Songs of Innocence (21 page)

Alan Briddock was born in 1934, in Sheffield, just as the old era was coming to an end. When he was four, his father died of pneumonia – a not uncommon occurrence at the time. But even
though he was not able to share the dream of a perfect nuclear family in a perfect semi-detached house, he did benefit from several of the huge changes brought about by the advent of the Welfare
State. The Briddock family, which had lived in a two-up, two-down in the centre of town, were among the first to move when slum clearances brought the new council estates which would dominate
housing policy during the post-war years. Their move came earlier than most – just on the eve of the war: ‘The local authority were rehousing, to redevelop the area. Where we had lived,
it was two up and two down, no bathroom, toilet in the yard . . . my sister remembers it vividly. She said the new house was like a palace. The toilet was at the back,
in
the porch, but we had a bathroom upstairs. There was a garden. It was cleaner, there was more open space, the amenities were so much better than the old place. Nowadays it’s talked about as a
sink estate, but it’s the people who make it what it is.’
⁸

There was a new sense of possibility, too. Not only had families like the Briddocks moved out from the centre of Sheffield; the promise of a free secondary education – an academic
education, for those who could pass the eleven plus – offered the possibility of social mobility, too. The 1944 Education Act had brought with it a free secondary education system with three
types of schools – secondary moderns, technical schools and grammar schools. The last, of course, was for those who could pass the eleven plus exam. Alan Briddock worked steadily for it, and
consequently found himself travelling across Sheffield every day – a walk, then a tram, then a bus – to Firth Park Grammar School, which had been recommended by the local vicar:
‘None of my friends from primary school went there, but down the road there were a couple of guys. My mother couldn’t afford the red coat and I just used to wear a red cap. I
wasn’t on my own in that respect.’

Alan’s sister Lilian had passed, too, but their mother couldn’t afford to send both of them. In general, Alan enjoyed it and did not feel he was different because he had not come
from a well-off family. But one incident remained with him through his life: ‘We were considered so poor we had vouchers for free boots. But once the head-teacher . . . took me into his
office and offered me a pair of shoes. They were women’s cuban heeled shoes. He had no idea of the embarrassment a young person would feel at that! I could see they were women’s shoes,
and this silly old guy . . . I was twelve or thirteen, and I was mortified. He thought he was giving me charity. If they’d been a decent pair of shoes I daresay I would have taken them
– I think I just said they wouldn’t fit me, and backed out of the room.’

Despite this, he was glad to have gone to Firth Park: ‘It having been a fee-paying grammar school, the teachers were out of the top bracket, they really were. They
were all graduates from university. There was a terrific English teacher – Doc Wood. I enjoyed it. Grammar school gave me the education that was required. Had I gone to a secondary modern
school, I would have gone into the steel works as a labourer.’

Others, like Michael Foreman, who grew up near Lowestoft and who later became a well-known illustrator and author of children’s books – was rather glad to have escaped the grammar
school system. ‘I used to cheat,’ he explained. ‘In the final year I sat next to Brenda Smith, who I thought was the bees’ knees, and she was good at maths and I
wasn’t. And in examination conditions you get found out.’
⁹

He remembers just one thing about the exam itself: ‘The whole affair was a blur at the time, but I remember the spelling part. One by one we had to go to the front of the class and stand
beside Oscar Outlaw, the teacher, as he sat at his desk. On the desk were several sheets of paper with columns of words. As he pointed to a word we had to read it. The only word I remember is the
word I had never seen or heard before. “Antiku,” I said. It was “antique”. There couldn’t have been many households in our village where antiques were part of tea-time
conversation, but if there were, those were the children the grammar school wanted.’
¹⁰

Michael Foreman’s feeling that the grammar school system was not set up for village boys like himself was not universal. Elsewhere, middle-class parents were feeling the pain. For every
working-class child who passed in through the gates of the grammar school, a middle-class child – whose parents would previously have paid fees – was left outside. A father calling
himself ‘Pater’ wrote an anguished letter to
The Times
in July 1945 complaining that there were no fewer than 1,000 hopefuls applying to Manchester Grammar School: ‘I am
prepared for some sacrifice to give my boy a good education, and
he in turn is anxious to learn, yet at the age of eleven his whole future is in jeopardy owing to rules and
regulations of the education authority . . . The country is going to lose in the long run because the children and the parents who have the interest and the desire to send their children to a
grammar school are not going to be able to, whereas children and parents who have not that interest are able to send their children on the result of an examination.’

There might even have been something in this view. Michael Foreman, having discerned that the eleven plus tended to favour boys who knew what antiques were, had no desire at all to pass it.
Everyone he knew was going to the secondary modern: ‘There were a few posh kids in the area but they went away to school, and they went away for holidays. They hardly existed for us at all.
We were the “common boys” they shouldn’t play with. We could spit further, pee higher.’
¹¹

Michael found himself in a borderline group, whose members had to undergo an interview. When his teacher told him the result he was overjoyed: ‘I ran from the room, bounded down the stairs
two at a time, which wasn’t allowed, and burst out through the doors into the sunshine. I leapt and jumped and whooped down the road after my friends. I hadn’t passed! I was going to
the secondary modern school with my mates. What a relief!’

Childhood in a Cold War

‘One day two strange boys arrived at school. One was very tall, the other had a very round face and startling white hair. We Pakefield boys had the usual very baggy
British knee-length trousers which made the backs of your legs sore in cold, wet weather, and long grey socks which always slipped down around our ankles. These strange boys had tight trousers,
hardly lower than their bums, and bright
white ankle socks . . . But there was something about the two strange boys which excited me. They had come from somewhere
else.’
¹²

No sooner had one war ended, it seemed, than others were breaking out. At Michael Foreman’s school in Lowestoft, the arrival of two strangers from Estonia made flesh of the news in the
papers – the borders of the Soviet Union were closing, and families like those of Michael’s friends, Rigo and Henno, were leaving before it was too late. There was trouble elsewhere,
too: Michael’s older brother, Ivan, was called up to go to Egypt during the Arab–Israeli war of 1948. The local station again became a place of sad goodbyes.
¹³

There were major compensations, though. While Ivan was gone, his girlfriend Brenda would take the young Michael to the pictures every Thursday evening. If children had had their way, the Cold
War would have been won before it had even started – by the Americans: ‘We loved all things American. All our movie heroes – cowboys, Indians, even Robin Hood and his merry men
– had American accents . . . I didn’t like Saturday morning pictures with all the singing or the films made specially for kids. My mates and I went on Saturday afternoons to the real
films. Hopalong Cassidy, who didn’t sing, and best of all Gabby Hayes, like a Wild West Father Christmas. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry always burst into song and we booed them.’

This was the golden age of Americana, and the cinema was its king. Picture-houses had moved on from the days when they were unruly fleapits where the children of the poor could keep warm on a
Saturday. Saturday-morning cinema was still a major event, but adults and children from all walks of life were now embracing the world of film. In 1946, eight out of ten people in Britain would
attend at some point during the year, and the weekly audience would reach an all-time peak of around 1.6 million.
¹⁴
And a very large part of that
audience consisted of children. A Mass Observation study in 1946
¹⁵
found that while one third of adults went to the cinema at least once a week,
the proportion of children who did so was twice as high.
Despite the growing respectability of the cinema, it was still predominantly a working-class leisure activity, with
the children of factory and clerical workers spending more time there than their middle-class contemporaries.

And there were comics, too. Again, Michael Foreman was among the lucky ones – his mother sold them in her shop, so he was able to read them first:
Film Fun
, the
Dandy
, the
Wizard
, the
Hotspur
and the
Rover
. ‘Later a new comic, Eagle, appeared but I didn’t like it. It was not daft enough.’
¹⁶
Most of these comics were perfectly innocent. But now, with the cultural dominance of America growing, there was a sense of unease about some of the material to which
children were gaining access. A history teacher named Peter Mauger reported, for example, that he had been horrified by the sight of a young boy on a train far more engrossed in his comic than he
would ever have been in a school book.
¹⁷

Teachers were in the vanguard of this minor moral panic of the early 1950s. One early campaigner was George Pumphrey, a junior school headmaster from Horsham in Sussex, who would rail against
this new habit children seemed to have formed of sneaking comics into school. His articles on the subject began appearing in
Teachers World
magazine, and the
Schoolmistress
, in 1948.
Soon the unions were involved, too. At the 1952 conference of the National Union of Teachers, no fewer than fourteen motions on the subject were tabled for debate. The church had its concerns, as
well. The
Eagle
, the comic so despised by Michael Foreman for not being ‘daft’ enough, was actually the brainchild of the Reverend Marcus Morris, who wrote: ‘Morals of
little girls in plaits and boys with marbles bulging in their pockets are being corrupted by a torrent of indecent coloured magazines that are flooding the bookstalls and
newsagents.’
¹⁸

Morris was talking about a strain of comic now being imported from the US, which would become universally known as the ‘horror comic’. An infamous example, cited in a campaigning
book on the
subject entitled
The Seduction of the Innocent
, was the
Grim Fairy Tales
, which were parodies of the well-known stories which included Sleeping
Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. The most controversial of these comics,
Foul Play
, featured a baseball player who was murdered and dismembered for some offence; his body parts were then used
as bats and balls in a game.

A successful campaign was waged, leading to a ban under the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, 1955. And the interests that combined to make this happen were not just
religious and educational. The Communists had an angle, too – Peter Mauger, the history teacher who was so shocked to see a boy enjoying a comic on a train, was in fact a member of the
British Communist Party, which had seen an opportunity to exploit anti-American feeling. It, too, flung itself into a campaign against the comics and in so doing brought the Cold War into the world
of children’s literature. The left had not been slow to spot the growing dominance of the United States in the lives of the British populace, and it hoped to put a stop to it. In these years,
the ideological struggle between left and right was not just about the big geopolitical blocks of the world, the US and USSR all-powerful with the smaller and less powerful countries lining up
behind the protective barricades of either one or the other. The Cold War was fought, too, in the world of culture. And nowhere more so than in the world of children’s culture. But there was
never any contest, so far as the children were concerned. On the one side was Soviet-style austerity, the work ethic, a world in black and white. On the other was the unstoppable machine of
American capitalism, in full colour, with music and lights.

To the young Michael Foreman, everything that came from America seemed strangely alluring – even the consumer goods that had little to do with childhood seemed bigger and shinier than the
things post-war Britain could make: ‘Magazines would have ads for the latest fridge, when nobody had fridges . . . you’d see the ideal
housewife, who would look
very American. Also there were the B movies on Saturday mornings – there was one called
Blondie
, which was also a strip in the newspapers at the time. A typical American family, living
in a typical American suburban street, with the front lawn and the picket fence. And the newspaper boy would cycle down the road and throw the newspaper into the front yard, because it never rained
in these films, it was always perfectly sunny. Then you’d get to see what their kitchens were like.’
¹⁹

Yet even the most pro-American youths knew it was OK to be anti-American on some fronts: ‘I had a ban the bomb symbol in my window – but people thought it was a Mercedes sign,’
Foreman recalled. ‘And I painted “Ban the bomb” on the police station in the middle of Lowestoft in the night. My Auntie Lou, who lived in the north end of the town, came to the
shop, saying: “Some fool painted ‘Ban the Bomb’ on the police station.” I went on the second Aldermaston march.’