http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/26/catherine-bennett-50s-nostalgiaNot satisfied by the consolations of Call the Midwife, Julian Fellowes, Upstairs Downstairs and the ever-increasing number of inanimate objects urging them to Keep Calm and Carry On, incurably wistful baby-boomers are circulating an email in which they Downtonise another bygone age: their childhoods.
"Congratulations to all my friends who were born in the 1940s, 50s and 60s," begins this friendly, if undiscriminating tribute to an era in which, you gather, everybody was too busy making dens or taunting fatties to want to sit indoors, circulating viral emails. Forwarded around the net for months, this now ubiquitous document features a list of childhood-related experiences that are all presented explicitly, or by implication, as superior to the present day, however immediately unprepossessing. For instance: "We ate white bread and real butter; drank cows' milk and soft drinks with sugar; but we weren't overweight because... we were always outside playing!"
The stories you need to read, in one handy email
Read more
Even vintage injuries could teach you something. "We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. And we ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, too." And at least, if you succumbed to botulism or a particularly bad bout of rickets, you could be mourned by a respectable nuclear family, this being before the invention of latch-key kids and class-based resentment. "Mum didn't have to go to work to help Dad to make ends meet because we didn't need to keep up with the Joneses!"
Yes, here, in a single, entirely positive document, we have the long-awaited corrective to such unsettling accounts as Kes, A Taste of Honey and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. As for Philip Larkin, what was his problem? Everyone else was happy. "We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility and we learned how to deal with it all".
Or as the makers of Kes put it: "They beat him. They deprived him. They ridiculed him. They broke his heart. But they couldn't break his spirit." And, to be fair, at least Kes's tragic owner wasn't gay. But maybe that wasn't actually so bad, either, if you were there? By conflating the 40s, 50s and 60s into an era of uninterrupted, healthful, intergenerational harmony, this enthusiastically shared document casts doubt on many less glowing accounts of the period, from the diaries of Joe Orton, the films of Lindsay Anderson and any number of misery memoirs, to more scientific studies of poor public health and inferior longevity. "We survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank sherry while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos," writes the unnamed internet historian. "They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, bread and dripping, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer."
Who can have written it? Despite its fatuous Boy's Own obsessions and respect for old school teachers who "hit us with canes, gym shoes and threw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren't concentrating", the unambitious prose and barely suppressed bigotry – "only girls had pierced ears" – rule out authorship by the sophisticated educationalist, Michael Gove; moreover, there is nothing here about Latin, Our Island Story or yachts. And even with his sly introduction of cervical cancer and pervasive contempt for health and safety, the author is unlikely to be Paul Dacre or one of his staffers. After it appeared in the Daily Mail last week, the centrepiece of a 50s celebration, as "When we was brung up proper!", this tribute to a time when "political correctness was unheard of" was promptly reprinted, verbatim, in the Sun, along with its final instruction to "forward it to your children, so they will know how brave their parents were".
At this point, you wonder if some unemployed troublemaker from the boomerang generation has alighted on ostentatious smuggery as the ideal catalyst to convert savage resentment over the baby-boomers' houses, jobs and pensions into murderous intent. How does it feel, after all, for the younger generation to learn, from this literal nostalgie de la boue, that even postwar worms were tastier?
What makes this memoir and its popularity so striking, even with panic about toxic childhood at its current high level, is a curiously perverse kind of yearning that will celebrate virtually anything – air guns, injuries, mud, failure – in its determination to rubbish an allegedly inferior and over-regulated present (except when it comes to lax opening hours and year-round sale of Easter eggs).
To this end, the anonymous author and his red-top vectors are obviously at some trouble to suppress, or exonerate, the more glaring deficiencies of the recent past. In Downton's case, a shortage of living witnesses helped smooth the Kitchener-Fellowes fiction that ignorance and subjection in a stately home could be a marvellously warm and fulfilling experience. But that so many children of the 40s, 50s and 60s should want to replace their recent, lived history with a similarly false or sanitised version is weird: as if, say, Fellowes hankered to be middle-class again or Charles Dickens had decided that the blacking factory had, after all, been a blessing in disguise.
Only someone very unsettled by the present could look back, in longing, on upbringings in the 40s, 50s or 60s that featured, for huge numbers, cold, illness, dirt, outside lavatories, pain, shameless bullying, bigotry, unending domestic drudgery, coal fires, hand-washing, hideous food, unending trudges to and from school, the 11+, abject secondaries, snobbery, corporal punishment, teachers who might be any or all of sadistic, lecherous, useless and idle, sexual ignorance, disapproval of difference, fear of pregnancy, illegal abortions and, to a degree that is today unimaginable, crushing boredom, occasionally relieved towards the end by Carry On! films or – with similarly lubricious commentary – Miss World.
True, a high survival rate from an age that smelled, all winter, of wet wool and boiling handkerchiefs has shown that children can live just as well without costly rights and self-esteem as they did without tonsils, holidays, avocados, hot running water, pain relief for fillings and – give or take, survival of the fittest – vaccination for common diseases. Discouraged from prideful ambition, even educated girls probably went more willingly into their family's service or were satisfied, as instructed, by jobs in nursing and teaching.
In the Yorkshire suburb where I grew up, divorcees, like black people and gays – unless you counted Kenneth Williams – had yet to be invented. If they had been, I'm sure many residents would have dealt with them as capably as they did with local Jews, who were, according to hallowed suburban tradition, excluded from the golf club.
Happy days! Still, you could argue, why not improve on it? Psychologists say nostalgia can be good for you. And if it works for the boomers, today's neets need only wait a few decades before they look back and discern in their present difficulties what was actually a glorious era of generous benefits, character-building job applications and the tremendous comradeship of living in the big society.