A TALE OF TWO CHILDHOODS
With Father’s Day almost upon us, DAMIAN FLANAGAN reflects on how growing up has changed since his youth
HIDING my children that they should be in bed by 8.30pm and that it was now nearly 9pm, I started to read out to them the first entry which recalls New Year’s Eve 1977 when I was eight years old: “Went home to watch the late film. The film was in black and white and wasn’t any good. Saw Big Ben striking on the telly. About an hour later I went to bed and at 2.30am went to sleep.”
At 2.30am?! Admittedly this was New Year’s Eve but my eyes popped at my being home alone and allowed to stay up until 1am at age eight. Reading on I discovered that I was rarely in bed before 10pm the whole year round – not exactly the shining example to my children that I wished to set.
Then, since I am permanently trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to lure my kids away from sugar and towards vegetables and fruit, I was horrified to discover that my childhood consumption of chocolate and sweets was prodigal. Here is my entry on that same January 1, 1978: “Today I spent most of the day playing out and eating all my goodies, like my box of Maltesers and my two boxes of wine gums and my two Matlow bags which contain fizzers and chews and other small toffees and I also had a gigantic Toblerone which I hadn’t touched yet. Everyone was happy and cheerful today it was a great day… I went to bed at about 12 midnight.”
At least, though, I was not stuck in front of a screen for hours on end… well, actually I was. I discovered I would often watch three hours of back-to-back TV. On March 2, 1978 I wrote: “I watched Top Of The Pops and The Good Life and Armchair Thriller and
VANESSA FELTZ IS AWAY
George And Mildred.” Next day it was The Goodies, Going Straight and The Professionals; and the following one The Les Dawson Show and Starsky And Hutch.
The main difference between then and now – apart from the obvious absence of computers – was that the TV programmes I was watching were nearly all adult Daily Express Tuesday June 13 2017
BACK IN 1978… SEVEN FAVOURITE DIARY QUOTES
1. Our dinner money is £1.25. Expensive isn’t it? It used to be 75p. (March 3) 2. (March 5, Mother’s Day) Made a pot of tea for mum and brought it up to her, to find she was coming down so I had to cart it downstairs again. 3. Felt sick this morning so stayed off school as I wanted to anyway. I got up, watched telly all morning and baked a Chocolate Gateau. (March 10) 4. It’s Father’s Day today, but seeing I haven’t got a proper father I did not have to get a present. (June 18) 5. The Wimbledon championship today for the men was played it was between Borg and Connor. Connor won. (sic) (July 8) 6. Went to see Star Wars at the pictures it was great. (July 28) 7. Entered a contest in the Daily Express. (October 6) ones: sitcoms, thrillers and dramas. My kids never watch adult programmes – not because I don’t let them. They just don’t want to. They have a plethora of children’s TV channels and refer to all adult channels as “boring news”.
Did it shape my development that I watched so many adult programmes? Did it make me mature more quickly? Yes, I think it did. And although we often speak today about children growing up far more quickly than they used to, I think the reverse is true. My children spend far more time locked in their exclusively childish world, oblivious to what adults are watching.
Perhaps the biggest difference from my own children is that as an eight and nine-year-old I had no father to give me guidance. I was brought up, along with my sister, by my single mum, my father having disappeared from our lives when I was about six. For all my precocious maturity as a nine-yearold diarist, I was startled to read that I still shared a double bed every night with my mother.
Father’s Day had no meaning at all for me growing up. Now it’s a great pleasure and honour to be able to enjoy the role of father.
But reading my own diaries with my kids, I am finally persuaded that childhood today perhaps has as many wonderful things about it as my own vanished idyll – not least that these days papa gets to travel to destinations all over the world with his beloved children.