The Baby Boomer Generation
Page 18
When we were children in the 1950s, we saw patched-up ex-soldiers on crutches, forced to scrape a living selling boxes of matches from a tray on street corners. It was a time when the word poor really meant poor – potless, starving, clothed in rags – and there was much evidence of this in all of our towns and cities, particularly in run-down and slum areas. In Britain today, poverty has taken on a whole new meaning. We now live in a materialistic throw-away society in which there are people who consider themselves poor if they can’t afford the latest widescreen television. In the 1950s, a classy pair of shoes was a pair without holes in them. Many a child passed their 11-plus exams but never went to grammar school because their parents couldn’t afford to buy the school uniform. There were no cheap school uniform deals from the likes of Tesco and Asda back then; you had to buy the complete outfit from one of the designated school uniform shops and everything was expensive, as were the leather satchels and bags for your school books, not to mention the gym-kits, football boots, hockey sticks and all the other paraphernalia. The best you could do as far as a bargain was concerned was to buy your shirts, blouses and socks from your local Woolworths on the high street. You also had to be able to afford travelling costs because grammar schools were few and far between. Some people did two or three jobs just so they could earn enough to pay the rent on nothing more than a slum property, often owned by an unscrupulous Rachman-type landlord. We don’t want to go back to those days of hardship but along the way something has gone wrong with the way Britain’s welfare system has evolved.
I loved the whole atmosphere of the 1950s country I grew up in. I could have done without all of those brutal and overzealous canings I got at school, but it was the fear of those beatings that kept us young chancers in check. Times were hard but as youngsters we knew no better and we just got on with life. The nearest thing we had to a mobile phone was two tin cans joined together by a long piece of string and then stretched across the road and pulled tightly. We shouted into those tin cans and we thought that we could hear what each other was saying from several yards apart, but we were just kidding ourselves; we were usually shouting so loudly into the tin cans that everyone in the next street could hear us. It is incredible how far things have advanced since we were children in the 1950s. Kids don’t use old tin cans to communicate with each other anymore; they now use mobile phones, iPads and computers to keep in touch with one another through the Internet. They have hundreds of what they call ‘virtual friends’ whom they meet over the Internet using social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and MySpace. Many have never met each other face to face and they don’t actually know all of their virtual friends personally. They just consider themselves to be like-minded with the same kind of interests and they use the social networking websites to link up with each other to chat and exchange information. Having never met doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to disclosing personal information and photographs. It’s a very strange cyber-world that many of us baby boomers find hard to understand. It’s a sort of modern-day version of pen pals, except you don’t have to pay for postage and wait for a reply, and with this modern version you can have hundreds of pen pals all sharing the same information at the same time. If you want to be really sharing you can open a Twitter account and you can leave short messages for the whole world to see. You can tweet about everything and nothing, and you can tell everyone what you are doing and where you are going for every minute of the day. All of this is posted on the Internet for all to see, but who really cares? Well, it seems that the 900 million worldwide registered users of Facebook care, and so do the 500 million worldwide Twitter users. About 46% of Facebook users are aged 13–25, which is not surprising, but 5% of Facebook users are in the 55–65 age group and that number is growing. I would imagine that most of the older users of Facebook only use it to communicate with known friends and family. Any of us who do use it to communicate with virtual friends probably need to get out more. In this modern age, friends and family are often spread far and wide apart and the Internet makes it easy to communicate instantly with them to exchange information and pictures, and even talk to them and do one-to-one video calling for free.
No child will ever again experience the joys of a 1950s childhood with all of the freedom and innocence we once knew. In the 1960s, we had the best teenage years you could ever wish for and we will go on to become the most youthful older generation there has ever been. We have certainly come a very long way since the days of shouting into tin cans and playing hopscotch on the pavements. There has been a whole lifetime of change and we have adapted to it well and embraced much of it, but we post-war baby boomers will never forget how it all started for us: the tin baths, outside lavatories and doorsteps of bread and dripping. Our 1960s slogan, ‘Turn on, Tune in and Drop out,’ has now for us become, ‘Turn on, Tune in and Drop off.’ Who would ever have thought our journey through life would be so eventful? We have seen and done it all and along the way we bought most of the T-shirts. We are lucky to have so many memories to reflect upon.
Copyright
Originally published in hardback as ‘From Ration Book to ebook: The Life and Times of the Post-War Baby Boomers’, 2012
The History Press
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This ebook edition published in 2015
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© Paul Feeney, 2012, 2015
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