Songs of Innocence (24 page)

And secondary education was about to change, too. By the time the Plowden report was published, the Labour government, re-elected in 1964 under Harold Wilson after thirteen years out of office,
had announced the abolition of the grammar school system. The period in which all children would – in theory at least – have access to a free, selective secondary education was destined
to be a very short one.

In 1970, David Hughes, growing up in Rhyl, became one of his area’s comprehensive school guinea pigs. He had greeted the news that his future would not rest on a single exam with a sense
of relief. His new school would be an amalgamation of a secondary modern and a grammar. ‘It was like the Hittites had arrived,’ he remembered later.
¹³
‘At first it was a mixing pot – they developed a junior high school, which gave the grammar school time to prepare for the hordes, get the discipline
right.’

At that stage, though, the ideas of educational psychologists such as Piaget had had little impact on the secondary school system in North Wales. The local authority’s solution seemed to
have been to divide pupils into ability groups and to carry on pretty much as before: ‘Some of the nuances were lost on me. I was aware there were two streams in parallel – if you were
in Glyndwr you did modern maths, while we had to do the standard stuff. The tutor groups were mixed ability, but the classes were segregated from day one. I think if you were top set, you were top
set for everything. For the lower sets, the balance of the curriculum was more practical – using the assets from the secondary modern curriculum. If you weren’t very good at maths, you
did more woodwork and cookery.’

The teachers could be brutal, too: ‘Once, a woodwork teacher got me to put both my hands in a vice. Then he walked away. It was a
double period, eighty minutes, and
I spent the whole time with my hands in this vice. It became psychological. I wasn’t going to let on I was irritated. I thought afterwards it was a fair cop. He was an interesting guy. He
showed us how to make a helicopter. I wouldn’t have wanted to have crossed him.’

Schools may have been changing slowly, but changing they certainly were. Writing in the
Guardian
, Jill Tweedie lamented the loss of the orderly atmosphere of her old grammar school, and
recalled her secret joy when one of her teachers, a Miss Needham – ‘profile sharp as stalactites, great brown bun bowing the scraggy neck, feet two yards long in pointed button
shoes’ – had unfairly lost her temper with her for walking on the wrong side of the corridor: ‘How super, how smashing, Miss Needham was being unfair . . . we judged all our
teachers at some deep level by the standards of our parents’ world. As girls we knew our looks and charm were all-important and so we applied the same criteria to our teachers. Did they have
a man? Could they get a man? . . . Only the one or two rare birds, the cold clever women with sharp tongues and a deep cynicism, escaped our ultra-conventional net.’
¹⁴
Nowadays, Tweedie felt, the deep lines that had divided teachers from pupils were breaking down. Instead, teachers were being made to feel they must befriend their
pupils. ‘We ask for less exercise of authority and more equality, less parrot feeding and more understanding and involvement . . . Mothers who lam out quite happily at their own children
condemn bitterly teachers who adopt, even once, the same methods . . . We demand liberal attitudes, but we give teachers very little extra help for the extra time liberal attitudes demand. The
whole school structure today, combined with an appalling shortage of money, virtually demands an authoritarian approach to work at all.’ Tweedie felt teachers were being driven to despair
because they could no longer discipline their pupils.

The changes in the education system mirrored a broader change in social attitudes in which children were slowly being swept up. Eleanor Wintour, an American journalist
living and bringing up a family in London, exhorted British parents in the
Observer
¹⁵
to take a less buttoned-up approach to child-rearing
than they had done in the past. The Brits were still making parenthood look far too much like hard work, she said: ‘Americans, on the whole, aim at happy (some of them unfortunately prefer
the term “well-adjusted”) rather than good children . . . In upper-class English circles it is common knowledge that American children are spoiled, whining, bad-mannered little
creatures . . . Americans have a vague idea that English children are quiet and well-behaved, but when they happen to run into any . . . they find them quiet, unchildlike and repressed.’

Far from embracing this call to liberal arms, legions of British parents – most of them women – wrote in to the paper to complain about Mrs Wintour’s attitudes.
¹⁶
‘Why must Mrs Wintour postulate such an extraordinary either-or? Cannot a good child be a happy one?’ asked Claire Rayner, writing from North
Wembley. ‘We take it for granted that our children cannot live in an adult environment without learning a code of behaviour that makes them acceptable to adults.’ Diane Hemingway from
Birmingham asked: ‘Happy or slaphappy upbringing? A look at American juvenile delinquency figures might give a pointer. We may have followed Americans in many fields, but let us stand firm on
this and continue to bring up our children to be well-mannered, likeable people.’ Jonathan Lewis, who had lived in the US for a year, wrote: ‘The experience of myself and many European
friends has been that American children are indeed spoiled, whining, bad-mannered little creatures – in a word, brats.’ Not everyone agreed, though. Anne Spencer, from Chelmsford, wrote
in to assure readers that there were indeed British families who were adopting the more child-friendly American style of parenting: ‘There is perhaps an encouraging revolution going
on.’

There was indeed. As early as 1961, there had been a feeling that children should be given their leisure time – as they had been given, in part, their educational
time – and allowed to decide for themselves how to spend it. Peter and Iona Opie, who had been studying children’s playground games, made a plea for more autonomy for
children:
¹⁷
‘The qualities of self-organization, self-discipline and perseverance shown by most children of seven to eleven when they think
they are on their own has to be seen to be believed. It is possible we too readily think of a child as a “good citizen” only when he is one of a school football team or a scout patrol .
. . the more children have their free time organized for them . . . the more they lose the traditional art of self-entertainment.’

Increasingly, children were being seen in a wider social context as individuals, as social players in their own right. And as that change of attitude began to trickle into some of
childhood’s darker and more hidden corners, there would be radical change for some groups of children. In particular, campaigners for children’s rights were beginning to ask why
children who had disabilities, or who could not for some reason live with their parents, did not have a greater say in how they lived, or how they were educated. As the world began to wake up to
the notion that all children had their own individual worth, it equally began to wake up to the fact that some children were not part of society at all. In 1971, Maureen Oswin published a book
about the thousands of children who were hidden from view, spending their lives in institutions because they had disabilities or ‘social problems’.
¹⁸
Writing in the
Guardian
, she described their lives:
¹⁹
‘I met children in locked hospital wards who never went
on holidays, had not been outside the hospital for months, and had never been in a shop, children who had never seen food being prepared, or properly laid tables, because they always received their
meals from a hospital trolley. Children whose lives were organized to suit the working hours of hospital staff, so they were got up too early
in the morning, spent long,
empty hours of boredom . . . and were got ready for bed at three in the afternoon. I remember a dozen little limbless five year-olds, dressed in night clothes, bemused by boredom, sitting in a
straight row, staring up at racing and football results.’

Oswin’s reference to ‘limbless children’ underlined another dark news story of the time. In the late 1950s, increasing numbers of predominantly middle-class women had begun
taking a new wonder-drug to counteract the effects of morning sickness. It was called thalidomide. Within a few years, more than 10,000 children across the developed world had been born with
deformed limbs and other problems as a result of the drug – and many of them would spend their childhoods in institutions such as the ones Oswin described.

As the 1970s wore on, there was a gradual change of attitude towards these hidden children. But as David Hughes, growing up in north Wales, was to find, old taboos were slow to break down.
David’s older brother Graham was autistic: ‘I was told it was oxygen starvation at birth that caused it. That was easier to take than that there might have been something
genetic,’ he said.
²⁰
Their mother had flatly rejected suggestions that Graham should go into an institution, and throughout his childhood
had fought for him to have as normal a life as possible. ‘He was very thin and wiry, and he had a very limited range of subjects he’d converse on. I’m eight years younger –
but I would set sums and he would struggle to do them, even though I was dumbing down: two and one, three and two. And yet on subjects he was interested in, he had an almost encyclopaedic
knowledge. He was interested in electricity – from about the age of six he could wire a plug and knew exactly how it all worked. It was a bit like
Rain Man
²¹
– I’d say I’d met someone born on the 13th April 1980, he’d say it was a Sunday, we went to so-and-so and it was raining, so we had to put on
our coats. He was incredible, really.’

But when David was in his teens, Graham became increasingly
troubled. ‘The first time was about 1972. He was pretty affable, but he seemed more and more agitated.
We were in our living room and he was sitting there and rocking backwards and forwards. He started saying ‘No, no!’ – as if someone was talking in his head. He’d made a
poker with a ram’s head handle, and he picked it up and threatened me with it.’

For David, the stigma of having a brother who was mentally ill was hard to bear. As he studied for his A-levels, Graham became increasingly unwell and eventually was admitted to a hospital
– an asylum – known locally as ‘Denby Mental’. ‘In Rhyl, if you did something daft, they’d say: “You’re Denby Mental, you are.” It was a place
of horror. You didn’t want anything to do with it. When I visited, it was incredibly distressing. It felt like the treatment was to sit in high-backed chairs and sit it out, with lots of male
nurses coming every so often, and saying: “All right? Want a cup of tea, Gray?” Or, “Here’s your medication – take this.” My worry was he’d go in there and
never come out. Some of the people there had clearly been institutionalized since they were children. It was like a vision of nineteenth-century Bedlam. I was really, really scared of that. Of him
not coming out. Of knowing there were places like that. There was a whole group in society that basically nobody knew about.’

David found himself unable to talk to anyone at all about what had happened – even his girlfriend: ‘Part of it was that mental illness was almost contagious, that we as a family
might be tarred with the stigma. The closest I came was saying, “He’s ill, he’s in hospital.” In no circumstances would I have told them which hospital. There was a lad who
grew up on the estate with me – he lived with his Auntie because his Mum was in Denby Psychiatric Hospital. You could tell he had a really fractured life. He was talented but socially
dislocated. “Your Mum’s a nutter, so you’re a partial nutter.” The language associated with it was diabolical, really. There must have been thousands
of people who went through that and said nothing. It’s the first time I’ve talked about it.’

Gradually, these institutions would be swept away. In the mid-1970s a special committee on children’s health, headed by the chair of the British Paediatric Association, Donald Court, would
help to move the children’s mental health system into the modern age and to prepare the way for their closure. Slowly, quietly, the pendulum was once again swinging away from the
pre-enlightenment view of the child. Now, once again, children were born good rather than evil, and once again the adult world was beginning to be prepared to give children the benefit of the
doubt.

Yet despite this new, warmer atmosphere, adult–child relations were very far from being perfectly harmonious. Across the Western world, children were beginning to act in new, sometimes
alarming, ways. And the adult world often found itself scratching its collective head and wondering what on earth was going on. Strange, even hilarious, occurrences broke out. In Rochdale, in 1968,
crockery was smashed and food thrown at the Newbold Infants’ School after children who had been bullied out of their dinner tickets bit back and refused to watch their tormentors eating their
food. The result was, quite literally, a riot.
The Guardian
reported
²²
that 160 children had rampaged through the school, bean-bags had
been thrown at dinner ladies and the school left strewn with twisted and broken cutlery. The following day, the chairman of the local education committee, Alderman Cyril Smith, watched sternly as
the children filed, chastened and silent, into the hall for meat pie, potatoes and beetroot, declaring that all they needed was ‘a bloody good hiding’.

Elsewhere, people were asking why children and young adults were indulging in similar outbreaks of baffling behaviour. So, why? Perhaps decades of changing thought about children, of increasing
awareness of their need for individuality, was filtering through to their consciousness. Or perhaps the freedom offered by better
education, better health and better housing
had begun to embolden them. Certainly, greater prosperity was leading to children having more space, more time to themselves. Better housing meant more children having their own bedrooms; central
heating meant they could spend more time in them rather than huddling round the fire downstairs. Now, teenagers used their own rooms to do homework, spend time with their friends, listen to
music.
²³
Freely available parttime work meant they had money to spend, and better adult wages meant their parents didn’t necessarily need
that money to go into the family purse. Children with money to spend could create and shape markets: for clothes, for records – and sometimes for leisure pursuits that were considered rather
less than desirable.