Part 1 was published here yesterday.
Talking of lawns, there were few motor mowers in those days. If you were posh and wanted lines on the lawn a Qualcast roller mower was the thing, but many just used the cheaper and lighter push and pull mower; quite hard work if you had let the grass grow longer than usual, but it did have the benefit of giving you a good period of exercise and it took time – something many of us will have for some time it seems this year.
Lots of Mums tended the garden, pruning and planting favourites such as gladioli, dahlias and delphinium, while making sure that all sorts of slug bait was in position to keep the young plants safe; nothing much changed. Dad would be busy with cuttings and seeds, sometimes in a greenhouse but mostly in a green cold frame. When did you last see one of those I wonder? Mostly stylish trugs these days and not half as useful. Plots would be prepared for vegetables, and bean sticks would have to be prepared. Other work would be home decorating, and again, rather different than today with our mostly plain emulsioned walls, Mum and Dad would strip and replace wallpapers and ceilings and the woodwork having received two coats of the then new brilliant white, high gloss and, including the latest D.I.Y fashion, flush doors that Dad had converted using thin hardboard.
Keeping the kids amused for any length of time was not a problem. Kids went off with their mates for hours on end, both genders and, as far as we knew in those days, there were only two, played ball games either in the street (much to the annoyance of residents), or in the local park or ‘rec’. Parents in the main didn’t play with their kids, they didn’t have to, kids used their imagination, only on cold wet days did the cry “Mum, I’m bored” get uttered, and silenced with “well go and read a book or play with your train set” being heard across the nation.
The press, broadcast and print media, reporting as they do on our present situation, are not, in my view, helping the situation. We are not at war. Even in the darkest days of the second world war, with pain and tragedy everywhere, the press and the media in general mostly put a brave face on it even if the news was anything but good, and showed the bravery, determination and stoicism of the ordinary man and woman in the street, with what were then really then ‘heart wrenching stories’. Mothers protected their children as bombs fell near, and when told she was a brave woman, one said, according to a Mirror report of the time: “It was nothing. Somebody had to look after the children.” Another story, later in the war, gives truly heart wrenching details headlined ‘Sons of heroes get dead fathers medals’ (told as it was then, was it not?) as one eight-year-old received his truly heroic father’s posthumous Victoria Cross.
By contrast the Daily Express today ran a story about Megan Markle and her heartbreak. ‘Lockdown measures have taken their toll on Meghan Markle and Harry after their move to Los Angeles, with one royal insider revealing that the last couple of weeks have been ‘incredibly hard’ on the Duchess of Sussex’. During World War Two, the great grandparents of Harry (formerly known as Prince) were in the thick of it and regularly visited areas that had suffered terribly in the Blitz, something that they very probably did find incredibly hard and heart-breaking. Vera Lynn spent the war years travelling to war-torn and often dangerous areas, holding concerts often near to the front line. Many of the men she sang to were soon dead – heartbreaking indeed. I’m not aware of the overpaid celebrities and media experts putting their lives on the line helping hard-pressed ambulance and nursing staff in hospitals at the moment. Perhaps that would be too much to ask as they may too, like their better known, now ex-royal sister, find it ‘incredibly difficult’.
That apart though, things are different this time. Media led panic, hysteria on one hand; on the other ordinary people going out of their way for others, while others criticise, often without any evidence at all. The police service, which in those far-off days, along with truly heroic members of the fire and ambulance service, were seen by most to be our friends and someone to turn to, have it seems turned into some out-of-control force of occupation, enforcing laws that only exist in their imagination. What is difficult and certainly different this time and something the war time generation and those born immediately afterwards find hard to come to terms with, is the hysteria and faux emotion surrounding the emergency. Even in the darkest days of the 40s cinemas and theatres remained open, sporting events took place and pubs and cafes along with the British restaurant remained open, people went to work, schools were open, travel was possible, people went on holiday, just as they did during the world-wide pandemic of the 1958 Asian flu, which killed thousands here in the UK. The economy suffered but life went on and we recovered.
We, in the main, are getting on with it, despite all the media hype driven by some woman who has spent years talking to a huge news studio television screen, or some bloke on the other channel talking down to us while spreading the daily diet of gloom and doom while almost relishing the daily toll of deaths reported, as they are, like some hideous television reality game.
But for all that, we shall, as they say, come out the other side, probably poorer but wiser and in many cases aware, for the first time in our comfortable lives, that other people have lives and matter too, and that there is more to life than the latest must-have gadget or two weeks’ vacation in Tuscany. Despite them and it, ‘things will get better’.
Photo by nigel@hornchurch 
Our ‘play’ was climbing up the railway embankment and putting pennies (the big ones) on the line pending the express coming through.
When we found them they would be squashed to about half their thickness, and be warm; our mothers never knew about this.
Thank you Norman for a trip down memory lane. The only hysteria I remember as a young girl was after the Moors murders and parents stopped allowing their children to go out of their sight to play. My mother even telephoned the local park keeper’s hut to find out where I was, and when my friends and I were found in the park, we were told to go home straight away as my mother was “worried sick”.