Songs of Innocence (23 page)

‘The way children do, you get used to the fact that your parents quarrel a lot, or sometimes there are bad scenes or for some reason Dad’s not sleeping in the bedroom any more. I
think home’s so important to children that they always discount the idea that it’s going to go to the crunch. I certainly did,’ he said.
²
‘I remember thinking when I was about fifteen, before my parents split up, how common it was becoming, looking round my friends and thinking: “Wow,” how many
parents had split. I was aware this was something new and rather strange, and in a sense sort of menacing in a way. When they actually did split up, it was awful. I think probably they’d
decided in the classic way of the time to stay together for the sake of the children.’

After the millennium, women would be more likely than men to initiate divorce. But during the 1960s, the assumption among observers of the rising divorce rate was that the phenomenon was
actually being driven by men. In 1971, the Conservative Political Centre published a pamphlet on the subject, regretting the terrible toll that divorce was taking on abandoned women:
³
‘The deserted wife and the unmarried mother may find themselves leading a life of total isolation, unable to leave the children, caught up in a
situation of poverty and despair,’ it said.

Indeed, the ‘deserting father’ became something of a hate-figure. Many disappeared without trace, according to the Conservative Political Centre, leaving their wives and children
distraught: ‘A health visitor in a middle-class suburb reported three attempted suicides in one week, by wives with children, deserted by their husbands.’ But, in 1969, one such father
did dare to put his head
above the parapet and confess what he had done – in an article in the
Guardian
, headlined: ‘I Left My Wife and
Children’.

‘I am a deserting father, the arch-villain of liberal humanists and social workers,’ he wrote. ‘Three years ago I left my wife and children and went to live with another woman.
I last saw my children a year ago. Have I now, finally, to accept that we must become extinct for one another?’ With perhaps painful honesty, this father confessed that he had stopped weeping
for the loss of his children. In any case, they were apparently doing well now the tension of the break-up had ended: ‘To tell the truth, I’m scared of the assault made by children on
the emotions.’ The reaction to the article was angry, and mainly from abandoned wives.

‘My husband, unlike the writer, left me “out of the blue” with two toddlers and a third on the way . . . He promised to see them once a week in order to establish some degree
of security in their lives. This lasted all of two weeks,’ one of them wrote. Others, including one deserted daughter, pointed out the terrible toll these break-ups were having on children.
‘I cannot understand how he could hold me in his arms one day and say he loved me, then walk out of my life for ever the next. My heart was broken . . . my emotions became more settled only
after he had completely left, and I beg the author of the article . . . PLEASE, PLEASE leave the children alone.’
⁴

Others were beginning to notice the emotional effect all this was having on the children, too: ‘Disturbed kids come from bad homes: There appears to be a greater number of educationally
sub-normal children in one-parent families,’ the Conservative Political Centre noted. ‘There may be symptoms of lack of concentration, withdrawal, truancy, moving home and therefore
change of school, or disruption in school attendance.’

These disturbed children were not just coming from homes where marriages had failed, either. There was a growing worry during the 1960s that the fabric of society could be under threat from the
number of children who were now being born outside wedlock. Indeed, politicians and commentators were beginning to detect a trend that would accelerate in the next three
decades. In the years just after the war, four out of every 100 babies had been born out of wedlock. By the latter half of the 1960s, this figure would double. By the millennium, four out of ten
babies would be born outside of marriage. In the 60s, there was widespread agreement that this was a major social problem. Lord Derwent, speaking in a debate on the welfare of these children in
1967, told his fellow peers that the risks were great: ‘It is now generally agreed that one of the important causes of juvenile delinquency is in fact illegitimacy,’ he said. ‘It
is quite understandable. The child grows up feeling that it does not really belong and that it is rather different from other children. The child gets a grudge against society, and where this
happens juvenile delinquency may well start.’ The modern parlance was to call such children ‘illegitimate’, he went on, but ‘I prefer the word
“bastard”.’

Nor was it just family life that was causing concern. The Welfare State, receptacle for so many of the nation’s hopes and dreams during the fifteen years after the war, was starting to
show its flaws, too. In October 1961, the
Observer
newspaper ran a series of articles entitled ‘Gaps in the Welfare State’. They spelled out the extent to which poverty and
inequality were still stalking the land, and the extent to which they penetrated every area of national life. And they helped to popularize a new term: the ‘problem family’.

‘Mrs A, the head of a problem family and herself a problem (she “can’t cope”), would have no problem with definitions,’ one article said. ‘She is simply in a
mess, and does not know where to turn. She has been deserted, the six children are under eight years old, she lives on National Assistance, far away from relatives who might help and four floors
up. Although she is only 30 she has high blood pressure and . . . is grossly overweight.’

The welfare state, the paper reported, was failing to join up the dots. It was dealing with the delinquent teenager, the neglected toddler and the rent arrears as three
separate problems. And while local authorities were beginning to see the merit in employing family case workers, such preventive services were ‘patchy to say the least’.

The underlying problem, the newspaper implied, was inequality. It also told the story of Alfred B, an unskilled worker saddled with£1,700 in debt from hire purchase agreements for consumer
goods. ‘The man is one of the have-nots, as we used to call them before we assumed that everybody had . . . it is a sad fact that in the Welfare State it is more reprehensible not to have
than it was in the days of Victorian charity.’

Of course, there were plenty of children with no reason to believe ‘everybody had’. David Hughes, born in the late 1950s in Rhyl, north Wales, was aware from an early age that living
on a council estate carried a stigma. ‘I didn’t realize it until someone unkindly pointed it out to me, but . . . to those who lived in the posher areas of town, the drives and
crescents and boulevards, we were considered “the savages from the reservation”,’ he wrote in his autobiography
The Reso
, named after the popular local name for the estate
where he grew up.
⁵

‘I don’t remember anyone saying directly, “You’re off the estate,” but it became clear later I wasn’t welcome in certain houses. People would meet me in
neutral venues. I remember a friend saying, “It’s best not to meet at my house. Meet in town, or the football field.” It didn’t hurt – I didn’t register it as a
social snub – but at secondary school it became clear there was a form of apartheid, really, about those from the estate: “He’ll be trouble. Don’t bring him round the
house.”’

David, a bright boy whose bright father had been forced to leave school at fifteen during the depression of the 1930s and who worked in a chemical plant, was aware from an early age that there
were
things he could not have: ‘I remember a shop called Hughes’ in Rhyl where they had a model railway in the window. I was conscious of never being able to
afford one, but there was a democracy about being able to stand outside and imagine, just like anyone else could . . . when I got married I bought a model engine every week,’ he
said.
⁶

Britain was still a country of haves and have-nots, then. The National Child Development Study,
⁷
which was following the lives of 17,000
children born in a single week in 1958, uncovered what at the time may have seemed a striking fact – that some children were at a disadvantage from birth. ‘Their disadvantages increase
if they belong to large families, physically if they are male and across a broad spectrum if they are badly housed,’
The Times
reported.
⁸
‘Nearly half the children from unskilled families suffered from social, health and educational handicaps compared with those from professional families. They were on
average 1.3 inches shorter. Working-class children were more likely to have a squint, a speech defect, poor physical coordination and to wet their beds after they were five years old. They were
twice as likely to have hearing trouble. They were less likely to be immunized or vaccinated or to have been taken to clinics or health centres. Fewer working-class children had visited a dentist
at all in their first seven years although more had bad teeth. In fact, the study shows that the children most in need of the health and welfare services were the least likely to have used
them.’

There was a growing body of evidence that all the efforts of the post-war government had done little to make Britain a more equal society. One of the biggest disappointments – and one
which was to remain controversial for generations to come – was the grammar school system. Here, too, things had not turned out quite as predicted. Working-class children like Alan Briddock
from Sheffield, who won a place at grammar school, were still finding themselves at a disadvantage once they got there.

Alan, having come joint top of his year in the School Certificate exam, which all pupils then took at sixteen, progressed into the sixth form at Firth Park Grammar
School. Yet there was little sense that the school was driving him on to greater things; no guiding angel, whispering in his ear of the better life to which he had been handed the key. A few months
later, worried that he was not bringing money into the house and uncertain whether he could cope with further maths, he left.

‘I don’t think I had ideas about where it was taking me,’ he said. ‘I think I just ploughed on until I couldn’t go any further. Nobody said anything. We
didn’t get any advice, nobody talked about when you left. They didn’t say, “You’re ripe for this or that.” So I left school and on the Monday I went into the chemi lab
at Arthur Balfour steelworks. I was sixteen.’
⁹

For most working-class children, grammar school was never a realistic possibility at all. A study published in 1962 by a Liverpool University academic revealed that in one of that city’s
poorer areas only a quarter of the pupils even sat the eleven plus exam.
¹⁰
Just one in ten was destined to make it to grammar school.
The
Observer
, reviewing the book, noted that teachers in deprived areas – most of whom were caring and well meaning – fed their pupils a standard academic curriculum, ‘leavened by
country dancing and songs about cuckoos’. In Liverpool 7, in sight of the docks and with racial intolerance and prostitution rife, the school experiences of these pupils seemed
‘derisory’, the paper’s education correspondent felt.

One of the problems with the system was that while children like those from Liverpool 7 lived in homes where there was little interest in education, few books and nowhere to do homework, even if
they should wish to do so; children in middle-class areas were being drilled for the eleven plus years in advance. In 1962, the president of the Manchester Teachers’ Association felt inspired
to warn parents against putting their children through private lessons in order to
pass the test. ‘Parents . . . may cause much misery in later years. They may be
doing their child a grave disservice.’ Children, said Miss Webster, Headmistress of the Styal Open Air School, would find the right niche only if they were left to progress naturally, without
pressure.

Miss Webster’s speech bore hints that schools were beginning to enter a new, more liberal age. Junior schools were relinquishing the formal approach to learning, taking on board the work
of post-Freudian child psychologists. The Plowden Report into primary education, published in 1967 but commissioned by the government four years earlier, would be a sort of homage to the work of
Jean Piaget. Piaget had developed four ‘sequential stages’ of intellectual development through which he believed all children must pass – albeit at a wide range of ages. These
stages also embraced physical, motor and emotional development, and Piaget believed that it was pointless trying to teach a child something until he had reached the right stage along the continuum.
Bridget Plowden’s report went so far as to state, for example, that ‘a child cannot read without having learned to discriminate shapes’.
¹¹

Despite this apparently biologically deterministic base, the report heralded in a new age of liberalism in education. It embraced, too, Piaget’s theory that a child should be the master of
his or her own destiny, in educational terms – sparking a wave of new, radical practices in primary schools. Learning became more flexible; play was placed at the heart of children’s
lessons, pupils were encouraged to use their environments and to learn by discovery: ‘Teachers should not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.’
¹²
Typically, children in one of these newly liberalized primary schools might spend the morning learning the ‘three Rs’ and the afternoon doing
‘discovery’ – nature, music, literature, arts and crafts. An
Observer
journalist who visited one such school noted that the headmistress, a Miss Horsburgh, gave her pupils
fine china cups to wash and then
smiled benevolently when they broke them. ‘The workbooks had no marks, only comments such as “good work”, or “well
tried”.’ Miss Horsburgh explained: ‘I don’t give my children marks, or grade them. They are individuals and I expect them to do the best they can.’