Oh to be young!
Throughout the Sixties I was at boarding school. From the age of eight to thirteen I was interned with about sixty other boys in red brick buildings on the Suffolk coast that overlooked marshland and the grey/brown menace of the North Sea. If you gazed out from the small dormitories at the top of the building you could see the construction of the first nuclear power station at Sizewell, just down the coast. Thankfully, the school no longer exists, for, like many others of its kind it held the lives of boys suspended in an unhappy haze of deprived privilege. When I left in 1965 the world was changing from black and white post-war conformity to a tide of creeping colour of sights and sounds.
...
‘Hey let’s do it!’
It is 1968, the year of global student revolutions against military, political, corporate, hereditary, and bureaucratic elites. I am at a school being prepared to join those elites. The film ‘If’ by Lyndsay Anderson has just been released, depicting a group of British Public School boys resisting the tyranny of the teachers and their prefects, ending with the boys shooting their enemies.
A group of us are standing near the cloistered area of the large court bounded by red brick buildings and the hanger-like glass fronted dining hall. We hold our files, books and the revolutionary enthusiasm of sixteen year olds. Five minutes to the next lesson.
‘Let’s not go – let’s protest!’
A wave of excitement sweeps through our small group. A chance to change the world, to have our say, to fight against repression. We are growing our hair, challenging the uniform we are forced to wear and questioning the hide-bound traditions of the school.
‘Hmm… Well…’
We shift about a bit. One boy had the hallmarks of a ringleader.
‘Come on. Why should we put up with all this?’
There is indistinct mumbling from the rest of us; and the bell rings out over the court, calling the faithful to gather in places of learning.
We look shiftily from one to the other, and then begin to drift towards our designated rooms.
‘Is that it then?’
Our ringleader looks around and plucks victory from defeat.
‘OK we have English now. Maybe after that?’
The feeling does not last long, and is dissipated by confusion, fear, and A levels.
...
Technological change was working its magic, simultaneously introducing new worlds of possibility, freedom and independence, and exploiting the aspirations and expectations of all with whom it engaged. Horizons were being expanded in living rooms all over the world, young people could see what was happening and were no longer living in cloistered seclusion according to class, wealth, or education. There was emerging a new kind of equality, slowly but inexorably. However, the dark shadow of exploitation was close behind, for with these new worlds came all kinds of opportunities for making money, for profiting from the unsuspecting, the naïve, the young. Such a market!
Freedom was the word that that echoed from the page, the song, the images of young people dressed and behaving and expressing themselves however they wanted to – free to be themselves. Anarchic and joyfully chaotic.
So it seemed to me in my late teens. I yearned to join them. I yearned to be free. And I thought I knew what freedom must feel like. But the young mind that has been closed and cloistered does not always understand the implications of its thoughts.
‘Most of the problems we face today as a species, as a civilisation and as peoples and nations, are problems we have created ourselves. They are possible to solve. We have the knowledge to solve them. What we may lack is the understanding and the sense of personal and collective responsibility before it is too late.’
p.462 The Nordic Secret: Lene Rachel Anderson and Tomas Bjorkman
