Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  The subliminal messages from Janet and John and the Famous Five were reinforced by such classic children’s literature as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Here too are children whose parents are never in evidence. They are packed off first to a remote country house and then to a boarding school; we never see or hear from their mothers and fathers. They too roam the world, in this case an alien one, never coming to any harm. They fight wolves, face wicked enchantresses, engage usurping kings in hand-to-hand combat and yet always come out on top. Once again, the message is clear: older children may be safely left in charge of young siblings and whatever the perils they may face, it will all end well.

  Of course, another view of the case might simply be that these books are wish-fulfilment and that by creating a world free of adult interference, the authors are really appealing to their readers’ deepest desires. Imagine, they are saying, a world where you are never sent to bed at a particular time and may explore wherever you please without anything bad happening to you. Could this also be the reason that boarding schools are such a popular setting for children’s books; that it frees the protagonists from the interference of parents? This might be persuasive if it were not for the fact that throughout the baby boomers’ childhood years, they were as a matter of course allowed to leave the house unescorted from an astonishingly early age, as young as three or four, and very often were left all day in the care of children who might themselves be only 11 or 12. This part of the plots of these books was not make-believe, but reflected what was widely seen as acceptable neglect by parents. From this perspective, the William stories of Richmal Crompton are very interesting.

  The William books were tremendously popular with baby boomers, the last of them being published in 1970, a year or two after Richmal Crompton’s death. The later books deal with such things as television, pop stars and space exploration. Despite coming from a thoroughly respectable and stable home background, William and his gang present as what we would today describe as ‘feral’ children. Chronic underachievers academically, they roam the streets and countryside aimlessly, causing all sorts of trouble for ordinary people. They trespass, smash windows, break into empty houses and fight rival gangs with air rifles, bows and arrows and catapults. William always carried a knife with him. There was nothing in the slightest outlandish or improbable about the way of life led by William and his friends; it was because it was so familiar to readers that the books became so wildly popular. William was certainly a lot more unruly and destructive than the characters of whom Enid Blyton wrote, but there is a common thread running through both the William books and those featuring the Famous Five, which was that children could cope perfectly well if left to their own devices and no matter what befell them, they would always arrive home safely by teatime. Arriving home in time for tea, after many vicissitudes, is a regular event in the William stories. In neither Richmal Crompton’s works, nor those of Enid Blyton, do any of the children suffer anything worse than a grazed knee or, at worst, a black eye. They certainly do not lose fingers or eyes from playing with fireworks or being shot at with airguns, both, as we have seen, genuine risks for children in the real world at that time.

  It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the books that they read as children have somehow become mixed up in the minds of the now grownup baby boomers with their actual childhood experiences, and that much of the golden age of which they dream has really been taken from the pages of the stories with which they grew up. This might account, at least in part, for the constant refrain of ‘back in time for tea’. Whether it is William and his friends who are charging round the neighbourhood damaging gardens and breaking windows or the characters from the Narnia books, fighting witches and wolves, the recurring theme is that no harm will come to children when they are having adventures on their own with no adults to protect them. Some of this attitude must subconsciously have rubbed off on the children reading these stories. How else are we able to explain the repeated and untruthful assurances of those who grew up at that time that everything was safer in those days and that no children ever came to any serious harm?

  The world portrayed in children’s fiction of the 1950s bears a startling and uncanny similarity to that which we see in modern newspaper articles about that period. As we have seen, there is a stark dissonance between the generally accepted image of childhood at that time and the reality for most children. The image of happy, healthy childhood to which so many subscribe is not drawn from reality, but is a compendium of many misleading or false memories from five or six decades ago. We see 12-year-old Julian in the Famous Five books, cheerfully taking care of his younger sister Ann, while scarcely catching a glimpse of their parents, who are content to leave the welfare of their two younger children to a 12-year-old. In books by Enid Blyton, of course, this sets the stage for all manner of fantastic and exciting adventures. In real life children like Julian were always being used in this way as convenient babysitters and childminders, but with less satisfactory results than those seen in story books. We remember the police inspector in Manchester in 1961, who told reporters that some of those being allowed to trespass on railway lines were toddlers. This was the reality of letting older children care for young brothers and sisters.

  If we want to study works of fiction which shed the clearest light on the behaviour of children in the 1950s when there were no adults around to monitor or moderate their conduct, then two books stand out. Both were published in the early 1950s, just three years apart. The first of these is perhaps Enid Blyton’s least-known book, The Six Bad Boys. In it, Blyton abandons her habitual practice of showing how children can traipse about without adults, with things never going too badly wrong, and shows how children playing out sometimes end up running wild and getting into serious trouble with the police. The Six Bad Boys focuses on the lives of three middle-class families, two of which have no fathers to control their children. They are in fact what was once known as ‘broken homes’. Bob’s father is dead and Tom’s leaves home after a series of rows with his mother. The two boys team up together and eventually join a street gang who steal money from a newsagent, among other things. The strength of the book lies in its depiction of the perils of ‘playing out’ and shows vividly how the aimless hanging round the streets could result in dangerous or criminal activity. Here are Tom and Bob ‘playing out’ when it begins to rain and they do not want to go home:

  ‘What shall we do?’ said Bob. ‘We can’t mess about in the rain. I was rather thinking going down to the canal and getting on board a barge that’s lying there. Nobody’s on it. We could have explored a bit.’

  ‘Well we can’t now that it’s pouring with rain,’ said Tom. ‘But I don’t particularly want to go back home, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Bob, decidedly

  ‘Got any money?’ said Tom. ‘We could go to the cinema. There’s a good picture on.’

  ‘I’ve only a penny or two,’ said Bob. ‘It would be nice to go to the cinema. It’s warm in there, and you can forget everything except the picture.

  In the end, the boys get into a cinema free, through the fire exit, and get into trouble. This begins a downwards spiral, which leads them to the juvenile court. The scenes showing the boys trying to amuse themselves when they have no money are exquisitely drawn and very unlike Enid Blyton’s other work, in which playing out is shown to be one long lark.

  Although not written for children, Lord of the Flies describes perfectly just how things become when there are no grown-ups about to step in and take charge. Children, especially boys, can be unbelievably callous and cruel. It is only a step or two from pulling the wings off flies to mistreating smaller children. The savagery that is to be found in Lord of the Flies does not seem at all over the top to anybody who played on bomb sites about the time that the novel was written. In the book a party of English schoolboys of 11 and 12 are stranded on a desert island. Just as happened regularly in the early 1950s, when the book was being written, with no
adults to check their behaviour or step in when things get out of hand, the descent into barbarism is swift, as survival of the fittest and most ruthless becomes the order of the day. Similar scenes were played out in real life every day at the time that William Golding was writing this novel. It was only the fact that the children had to be back in time for tea which stopped the wanton violence, cruelty and bullying from reaching the logical and inevitable conclusion so graphically described in Lord of the Flies. The assaults on young and vulnerable children by those older and stronger, at which we have looked, show that the conduct of the schoolboys in this book is anything but improbable, once adults are removed from the picture.

  Chapter 9

  Limited Choices:

  How Much Freedom Did the Baby Boomers Actually Have as Children?

  It is frequently and firmly asserted that children in twenty-first-century Britain have less freedom than those of previous generations. Expressions such as ‘helicopter parenting’ have been coined to describe mothers and fathers who cannot just leave children to their own devices, but instead strive ceaselessly to ensure that every minute of their offspring’s lives are filled with enriching and educative activities. Like helicopters, such parents hover above their children, supervising their leisure time, arranging music lessons and even selecting friends for them. It is for most of us axiomatic that such suffocatingly close involvement in a child’s life must stifle their independence. It is certainly a very different style of parenting from the laissez faire ways which so many baby boomers remember.

  On every side, regret is expressed that children cannot be given the freedom that their parents and grandparents evidently enjoyed so much. Adults talk in fulsome terms about their own carefree childhoods, while at the same time explaining regretfully that such a lifestyle is no longer possible. Let us consider, before going any further, just what we mean in this context by the word ‘freedom’. Freedom, if it means anything at all, must surely entail the ability to make choices; to decide upon one course of action over another. Perhaps thinking in this way will show what choices children in the 1950s and 1960s faced in their lives; how much freedom they actually enjoyed.

  Imagine for a moment that you are a 12-year-old child in a house with no machinery or gadgets at all run by electricity, other than the lights and perhaps a mains-operated Bakelite radio. For amusement, you have a few books which you have read time and again, some dolls, marbles, a lump of plasticene and possibly one or two board games like snakes and ladders or ludo. Your mother and father are frequently too busy to give you any attention and there is no telephone in the house, no way at all of connecting with anybody in the world other than those present in the house at that moment. There is no money available to go to the cinema or visit a café. You have literally nothing to do. Really, there is only one choice to be made: staying indoors, bored to tears, or leaving the house and hoping to bump into some school friends. Once you have met friends, none of whom are likely to have any money, the only things to do will be play in the park or perhaps go and stand on a windy platform at a railway station and write down the details of passing trains in an old exercise book. Put in those terms, the baby boomer child was distinctly short of choices. The pastimes of that period about which everybody now speaks with such pleasure, playing Cowboys and Indians or trainspotting, were not a sign of increased freedom at all, but rather the precise opposite; the symptom of an almost complete lack of choice on the part of the children growing up at that time.

  Let’s pretend that we can now offer the bored child, trapped in the house with nothing to do, some real freedom, in the form of a few more choices. Suppose we told him or her that there was the chance of watching the latest Disney film, in colour, in the comfort of a warm bedroom? What if we suggested the possibility that instead of being obliged to trek round to people’s houses in order to speak to them, one could instead chat endlessly on a telephone which also featured live colour television pictures of the person to whom one was speaking? Or suppose that we gave such a child the opportunity to visit a warm, bright, indoor shopping mall, and being given enough money to eat and drink in a café where friends also hung out? It cannot be doubted for a moment that our hypothetical 1950s child would leap at such new choices, which would be vastly more attractive than the meagre opportunities for entertainment and stimulation that were usually available. Who wouldn’t choose to do some of the things that are there for today’s children, rather than hang aimlessly about in a park or by a railway line? No wonder the children of that time used to get into such mischief; this is what is meant when adults today talk of ‘making their own entertainment’.

  From this perspective, modern children have infinitely more choices and therefore freedom, than their grandparents had at a similar age. Never in the history of British childhood has a generation been faced with such a dizzying array of choice in leisure-time activities. It is not that modern children are forbidden from joining church youth clubs or watching trains at the local station, it is more that there are so many more interesting things to occupy their time. It may well be true that they tend to be driven to and from school, whereas at one time they would have walked alone, but so what? Why on earth would anybody in his or her senses choose to walk, when a lift is being offered in a car? There is an increasing tendency for even secondary school pupils of 14 or 15 to be driven to school in the mornings by their mothers and collected in the afternoon. This is hardly a loss of freedom, however; the children concerned are generally only too happy to be delivered and picked up like this.

  Let us offer a couple more choices to our hypothetical baby boomer child. It is a cold winter’s morning and a 10-year-old is about to leave for school. He or she faces a walk of a mile or more, bare-legged in the wind and rain, to get to school. Would this child decline the opportunity to be driven to school in a warm car, in favour of trudging through the bleak streets in the company of other similarly miserable children? It is unlikely. Anybody who can actually remember those days must surely realize that if children at that time had had the freedom that modern children have, that is to say had a choice in the matter, very few would have wished to continue walking to school in all weathers.

  Let’s offer one final choice to our baby boomer child. Photography was a very expensive hobby in the 1950s: even taking black-and-white pictures with a box camera bought at a jumble sale cost more than many families could afford. Few parents had enough money to spare to give cameras to their children and pay for them to have films developed regularly. As for the recording of sound or the taking of moving pictures, this would have been unheard of. What if we told a child from the 1950s that instead of playing Cowboys and Indians in a cold park, he or she could now take as many colour photographs as wished and even make films with a soundtrack? How many would have chosen to carry on hanging out in the park?

  The lifestyle of British baby boomers as children was dictated by their economic circumstances and the technological developments of the era. Rather than being a time of unlimited choice and exhilarating freedom, those children’s horizons were more cramped and restricted than can readily be imagined today. It was the very antithesis of freedom, if by freedom we do mean the ability to make choices.

  This is one of the reasons that today’s children and young people do not follow the way of life which their grandparents apparently found so enjoyable. They choose not to do so. Of course, parental anxieties are at work too today, in that many mothers and fathers are afraid that their children will come to harm if left alone in public. This is curious. A little investigation would soon reveal to anybody even remotely interested in the subject that children are at no more risk today from sudden death or abduction by sexual predators than they would have been in 1950, 1960 or 1970. If their parents are really convinced that their own childhoods were so wonderful, why on earth don’t they give their own children this priceless gift of early freedom? The answer is of course very simple.

  When harassed and busy mothers in the 1960s
sent nine-year-olds like Robert Elms off to travel round central London alone for the day, they knew perfectly well that this was not a sensible or wise course of action. They too, just like their children, had very little choice in the matter. There was so much housework to do and much of it would be more easily accomplished without a little boy hanging round the house and complaining of being bored. In the 1950s, it would be a very rare housewife and mother who would say to herself, ‘Blow it! I’m going to forget the housework, let everything go to the Devil, and just play with my son.’ Of course, mothers did do that on occasion, but they could not just let everything slide too often. Husbands in those days were apt to get a little tetchy if their shirts weren’t ironed or tea on the table when they got in from work. The mothers, like their children, had fewer choices and far less freedom in those days than is now the case.

  Our common sense tells us now that we would not give a nine-year-old child a travelcard and send him off to London for the day. It would not be safe and he would be exposed to all sorts of hazards and risks, ranging from crossing the road carelessly to being bullied or mistreated by older children or adults. There is also a small, but definite, chance that a child out and about by himself in this way will be abducted or even murdered. This is not because the world is a more wicked and dangerous place now than it was a few years ago: we have looked at the misfortunes which befell many children during the years that the baby boomers were growing up. It is more that we now have a greater number of choices as parents. Just as our children have more freedom, in the sense of more choices, so do we. We can let our children sit and play on laptops or tablets, we most of us have cars, so that we can choose to drive them to school instead of letting them walk, there is money available for them to go to holiday clubs or play schemes; our choices as parents are far more varied than they were fifty years ago.