said, not the sixties. It was true. He was a war baby.
*
The war babies envied Americans. In the grey gloom of the fifties, they consoled themselves with pale imitations of the delights they saw on the big screen. Life for young Americans seemed so much better than theirs. It was all driving Chevys, wearing smart clothes, having fun and spending money.
But the war babies, like their parents, still thought that the British were superior: uncritical admiration of the USA is a baby boomer phenomenon. Everyone knew, when British heavyweight boxing champion Don Cockell flew to San Francisco to fight world champion Rocky Marciano, the first Briton to challenge for the title for seventeen years, that our boy didn't have a chance, but we all hoped against hope that the arrogant, uppity Yanks might get theirs. It looks as though poor Cockell shared this sad delusion, because on 16 May 1955 he fought on when every rational argument was for getting out before he was permanently damaged. Marciano won by a technical knockout fifty-four seconds into round nine, after Cockell had been knocked down twice, for counts of eight and seven.
We comforted ourselves: what American would have shown Cockell's grit? Peter Wilson wrote in the Daily Mirror that Cockell had fought with 'the kind of courage which refuses to bandage in front of the firing squad. The driving urge which made men die rather than surrender to Everest… The sun had set on the arena, but it had never set on the heavyweight champion of the Empire.' British newspapers complained of the baiting and bullying doled out to Cockell by the American press, which homed in on his shape, calling him 'fatso', 'the waist of time', 'the Battersea butterball' and other opprobrious epithets. They said that Marciano fought dirty. He probably did, but Cockell never complained. Cockell also never recovered; he lost his next two fights to opponents he might have beaten before the dreadful battering he received in San Francisco, and then retired.
Newspapers fed national pride with the discovery of things a Briton could do that no American could do. On 29 May 1953, Edmund Hillary reached the top of Mount Everest, the first man to do so. On 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in less than four minutes. 'English victory beats the world,' roared the Daily Express. Years later Bannister told Peter Hennessy that fifties patriotism was a part of it all, but he did so in a curiously understated fifties way:
It was a lot of fun to be an athlete in those days. We were poor. The only way to travel round the world was to represent your country so we also had a curious kind of loyalty to country and even patriotism. The war was over. Everest had been climbed. And we were part of this scene. And I was going to have to do my national service anyway. So that again linked you to the country.[8]
Patriotism is not a particularly elevated or useful quality – it is too close to nationalism and racism, and too irrational – but it kept the war babies free of the delusion that the USA had all the answers: a delusion that, in the end, overcame and sank the baby boomers.
*
One last thing needs to be said about the fifties. Fifties parents loved their children with an all-consuming uncynical love that has somehow been lost. If they sent them to dreadful, abusive schools – and they did – their motive was love; they thought they were doing the best thing for them. It was often over-protective, possessive, even manipulative love, but it was love. 'I want him [and, just occasionally, her] to have the chances I didn't have,' they would say, and put aside all the money they could afford 'for a rainy day'.
A 1951 survey confirms what everyone who was a child in the fifties knows. A young mother is quoted as saying: 'When I was a kid Dad always had the best of everything. Now it's the children who get the best of it. If there's one pork chop left, the kiddie gets it.' I know, as I write, a very elderly lady whose children were born in the forties and fifties and have been earning their own livings for years, and who is still saving out of her meagre pension so that she can help them if they need it. John Lennon was thinking of the aunt who brought him up in the fifties when he inserted into a song of Paul McCartney's, 'She's Leaving Home', words that millions of children of the fifties understood at once, words that explained to us why the parental love of the fifties had to be rejected, or we would never be free. We, the parents, it said, 'sacrificed most of our lives' for our daughter, we 'gave her everything money could buy.' So why should she want to leave home?
The baby boomers were warmed by their parents' love, but they were also scalded by it. 'We rejected our parents, but our kids aren't rejecting us,' Greg Dyke told me with a kind of wonder, and he is right. The baby boomers, the recipients of this unprecedented, unselfish and stifling love, were the first and last generation to grow up with a grim determination to reject their parents.
Notes
[1] Greg Dyke, Inside Story (HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 37–8.
[2] Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945 (Penguin, 1982), pp. 45–6.
[3] Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up (Pimlico, 1999), p. 6.
[4] David Lister, The Independent, 27 November 1997.
[5] Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (Continuum, 2008), p. 83.
[6] U3A News, June 2009.
[7] Jonathan Croall, Sybil Thorndike (Haus, 2008), p. 394.
[8] Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good (Allen Lane, 2006), p. 275.
