Those good old, bad old days.....

‘The past is another country;

They do things differently there...’

I suppose it was inevitable that a consequence of the riotous assemblies in England that commentators should be wishing for the ‘good old days’ when we knew our place and law and order were administered by large bobbies unaided. (We had no juvenile crime. The village bobby, a huge Irishman with a bright red face, had two crime prevention tools. One was a thick leather belt around his tunic and the other was his cape which he used to flick you off your bike if you try to get away. Every Saturday night there were fights at the village dance. That was why the lads went there. PC Fish would wait outside. When it was all over he would flatten whoever was left standing and depart without even taking out his note-book).

Well, my memory goes back to the time before Doris Day became a virgin, and I can tell you about the good old days

They were bloody awful!

We lived in a repressed and repressive society. In 1952 no less than 167,000 books were banned. Films were censored. The theatre was censored. In case anything even slightly risqué escape the attentions of the busybodies, we had local authority Watch Committees with power to ban films outright. When ‘Last Tango in Paris’ came out (as late as 1972), the Chairman of the Southend Watch Committee got a big headline in the Times when he announced that ‘Oral sex is not something we will swallow in Southend!’

Donald Gill’s wonderful sea-side postcards were regularly banned, like this one; Man; ‘Do you like Kipling?’ Girl: ‘I don’t know; I’ve never kippled!’

Anything ‘tending to deprave or corrupt’ could be banned’, although nobody thought to ask that if this were so why were the censors not corrupted?

Homosexual acts were criminal, and every day some unfortunate would be jailed for ‘importuning in a public place’ – usually ‘cottaging’ in the gents’ toilet - or ‘committing an act of gross indecency’. Contraception was hard to come by, and a very high proportion of marriages were of the shot-gun variety with often miserable results, especially as divorce was difficult and largely the privilege of the better-off.

We had capital punishment, including two complete miscarriages of justice (how many more never came to light?) but the execution of Ruth Ellis probably put the kibosh on hanging eventually. We had the Great Train Robbery, Profumo. I missed the swinging sixties because I went to Africa in 1959, but I had the stupid seventies with Red Robbo , Scargill, Heath, fuel rationing, the three day week, wage freezes, and generally a whole can of very smelly worms.

I grew up during WW2. I have to say that despite food rationing we ate like fighting cocks – and behaved like them. We were fortunate to live in the country. No food shortages there, but we always seemed to be cold and dirty. We lived in an agricultural cottage with one cold water tap, a bucket-and chuck-it lav in the garden. Heating and cooking was by a Victorian cast-iron range and laundry was a coal-fired copper. We bathed once a week in a tin bath in front of the kitchen fire and changed our clothes twice a week. But, as the Python sketch might say, ‘We were lucky!’. Many people had no mains water and had to carry two buckets of water on a yoke from a village pump maybe a quarter of a mile away. Some had no electricity.

The notion that we were ‘poor’ would have been laughable, and yet the measure of poverty today seems to be the absence of a large new flat-screen colour telly (one that has been substantially rectified of late).

We were also as tough as teak and devoid of fine feelings. One day, we were kicking a ball around in the main street (there being only 5 cars for a population of 1200 souls) when we saw two Wellington bombers. Suddenly there was an enormous flash, a huge bang and an aluminium shower as they collided. Two parachutes came out but were both on fire. One lot of wreckage dropped on the railway station a mile away and we were off to see it at the gallop. We were after souvenirs, especially live ammunition of which we already had a goodly stock. It was rumoured that one of the girls who lived nearby got a flying boot but dropped it because it contained a foot.

The fire brigade saw us off very quickly.

(When I learnt to fly years later I always kept a particularly sharp look-out).

We had no feeling that we had just witnessed the deaths of probably a dozen young men. But I think the moral of this for these times is that children are animal until they receive discipline,  parents’ upbringing, and some education, especially the difference between right and wrong (we had to learn the Ten Commandments by rote at quite an early age, although I doubt that we ever began to understand how one could covet thy neighbour’s ass).

There was church on Sunday followed by a large ‘dinner’ at 2 p.m. when the Old Man came back from ‘The Sportsman’, the News of the World that only he was allowed to read, then the endlessly boring Sunday afternoons when all sport and entertainment was banned (and no shops open, of course) until ‘The Billy Cotton Band-show’ and ‘Albert Sadler & the Palm  Court Orchestra’.

As if WW2 was not enough, we had 6 years of Labour government to follow. They quickly introduced bread rationing that we did not have at any time during the War. Sweets and chocolate came off the ration in time for the Coronation and Mr Attlee’s departure.

Then to grammar school. Was it as good as is claimed today? In parts. Mine had been founded 70 years before the discovery of America so it was pretty big on tradition including a weekly prayer for our founders, most of whom dropped off their twigs in the 15^th century.

The maths and physics master had joined the school immediately after army service in WW1. He remained for over 50 years, retiring in the 1970’s. Your actual Mr Chips. The other masters had mostly just returned from the war. The women teachers were all spinsters from the lost generation after WW1, which had decimated their potential husbands. Some could teach; some couldn’t.

The quality of education was variable but the fact remained that it was the only way for a boy from a state school to get a higher education or a place at Sandhurst or Cranwell, two favourite career choices when you became an instant gentleman.

The fifties were certainly the worst decade of my part of the 20^th century. When I was commissioned into the army my working-class roots were regarded with a certain lofty disdain. Snobbery and class-consciousness were the dying gasp of the old order. I was never very good at deference, so there were a few clashes.

And we had Korea, Malaya, Cyprus, Suez, Kenya and the Cold War to stop us getting too complacent. And 2 years compulsory military service, of course, which did rather help to concentrate the mind on world events.

Popular music was dire – Max Bygraves, the Beverley Sisters, ’How much is that doggy in the window?’, ‘I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue tooth brush’. Restaurants were ditto. Pubs were grungy and stank of tobacco, feet, halitosis, stale beer, BO and armpits (not much change there then, apart from the smoke). There were 2 TV channels and a BBC monopoly on sound broadcasting.

The ‘good old days’?

Balderdash and piffle!