Were they really happy in 1957?

Published on Thursday 4 May 2006 01:49

IT'S hard to locate the crucial feelgood factors of an era which you have observed from a height of 24 inches or so. When Harold Macmillan was delivering his instantly-famous "most of our people have never had it so good" speech at Bedford in 1957, I suspect I was focused on deciphering the Rosetta Stone that proved to be a Farley's rusk.

If only my mother had realised that nearly half a century later, Macmillan's words would be echoed by a very different generation, I'm sure she would have woken me from my many compulsory naps, so that I could better appreciate the little Eden in which our family so thoughtlessly frolicked.

For, as the results of yesterday's BBC-commissioned survey indicate, we were all happier in 1957, when 52 per cent of citizens polled by Gallup declared themselves "very happy", compared with a mere 36 per cent claiming the same today.

Hence I must probe the still-snoozing portions of my ancient infant brain (the part which my friends assure me remains dominant) to discover exactly why I was so enviably and unrepeatably happy in that frilly romper suit and the big Silver Cross pram.

This should not be as difficult as it may sound, for we were a family of rigorous routine, and I can confidently assess many things which must have happened in 1957 from the pattern which became so familiar in the next decade.

THE house was my mother's domain, and my brother and I were part of it - rather in the manner of the sitting-room fire, we were stoked with fuel, cleaned, brushed, and generally rearranged in the hope of bringing my father maximum satisfaction and minimum inconvenience on his return from work.

The collected works of Dr Spock and Good Housekeeping can be blamed for these stern measures - my mother was so determined that everything in the household would reflect her very best efforts that she took my eight-month-old brother to our GP to inquire why he was not sleeping to the pattern so clearly explained by Dr Spock. "Perhaps Geoffrey hasn't read this particular book," was the dry response.

This did nothing to diminish my Mama's manic perfectionism. She was a home-dress-making demon, making party frocks as easily as birthday cakes, running up curtains in the afternoons, spending her evenings on smocking and embroidery.

Food was plain. Very plain, now that I look back on it. We had chicken on Saturdays, lamb on Sundays, but weekday meals favoured macaroni cheese, mince and tatties, liver and bacon or fish pie. When I first caught sight of a pizza on the Lucille Ball show, I thought it was a cake which hadn't risen. I didn't taste lasagne till I was 15, had never seen the inside of an aubergine, and curry was something which came from a planet called Vesta. We ate out a few times a year - mostly afternoon tea. The idea of going out for dinner simply because there was nothing in the fridge would have made my mother predict the end of civilisation.

BUT what would have convinced both my parents that this end had already arrived can be summed up in one word: debt. The credit card was well and truly embedded in the British psyche when my mother died in 2001, yet she refused to carry one. Credit was for losers; for people who could not manage a budget, or were simply too intemperate to observe the postponed gratification motto of the middle classes. Thinking people saved. They made do. The gaunt killjoy shadow of Sir Stafford Cripps still whispered imprecations of austerity, and my parents' big night out (every second Tuesday) was to a Scottish country-dancing class.

Yes, yes, I hear you mutter between swigs of Bollinger. But were they happy in this circumscribed, sock-darning , eightsome-reeling bourgeois bubble?

I think I know the answer - and it may not surprise you. They were too busy to notice. Besides that, they never really expected that "happiness" should be the result of day-to-day living. Contentment, possibly, but happiness to them was serendipitous - an accident, not an aim. It was only after my father retired, and tried to enjoy the Arcadian leisure span he had promised himself, that he realised how much pleasure he had taken in work. He died five months later.

Sir Stafford Cripps would have understood. The 1957 model Briton was always happiest pedalling uphill.