Joan Bakewell, author of She’s Leaving Home, explores coming of age in the Sixties

By SUSAN MANSFIELD
Published on 20/08/2012 13:59

THERE are those who would claim that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. Others, like broadcaster and writer Joan Bakewell, were – and do.

After one too many calls from “independent television companies run by very young people wanting to make programmes about the 1960s and not getting it quite right”, she decided to explore the subject for herself.

Her second novel, She’s Leaving Home, is both family story and social history, a girl coming of age in a small town in north-west England, dreaming of the bright lights of Liverpool, where Chuck Berry records arrived on liners and a café with a Gaggia machine was the height of sophistication. As Martha breaks free of her repressive home, the second half of the 20th century unfolds around her: the Lady Chatterley trial challenges the censorship laws, the pill is invented, the sounds of pop music are heard for the first time on Merseyside, and a generation who don’t remember the war begin to challenge the received wisdom of the state and of their parents.

But what of those parents? Martha’s father, a cinema projectionist, watches the new world emerge on the big screen, the glamour of American movies being challenged by a new wave of British films: Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey. Her mother, meanwhile, was one of many women liberated from domesticity during the war and thrust back to hearth and home when the troops returned. She has nowhere to direct her frustration but at her daughter. And she’s leaving home.

While Bakewell was cutting her teeth as a television reporter covering the cultural explosion on Merseyside, another journalist, Sandy Gall, was reporting from the world’s hotspots, from Suez to the fall of Saigon. But the country he has returned to most over the years is Afghanistan. His latest book asks: where did it all go wrong?

He was joined in discussing this question by author Max Benitz, who spent six months embedded with the Scots Guards in Helmand Province in 2010.

Even as a further company of Scots Guards left for Afghanistan on Friday Gall suggested that a solution for the country may depend on the resolution of arguably much larger issues between India and Pakistan.