well, it was playing on the mp3 jukebox…
I will maintain that apart from the obvious ageing processes, and apart from the obvious knocks that life can throw at you, I haven’t changed, nope, not a fucking bit.
Watching me at 7 years old for a week would give you a damn good insight into watching me now for a week straight over half a century later.
Of course we are always told that “t’were different, back when I were a lad” is all bollocks, your perspective just changed, and all that, and of course perspective is all important.
The internet itself is full of memes of things routinely did as kids back then, and how did any of us survive to our teenage years, much less adulthood, and while amusing, they all also miss the point.
So, for those of you who are younger, here is how things were 50 years ago, as a child, and yes, it is a personal list and a personal anecdote, but compare it with pretty much anyone knocking on 6o or older and they will corroborate everything I have said, and then sit down and think of the implications of that, and some of the things on this list.
- Inflation – for most of my early life this had nothing whatsoever to do with the price of a basket of shopping, instead it dealt with a contraction of expansion of the total amount of money in circulation… such a simple thing, but if you import half a million immigrants and the money supply stays the same then either the money has to move around faster or you need less of it to do the same things (prices falling) – back then inflation wasn’t good but deflation was bad, money moved around slower and you needed more of it to do the same things (prices rising) – of course all this went away with the new economic models.
- Policemen (priests, teachers, etc) – you could walk up to *any* policeman anywhere and ask them the time, for directions, even for change to make a phone call to your parents from a call box, of the course the policy then was policemen served mainly in the towns and areas that they were from.. – of course there were exceptions to the rule, but they were exceptions to the rule, by and large anyone in authority and pretty much any adult was deemed trustworthy, *especially* if they had a trade, be it taxi driver or shopkeeper or bus driver or builder or fisherman, I only really realised how much this has passed when I went to spain in the mid 80’s as a young adult and saw how it was there then, kids could run around wild because every adult around had a general “protector” role towards all kids.
- the next ice age – I know it sounds weird to those weaned on man made global warming and carbon taxes, but as a boy the only possible climate change on the horizon was going to be colder, not warmer, and that had huge implications for agriculture and industry, because the UK was on the same latitudes as the hudson bay and the aleutian islands, and everything depended on the atlantic conveyor and jet stream
- debt – pretty much the only kind of borrowing anyone did, or could do, was to borrow money to buy a house or land or a small business comprising the above, apart from that for 99.99% of people it was pretty much impossible to borrow money, you either had the cash or you didn’t… credit cards didn’t exist, overdrafts were something shady business men used, and that was it, so of course if you were a retailer you sold for cash, if it was an expensive item like a watch or sofa or motor car, you wrote a cheque and waited for it to clear.
- cash – it was law that every worker had the right to be paid in full, in cash, every week, some folks in the city and some folks like mine who worked abroad as ex pats were not paid cash “wages”, they were on a thing called a “salary” that was paid into the bank once a month, but it was very much the exception, not the rule… so they just went to the bank to draw cash, or wrote a cheque, or, quite commonly, just signed a chit at the shop in question and the shopkeeper could take that chit to the bank and be paid from your account….. everyone knew everyone…
- weapons – as a boy of 12 I could go into a shop in the UK on my own and walk out with an air pistol, a catapult, a knife, no permits or any such nonsense, I could also go to the local chemist and buy stuff (it was encouraged, you were using your brain and learning) like sulphur and mercury and iron filings and copper sulphate, of course iron filings and sulphur and a small strip of magnesium and of course a box of matches was a perennial favourite with young boys, no store bought stink bomb ever came close…. most people you knew had at least one shotgun, probably two, one is 12 ga and one 410, and quite a few would have what was then a 25 year old ex war firearm, be it a webley or browning or luger, and maybe a dozen rounds of ammo, now and again you’d know someone with a rifle, and it was always a bolt action 308 of some sort, again with maybe a couple of dozen rounds…. there were back then “permits” for these sorts of things, but they were a lot like dog licences, in theory every dog had to be licenced, in practice maybe 1 in 10,000 was, and nobody gave a shit.
- identity – this one has really changed, and I’m not going anywhere near gender identity shit or any of that crap, I’m talking about who you were, one the one hand nobody carried any, driving licences and stuff were things that lived in a drawer somewhere at home, on the other hand it comprised, day to day, of what you did for a living, where you were from, and who knew you… back then nobody would have given a fuck if you said you knew someone like Bill Gates, the only thing that carried any weight was Bill Gates stopping to talk to you in the street, if it was Reggie Kray it cut the other way of course, nobody doubted that Reggie knew you, and most would avoid you as a result.
- hard knocks – there literally wasn’t a proper adult around who hadn’t been in the last war (most of the cities still had the remains of buildings that got bombed out 30 years previously) even if they hadn’t served abroad, so if you started trash talking about how tough things were or how tough you were 75% of those in earshot could outdo you, and prove it, which made them all very compassionate people, but also made them extremely intolerant of weakness (moral and spiritual as well as other kinds) because whatever sob story you had, they had had it worse, so on the one hand they would buy the tramp a drink and a sandwich, and on the other hand beat the living shit out of anyone who decided to get drunk and piss on said sleeping tramp.
- tools of the trade – if a man was respected, a man’s tools were fucking sacrosanct, even thieves would get a beating from fellow thieves for stealing a man’s means to work, and the tools would be returned forthwith, there was a special ire for getting rid of all the steam engines on the railways, but it only flew at all because the new diesels were better tools, allowing everyone to work better, but even so, getting rid of old tools that had served well…. I met guys dead of old age now who had special reverence for a gun or knife that the carried through the war and which they credit as a tool for saving their lives, that ain’t nothing compared to guys who used other tools for longer, if you could reincarnate my dad now I can guarantee that nothing would make him happier than seeing that tools he had as a boy apprentice are still in my possession and use… nowadays most tools are mere commodity items, nobody gives a shit about them and nobody respects them, be it a company vehicle or a knife.. I still have both buck 110’s I ever bought, one in daily use.. tools, in the broadest sense of the word to include bridges and irrigation systems and so on, used to be held in the highest respect, and I really cannot begin to explain that adequately to most… the luddites throwing their clogs in machinery, the modern equivalent is going to mecca and taking a dump on abraham’s meteorite, I shit you not.
- schools and “bullying” – I come from an age where punishment was corporal, and that means physical, parents had hands and belts and wooden spoons (how I laugh now, if ever there was a weapon of punishment that was unable to inflict any damage it is the wooden spoon) and schools and teacher had a cane or a leather strap, nobody lived in fear of the class or year bully, or his gang, ( the king film christine, and the scene with cuntingham in the school workshop ) because the power disparity just wasn’t that fucking big between the bully and the wimp of the year, the real power disparity came between one year and the next (at the time in the uk your first year in secondary school at 11 was “first year” up to “fifth year” at 16 for O levels and if you stayed on for A levels it was lower and then upper sixth) and the only saving grace in being a first year was next year you’d be second year and able to get some payback on the new first year, en fucking masse, by the time you rose to 3rd year you yourself referred to the 1st year as “crappers”, because they crap themselves when bullied by the older years… on top of all this of course were the masters.. an even mix of academics and ex services, you lived in fear of the ex services guys, not because they could beat you to a bloody pulp, but because they drag the whole class on an extended cross country run until you all puked, then run you some more, then back for showers that the hot water had mysteriously run out on, then a late lunch that the cooks had kept back but mysteriously couldn’t keep warm… meanwhile the whole class is reminded to thank messrs Jenkins and Browne, whose escapades are responsible for the whole class being beasted, and I know you will all love to do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and so it would continue until Jenkins and Brown turn up covered in bruises, not too big or too dark, but plenty of em… and girls schools were just as fucking vicious, if not more so, many a grudge was settled with hockey sticks, all accidental like, as 20 girls pile one one trying to get the ball… by the time you left at 16 most of the latent thuggery and propensity for violence had been moderated due to the fact that you mob will always kick your ass, unless you are bruce lee in some chop socky film of course, and even old bruce would succumb to a morris starting handle to the back of the head out of the blue…. ain’t a single kid today would survive a single 60’s school term…
- dumb insolence – I was a past master at this by the age of 12, you’re stood before someone in authority, say a headmaster, and asked who took the crook out of the statue of Joseph in the hallway, (fuck me, religious statuary in a school…) and replaced it with one of cook’s sausages, if you’re like me you soon learn that grassing up the guy that did it is bad, admitting it if it was you is bad, and entering into any sort of discussion with an authority figure (who probably already know damn well who did it) is going to end badly because they will infer what you are trying not to say, so you sit there and yes sir no sir when they ask if you can hear them and nothing else and look carefully at a point on the wall and take whatever licks you have coming, and hate all the bastards for it, until you meet one of said bastards in later years, and head from the horse’s mouth that they were immensely proud of you, being one of the first to really get the lesson and stick to it 100%… WTF???!!!! .. I thought the “dumb” was not speaking and the “insolence” was not obeying authority?? Oh no, it’s code for “character” but if they said that, you’d never learn the lesson…
- understatement – back then you’d think you knew someone, and then one day something would come out completely unexpected out of the blue, and it was always some ability or talent, the lady from the post office who could stick weld like a motherfucker from her time in the armaments factories, the local priest who could speak malay and urdu from his time in the jungle evading the japanese after Singapore fell three days after his boat landed, the local bus driver who could do field surgery on the kid who fell and impaled himself on some railings and pierced an artery, and saved his life long enough for the ambulance and fireman to arrive (all real examples) – nowadays it’s the exact fucking opposite, 90% of what people claim to be able to do they are worse than fucking useless at, and they are piss poor at best at what they claim to do for a living
- Flash Gordon – nuff said