FOUR


ONCE MORE INTO THE BREECH, DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE 


But looking over this childhood I am left wondering whether the fact that both Colin and I went into different kinds of ‘national service’ in the “front line’ had as much to do with these years before Crotch Crescent became a conflict zone as the obvious impact of that unhappy period.


And in a very real way I believe that the Smart family got caught up in wider historical forces. 

One of the weaknesses of the ‘Brave New World’ of the Welfare State was that it institutionalised the unemployment or underemployment that had been such a problem between the wars in a way that had been put forward by Robert Owen in 1815 in his ‘Plan’.


Robert Owen had risen to become the manager then owner of a huge cotton mills in Scotland, which had expanded dramatically during 20 years of war. But peace was going to be a challenge to his firm because, as Owen could see, three or four great complexes like his using the latest technology could produce everything that the people of Europe could desire. This would mean that lots of people would not need to work. But Owen’s answer was that such firms would make so much money that they could pay taxes which would allow ‘the surplus population’ to be settled in “Rural colonies”, where they would live in a kind of supervised and managed state of what we might call ‘occupational therapy’. Ten years or so later volunteers went out to start to build “New Harmony” settlements in the USA, which ran vaguely on ‘Owenite’ lines as long as he had enough money to subsidise them.


“Owenite” principles were very influential among the intellectuals of the Labour movement of the Attlee generation; and the Welfare State was an adaptation of Owen’s ‘New Society’ concept. For adult men [ 21-65 year olds] there would be no unemployment and two years National Service would take the 18-20 year olds out of the job market. Women, of course, did not count in aim for ‘full-unemployment’ either: for though women had been conscripted into war work, that was usually seen as just standing-in for the men: and with the Welfare State providing social security, health and education for their families women were supposed to be free to create dream homes in a brand new ‘home of their own’ often far away from any friends and family.


As for children, children of ‘working class’ families had always worked in one way or another, and even compulsory schooling that had limited this sent twelve-year olds like our parents ‘out to work’. But now especially in the semi-detached suburban estates (a) there was little or no economic activity for ‘working children’ to help out with (b) children were now required to attend school up to the age of 15 (something that June recalls with some frustration since she had to spend an extra year effectively doing nothing, because the school did not yet have a syllabus to teach: and (c) eventually, when 15 year olds did go out to work in the “They’ve never had it so good” conditions of the Welfare State taking care of their families, increasingly these ‘teenagers’ had leisure time and money that people of their age had never had before.    


In short it was a massive experiment in Social Engineering with the British people a guinea pigs and it had disastrous consequences, though, like nuclear tests that now went underground, the most violent impact and the consequences were suppressed and largely hidden from view by what we now recognise as being addictive drugs.


The huge ‘nationalised’ men- only work structures supported, and were supported by, a prevalent culture of fags and beer and gambling, so that lots of wild talk never got much further than the pub and or the football stadium. The lonely, underemployed British housewife got by on large quantities of aspirin and a very large NHS bill for sleeping pills and ante-depressants. Children got by on a regular intake of sugar based ‘sweets’, gradually moving on to the adult drugs of cigarettes and alcohol in an emerging teenage culture of Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll.

Sociologists acknowledged this new reality in the significance of the “delayed gratification” that distinguished ‘the middle class’ from ‘the working class’ masses.


The ‘new post-1945 world order’ was going to keep ‘the masses’ quiet by making sure that they got their regular ‘fix’ in addition to ‘the establishment’ making sure that their basic ‘human needs’ were met.


But the ‘middle class’ had become, in effect, the governing class because they saved, and invested and worked for the future, all three of these coming together in the key indicator, the buying a house and home.


Of course such scientific disciplines accept that “It is the exception that proves the rule” and our parents had bought their house on a mortgage: and “delayed gratification” was very much the order of the day in a household that stayed loyal to the earlier mid-Victorian aspirations of working people in the age of the “New Model Trade Unions”, whose members saved, and invested and worked for the future inspired by ideas of ‘self-improvement’ and “progress”. So our Dad was always working not least on his various inventions, perhaps the ultimate form of investment. And our Mum was no classic bored suburban housewife for most of our childhoods when she was still ‘economically active’ in the centuries old West Country ‘domestic system’.  As centuries before a merchant ‘put out’ the raw material in the form of the pre-cut pieces that were then sewed together into leather gloves in the worker’s home, the gloves then being packed into a parcel that was left on the front step, where the merchant collected it and left a new pack of materials.


So our back room was a ‘workhouse’, as in its own way was the large garage that Dad built at the end of the garden, for we were more a “Jack of all trades” than a mere DIY and “Make do and mend” family. But there was an inherent weakness in such industriousness and ‘sobriety’, when the post-war emphasis on national collectivism and community spirit declined, not least, perhaps because soon we were hearing all about yet another German economic miracle, which was no more welcome news to the British working classes than the first.


With so much coverage of the outbreak of the First World War a hundred years ago it is interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that there has been no mention of the very hostile public attitude towards Germany in the build-up years with a growing feeling that the British people would have to fight someone for their very survival, perhaps most obviously, but almost unthinkably, this new Germany with yet another European monarchy that wanted to ‘rule the world’


In the 1949 edition of “The Common People” G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate said that the courage shown between 1940 and 1945 had “silenced much chatter about British decadence”. That chatter had begun to be whispered before the Great War, and during the Fifties, as West Germany led the economic revival and reconstruction of Western Europe, Britain became associated with “The British Disease” of slow growth and weaker economic performance: and it was common to hear people saying that anyone would think that it was US who had lost the war.

In this age of “The Angry Young Man” and “Kitchen sink” dramas when Dad’s social activism became focussed on ‘bingo- calling’ in various Community Centres, where people came for a night out away from the TV and the new world of home entertainment, which turned social isolation into something positive.


And generally our family life was based upon ‘keeping going’ on track towards a better future, but without any effective support or cooperation as far as I could see then or can remember now. I suppose my own ‘life-saving’ factors were (a) being locked into my ambition to get to university to study History and (b) the fact that, having worked as a Christmas Post Office ‘special’ in 1959, I could buy a Burton’s suit and take up both ballroom dancing lessons and Church attendance. But, when things just ‘got too much’ for Mum she would pick up her shopping bag and walk out the door muttering about the possibility of throwing herself into the river off of one of Oxford’s many bridges. Dad retreated to his garage or the allotment, in either with recourse to his cigarettes, and when things really came to a crisis he packed a suitcase and walked out.


And these were possibly more than usually dangerous times for people living in conditions of the kind of social isolation that the Welfare State institutionalised.  In Robert Bolt’s early Sixties play “A Man For All Seasons”, based on William Roper’s life of his father-in-law Sir Thomas More, there is a scene in which More says ‘I think none harm. I mean none harm. I do none harm and if this not be enough to keep a man alive in England, then truly I long not to live”.


But, as More discovered, not meaning any harm or doing any harm to anyone else is no guarantee that malicious people will not decide to do you harm, for, in fact, for some people you become an obvious and easy target as a loner with no ‘back up’, who will not fight back, as both Colin and I had discovered at school.


But the working life and careers of the three Smart children seem to have been shaped by “the gospel of industry” and a belief in willingly undertaking hard work towards worthwhile ends at a time when the German people were showing the world what “national reconstruction” and “rebuilding” were all about, while Britain became associated with ‘wild cat strikes’ and industrial disputes like ‘working to rule’ and ‘sending to Coventry’.


Each of the three of us seems to have, sooner or later, surprised, and at times unsettled some of those whom we worked with over the intensity, the quality, and the sheer productivity of our output, as well as our degree of applied intelligence and our capacity to manage ourselves and our work. This was perhaps reflected in the ‘good wishes’ I received on retirement from my last but one Headteacher, by then retired, who wrote to me that “I could be a pain”. But she had some years before introduced me to a guest from Head Office as the member of staff who made her heart sink when she saw my hand go up in a meeting. She knew that I would always take the discussion in a different direction from the one she had intended, and to her credit, she added “And with hindsight he was usually right”.


My colleagues, who had quickly given me a special joke award for “putting my head above the parapet”, in contrast with the way that they just kept theirs down and kept out of trouble in the face of this rather domineering lady, never understood how we could be quite amicable. But then she was in many ways an ‘old school’ Scot with the kind of driving character that had ‘taken over’ Britain and powered the growth of the British Empire, and she recognized someone with a similar capacity and a basically similar old-fashioned view about the way that education should empower our pupils. But, in addition to things I did that she found ‘questionable’, in a school where she devolved more or less no power, it was her job to take note of and act upon complaints from fee-paying parents and their children. And inevitably there were one or two because, as an ex-pupil recently in-boxed me on Facebook I was one of the “stand out teachers”, who taught her to think for herself and to take control of her own life.  Some people are just in it for the ride, even parents who just expect a school to churn out a uniform and predictable product line 


Not everyone appreciates something and someone different, which is perhaps an appropriate point to stop looking back and to think of the imminent arrival of our first grandchild, ‘of whom we know nothing’, apart from the fact that Smart genes will be in there somewhere.