Growing Up in Postwar Britain: A 1950s Childhood

There comes a moment when you start to see your own life as part of history, not just a family story. I grew up in the 1950s, during the postwar baby boom. I was born in Manchester in the early days of the NHS, the national health service that began in that city.

In my early years, the city center still showed scars from the Blitz. During the bombing, my mother spent a terrifying night crouching in the huge marble entrance of one of the big banks off King Street. Later, I learned how the war had shaped my parents' generation. My dad had worked at Haslar naval hospital on D-Day. Uncle Syd was torpedoed and sunk off Tobruk. Uncle Bill was at Dunkirk, D-Day, and the march to Berlin. These events were close in time, yet they felt like another world to us.

We were small people. Our parents were grateful simply to have survived. After the war, people married and returned to work as clerks or shopkeepers. They grew dahlias. They asked for little and expected little. We kids grew up with Airfix kits, war comics, and films starring Kenneth More and Alec Guinness, such as Reach for the Sky and The Bridge on the River Kwai. The war shaped us, though we never thought about it at the time.

I attended a Victorian primary school on the edge of Moss Side. Then we moved to Wythenshawe, which became one of the largest council estates in Europe. There I went to Benchill Primary School. We had an inspiring head teacher named Mr. Thomas and committed young teachers from the first postwar group. I was one of the first two pupils to go from Benchill to Manchester Grammar School, and later to university.

Books were our thing. My first steps in serious reading came from the traveling library that visited Wythenshawe on Tuesday nights. One of my first books was a Penguin history of Alexander the Great. I took that battered copy with me when I retraced his journey on film 35 years later.

Our horizons were narrow: tea at grandpa's house on Sunday, holidays in Llandudno. Looking back, we were not working class but lower middle class. Nobody told us that, but it was there in class anxiety, frugality, and deference. We kept our heads down and kept our business to ourselves. In time, I recognized it as a habit of mind. For years, though, I never quite understood what it meant.