Dad! I'd like to register a complaint
What did we actually DO in the 70s?
Remember the days when nobody went anywhere? When we all just stayed where we lived?
Last week I had a few days away in Yorkshire with friends, and Wendy and Bridget and I found ourselves wandering around the beautiful market town of Skipton.
It’s a lovely place, nestled in the green and rolling landscape on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. There are fantastically preserved textile mills and a castle of over 900 years old. It was all wool and textiles around here - the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Dewhurst’s factory was here (remember Sylko sewing threads?). There’s a bustling market with an incredible cheese stall and surely the world’s friendliest cheese man, and brightly painted narrowboats moored on the canal.
It’s one of those towns where you find yourself announcing, ‘Isn’t this a lovely!’ at every turn. I was quite entranced by it all.
The thing is, my childhood village - where I lived between the ages of three and fourteen - is a mere nine miles away from this place. Yet I have no recollection of Skipton at all.
Back home in Scotland after the trip, I visit my 90 year-old dad. ‘I never realised Skipton was so lovely,’ I tell him.
‘Oh yes, it’s really nice,’ he says.
‘I mean, it’s so full of history. It’s fascinating!’
‘Yes!’ he agrees.
I look at him - slightly accusingly, I realise - and show him one of my photos on my phone. ‘Look at all the narrowboats on the canal.’
‘Yes, that’s the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.’ He tells me at great length about how the Pennines were excavated to build this canal but I am not really listening.
‘The things is, Dad,’ I start, ‘we never seemed to… go there.’
‘No, we didn’t,’ he says mildly, with a shrug.
Now, I’m not going to get all peeved that my parents didn’t whisk me off on day trips to Skipton at nine years old. But still, I’m curious.
Why didn’t we take advantage of the resources on offer to us?
My primary school was in a West Yorkshire village called Oakworth, where the original film of The Railway Children was shot. At Oakworth station! That’s where Jennifer Agutter tore off her red petticoat and waved it to stop the train! And the actual steam railway - the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway - still operates today and indeed was chugging back and forth when I was a kid.
Did we ever go on it? No, we did not. I vaguely remember being taken to look at some stationary trains sitting in the engine yard. But actually travel on a moving steam train? We never did that.
Next station along the Worth Valley line is Haworth, of Bronte sisters fame. Admittedly, we visited their childhood home, the Parsonage - just once. If I’d known that was it, I’d have paid more attention. All of our other visits to Haworth were for pub lunches. Not that I’m knocking those - in 1975 few things were more thrilling to a child than a pub lunch. But fifty years on I still have vivid memories of chicken in a basket at The Black Bull and none whatsoever of Charlotte Bronte’s writing desk.
Just saying.
Why didn’t we 70s kids get to do things and go places? Were our parents too busy to take us? If so, busy doing what?
Having fondue parties?
Watching Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em?
Making nail-and-thread owl pictures like this?
I guess that was fiddly and time consuming. But also, that was just the normal way of things and parents didn’t feel the need stimulate their children constantly. There was no pressure on that score.
Your kid could spend the afternoon playing idly with a single dock leaf and no one would judge you.
They could consume a 2lb bag of granulated sugar over the course of the day and all their teeth could crumble and that would be fine.
Our friend Hannah has just had a baby, a little boy called Ziggy, and it was thrilling to go round and meet him this week. Like having a new baby in the family really, as we’ve spent tons of time with Hannah and her parents over the years.
As I held him - the first time I’d held a baby since my daughter was tiny, 25 years ago - I wondered: how different will it be for Hannah and Matthew to raise their son in modern times?
Even when my twin boys were born - in 1997 - the rice cake and mini boxes of raisins movement was gaining traction. In East London at that time you could actually be dragged off to jail for slipping your child a chocolate button, and were fully expected to fit in a finger-painting session before breakfast. But back in 60s and 70s West Yorkshire babies were parked in the prams in the garden and children roamed around the countryside from dawn till dusk.
There was no pressure to breastfeed or pay for tutoring or extra curricular activities or even DRIVE NINE MILES TO SKIPTON apparently!
I decide I really should pull Dad up on this. But he has fallen asleep.
Love,
Fiona xx
PS A new novel is a-coming! In The Woman Who Got her Spark Back, Celia’s quiet and steady life of running her houseplant hospital is thrown up in the air when she catches her husband cheating. Suddenly, she is all alone in her leafy plant world - until her childhood friend Amanda arrives, uninvited, and decides that Celia’s safe and cosy life will take a very different course.
Is it ever too late to bloom? You can pre-order your copy here!
I dragged a plastic Collie dog on a string (imaginatively called 'Pet') down the back lane behind our house between the years of 1974-76. After I got bored of that, I picked the peeling paint off garages.
There are very few newsletters I laugh out loud at but I always do at yours. Thank you! This was my exact experience of a 70s childhood! When watching Allo Allo with cheese on toast was the main weekend activity!