We who grew up with very little following the second world war were in many ways fortunate. You could say that our general misfortune concerning the troubled time in which we were conceived was in itself providential and paved the way for the resilience that accompanied it because no matter which way you viewed it, we were a remarkably robust bunch. For example, at a most basic level it was accepted during those times that only girls cried. Boys did a sterling job of controlling the urge to do so even under extreme circumstances. By the time boys were five years old most of them were in total control of such displays of emotion and tears were reserved for the home, witnessed primarily by mothers and siblings because crying in the presence of fathers did not earn a boy much kudos. The only boy I knew who was known to weep on a regular basis was Colin Bardoe and he was frequently reduced to tears if a game did not proceed to his liking. His twin, Alan, was not given to the same weakness but then Alan was a different sort of boy altogether.
On the other hand, many girls, and I was one of them, were prone to tears at the slightest provocation. This did not mean that we were inclined to a general weakness of spirit, however, because overall we were just as emotionally sturdy as our brothers. Possibly this was simply what was expected of us in order that we should be able to cope with the ups and downs of daily life, the first of which may well have been starting school. Few under-fives were able to adjust to the idea of starting school by cutting their teeth at supervised playgroups. There was no such thing as visiting a local classroom prior to the day we were due to start, for a more gentle introduction. Usually we were simply thrust into the education experience without much warning and expected to acclimatize. After a great deal of hysteria from many of us, acclimatize we did. Savage though it may appear to today’s parents, such expectation did at least begin the process of preparing us for the fact that life was likely to throw some nasty surprises our way. The future would undoubtedly involve setbacks infinitely worse than being plonked unceremoniously within a strange room, alongside a dozen or more other wailing five year olds safely in the charge of a responsible adult called The Teacher.
By the end of our first school year we had learned that some of us had a reasonable aptitude for education and others did not. Those who mastered the first Readers with ease and learned to write in sentences with capital letters and full stops placed correctly were told we were Clever. Pressure was placed upon those unfortunates who could not Keep Up and a few children stayed in the Infants’ Class for another year so by the time we were six years old we knew they were not Clever and often were even described as Slow. This was the fate of poor Alan Spooner who spent a great deal of time pretending to be a steam train in his second year of school in 1946. The unfortunate terminology that surrounded academic progress has long been abandoned of course and even by the 1960s the Clever children had become Antelopes and the Slow ones Tortoises. In 1972 my oldest son emerged from his first few months at a school in Auckland and proudly announced that he was a Bear and all the children who could not read the first Janet and John book were Monkeys; he was very glad not to be in the latter category and despite his tender years fully understood the implications.
At St Botolph’s in the late 1940s quite a lot of playground bullying took place, particularly between groups of boys and those exposed to it were expected to find coping strategies without resorting to involving adults. Fights between boys took place on a daily basis and winners were lauded whilst the teaching staff appeared not to notice the level of barbarity. It was definitely a time of Winners and Losers and it would have been unthinkable to institute games where this was not the case. When Alice In Wonderland was read to us in 1949 by our greatly loved class teacher Will Clarke, we all laughed heartily when the Dodo, after thinking long and hard about a race, decided, `Everyone has won and all must have prizes.’ Yet this is precisely what happened at a sports day in a local school in the late 1980s and I, to my chagrin, felt forced to issue participation certificates, if not prizes, to all attendees at my school holiday courses by the year 2000 in order that no-one should feel emotionally sidelined.
It is a fact that children all over the world have become vastly less hardy over the years and today’s seven year olds would find themselves quite unable to cope with the daily difficulties that plagued the lives of those of us who grew up in an earlier era. We in our turn saw our setbacks simply as part of Life because all around us the adults in both their conversation and attitudes made us mindful of the fact that there were other children who had greater problems and obstacles to contend with. The ten year old boy called Isaac with the odd way of speaking who had somehow or other lost his parents in a camp in Poland and was now visiting the most far flung members of his family, was one of them. Though watchful the boy was not slow to make friends, join in games and seemed not to be in need of therapy. He and others like him went on to lead successful lives and showed little evidence of character weakness. Even our own parents and grandparents whose early lives we knew to have been much harder than our own, grew to adulthood possessed of an inner strength and a great deal of fortitude.
Each decade that followed us has seen an inevitable progression of helplessness and vulnerability that has resulted in the astonishingly weak and dependent young adults we see around us today. These are the assemblies of youth who find themselves quite unable to cope with criticism, who see insults everywhere and are therefore affronted on a daily basis, who accuse all and sundry of racism, of sexism and any other ism you could possibly conjure up and who reach out for support at the slightest stumbling block. Counselling is required for moderate trauma, and in depth therapy for the kind of sexual assault we of an earlier generation might have regarded as a clumsy compliment. This lack of mental stamina has led to the inability of those under the age of fifty to take responsibility for their own life decisions and when things go wrong for them and there is no immediate and obvious prop there follows a feeling of growing panic. Often then, because the blame has to be apportioned somewhere, they lay it upon the shoulders of their ageing parents who somehow or other in the past made serious errors of parenting and failed to provide adequate emotional sustenance. This results in inescapable family rifts where grandparents are punished by being forbidden to see their grandchildren and perplexed seventy year olds are told that they have ruined lives with sins such as circumcision or the failure to observe talent that would have turned their middle aged offspring into stars.
It would be tempting to decide categorically that these frequently melting snowflakes are completely responsible for the lack of backbone they display but of course life is never that simple. What our generation is in fact responsible for is pandering to the inadequacies of the next generation, contributing to what made them weak and helpless in the face of the slightest adversity. It is a fact that the children who cannot deal with games featuring losers are likely to become the adults who dissolve at any hint of misfortune. They fail to handle the most minor of life’s impediments, can only see rampant racism and sexism in cartoon drawings and fail to understand the humour. They must be protected from the dangers of Freedom of Speech for fear that speech might expose them to dangerous concepts and somehow or other their sense of judgement regarding relationships with the opposite sex has been irrevocably tarnished by their fear of being taken advantage of sexually.
On the other hand, we who had the good fortune to grow up in an earlier age, did not have to face the alarming myriad of choices that so beset those growing up today. Most of us were confident in the gender we were assigned at birth and the disturbing thought that we might select an alternative did not cross our consciousness. By the time we were eleven years old we were completely aware of our ability, academic and otherwise and knew that if we were Clever we might pass the eleven plus examination and if we were Average we were unlikely to do so and if we featured among the Slow children we would be afforded the safety and comfort of the D Stream. There was little confusion and no Suzuki Music Schools to lead us to believe that we might become concert violinists. Our parents were most unlikely to lead us to believe that we were good at something if we were not because by the time we reached school age we were expected to cope with the idea that talent was capricious. Along the way we came to the conclusion that moments of happiness could be sporadic and life was not always fair. And so little by little we were able to separate good luck from bad, sense from nonsense and truth from fiction. Sadly, somehow or other a great many of us have failed spectacularly to pass the simplicity of these notions on to our children and their resulting lack of resilience is quite remarkable.
