Songs of Innocence (25 page)

In 1961,
The Times
reported that a young man named Jonathan Phillips from Surrey had been remanded in custody after being caught in possession of fifty ‘cannabis cigarettes’.
‘He had taken hemp cigarettes to parties instead of a bottle of drink, but sometimes took a bottle as well. The parties were mostly attended by teenagers and often one did not know who was
giving the party.’ Jonathan Phillips, it emerged, was considered very bright but had dropped out of school and had become ‘a source of much distress to his parents’. His father,
the paper reported, feared he was becoming part of the ‘Beatnik fraternity’. The judge told Phillips his was one of the most serious cases of the kind that had come before him:
‘Not only from your own point of view but from that of the young men and women who might have come under the influence of this drug which you were growing and manufacturing. The evidence here
displays, in our view, that there are probably no depths of degradation to which the human personality in young people cannot sink when they come under the influence of something like
this.’

There was bound to be a backlash against the more liberal atmosphere that was beginning to cling to the life of the young. And the new freedoms teenagers had gained were beginning to cause
discomfort, not to say consternation, in some quarters. There would be plenty more for social conservatives to worry about as the decade wore on. A few years later, Peter
Popham, at school in north London, would stop going to Sunday school and begin secretly smoking the occasional joint: ‘Before long I was taking LSD with friends. Just sort of buying into the
whole “underground”, as we called it. But I was slightly too young to be part of what was going on, being conscious that I was on the fringes, peering in through the window.’ At
sixteen, he and a friend went up to town to the hippy-oriented Middle Earth Club, but felt their short hair marked them out as distinctly uncool.

Everywhere the less-than-liberal part of the adult world looked during the 1960s, it seemed to find young people doing things of which it could not approve. In February 1960, Lord Saltoun told
the House with some consternation that sexual activity was now rife among teenagers. ‘Fifty years ago when I was living in Hackney I do not remember that these fashions prevailed among
children, although people were living far more on top of one another than today,’ he said. The cause of the trouble was clear: sex education was being taught in schools: ‘I do not think
this kind of instruction is suitable for classes . . . I am convinced that a lot of this misbehaviour among juveniles is due to this cause.’

Something was certainly going on. The teenage pregnancy rate was rising to an alarming level, doubling between 1955 and 1970 to fifty births for every 1,000 girls aged between fifteen and
nineteen.
²⁴
Yet most girls, if asked, would still express quite conventional views about sex. A
Guardian
journalist interviewing a group
of schoolgirls in 1970
²⁵
remarked that ‘you can hear their mothers’ voices behind them’: ‘Susan wouldn’t get
pregnant. That wouldn’t be fair to her mum . . . It’s funny, she says. When she was younger she couldn’t think how anyone could. Now if she’s out with a boy she really
likes. You know. The others don’t say much. Lynne, in a small voice, says that those pictures in the biology room, of babies being born, put
you off. They’re all
silent. “Still, it’s fulfilling, having a baby, isn’t it?” says Susan. They cheer you up. Oh, yes. They’d all like to get married and have babies one day. They
don’t know what they’re going to do till then.’

But despite this conventional response, there were many places where the younger generation, having begun to form its own identities outside the classroom, was beginning to test the boundaries
within schools as well. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a whole series of episodes of radicalism, quickly squashed but widely discussed, were to break out. In April 1971, the Obscene
Publications Squad moved in on the offices of a small publisher named Stage 1 Ltd, in Theobald’s Road in London. Their target was
The Little Red School Book
, a slim volume which had
sold 500,000 copies in mainland Europe and which was now being published in the United Kingdom with a print run of 20,000. The book, first published in Denmark, was written in a plain, informative
style. It contained useful tips on how to complain about a teacher and how to organize a demonstration or a strike. It appeared to condone the use of illegal drugs, and advocated the sale of
contraceptives in schools. The case would immediately send both liberals and conservatives running for the barricades: on the one side, a flamboyant Tory MP named Sir Gerald Nabarro and the
anti-indecency campaigner Mary Whitehouse; on the other, the National Council for Civil Liberties and the eminent barrister John Mortimer. As the trial of the publisher, a twenty-seven-year-old
named Richard Handyside, progressed, the papers were full of the story. Mrs Whitehouse railed that the book was ‘a revolutionary primer’: ‘Children were constantly exhorted to
collect evidence against teachers of alleged injustices or anything which was likely to enhance revolution.’ Mrs Whitehouse declared herself ‘very relieved’ when Mr Handyside was
fined £50, but the book continued to circulate.
²⁶
Perhaps a partial clue to these episodes of apparent
radicalism,
though, was the reaction of more liberal adults. ‘The crux of the matter is that the book encourages children to question the “system”, and to organize themselves to fight it when
it begins to crush and mould them,’ a Mrs Stella Robinson from Surrey wrote to the
Guardian
.
²⁷
‘I have read the Little Red
School Book, and thought it absolutely first rate.’ The truth was that liberal parents – and there were a growing number of them – rather liked having their children exposed to
radical ideas. In fact, where the book did land among the young, it largely failed to inflame. In one conservative Manchester school, pupils were given the book to discuss in a lesson, the
Guardian
reported.
²⁸
‘There was a great deal of laughter and a general agreement that it was naïve rubbish which would appeal
only to middle-class revolutionaries.’

So, what was going on? Were books such as
The Little Red School Book
, or the sex education film
Growing Up
, which caused shock waves in May 1971 with its graphic portrayals of
masturbation and orgasm, inspired by some new radicalism among children, some desire to shock? Or were they really aimed at adults who quite liked the idea that their children might be radicalized
by such material? In December 1971, there was another row – this time over a magazine called
Children’s Rights
. The magazine had published a communiqué from the
Children’s Angry Brigade, which exhorted the young to ‘unscrew locks, smash tannoys, paint blackboards red, grind all the chalk to dust’. One of those who responded to a
Guardian
article on this development was A. S. Neill, founder of the progressive Summerhill school in Suffolk, who introduced himself as an editorial adviser to the new publication but
confessed he had not read it ‘owing to the small print’. Neill was eighty-eight years old at the time. ‘I am all for children’s rights: the right to reject the barbarous
cane, the right to have some say in their studies, the right to wear what they like. But sabotage is not the answer,’ he wrote.
²⁹

At around the same time, the National Council for Civil Liberties, founded in 1934 to promote human rights, decided to hold a conference to champion the rights of the
child. Parents should run their homes in a way sympathetic to their children’s lifestyles, the organization suggested, and should even allow their children to have a degree of sexual freedom.
The very notion drew an angry response from some quarters. One correspondent to
The Times
felt the whole idea was ridiculous:
³⁰
‘What are they trying to do? Destroy parental authority? . . . We can already see the results of lack of parental control in the troublesome youths and students of today . . . They should get
their heads out of the clouds and start exercising some genuine responsibility to society as a whole.’

There certainly was radicalism among children, even though much of it was encouraged by adults. Peter Popham, attending a large, cosmopolitan school in north London, tended to avoid the small
clique of Trotskyists who had a habit of cornering their fellow-pupils in corridors ‘to preach rebellion’. These people were not regarded as cool by their peers. But Peter did begin
reading alternative magazines –
International Times
and
Oz
.
Oz
had started out in 1963 as an Australian satirical magazine, but in England, where it was published from
1967, it quickly became essential reading for anyone who wanted to be associated with the hippy scene. Its brightly coloured psychedelic covers quickly became collectors’ items. By 1970,
though, the magazine was facing criticism that it was losing touch with the young. In response, its editors decided to invite ‘school kids’ to edit an issue. Peter Popham, who had been
trying to inject ‘a slightly hippy dippy thing’ into his school magazine, took up the challenge. ‘I thought this would be fantastic, but having got myself there, I didn’t
really know what I wanted to do,’ he said. ‘I ended up writing a couple of record reviews. I wasn’t angry about anything. It was no good pretending I was. It was just a wonderful
thing in its own right, to be part of the group that produced
Oz
.’
³¹
The issue, which was
hammered out in a
basement flat in Notting Hill and which contained a pornographic Rupert Bear cartoon, soon caught the eye of the Obscene Publications Squad. The law moved in – this was not the first such
raid on the Oz office – and Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson were all charged with corrupting public morals. The case became the longest obscenity trial in history, with John
Mortimer, barrister and later author of
Rumpole of the Bailey
, defending, the comedian Marty Feldman giving evidence along with the jazz musician George Melly, and John Lennon marching in
protest. The three were cleared but were convicted of lesser charges – later overturned on appeal.
³²
By then, Peter Popham had left school
and gone travelling in the Middle East, so he was not in London for the trial. ‘I was in touch with them by post, and sent a long article on spec about hippy dystopia in Eilat, in southern
Israel. I was just delighted and relieved when they decided not to call me as a witness.’

The
Oz
trial was sparked not by children’s radicalism, but by the decisions of the adults who ran the magazine. And, inevitably, the ideological battle over childhood in 1970s
Britain would be as polarized as the adult battles that were concurrently raging over class, race and gender. But as the decade drew to a close, one particular idea was gaining strength: children
were, like immigrants, like women, like the workers, an oppressed minority. Their consciousness had not yet been raised; but once it was, they could be freed to fly in their own idiosyncratic ways
to a brighter, better future. Writing in 1979, an academic called Martin Hoyles would argue that the popular image of the child had changed little since Victorian times: ‘It is typified at
Christmas in the image of the babe in the manger who grows into Charles Wesley’s “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” . . . Particularly at Christmas, children are celebrated
sentimentally as playthings.’
³³
Yet the very fact that academics were beginning to examine the way in which children were viewed by the
adult world was an indication that the wind of change was blowing. By
now, a wealth of Marxist and feminist literature had built up around the notion that childhood was but
an oppressive social construct, a tool of the capitalist or the patriarchal system. Hoyles’ book included a chapter by the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone, entitled ‘Down with
Childhood’: ‘Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath . . . The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of
this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of
women without also discussing the liberation of children, and vice versa. We must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution.’ Firestone saw childhood as a kind
of apartheid, invented by adults to bind children to the family unit, and claimed the use of animal terminology to describe children – mice, rabbits, kittens – was part of this
machinery of oppression: ‘The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF . . . Gone are the days of Huckleberry Finn: Today the malingerer or dropout has a full-time job just in warding off the
swarm of specialists studying him, the proliferating government programs, the social workers on his tail.’

The current radical thinking, then, saw childhood not just as something invented by adults but as a tool they were using to keep their offspring in check. The idea that childhood was the
happiest phase of life, for example, was a fantasy shared by adults who wanted to believe at least one part of their own lives had been free from drudgery, anxiety and ill-health. This view
contrasted with the notion that sentimentality about children was actually becoming a sort of substitute for economic value, which had dwindled as the child’s role had changed from that of
wage-earner to that of scholar.

Meanwhile, the French philosopher Michel Foucault was drawing comparisons between schools, prisons and asylums:
³⁴
‘Madness is
childhood.’ Hoyles added that the comparison was ‘brought home
forcefully’ by the knowledge that the city of Omaha was dosing children with
amphetamine-type substances in order to control their behaviour, and that hyperactive children in Britain were being similarly drugged.