LITMIR.BIZ

      Doing It

      You may not have a personal memory of the 1950s – many of you will not have been born yet, nor have grown up then, as I did – but I’m sure you can nevertheless call to mind pictures or photographs of the period, possibly in old newspapers or magazines, especially the advertisements. Housewives in frilly pinnies with syrupy smiles on their faces, waiting for their hubbies to come home from the office and holding out plates of freshly baked biscuits. Advertisements for vanishing cream and Brylcreem. Perms. Twinsets.

      We wore pull-ons or girdles to hold our tummies in (the sort of underwear that Woolies sells today, only now they’re called shapers or firmers).

      We adored British pop stars like Cliff Richard and Adam Faith and American crooners like Nat King Cole; and we danced to the inimitable Buddy Holly.

      We read novels like Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien would later be one of my university lecturers), Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Some of these books became classics; many are still set-works in schools and universities around the world today. One of my most prized possessions is a copy of Things Fall Apart that Chinua inscribed personally for me when we met in Nigeria many years later.

      On tiny black-and-white television sets we watched American shows such as I Love Lucy, Lassie and Bonanza and, on BBC, What’s My Line? And we all perved over the young David Attenborough in Zoo Quest.

      We went to ‘the pictures’ (think ‘bioscope’ in South Africa in the same period) and saw The Seven Samurai, High Noon, Ben Hur, A Streetcar Named Desire (with the young Marlon Brando), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo and, of course, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Over the decades since, the 50s have been brought back to life on both small and big screens with fair regularity – in the Indiana Jones movies, for example, West Side Story, Brooklyn, The Godfather, M*A*S*H and Call the Midwife.

      Well, it was like all that in the 50s – and at the same time it wasn’t.

      Sex was a word hardly ever uttered.

      If a movie had a scene in it with a man, a woman and a bed, the British film censors decreed that if the man and woman were on the bed at the same time, the man always had to have one foot firmly on the floor.

      Sales of The Kama Sutra doubled.

      There was high moral outrage in Britain when the movie Quo Vadis, which was about a tough Roman commander and a beautiful Christian hostage, was released in 1951. Why? Because on the soundtrack the crunching of the Christian’s bones by the lions in the Roman amphitheatre was clearly heard.

      This was unacceptable and pious music was inserted instead.

      At Lincoln College, Oxford University, where Malcolm, my first husband, was a student, there was a handwritten notice (in copperplate of course) warning the gentlemen scholars that if they entertained a lady in their rooms, the bed must be put outside the door. Which was actually impossible as the rooms were situated up and down a twisting, very narrow fifteenth-century staircase. I wonder if the college authorities really believed that sex could only take place on a bed?

      But these were halcyon days to be a student. For one thing fourteen years of food rationing finally ended in Britain, at midnight on 4 July 1954, when restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted. Until then, since 1940, a few months into World War 2, people were assigned ration books, with coupons that we could exchange for food and clothes. The Germans cut off food supplies that had traditionally come in by sea so we had to manage on a lot less than we’d been used to. It seems hard to believe now but we were allowed one egg a week, 50 gm of tea, butter and cheese, 225 gm of sugar and, every four months, 450 gm of jam and 350 gm of sweets. There were no soft drinks such as Coke back then, but we did get 3 pts (1 800 ml) of milk a week, which sometimes dropped to 2 pts (1 200 ml). As the war dragged on, food became even less readily available. Bread was added to the ration and our sweets ration was halved. There was little or no petrol available either, so we walked or cycled everywhere – my family couldn’t afford a car anyway so this didn’t affect us overmuch.

      So it was by the time we were students in the early 1950s, the first generation of British working-class kids to go to university on grants and scholarships, we were in seventh heaven. We could eat what we liked, overdose on chocolate and chips if we liked, and buy all the clothes we could afford. Ration coupons had only allowed us to buy one completely new set of clothes once a year. Luckily, Doris (my mother) was a dressmaker so my sister Rita and I always had the latest fashions, even if one of my very best party dresses as a child was made out of curtain lining. No wonder I empathised with Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind when she made a dress out of the antebellum mansion’s green velvet dining room curtains.

      When I went up to university, students on the whole were happy, content and fully understood that although we were on scholarships it would be necessary to find a job every vacation in order to keep ourselves supported because the money we got from government only covered lodgings during term time, fees and books.

      A couple of years later, when Britain was riding high on the post-war economic boom, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s then prime minister (whom I was to meet some years later, in 1960, on the occasion of Nigeria’s independence), was reinforcing the message to the whole British public with his famous declaration that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.

      Scholarships, however, were not so easy to come by. Only one per cent of the British population went to university, and it was a strict meritocracy.

      At age seventeen I was lucky enough to be interviewed in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the county where I lived, by the county education officer, John Newsom, who was later knighted for his services to British education and had a school and several streets named after him. My A Levels had been pretty good but not brilliant; nonetheless I had been selected for a personal interview with him to see if I was university material and eligible for a county scholarship.

      I’ve always loved English literature, the poetry and majesty of words, the nuances and rhythms of language. I’d read at least four or five books a week since a young child and I still do. Sometimes more.

      Mr Newsom’s first question to me was:

      ‘Which poets do you enjoy?’

      And I was away. Two hours later our conversation had covered everything from AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and his Christopher Robin poems, to WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Enid Blyton and Shakespeare.

      I remember that conversation well and the kind, clever man who was nevertheless incisively probing my mind as we laughed and shared likes and dislikes. I owe him a huge debt because he awarded me my scholarship, just as I owe a huge debt to my sister Rita, my mother Doris, and to my amazing O and A Levels English teacher, the Hon Gwen, who fostered my love of learning.

      Unbeknown to me at the time, somewhere in London Malcolm had just won a scholarship to Oxford but had postponed going up so as to complete his compulsory national service first. And somewhere in the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland, Alan (my second husband) was preparing to sit for his university scholarship exam.

      Our paths were to become inextricably crossed.

      I grew up first in the East End of London. Then World War 2 happened. Rita and I were evacuated from London to the countryside along with hundreds of thousands of other urban children. In September 1939, I aged four and Rita aged six, with gas masks in brown cardboard boxes tied with string around our necks, each clutching the one small attaché case we were allowed packed with a few clothes, with brown paper parcel labels with our names on tied through a buttonhole on our pink homemade coats, were kissed goodbye by our parents at London’s St Pancras Station, put on a train with straw on the floor and literally sent into the unknown.

      I remember how at school we used to practise putting on those suffocating gas masks, which smelt of

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