The Good, The Bad, and The Innocent

An innocent, 1960

Something someone said on the radio about children's easy access to pornography and ultra-violent video on their phones made me wonder whether I had, in fact, grown up in an age of innocence. Looking back over 60-odd years, I think I was a fairly innocent boy, in the old-fashioned sense of "unacquainted with vulgarity", until I reached the age of about 12. My parents were self-consciously decent people who never swore and never got drunk – indeed, rarely drank alcohol at all – and I'll never forget being chased down the street by my grandmother (for whom the word "feisty" might have been coined) after I'd been encouraged to tell her to "buzz off!" by another boy. I may have been unacquainted with vulgarity, but was fairly familiar with corporal chastisement. Nothing ultra-violent, though.

In those far-off days, most of us were innocent in that sense, I think. It wasn't that children from decent working-class families were living within a protective bubble, far from it, but more that we were somehow immunised by the common culture against "adult" concerns. We were kids, and only interested in kids' stuff. The grown-up stuff was there, but hidden in plain sight behind a screen of innuendo. For boys, the ritual transition to long trousers from the shorts we wore even in winter, generally somewhere around age 11 or 12, marked the beginning of the end of innocence. But even as smut-seeking teenagers, you had to work pretty hard at coming across anything remotely resembling pornography, as until the mid-1960s the vaguest hint of "indecency" in sexual or bodily matters was heavily censored, to the point of hilarity: censors often detected filth and depravity where none existed, other than in their own inquisitorial, smut-seeking minds.

That said, I knew all about the mechanics of reproduction from a fairly young age due to my precocious interest in and reading about natural history – "the male inserts his penis", etc. – but these so-called "facts of life" aroused no prurience or erotic feelings at all. In a way that is very hard to imagine today, in our hyper-sexualised world, we children were strictly gendered but mostly asexual beings, unable to pick up on the cues that, in adolescence, would connect anything and everything to sex, sex, sex.

Mostly. A few – generally but not only boys – told "dirty" jokes in the playground that no-one else got, and sniggered at innuendoes that no-one else saw, and seemed to exist in a mental stew of unrealisable concupiscence. I suspect these would have been kids with older, sex-obsessed adolescent brothers, or perhaps even those poor devils who, as we now know, were suffering various types of abuse. For some reason, recently I found myself recalling some jokes told to me by one such lad among my primary school classmates, when we were around age nine or ten. We'll call him Frank, and he happened to be the son of one of our teachers. He seemed to have a bottomless fund of these jokes, which were all of the sort that (I imagine) get told in rugby club changing rooms and golf club bars. To find them funny, you need a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of a range of sex acts, a fairly misogynistic cast of mind, a good grasp of racist and anti-semitic stereotypes, and a profound dread of homosexuality. Needless to say, they went entirely over my head at the time.

It then struck me: where had he been getting this stuff from? Frank had no older siblings, just a younger sister. Also, although they lived in a nearby street, he was kept on a short leash by his really rather scary father, a jowly disciplinarian with an unpredictable temper, and was rarely allowed out to play with us other boys, despite being friends with us in school. It dawned on me, with a certain mix of horror and bemusement, that those jokes might well have been – had most likely been – told to him at home, and most probably by his own father [1].

Now, the telling of the classic narrative-style joke with a punchline seems to have gone out of fashion in recent times, and was probably never in fashion in sophisticated circles. I cringe when I recall some of the appalling jokes I retailed merrily to my new, more politically-advanced friends in my first days as a student; let's just say that social idiocy is another kind of innocence. But I'm pretty sure that even back in 1963 it would have been, let us say, unusual for a professional-class man, a teacher, to be regularly sharing off-colour jokes with his nine-year-old son, who was then passing them on in the playground of his own school. Assuming, of course, that was the case; I suppose the guilty party might have been some creepy neighbour, relative, or regular adult visitor.

Whoever it was, surely that would have been frowned upon even then? I'm pretty certain that if my father had got wind of what was happening and who was responsible, he'd have been straight round to have words with Frank's father, deference be damned. And wouldn't we now regard it as a form of child-abuse, or at the very least as laying the foundation for a life in which sex, aggression, and repressed anxiety would form an unhealthy threesome? But then maybe I was, and maybe I still am more of an innocent than I like to think. In a wicked world, that may not be such a bad thing. Call me Candide.

An idiot, 2021

1. A classic example of this would be the set-up line, "It's nice out, isn't it?", frequently uttered by comedian Eric Morecambe towards the end of the ultimate British Saturday night family-viewing TV, The Morecambe and Wise Show, only to be quickly shut down by a flustered Ernie Wise. To know why this was funny, you needed the never-spoken punchline, "Yes, but put it away now, there's a policeman coming". Plus, of course, you needed to know what "it" was, and why on earth anyone would be taking "it" out in public, sitting with a friend. Frank, alone in our class, knew the punchline, and why it was supposed to be funny. I very much doubt he worked this out for himself.