Songs of Innocence (28 page)

And just as young women were beginning to wonder if there might be other options than a couple of years’ office work followed by marriage and children, another major problem was creeping
up on
the young: unemployment. Since the war, children growing up in Britain had had no cause to worry about what they would do when they left school because there were
always jobs available. In the 1970s, that began to change as the UK’s manufacturing sector began to shrink. By the last years of the decade, youth unemployment had become a constant spectre,
and a generation of children had begun to understand that their lives would lack some of the certainties their parents’ generation had enjoyed. Between 1971 and 1979, 600,000 manual jobs
disappeared from the British economy.
⁶
And at the same time, the number of children leaving school was growing. There had been an increase in
births in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and migrant workers from the Caribbean and from southern Asia, arriving to take up vacant manual jobs in times of full employment, had brought their
children too. The cohort which finished its compulsory education in 1980 would be the largest ever. About half that cohort – a much higher proportion than in other Western countries –
would expect to go straight into work rather than continuing in education. The result: thousands of unemployed teenagers, many of them angry and dispossessed. The inner-city areas where immigrant
communities lived were among those with the highest proportion of teenagers, and also among those where jobs were disappearing at the highest rate.
The Economist
pondered a question: was it
more dangerous, in terms of social unrest, to tolerate unemployment among the young than among adults? The answer was already clear: In the summer of 1981, riots broke out in impoverished areas of
London, Liverpool and Manchester. Four out of ten school leavers were able to find work; but for the black youth of the inner cities the chances were virtually nil.
⁷

Nor was it just the unemployed and impoverished young who were feeling alienated. The sense of grievance ran right through every stratum of society. Heather Montgomery, at her private
girls’ school in Surrey, picked up on it: ‘I got very interested in politics, which
wasn’t considered very respectable. I certainly had a strong sense of
injustice about being a child, and being a teenager and not being listened to and having very limited choices about what I wanted to do. It was a very academic school – the only choice was
about which university you went to. Polytechnics were not an option. I just did have the sense that I had absolutely no agency at all, and I pushed very hard to go to a sixth-form college –
but that wasn’t allowed. I did have this sense of unfairness, of always being told what to do, having no say over anything, having to wear a boater in the sixth form, those sorts of stupid
things.’

Life in the early eighties was political – and mostly it was political with a capital ‘P’. Heather Montgomery found herself caught up in it: ‘You had all the last great
causes. You had apartheid, you had Thatcher, you had pit strikes. I wanted to feel connected with those sorts of things even though I was a middle-class schoolgirl in Surrey. My crowning moment was
appearing on
Question Time
with Robin Day, asking about secondary picketing. I was interested in party politics and big issues. I wouldn’t have known a miner if one had bitten me on
the nose, but it was a cause I cared about.’
⁸

The older generation had failed to see this new politicization coming. ‘Youth have traditionally been seen but not heard,’ wrote Simon Frith in
Marxism Today
in
1981.
⁹
‘As the media’s bewildered response to the riots made clear, no one had been listening to youth’s rough music except the
young themselves. The young had been talked about more than ever in the last decade, but they had not been heard.’ While earlier generations of rebellious youth had been kicking against their
parents’ safe, comfortable lifestyles, this generation felt angry and let down. And the adult world began to feel a rising sense of panic.

Everywhere there seemed to be a sense of dislocation, a sense that old orders were breaking down and without any clear sense of what was to replace them. In his 1983 book,
The Disappearance
of
Childhood
, Neil Postman,
¹⁰
an American cultural critic, argued that television was largely to blame. In the past,
he said, children’s lives had a sort of hierarchy to them: learning to read was a process which could only be achieved, for example, by progressing from one stage to the next: ‘The
literate person must learn to be reflective and analytical, patient and assertive, always poised, after due consideration, to say “no” to a text. But with television, the basis of this
information hierarchy collapses. Television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood . . . first because it requires no instruction to grasp its form, second because it does not
make complex demands on either mind or behaviour, and third because it does not segregate its audience . . . The new media environment that is emerging provides everyone, simultaneously, with the
same information . . . electric media find it impossible to withhold any secrets. Without secrets, of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.’

Others were noticing similar phenomena. Adults were even beginning to ask a new and shocking question: what were children actually for? ‘At a time when we were confident that our work was
making their future brighter, it was easy to think of children as innocent and refreshing,’ wrote an American academic, John Sommerville.
¹¹
‘But we have always known that they could also be messy, tiresome and cruel . . . children are more obviously a liability nowadays.’ He quoted an American columnist, Ann Landers, who
found seven out of ten readers answering a poll had responded that if they had their time again they would not have children. ‘Our children now represent a time that will only have bigger
problems and not a better life . . . we may resent the fact that these little citizens of the future are already compounding all our problems – energy, food, employment, pollution,
crowding.’

After a century in which successive governments had urged the populace to reproduce, suddenly the accompanying sentimentality about children and childhood was beginning to break down. Women
began, in growing numbers, to confess that they were not in fact maternal: ‘Finally, we non child-oriented types are coming out of the closet,’ wrote Tricia
Stallings.
¹²
‘There is nothing wrong with not having children. The only wrong is when we, feeling as we do, have children as a result of
society’s pressures. Then we become unhappy parents producing unhappy children.’ Parenthood, she wrote with a sense of revelation, was a choice.

And yet in place of the old, sententious attitudes about children and their preciousness, a new feeling was beginning to grow. In the coming decades, parents would find themselves unable to
admit the truth about their situation – some of them weren’t even sure whether they wanted their children at all. This unease, underpinned by a deeply buried sense of guilt, would begin
to manifest itself in diverse and unpredictable ways – renewed waves of moral panic; exaggerated concerns about children’s health and wellbeing; increasingly strange stories about
danger and jeopardy surrounding children. And, as ever, regular outbreaks of opprobrium over the failings of the young. The problem was always in someone else’s home, someone else’s
neighbourhood. But there was little doubt, now, that there
was
a problem.

‘Babies are the enemy. Not your baby or mine, of course. Individually they are all cute. But together they are a menace,’ Sommerville wrote.
¹³
Child-rearing was about to become an increasingly uneasy, defensive business. Women would be unsure whether they should be at home, baking, or out at work, using their
education. Fathers would be unsure of the same thing, too. Having had children, and not being entirely sure why they had done so, parents would feel increasing pressure to share their company. If
children were to have no monetary value in the home, if the wider economy were to have little use for them once they had finished their increasingly pressured and expensive education, and if they
were to represent an increasingly unsustainable burden on the planet, then what
was the point of them? The answer which parents increasingly gave was that children would
have to be enjoyed for themselves. The next age of the child would be an age of over-enthusiastic parent–child relations. It would be an age, too, in which children would come under
increasing pressure to please their parents – to please them by succeeding at school; to please them by being amusing company; to please them by being more attractive, more successful, better
at everything than their parents’ friends’ children. The age in which children were a distinct grouping, left largely free to develop in one another’s company, was passing. In the
coming decades, intensity and pressure would be the bywords of the Western childhood.

Sex and scares

To the children of the 1970s and before, sex was generally still something rather remote and frightening. Mary Hudson, writing in the
Guardian,
¹⁴
had described her discomfort, on arriving at university during the 1960s, at the discovery that there were young men there who wanted to sleep with her. ‘Only
men who really knew me realised that I was still a terrified virgin who would go to any lengths to avoid seduction. I would carry a well-thumbed copy of
Winnie the Pooh
to parties and
produce it in times of stress. I found a heartfelt rendition of Eeyore’s Birthday would cool the ardour of most young men.’

By the early 1980s, though, things were beginning to change. Access to contraception had become easier for teenagers, and although the number of teenage pregnancies had fallen, the number of
abortions – legalized in 1967 – was continuing to rise. So it was hardly surprising, in an era of uncertainty, alienation and rapid social change, that promiscuity would be blamed for
many of society’s ills. There was some confusion, though, about the precise
nature of the problem. Were young girls becoming too promiscuous, even leading vulnerable
young boys into temptation? Or were they, themselves, the victims of a new world which was propelling them too fast into adulthood? In a parliamentary debate on the subject in the
mid-1980s,
¹⁵
Viscount Buckmaster argued that the latter was the case: ‘For many young girls, early sex is more than mere physical
gratification. It often leads to the awakening of the homemaking instinct; the longing for a child and for a fulfilling and permanent relationship. When those desires cannot be realised, depression
often sets in—leading in some cases even to attempted suicide.’

While early sexual activity could be dangerous for the individual girl, he went on, it was also dangerous for society as a whole. After all, rising divorce rates and increased levels of single
parenthood were already posing a threat to the social fabric. What hope was there if young girls – who, for the most part, had previously been relied upon to remain pure – were to be
damaged in this way? It seemed the Viscount, having worried aloud that early sex could plunge girls into disappointment and despair when marriage did not follow, was also worried that it might lead
them to stop worrying about getting married altogether: ‘The irresponsible attitude of many children today towards such conduct can hardly be the best preparation for marital fidelity. How
can those hasty, furtive fumblings in cars or in bedrooms, with an ear cocked for the parents’ return, help towards a stable marriage? For many young people today, hopping into bed with
anyone, at any time, is just as normal as turning on a tap. We are indeed paying a terrible price for our failure to give children proper guidance.’

Most conservatives agreed, though, that the liberal attitudes imbued into the young in the 1960s, and still allegedly being promoted in schools, were to blame. In the same debate, Baroness
Masham of Ilton added her voice to the rising chorus of alarm: ‘We have heard of a girl
aged eight years being involved with prostitution. I have asked many young
people why there is so much promiscuity. They blame the 1960s. What happened in the 1960s? The Abortion Act, among other things. There is now the escape from being pregnant . . . with the risk
gone, many young people seem to think that they should sleep around. They go along with the idea that it is the done thing to do.’ Both schools and the Church of England were blamed –
schools for promoting liberal attitudes; the church for failing to speak out more loudly about the collapse in the morals of the young.

The feeling was abroad that teenagers were too often busy having sex with one another – and that this was a dangerous new development. A rash of organizations grew up aimed at trying to
shore up the allegedly fast-collapsing traditional family: the Parliamentary Family and Child Protection Group, Family and Youth Concern – otherwise known as the Responsible Society,
Christian Action Research Education Campaigns, Moral Rearmament, the Christian Broadcasting Council, the National Council for Christian Standards in Society, the Conservative Family Campaign
– the list went on. Some campaigners, however, preferred to fight their battles alone. By the mid-1980s one woman in particular would come to personify the rising sense of panic on the
Christian right about the morals of the nation’s youth: Victoria Gillick. A mother of ten, Mrs Gillick had demanded an assurance of her local health authority in Cambridgeshire that it would
not offer contraception to any of her daughters without first asking her permission. When the health authority refused to give any such assurance, she took it to court. The case went all the way to
the House of Lords.

The liberal
Guardian
newspaper’s leader-writer conceded, in the face of an appeal court’s decision in Mrs Gillick’s favour, that many young people were indeed having
sex: as many as one in twenty, the paper said. Some might even stop doing so rather than have their doctor ask their parents whether or not they should
be allowed
contraception. Many more would simply take risks and end up pregnant. The paper went on to point out that a majority of mothers actually believed in sex before marriage, and so might well allow
their daughters to go on the pill. And then it hit the nail on the head. In effect, this was not a case about teenage sex at all: ‘The court’s judgement is a searching exposition of the
legal rights of parents . . . in effect, Mummy knows best.’
¹⁶
The Law Lords did not agree, and finally in 1985 they ruled that it would
indeed be lawful for a doctor to prescribe contraception for a child under sixteen without consulting her parents.