The Fifties

Recently some fellow bloggers have been sickening me. I will not mention who they are, Kris and dani know their own names anyway, but it suffices to mention that they are both female! And you know what that usually means. One of these girls posted about growing up in the seventies as if it was a long time ago! I can assure you it is not. The seventies, in my humble view (and I mean humble) were the worst decade of the twentieth century, and I take into account the years 14-18 and 39-45 when I say that. Those war torn days did not produce either 'Abba' or the 'Bay City rollers!' This Kris female thinking this amusing, added to this by asking if they had cars when I grew up! Add to this dani has proceeded to make things worse. She has written about growing up in the eighties! Man alive that's only yesterday! What is the matter with these people! It is hardly history is it? It's a disgrace and I think I will go off into a huff!.

However this caused to me to linger on a gentler era, an era in which I grew up, the fifties. This was a real time of growth for the nation and benevolent wealth for everyone - well except us, we were still poor! Having seen a fantasy world of progress collapse with the Great War, the resultant social change followed by a deep and very real depression, where folks indeed needed soup kitchens to keep them alive, the UK ended up standing alone against Nazi Germany. Fifty years of such suffering meant drastic change was desired after the war, and we obtained this. The National Health Service, the great glory of the Labour Party of 1945, the welfare state, an example to the world and vast housing estates were built, some good some awful. There was a new optimism that, this time, a better, fairer, world would emerge. By the late fifties full employment had arrived, in spite of poor management and obtuse unions. This was something those who lived through the thirties could hardly believe.

Of course, while the west benefited from improvements the rest of the world suffered from the Cold War. Europe may have filled itself with a wide variety of atom and nuclear weapons bent of mutual destruction, but the actual fighting was done elsewhere. Korea saw the first major conflict, won by MacArthur after his arrogant stupidity almost threw it away. Africa and Central America began to find themselves proxy killers for the US or USSR, and both suffer still because for those years of horror. How nice to avoid war at home any fighting in the lands of those we consider of no account. Were we building 'Democracy' I ask? Britain itself, under Anthony Eden made a catastrophic error with the Suez invasion. This brought home to some that the old empire had died and soon afterwards the actual empire began to be dismantled, and about time too!

I was lucky! Around me lay the fear of nuclear war, behind the memories of a conflict that cost fifty million or so lives, but in front of me lay a small wooden fort and a number of 'Dinky Cars.' What was more important than that? While I dressed up as a soldier and marched around the house, with my 'Lone Star' rifle and cowboy outfit (with trousers that didn't fit) on my back, I would stop and listen to 'Listen with mother' or hope for a bottle of orange drink, delivered by the milkman. Playing in the small road outside, there was a major road divided from this by a long green strip planted with a long line of trees, we broke stones against the pavement singing 'Champion the Wonder Horse,' even though I personally, had no idea what that was! We played 'Peevers,' hide and seek, Japs and Commandos, in which we were constantly killed and re-killed, yet without developing into the mass murderers those politically correct types imagine today. We reflected the times, and it did us no harm. I do not think young boys play, or are allowed to play, such games today. This is wrong! Naturally we left the skipping ropes, and bouncing a ball against a wall to the girls. We also suffered divide playgrounds, the boys separate from the lassies and both happier with it. The need to develop separately taken from children to day by those who lack understanding, and , let's be honest, were only ever concerned with the girls and not the boys. The anti male attitude dominates today and has done us no good whatsoever.

While Churchill attempted to prevent a nuclear war, breaking off to inform de Gaulle just what he actually thought of him, I would dance to the 78" records my elder sister brought home. Elvis, Little Richard and Bill Haley were just the stuff to really annoy my folks and make dad wonder why he had fought the war after all. He trained up in the Caingorms to invade Norway, the Germans got there first so he ended up in Hyderabad! He also took part in the Rhine crossing, although as he stated "We waited two days while the armour went over, then we crossed." A hero! The 'Elizabethan Age' we now lived in was all very well but he often wondered, did we have to listen to Johnny Ray, 'Crying?' I listened as I read the 'Beano,' still a favourite, I mean, who else would show a stagnant pond and include ducks wearing gas masks? The other comics never came up to the 'Beano's' heights. Or played on the varnished floorboards at the edge of the living room. While folks are brought up on wall to wall carpet, we could not afford wall to wall lino. Like so many others we varnished the edge of the boards and over the lino placed a small carpet in front of the coal fire. We were informed that if you see green flames in the flames it means there will be snow! Of course it was going to snow, we were in Edinburgh! There was no fridge, no phone then, eventually the gramophone and in 1958 the TV set appeared and changed our life. 'Double you Money' and 'Hancock' the 'Tonight' programme and dim black and white football film from 'Scotsport' became life itself.

Life of course also meant travelling by two buses to school, later, aged nine or ten, walking home along a busy road in a way that would terrify the politically correct saps that insist we need 'hi-vis' jackets just to wander about. I was more afraid of meeting the 'Teddy Boys' from Pennywell Road than from 'ERF' lorries trundling from Leith and heading west. Later my sister married one of those 'Teddy Boy' youths seen lounging in drape jackets, 'slim Jim' ties and 'DA' haircuts in Princes Street. A haircut is something he does not need these days I can tell you!

Playing without a neurotic mother, living on potato soup and sticks of rhubarb instead of MacDonald's, TV sets you had to cross the room to change channel, cars which left oil patches on the road whenever they stopped for more than five minutes, the 'Co-op' dividend that was so important to my mother to make ends meet, and a football team that broke records and won things. Yes indeed folks, this decade saw a Heart of Midlothian side that, not only could score goals and win trophies, but they could actually pass the ball to one another! Ah me, how times change. Edinburgh may have been a soot blackened, rain swept, cold place in the fifties,with trams that trundled noisily through the city, but it was better then, life was slower, and having little folks were more generous. Wealth does not increase happiness and makes you too sophisticated to use a 'hula hoop!'