Growing Old with the Welfare State by Nick Hubble Jennie Taylor Philip Tew

Author:Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, Philip Tew [Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, Philip Tew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Modern, 20th Century, British
ISBN: 9781350033115
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The Wartime Generation

6

Introducing the Wartime Generation

Of the wartime births only Joy Warren born in 1939 could even have the faintest recollection of the war, being about six when hostilities finished; of the others Doug Frendon was an infant at three, and Brenda Allen and Joanna Woods only two, in 1945. In many senses their lives are coterminous with that of the baby boomers, growing up almost entirely with the post-1945 Labour government’s welfare state, as well as the gradual emphasis on youth and freedom that emerged, albeit overshadowed by the Cold War.

Reconsidering her past Joy Warren remembers certain distinct difficulties during both wartime and the subsequent years, a phase defined for her by personal deprivation and injury. She recollects her family’s difficulties in sustaining life’s basic requirements: ‘When I was a child and my mother did not have money to buy food, she pawned her wedding ring which in those conforming and inhibiting days of the 1940s was very brave.’

For Joy this period represented a very particular upheaval and this was connected with a series of calamities for the family, although not ones defined by the physical threats usually associated with conflict, and although she suffered injury and illness, these were not directly connected to the hostilities. She details various aspects of her life, including the importance of news and a childhood accident indirectly related to the war which clearly caused her great discomfort and distress:

We listened to the wireless a great deal – mostly the Light Programme and the Home Service. The wireless ran on an accumulator battery which was taken to a garage in the village to be re-charged.

When I was three years old I was hit by an army motor biker, and spent some time in Redhill General Hospital recovering from a fractured skull and other injuries. Parents were not allowed to visit as this was considered too upsetting to the children. When I was ready to leave I had forgotten how to walk – I don’t think physiotherapy was practised then.

During this time it seems likely Joy first suffered what might be described as ‘separation anxiety’, a term drawing upon much earlier work by John Bowlby (who in 1939 wrote to the British Medical Journal warning in effect that the separation of children from parents could be potentially traumatic). Joy’s first parental separation was compounded by another, for as she recalls:

My mother became very ill with a psychiatric problem in 1944 and was in hospital for about nine months. My father took my sister and me to a children’s home in Reigate. The staff could be very unkind, for example I was made to wash my soiled knickers although I was only five years old. I saw them as very big bullies and I will never forget their cruel behaviour to me. I was reading a great deal at that time having learned to read at my infant school in the village.

A further trauma followed aged seven, for when the war finished, she recalls that her father was imprisoned (which fact she only learnt about twenty years later).

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