It Wasn’t That Bloody Brilliant

I belong to or follow numerous Facebook groups. These include:

·       the M.R. James Appreciation Society;

·       Art Literature Poetry;

·       Painting and Fine Arts Group;

·       the Chic Murray Facebook Appreciation Society;

·       Cowdenbeath Past and Present;

·       Kinglassie Past and Present;

·       Auld Fife and Its People; and

·       Vale Memories and Banter.

The list could go on for some time, but something occurred to me in relation to the last four. These are devoted to reminiscence, social history (at its most informal) and general chat, the first three in relation to Fife and the last to the Vale of Leven in Dunbartonshire. I have read some very funny jokes on all of them, but a lot of the content is nostalgic, reflecting on the lost worlds of our youth. I get the impression that a substantial proportion of other members are in their sixties, as I am.

Many posts look back with fondness on childhoods in the 1960’s or thereabouts and remark on what terrific times they were. Understandably, we would rather look back on the enjoyable aspects of the past than dwell on the more unpleasant times, but I have to say, it wasn’t that bloody brilliant being a child in the 1960’s. We still had physical punishment at school, diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough were common, there was as much brutishness and violence around as now, and in lowland Scotland there was still a lot of ugly catholic-protestant sectarianism. And a lot of domestic violence and abuse was tolerated as long as it stayed behind closed doors.

In addition, the casual racism and sexism in our everyday speech and manners would be considered breathtaking nowadays. I recall that if someone was considered stingy, we referred to them as Jewish. I don’t think I actually met a Jew until I went to university. A bit rich, a Fifer stereotyping someone else as stingy (don’t all gang up on me, it’s just a pleasantry).

I do understand the tendency of one’s memory to airbrush parts of the past. There is always an argument for accentuating the positive. And there were positive aspects of the 1960’s. A major one was stability, which hinged on jobs and housing. When I was in primary school, most of my pals expected that there would be a job for them with either the National Coal Board or Rosyth Naval Dockyard when they left school at age 15. The substantial body of social housing meant that you could do an honest day’s work in a manual job and afford a decent roof over your and your family’s heads.

But times were changing and the Thatcher years accelerated those changes. When I started this blog in 2021, I resolved not to do any political ranting, and I am not going to start now. Indeed a colleague of mine whom I greatly respect once said that some of the modernisations that took place in the 1980’s would have done so under any government, of the left or the right. But I would add that some of those changes, whatever the intention, had consequences that (I hope) were not intended. For example: the destruction of social housing and  the lunatic house price inflation of the last thirty-odd years; the replacement of public monopolies with private ones; and the shambles of the energy market that we are currently putting up with.

Speaking of unintended consequences, George Orwell once said that the trouble with competitions is that somebody loses them. That’s not the only trouble. In the late 1980’s, when the deregulation of the buses freed us, in my brother John’s words, from the tyranny of being able to get a bus on a Saturday night, here in Cambridge, buses from rival companies ditched timetables and chased each other around the town trying to overtake just before bus stops, in order to have first call on the queues of passengers. And what did we end up with? Deregulation for many people means monopoly by Stagecoach. And so another trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.

But back to nostalgia. I think I have mentioned before that I wrote a series of short stories which were essentially fictionalised episodes from my own childhood, largely for the benefit of my sons, Bill and Tom. I don’t think Bill and Tom were particularly interested in them, and the other members of those Facebook groups could accuse me of leaving out the darker aspects of a Fife childhood in the 1960’s.

Professor Sylvanus P. Thomson, in the final pages of his book, Calculus Made Easy, noted: ‘One other thing will the professed mathematicians say about this thoroughly bad and vicious book: that the reason why it is so easy is because the author has left out all the things that are really difficult. And the ghastly fact about this accusation is that—it is true!’ And I too plead guilty. I did leave out the more unpleasant features of my childhood and that of my contemporaries. Bill and Tom know that life is scary, that life is sad, that life has many disappointments. They don’t need me to rub their noses in it.

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So I am just as guilty as my Facebook chums of airbrushing the past. There is no moral to the above. So let’s lighten up a bit. Here are some snippets of conversation which over the last fifty years I have overheard on either buses or trains. In none of these cases do I know the context. You might while away an otherwise empty few minutes by attempting to deduce the back-stories. For the first of these, I should say that I don’t know how state benefits are paid now, if they are at all, but unemployment benefit used to be paid in the form of a cheque drawn on the National Girobank. Indeed, in Cowdenbeath, we had a friend who worked in the social security offices, who was known as Giro John. Anyway, here goes:

‘The back door wide open and the Giro sitting on the kitchen table.’

‘Bare bottom and all.’

‘I couldn’t get one in Ann Summers.’

‘Did you enjoy the loose tubes?’

‘And try not to drop this one down the lavatory.’