Has the gulf between generations ever been so VAST?
Victoria, 21, has had nine lovers — and boasted about it on TV. At the same age, her granny was a mother and married to the only man she’s ever slept with — her husband of 51 years
JOYCE Thornton doesn’t spell it out, because people of her generation tend not to, but the message is there nonetheless. She met her husband at 16, was engaged by 18, married by 20 and then had three children in quick succession.
She’s still happily married today, half a century, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren on, and has ‘no complaints’.
‘You didn’t go hopping from boy-to-boy in my day,’ says Joyce, 71, who lives in Essex. ‘You just got with someone and hoped he was decent, and that was that. For life.’
Her granddaughter Victoria Cob-bold is 21, and from a generation which is louder (and much lewder) about these things.
‘It’s quite sweet, I suppose,’ she says of her granny’s lifetime of monogamy. ‘But for my generation that’s just weird.’
So what of Victoria’s tally? Well, given that the rather outspoken young woman admits, totally una-bashed, how she views ‘not getting chlamydia’, the sexually transmit-ted disease, as ‘a bonus’, you rather fear for the answer.
‘Nine,’ she says, not at all offended to be asked how many men she has slept with and seeming untroubled at discussing such things in front of her grandmother. ‘I think I’m quite restrained compared to my friends,’ she says. ‘I think you are doing well if you reach my age without getting into double figures.’
There follows an awkward silence. Joyce and Victoria might share a bloodline and obviously adore each other, but they could be from a dif- ferent species when it comes to attitude, outlook and morals.
Born half a century apart, they’re representative of two generations that have sprung away from each other like repelling magnets.
Joyce, nevertheless, tries to keep any hint of disapproval under wraps. ‘I don’t like to judge,’ she says, ‘but I do tell all my granddaughters they have to respect themselves and their bodies.’
Does she feel Victoria always respects herself? ‘Probably not, but she’s a nice person. And I accept that things are very different now. I’m not sure my generation got eve-rything right anyway.’
The more these two women talk, the more the gulf between the generations is laid bare.
Joyce, after all, has lived through seismic social changes that have seen divorce rates more than quad-ruple, and contraception become readily available, along with abortion.
She remembers an era when women couldn’t own property in their own right, and, when they did go to work, were automatically paid less than men.
Girls went routinely from their parents’ home to their marital one — university or foreign ‘gap years’ were the preserve of the privileged, and sex before marriage was risky and scandalous.
Victoria represents the generation that has turned personal choice into a religion. Aged 21, she is yet to decide on a career — she has worked as a hospital healthcare assistant, but her aspirations lie more in the world of reality TV — and she shows no sign of settling down.
A typical night out for her will involve copious amounts of alcohol and few clothes. Marriage and fam-ily are a distant prospect.
She sees the life her grandmother led at her age as quaint, but most definitely not for her.
With so little in common, it’s hard to imagine these tail ends of their family line wishing to spend too much time in each other’s company. But a unique TV experiment has thrown them together in the most unlikely way, offering fascinating insights into how much women’s lives have changed. THE show, on MTV, is called Springbreak With Grandad, and sees twen-tysomethings — Victoria among them — going on holiday to Cancun in Mexico and being forced to share a villa for a month.
A little like Big Brother, but with a twist — the partying youngsters take a grandparent with them.
The resulting programme wouldn’t be recommended viewing for those with refined sensibilities, but it does offer an eye-opening (and jaw-drop-ping) insight into what has hap-pened to respective boundaries of acceptable behaviour over the past 50 years.
And among all the boozing and bed-hopping, it is interesting to watch women, like Victoria and Joyce, learning a little more about each other, and respecting each other’s standpoint in some ways anticsJoyce admitsat timesher granddaughter'sappalled her although she envies her freedom.
And Victoria is full of awe for her grandmother for keeping her 50 year marriage happy and intact.
There were, however, some very low points that pushed their rela tionship to the limit. The night a very drunken Victoria ‘had an accident’ on the sofa being a particu larly tawdry nadir. It’s fair to say Granny was not impressed.
‘She’d had too much to drink says Joyce, angrily. ‘I said: “Victoria this is not on.” I made her clean up. She had to learn a lesson. She crossed a line with that one.’
What’s fascinating is that while Joyce is mortified by the story, Vic toria is much less so. It seems the sort of thing that ‘just happens’ in her world.
Being woken in the wee small
hours to find her granddaughter skinny-dipping in the pool with her holiday chums was another horrifying moment for Joyce, ‘I told her to get out and get some clothes on
now,’ she says, sighing. ‘I was a bit shocked by how little all the girls wore. They’d just run around in bikinis. Victoria doesn’t seem to need clothes. I think she’d be quite happy in a nudist camp.’
What does Victoria think of Joyce’s attitude to partying?
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen Gran drunk,’ she says, her words tinged with disbelief.
Yet Joyce is proud to say she, and girls like her, would never have dreamt of getting blotto when she was Victoria’s age.
‘my father would have killed me,’ she recalls. ‘ We did have a good time, but we didn’t go out dancing, prancing, all the time, even when we were single.
‘We did have the odd party, but they were parties that my parents would have been at. There was no alcohol. We would have been dressed very soberly’ YOU
wonder how some of these young women would want anyone — let alone their grannies — to see some of their behaviour.
Another contestant, Pearl Day, 25, cheerfully volunteers the tale of her ‘puking’ in the back of the van transporting the young holidaymakers. Thank goodness, she says, her grandmother Jenny, 73, wasn’t there to see it.
The two, who live in East London and describe themselves as ‘incredibly close’, had been away together before, but always on ‘lovely family holidays, where you don’t fall in the door drunk’, as Pearl puts it.
Pearl, who works in a bar, admits that several times she questioned her own judgment in letting Gran tag along, once when she found herself in bed with a fellow contestant — and later found that news of the romp had spread and her grandmother had a face like thunder.
‘I wasn’t happy about that,’ says Jenny, with understatement.
Pearl’s horror was tempered with laughter, even at the time: ‘She had rollers in, and a green face-pack on, so while she was trying to tell me off, it was still really funny.
‘But mortifying, too. There are things you just don’t want your grandparents to know.’
for her part, Jenny, a retired wait- ress, seems resigned to her granddaughter’s antics, saying: ‘ Well, things are different now. I think you just have to accept this is how the young people are.’ Although she concedes that, like Joyce, she did have to ‘have a word’ several times.
At Pearl’s age, Jenny (who was married at 17, to her first proper boyfriend) had three children. Outlandish holidays weren’t a part of her life. ‘Well, we didn’t drink. We didn’t often go abroad, and when we did, we wouldn’t have got up to anything like this,’ she says.
‘I do remember being in Salou, in Southern Spain, once with my husband. It was in the days when there was one hotel and three shops there. Everything was very proper. We’d have a drink, but there was none of this sort of stuff.
‘A policeman had a word with my husband because he had his shirt off. He’d just come from the beach! now, anything goes.’
Bob fitzsimmons, 70, a retired black cab driver and keen sailor, now from norfolk, must be the most unlikely person ever to find himself on an mTV show. neatly pressed and a stickler for standards, Bob says he didn’t even know what a pool party was before he headed for Cancun — much less how to dress for one.
‘When he was packing I caught him putting in his binoculars,’ says his granddaughter Paige, 24, a make-up artist who looks as if she has stepped straight from the pages of a lad’s mag. ‘I said: “Granddad, I don’t think it’s going to be that sort of holiday.” ’ BOB
is smitten with his granddaughter. When I ask what possessed him to say yes to all this, he admits he ‘did it for Paige, really’.
Paige wanted to be on the telly, and ‘ thought it was a great opportunity’.
How did he feel to see her so . . . er, free with her affections and drinking like a fish? ‘Well, I didn’t like that. I had to have a word a few times. I don’t understand why they have to drink so much,’ he says.
‘We weren’t saints, but I don’t remember ever being like this. They seem to swallow it like water. At several points I had to say to Paige: “You are drinking too much.”
Like Jenny, he seems more resigned to the behaviour he witnessed than angry. ‘I think we had to accept this is the way the world is,’ he says. ‘It was different for us. At 21 we were all married and settled down. now, many of them are still at home at 30. They don’t want the lives we had.’
In this, the generations are in agreement. neither life is perfect, but they wouldn’t swap.
Victoria shrieks in horror when I ask if she can imagine living her life the way her grandmother did.
‘no! I can’t think of anything worse. my first boyfriend was a nightmare. I didn’t even like him. Well, I thought I loved him at the time, but now I see that he was terrible. And I’m too young to have kids, and to be thinking about marriage.
‘I think it’s really lovely that it happened that way for my nan, and maybe some girls now are still that lucky. But for me? no way! I’d like to do all that eventually, but not yet. I want to live a little.’
A little? Joyce sighs and smiles in a ‘what can you do?’ way. SPRING Break With Grandad, MTV, Mondays, 10pm.