Getting Undressed Under the Bedclothes!

As I get older I find myself often looking back with rose coloured glasses and momentarily, at least, longing for “the good old days”. I suppose most of us do this on occasions and maybe it’s a kind of release valve as you get older. The future seems daunting as we senior citizens battle with i-pads,  the attitudes of the young, text messaging and what seems the ever rapidly increasing speed of life, so in that context the past seems a safe haven. It was better then, all was  well with the world!

I mention this because two quite separate and unconnected things have occurred in the past few days.

Firstly, as I mentioned in  a previous blog, one of the ways that I fill my time nowadays is by sending out e-mails on behalf of the U3A (University of the Third Age.) It involves circulating about 500 local members with details of courses, group meetings and the like. Course leaders and others send items to me and I then collate them, put them in an e-mail and circulate to all the membership. It is not an onerous job and one which I thoroughly enjoy. But one aspect of it always makes me think. So many of the e-mails that I receive are so badly written, filled with errors (e.g. dates of events incorrect), filled with grammatical and spelling errors or quite simply rude and inconsiderate – often never a please or thank you. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of the membership are articulate, “well educated”, retired people – I find this strange and a little upsetting. It’s not what I expect!  I often comment  that these people “should know better” and  usually add “had the mails been from teenagers I would have said ‘Oh that’s teenagers for you – can’t spell, no manners’..........!”. I received one such e-mail from a member this week which was abrasive and ill thought out. In the end, having e-mailed him back twice about the content of his mail, I suggested, in frustration, that he might learn how to ask with a please or a thank you. I didn’t receive any response!

Could have been my classroom -
except we were all boys!

I, like I suspect many of the articulate retired people who send me  e-mails,  often comment that the world is deteriorating, manners, spelling, behaviour etc. is on the way down .........and that it was much better “when I were a lad”. But then I wonder if it was and  are the oldies, like myself, quite as virtuous as we think?   Is the world, today, such a terrible place, are the young  quite the dreadful people they are often painted and was it so much better in years past?

The second thing that occurred was this morning. As I put my shoes on to go for our early morning walk I heard Pat singing at the top of her voice as she had a shower – a hymn, the radio had the Sunday morning church service on.

For all the saints, who from their labours rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

When she came down stairs I jokingly commented to her, as she put on her shoes, about the warbling sounds from the bathroom. “Nothing like a good hymn to start the day” she grinned “it’s such a shame that kids don’t learnt these at school nowadays – they’re missing out aren’t they” I agree with Pat – but her comment again set me thinking – all these wonderful things that we did in the “olden days” – were they really so good?

My mother used to be very fond of telling me that life was so much better in days gone by. “You could go out and leave your front door open and no-one would steal anything” was one of her favourite “homilies”. She was talking about the time when she was growing up – in the 20s and 30s. And maybe she had a point. She would (when I was a teenager and still up until the day she died) frequently complain about “the youth of today” – no manners, uneducated, lazy, long haired layabouts......” and so the list went on. Again, maybe she had a point – perhaps in the past there was indeed a golden age when everyone was honest, polite and well spoken and the young were dutiful towards their elders and betters. Perhaps the world was indeed a better place and   bathed in some sort of golden glow where everyone lived in perfect harmony.

I knew parts of Preston like this.

Except......and many might greatly disagree with me here.....I’m not sure the evidence supports this. I once suggested to my mother, in a brief moment of reckless bravery (I was about 45 at the time!), that maybe the reason why you could leave open your front door and no-one would steal anything was that for the vast majority of ordinary people there wasn’t much worth stealing in the house! Certainly in the street where I lived houses were furnished with second hand furniture and there were few, if any, objects of desire. Certainly little to attract any would be criminal. I never had any great urge to begin a life of crime by stealing Mrs Woodacre’s parrot who sat in his cage in her doorway on hot summer days or Tony Clarkson’s hand me down football or Mrs Graveson’s sheet music for “Come Into the Garden Maud” . My mother went ballistic when I said this – as was her fashion – and I still, thirty years later, occasionally massage the mental and physical scars left by the ensuing “discussion”!!!!!!

Me at 11 - bit of a
ragamuffin in my school
uniform!

Thinking back  I can vividly remember how my family struggled to make ends meet each week (it lead to frequent violent rows – even though we were “well off” compared with many) and I think of the long hours both my mother and dad worked to earn the meagre wages they did. Every penny was counted, no credit cards (some might say a blessing!), little opportunity for ordinary people to make savings by buying in bulk and putting stuff in the freezer, no cars to drive to a supermarket where prices might be less, no money for luxuries like holidays, card board in my shoes when I wore them out and mother couldn’t afford a new pair for a few weeks...........and so the list goes on. When I left school I began work in a drawing office as a trainee design draughtsman – a “plum job”, my family were delighted. I would be paid for holidays and I will always remember my auntie, quite overcome at my good fortune, saying to me “Oh Tony, if you save up you’ll be able to get a mortgage now you get paid for the holidays”! The excitement and the gilt, however, were rather tarnished for me. I needed a suit for work – I would no longer be able to wear my school blazer and I had few other smart clothes “Don’t worry” my auntie and mother said “we’ll go and see Charles”. We did........ ! Charles was an elderly man, smartly dressed and with military moustache and he had a gent’s used clothes shop in a Preston back street, mostly, as I remember it, filled with clothes that he bought from widows after their husbands had died. I came out with an old fashioned gentleman’s grey suit smelling of moth balls! Not what I had hoped for as the swinging sixties dawned. But, having said that, I was not exceptional – times were still hard for the majority – just don’t tell me it was better then. I often hoped that  some would be criminal would break into our house when mother went to the shops and left the front door wide open and steal the suit – but no such luck! It certainly did not have the appeal of an i-pad or stereo or mobile or Gucci outfit or Rolex – but it was, I suppose, the best we could do!

In my back yard - outdoor lavatory on the right!

In another arena, I often, in my years in the classroom, pondered on the sort of work the children I was teaching were doing and the fact that looking back at my old school books from when I was eleven or twelve the kids I was teaching and others in other schools were far in front of where I was – and in a greater range of subjects at - the same stage. My own school diet consisted of “reading, writing and ‘rithmetic” – it was all we did, adding up, chanting tables, writing spelling lists etc – it was no surprise that I was good at these things – it was my full school diet. But children in later years enjoy (if that is the right word) and are expected to develop skills and understandings over a much wider area. And despite the moans we might have, they generally do it very well and, I believe,certainly more successfully than I could ever do. I look back at my school years and remember the obvious poverty that many of my classmates suffered; I remember the cruel way in which Victor Bennett was treated by successive teachers because he didn’t know his tables or never had the answer. Today, Victor would be “special needs” and certainly have some kind of classroom support to enable him to make progress. I remember the violence with which Mr Roberts, the head teacher – known by us as “Cock Roberts” –  punished perceived offenders so that I, and many others, were terrified of stepping out of line in our class of 53 children. I remember the boys who languished at the bottom of the class and  suffered the venom of the teachers when they couldn’t remember the words of hymns like “For all the saints......” Yes, I find it very difficult to accept my mother’s premise that things were better then.

And as far the suggestion that everyone got on well together – both in the family and wider society, the evidence doesn’t seem to back that up. Both my mother and father came from large families – not unusual at the time – but both families had fragmented with internal strife where sisters didn’t speak to brothers, sons cut themselves off from fathers and the like. When my mother and father died I made efforts to contact long lost relatives and met people I never knew existed at the funerals. As I sat in a crematorium on the outskirts of Cambridge attending the funeral of my dad’s remaining a sister a few years ago. I was quite overcome that sitting by me where long lost and unknown relatives whom I had never known - so much for family life in that "golden age". Still on this this theme and returning to my earlier comments about Mrs Graveson’s sheet music for “Come into the Garden Maud”, Mrs Graveson was a  raven haired, bosomy woman who sang in local pubs and clubs. I once saw and heard her sing at a local church event – and yes, amongst other things, she did sing “Come into the Garden Maud” . She sang with a male “partner” and caused scandal in the street when she ran off with him – her “fancy man” my mother called him - not that I could see anything fancy about him!  She left her husband and son,  my friend, ten year old, Tommy.  No matter how hard I try I cannot believe that family life and commitment was as good as mother painted it in years gone by.  My experience does not support it. If it was any better it was not because of the intrinsic commitment or outlook of those concerned but simply that it was not so easy to break up.

Me and granddad just before he died -
he never left the tiny house where he lived
-except to go to France to fight in 1914

 And, of course, a look at the newspapers and newsreels of the time, a read through the history books  and they will tell you that world wars, murders and the like were far more frequent than they are today. Look at old photographs of the early years of the twentieth century and indeed up until the mid fifties and you will see scruffy kids, in hand me down clothes, dismal and bleak streets, houses (like mine) with no hot water or bath and an outside toilet where each week my mother hung a pile of torn up newspaper threaded on a string for toilet paper – we couldn’t afford the real stuff! Pat often tells of her childhood – of having to keep silent during the day because they lived in an upstairs flat and her parents were terrified that would be thrown out if she and her sister made too much noise and annoyed the downstairs owners. And as winter comes and we turn on the central heating she will often remark about how cold it used to be in houses – and how, as a girl, she would get undressed under the bed clothes to keep warm in the icy, unheated bedroom!

Whilst writing this I am reminded of George Orwell’s society changing book “The Road to Wigan Pier” which was published in 1937. The book was one of the formative documents that brought change to the British social scene in the immediate post war years. Orwell described the life, work, diet, expectations, living conditions of ordinary people in the north of England:

A powerful indictment of
"the good old days"

As you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dust-bins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous w.c.s. The interiors of these houses are always very much the same, though the number of rooms varies between two or five. All have an almost exactly similar living-room, ten or fifteen feet square, with an open kitchen range; in the larger ones there is a scullery as well, in the smaller ones the sink and copper are in the living-room. At the back there is the yard, or part of a yard shared by a number of houses, just big enough for the dustbin and the w.c.s. Not a single one has hot water laid on. You might walk, I suppose, through literally hundreds of miles of streets inhabited by miners, every one of whom, when he is in work, gets black from head to foot every day, without ever passing a house in which one could have a bath. It would have been very simple to install a hot-water system working from the kitchen range,

but the builder saved perhaps ten pounds on each house by not doing so, and at the time  no one imagined that miners wanted baths.

Orwell goes on to describe in detail many of the houses he visited:

House in Mapplewell. Two up, one down. Living-room 14 ft by 13 ft. Sink in living-room. Plaster cracking and coming off walls. No shelves in oven. Gas leaking slightly. The upstairs rooms each 10 ft by 8 ft. Four beds (for six persons, all adult), but ’one bed does nowt’(for lack of bedclothes). Room nearest stairs has no door and stairs have no banister, so that when you step out of bed your foot hangs in vacancy and you may fall ten feet on to stones. Dry rot so bad that one can see through the floor into the room below. Bugs, but ’I keeps ’em down with sheep dip’. Earth road past these cottages is like a muck- heap and said to be almost impassable in winter. Stone lavatories at ends of gardens in semi-ruinous condition. Tenants have been twenty-two years in this house. Are in arrears with rent, and have been paying an extra 1s. a week to pay this off. Landlord now refuses this and has served orders to quit. Rent 5s., including rates.

Preston in 1949

Although we had moved on a little by the time I was born in 1945 I can still recognise in the street where I lived as a child what Orwell had seen in abundance only a few years before.

We often worry, quite rightly today, about things like global warming, traffic congestion and the like but I look back and remember the smoke filled atmosphere, the dense smogs and fogs of my childhood as factory and house chimneys belched forth their poisonous gases into our lungs. Only last week Pat was recalling to a friend the night of the Lewisham train disaster in December 1957 when her father was involved as a passenger. Trains had crashed in the dense London fog at rush hour and Pat’s family waited for hours, increasingly anxious not knowing if dad was injured. Eventually he walked in late at night having had to walk home – no mobile phones and in those days ordinary folk didn’t have a phone where he could ring to assure them of his safety.

A foggy night in Lewisham - and a
train crash which Pat still remembers

No, times are better! I often complain about my GP but in reality I’m so lucky. Each month when I go to the chemist to get my prescription for the many tablets that I take each day to keep my heart pumping I get a twinge of guilt – I get this all for free.  All I have to do is turn up the chemist once a month and collect it. In years gone by I would have almost certainly been long dead and would not have had the drugs available to help me – and certainly not for “free”. My grandfather, who died in his early sixties of heart failure, would never have believed such things are possible –  this, combined with my downstairs shower, two cars on the drive, the chance to travel up and down the country at will, to go on foreign holidays – and so the list goes open would have utterly amazed him. My wonderful mother in law, Winnie Green, lived to her mid nineties and increasingly, as she aged, she repeated how lucky she had been and how lucky she was to have grown up in a world that was getting better and better. She was right.

Of course, many of the things I have mentioned are very much “material things” and there is infinitely more to life. There are still huge problems in the world – maybe insurmountable issues. There are things that are totally unacceptable about the way we all behave and live our lives. Many in our society do not enjoy the privileges and opportunities that most of us enjoy but compared with the past we live in paradise.  No, I’m not convinced that there was a “golden age” when all was right with the world. Maybe people had a different outlook on life, maybe, because of the relative poverty and make up of society, people reacted differently and had different expectations, maybe life was simply just simpler. Maybe because of the poverty and hard times people had to “pull together”  but  I do not believe that ordinary folk were intrinsically any better or  more honest or more caring or better educated than today – in fact, if I’m honest, I think the opposite is true.

I’m not  defending the behaviour that we take as part of modern life. I’m not suggesting that all is well with the world. Read any newspaper any day of the week and one cannot escape all too often being horrified – politicians’ motives, celebrity behaviour, gang violence, drugs, an apparent breakdown in family life, a feeling that people might have lost their moral compass......the list is endless and unacceptable. I have absolutely no doubt that given the opportunities that most children have today we should expect them to do well in their school studies – compared with children of yesteryear they are enormously privileged. The widening gap between the haves and have nots is inexcusable but in the final analysis, with all these and other things,  I am certain that the world is on the whole a better place, by whatever measure you use, than it was half a century or more ago.

My final thought (you’ll be pleased!) on this has just occurred as I sit here at my PC. On the shelf behind me is my copy of the autobiography of the football player Tom Finney. For those not into football folklore Finney was arguably the greatest player to play for England. He played his whole career for Preston North End – my team. As a child I watched him many times and on numerous occasions stood outside the ground to ask for his autograph. It was and is often said about Finney that as well as being the greatest of footballers he had huge commitment – he only ever played for one club. Today big clubs would be offering many millions to buy him, he could have his pick of which great club he played  for and he would without doubt be a millionaire many times over. Players like David Beckham would  pale into insignificance besides the likes of Finney. In his autobiography Finney comments that the “one club man” praise is misplaced. He stayed at Preston, he says, because there simply were few other options available. There was not the money in the game that there is today. To make ends meet he was also a plumber (he is known as the Preston Plumber) as well as a footballer. Finney comments, he could not have gone to London or abroad to play, he simply could not have afforded to take the risk, to leave his little plumbing business. And in those days players did not have the contractual rights and opportunities they enjoy today – they were largely treated as pieces of meat by the clubs for which they played. In simple terms Finney never got the chance to play somewhere else even though any club in the land would have had him. In that context Finney argues, had he been playing today he would not have been a one club man – he would have seized the opportunities to go to Manchester United, or Real Madrid or one of the other great clubs.  Finney honestly admits – he would have reacted just as the top players of today react – Wayne Rooney, David Beckham and the rest – he would have “taken the money”. In short,  the temptation would be there and he would have been tempted.

 And that, I suppose, mirrors my argument with mother all those years ago – you could leave your front door open because there was no temptation, nothing inside to encourage any would be thief!