Hi. To my astonishment it seems that people have stumbled across this blog and are reading what I post. Right now I should probably be posting caustic opinions about the parties competing in the imminent NZ national parliamentary elections but they hardly seem worthy of my attention. In a few weeks we will have a new government, either slightly left-of-centre or slightly right-of-centre. Yawn. But the rest of the world should be so lucky.
So now, the beginning of the autobiography which is my current obsession. Do let me know if you want more.
Before I Forget
It was apt that most movies we watched in the 50s were still in black and white even though colour cinematography had been around for decades, because the actual world was still in some essential way black and white. I was born in 1948 into a world that was monochromatically, crushingly dull. Our parents were popping us out in record numbers into a drearily conventional world. They thought we would be the blessed heirs of the grey, tasteless fruit of their struggle. To their horror, we tore it all down.
Dullsville
If we rose up in the 60s and smashed the old society to bits, the obvious question is why? So let me describe the world I was born into and by the time I’ve finished you will agree with me, with us. It just had to go.
The bulk of my childhood filled the 1950s, the last decade in this cycle of history with the social qualities that had made the industrialised nations great. Uniformity. Christianity, in name at least. Public order, although the incidence of drunken violence in the streets and in the homes was off today’s chart but we didn’t talk about that. Stability. Predictability. Durability. Manners, and the big one, Authority. No distinction was made between the law and moral standards and the cops enforced both as if they were the same thing. Clear gender roles. Missing, the two things we would come to want most and would make damn sure we got – fun, and the freedom of personal choice. I guess fun sounds superficial. That’s how we felt about it as children and teenagers, but it was in fact deeper than that. What we really wanted was happiness. The older generation didn’t seem happy, in the main, and they didn’t want us to be happy either, not really. They conformed, they gritted their teeth through what were in many cases obviously unhappy marriages and worked at lifelong jobs that were often demeaning and monotonous. And they did their level best to make sure we signed up to the same dreary life plan. We all know what happened to that.
Now we have not homogeneity but diversity. Now you are free to embrace whatever faith or superstition you choose, or nothing at all. Free to dress how you choose, go where you choose, marry whom you choose or don’t bother marrying at all. For all that you can thank, or blame, us. We broke the mould, probably forever, in the seismic upheaval of the 60s. In a bitter twist, our revolutionary ideas have now become an orthodoxy enforced just as vindictively as the old one. Corporations, schools and government departments can be, and are, punished and shamed for falling short of diversity targets. Who would have guessed the forces of darkness would take our glorious peacock dance of 60s-style diversity and turn it into a tyranny?
That was not the only tyranny it engendered either. It also produced the 21st century nightmare, the Islamic jihad.
Think about it. What is it about Western society that has so incensed conservative Muslims that many subscribe to the idea that that society must be wiped out, violently if necessary? Hedonistic alcohol and drug use. (Emphasis on hedonistic – there was little hedonism in the way our parents drank. A lot. They were drinking away the memories of a depression and a war.) Uninhibited sexual activity of every stripe – heterosexual, gay, lesbian, trans, you name it, liberated to the point that those who vary from the heterosexual norm demand, and get, rights to respect for who they are. People, and women in particular, dressing to enhance their sexual appeal and, when the temperature allows, exposing what is for Muslims (and conservative Christians) an outrageous expanse of flesh. Feminism, the utter rejection of the idea that male authority over the female is at the heart of Allah’s plan for humanity. And finally, many people, perhaps the majority, blithely ditching belief in any God as superstition rooted in an unenlightened past. Our fault, all of it.
In the English-speaking world of the 50s you professed Christianity, dressed in a narrow range of styles dictated by the occasion, travelled little if at all and held yourself to be contented with where you were both physically and in your station in life. That’s what they called it: a station. Visible discontent was a betrayal of the social contract. Sex (at least sex that was seen) was largely penned into the cage of marriage, permanent and often joyless marriage.
And that was the way it was supposed to stay. No-one wanted any kind of social change. Things were good by the frozen standards of the 30s at last and they wanted them to stay exactly the way they were, next week, next year, next lifetime. It’s understandable. They had lived through a hideous depression and an even worse war, all the time dreaming of the day when everything would come right. They knew exactly what that would look like and, at last, here it was. Unfortunately what we saw with our young, fresh eyes was racism, homophobia, over-bearing patriarchy, contempt and condemnation for unmarried mothers, nepotism in business and government, jingoistic patriotism and in our case colonial cringe towards the historic Home country and now America. Conformity and acerbic judgement ruled. No thanks. It wasn’t going to rule us.
The Life
The scarcity years had taught people thrift. In a time when the electricity bill was a trifle my father would yell at us if we walked out of a room and left the light on. Like most women my mother had a sewing machine, bought patterns and fabric and sewed clothes for us and herself. Although jam and tinned fruit were cheap, Elaine, like most women, made preserves. She had the time to do it because wives, of course, didn’t have paid jobs.
Everything you bought was made to last as long as possible; if it looked like it wasn’t you didn’t buy it. When the electric kettle burned out you replaced the element, not the kettle. The kettle itself and all the other kitchen appliances were expected to last the lifetime of the housewife who owned them. The lifetime of a car ran into decades. Although America was carving out a new aesthetic of wealthy exuberance, in what had been the British dominions the aesthetics of design were an afterthought, or nothing. When we first heard of planned obsolescence in the 60s we were shocked. Now people just shrug and buy a new one. There was little plastic. Most useful items were made of metal and wood, ceramics, glass and that unlovely material bakelite.
We ate everything on our plates and for snacks were given, or stole when Mum was out of sight, the biscuits and cakes she baked every morning. Yes, every morning except Sundays I woke to the smell of baking, not bacon and eggs.
A packet of potato crisps was a rare treat and came in one flavour – potato – sweets were small, plain and precious. Soft drink bottles were tiny, perhaps 200 cc. We would have regarded buying a litre of Coke and drinking it all ourselves as hellish gluttony, even if we could have afforded it.
Kids lived active, outdoor lives. Adults didn’t want kids hanging around the house and playing outside meant exposure to every kind of germ and bug imaginable. Bouts of sickness were common, every one of them another building block in a heroic immune system. Of course everyone got the measles, mumps and chickenpox at some point, and sundry other infections. In summer every scratch infected with what we called H-bug, causing crusty scabs which we kids made worse by picking at them because they itched. We didn’t mind that much. It was compulsive, picking at scabs, and almost an entertainment. I recently discovered the cause – a New Zealand epidemic of penicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus in the mid-50s, a warning flag waving unnoticed about the consequences of profligate, thoughtless use of antibiotics. There were no obese kids. None. Campbell and I were considered fat, and mocked, but looking at our school photos you would not be able to see why. Most kids were as lean as sheepdogs, but Campbell and I were endomorphs, slightly softer round the edges, enough to get us called Piggy and Little Piggy respectively.
Perhaps two kids at my high school of maybe six hundred pupils had asthma and everyone knew who they were. I believe there was not a single diabetic.
We played in industrial dumps, common in a time when every factory threw its rubbish over the back fence. So much interesting, useful stuff to find and make things out of. Pollution? We didn’t even know the word. Dad used to publicise his shows by driving us around in his car while we hurled bunches of handbills out the windows. No-one objected.
I bless these aspects of my childhood every day. They have given me the ability to cobble almost anything out of anything else and the constitution of a draught horse. I rarely fall ill and survived, as you will see, two bouts of untreated tropical disease that could have and from a medical perspective probably should have killed me. Even at 72 I almost died of septic shock but fully recovered within six weeks from a fortnight of the brutal insults to the system intensive care requires. It usually takes six months to a year and some never fully recover, indeed about forty per cent of people my age admitted to and discharged alive from ICU are dead within a year. Yet here I still am. Genes surely have something to do with it but I am convinced my young days rollicking in the mud and bugs have kept me alive more than once.
Good health, yes, but bad teeth. Parents paid little attention to whether or not kids brushed their teeth because they assumed that, like everyone, when fully grown they would have them removed and replaced by dentures. Especially in farming communities parents were expected to give away their daughters as brides with a mouth full of shining plastic, a great advantage in far-flung districts where the wife had to be in the kitchen every day of their lives.
Only the wealthy or the naturally endowed had their own, good teeth. Toothache was common, treated by trips to the Murderhouse, the dental school in Edenvale Rd where dental nurses received their training, going on to become what the Chinese might have called barefoot dentists, posted to rural school dental clinics where they drilled and filled the carious gnashers of farmers’ kids. We didn’t call it the Murderhouse for nothing; without so much as an aspirin, on the business end of a grinding, foot-cranked drill, we writhed in agony as they slowly hollowed out and stuffed our teeth with mercury amalgam. The only consolation came from nestling our imaginative little heads against the breasts of nubile young women. It’s a wonder we did not grow into a generation of masochists, recapitulating that unique blend of pain and erotic pleasure.
Home entertainment was the radiogram, board games, cards, marbles, books and comics (if you were allowed them) and things we made ourselves, like stilts, kites and of course, trolleys. I recently spent a couple of weeks sleeping in the bedroom of a friend’s ten-year-old while he was overseas. Overseas, with his Mum. A kid. If you had told me at his age that I would live to see kids commonly taking overseas holidays I would have scoffed. He has literally hundreds of toys and pieces of toys, and they are far from wealthy. At his age I had perhaps ten.
In the matter of dress there was no such thing as a look. Everybody dressed ‘decently,’ which meant the same as everyone else. Women wore frocks, men wore proper trousers they called strides, shirts and ties and sports jackets, although hats had mostly gone by then. When the bikini came in in the late 50s only the most daring would be seen in one, even though they were really just women’s swimming togs with the middle bit missing.
Kids were expected to be, forced to be respectful to their elders. And patriotic. The first film on any movie programme was ‘God Save the Queen’ and any kid cheeky enough to remain seated would be dragged to a stand by the scruff of his neck by a man in the row behind and probably given a clip over the ear for his trouble, to general approval.
On Saturdays everyone listened to the races. New Zealand has to this day a Minister of Racing, a ludicrously out-dated appointment one rank above the Minister for Clocks. Pop quiz: name him or her. Exactly. Everything was closed on Saturday except the pubs, which closed at six o’clock every evening and didn’t open at all on Sundays, and the TAB – the Totalisator Agency Board, the government bookie where you could place a bet on anything as long as it was a horse. I would go for long walks on those achingly dull Saturday afternoons and as I wandered from street to street, suburb to suburb, the sound of commentator Sid Tonks calling the current race rang from the houses and along the empty streets. He was famous, of course.
With the exception of the heaven-sent Goon Show at eight o’clock every Sunday night radio was starchy and dull, too, all of it run by the government. At six o’clock on Sundays, a big radio evening after the dullest day of the week when the whole world keeled over dead, the flagship show was Brass Band Parade, hosted by Lloyd Thorne. He too was famous. Brass band music. God help us.
Are you getting the picture? The 50s were, and not just by today’s standards, crushingly dull. Deliberately so. Our parents’ generation had had quite enough excitement in their lives, thank you very much.
Little did they dream that the teeming horde of frequently smacked kids out in the streets and back yards were coming to get them. The silent vow of every kid who is beaten by his father – one day I’ll be bigger than you – was to come true en masse and blow up in their faces. Because not only, better nourished, would we be bigger than them, we would outnumber them. As we have gone on outnumbering the other age groups till this very day, and getting our own way because of it. It has all turned rather ugly, that.
So we changed the world. In the social explosion of the 60s, culminating in the Summer of Love in ’68 and Woodstock, we pushed the Western world permanently off its authoritarian axis in the direction of liberalism, freedom and perpetual peace. In doing so the baby boom generation revelled in the most outrageously anarchic and downright joyous period of youth the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it didn’t quite work like that for young Christopher Hegan.