I have been reading a lot of online articles (mostly from established British hard publications such as the Independent and the New Statesman) about the Britsh baby boom and it appears that in fourteen yeas of living in the United States I have become brainwashed! Now there's a surprise...
Speaking from memory alone, I recall that as a child at Primary school in the 1960's, the school was not big enough to accommodate the numbers of children it had to serve. The building was only built in the previous decade, yet by the time I was in my fourth and final year they had added two or three "temporary" classrooms (ie on a permanent foundation but built with wood, not brick like the rest of the school) and three "mobile" classrooms (or "huts") which were parked in the corner of the playground. Forty years later, the temporary classrooms are still there, and so is one of the original "mobiles". (That dates me right there - a mobile used to refer to a classroom not a phone!.)
I remember my mother referring to the increased and rising birthrate not as a "boom" but as a "bulge" and indeed I was very much aware of being in that bulge. Even with an alphabetically ordered register in class and the girls being several places down the list from the boys, I was number 40 when we called out our numbers, and I was only halfway through the girls list.
I have over the past twenty years or so come to realise that much of what is on tv is what I am interested in. My kind of humour, my kind of drama, etc. Could be a boom-effect but more likely that until this year I fell right into that demographic that advertisers want to appeal to. This is - or was - less apparent in the UK than it is here in the US, but it is obvious that over there I was part of a bulge which was amused by both Morecambe & Wise and Monty Python and while I thnk the range of entertainment which was offered in the UK when I lived there had cross-generational appeal, in the US the elderly and the very young are neglected on network television.
Now it is clear that the boomers are back in the demographic in a different way - luxury cars and retirement options are being marketed at them (strange to hear what used to be called "progressive" music being played in commercials) but in ten years when I am 60, those early boomers will be too old and I will still be too poor.
It is true, that as a baby born in England in the 1950's I benefitted from free milk, free education right through college, free health care and was brought up to expect that it would always be so. Now my contemporaries in the UK are coming to realise that "from the cradle to the grave' only applies if you die before you retire. We don't see our future suffering from poverty and neglect in our old-age because we were taught from birth that "the authorities" would take care of those in need. Our parents were taught to respect authority because of the war (WW2); one did as one was told without question. We were brought up the same way although unlike our parents, we rebelled. However we only rebelled mildly. Teenagers argued with their parents but eventually gave in to the higher authority; those born before us became hippies and joined protest and peace marches. We did a bit of that, but not so much because... well there wasn't much point was there?
I am - or was - sandwiched between hippies and punk-rockers. The hippies were pretty much gone in the UK by the end of 1971, and the punk movement started when I was at college in about 1976. So for the four intervening years we had what people have been pleased to call the era of bad taste. I wore smocks, long flowery skirts, brown corduroy, platform shoes, mini skirts, long-sleeved shirts with short-sleeved jumpers over the top and as schoolgirls we wore tights ("panty-hose" came to England just as my friends and I turned 12 and started to be allowed to wear nylons to school) with knee-high socks over them. Grey tights mostly.
I also wanted anything I could get hold of that had sparkle and glitter (which was mostly the kind of glitter that was glued to Christmas cards) because this was also the age of Gary Glitter, David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust & Alladin Sane), Alvin Stardust, Slade and the Sweet. We cultivated straighter than straight page-boy haircuts with not a hair out of place, we wore clean and freshly-ironed clothes with creases down the fronts of our jeans (if we even had any) and Oxford Bags. Some of us would get a "shaggy perm" and others, whose parents were not liberal enough to allow their sons to grow long hair, wore a long fringe and made up for their follicular fauxs-pas by wearing extra trendy clothes.
I was a wanne-be hippy but I enjoyed the glam-era. Like my friends I was rather baffled that the "teeny-boppers" that bopped up behind us in the discos, swooning over the Bay City Rollers and Little Jimmy Osmond should also spawn a group that didn't iron their jeans wore safety-pins!
My introduction to the punk lifestyle occurred at college, at the beginning of my seond year in 1976. There was a student who I had seen around and vaguely knew but hadn't really spoken to him before. We were at an evening folk club event and he was there with a hole in the knee of his jeans held together with a safety-pin. My friend asked him why he didn't sew up the hole instead of leaving it pinned together. To us a safety pin was something that was used in an emergency and was to be hidden and here he was wearing one in full view where most of us would be ashamed to be seen with one. We obviously didn't get it and sadly we never did. I remember pogo-ing at my friend's 21st birthday party a year or so later, by which time I was clearly "past it". I did it for a laugh, not because it was something me and my friends did for real... that was something for the teenagers jsut behind us.
Now I am listeneing to "Teenage Kicks" and realising that there was a lot of good music out there in the late 70s and early 80s that I simply ignored because it was different from the glam and rock music I had listened to as a teenager. I still don't like all punk music - or new wave or alternative or whatever label it had, but I find I ilke a lot of it and, most importantly, I realsie that those kids who liked it at the time were no more than three or four years younger than me which isn't such a big age-gap now as it was then.
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