By Coral Milburn-Curtis
Author of PREVENTING YOUR CHILD FROM BULLYING

When I say that I grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s, the usual response is, ‘Ah, the Beatles! After which the conversation frequently comes to a halt because the fact that the Beatles hailed from there is often the sum total of anyone’s knowledge of the city.

Not so me. I know all about it - and not to put too fine a point on it, it was rough.

Quite recently I thought I might test my little grey memory cells and try to find those places where I lived just to check to see if my perception of my past was indeed true.

It was true.

Google Earth produced the layout exactly as I had remembered it. There was the trellis pattern of back-to-back houses, the Salvation Army house where my father was the minister and the church hall, where we lived in the cellar when we mysteriously fell upon hard times the year that I was 10.

The children at my school used to say that I was ‘posh’. I wasn’t – I just spoke with a slightly less harsh accent than theirs. My parents wouldn’t let me play out in the street like the other kids, saying that they were ‘common’. Not that that stopped me. In those days of relative poverty, parents were rarely at home, needing to go out to find work at every opportunity. So I was often left to my own devices – which meant taking the chance to play out on the streets whenever the coast was clear.

Street life was interesting and not a little dangerous. Apart from the health and safety risks (playing ‘chicken’ across the front of moving cars, scrumping for apples and falling out of trees, easy access to derelict buildings and bomb-sites, aggressive stray dogs, gang warfare, riding pillion on mopeds without a helmet), there was also significant danger from some of the stranger inhabitants of the neighbourhood.

There was the local bully, who used to wait for me at a particular road crossing, on my way to school and beat me on the head with an iron bar. Well in my memory it was an iron bar – it was probably a rolled up newspaper – but it still hurt and I still had to endure it every morning.

Then there were the teachers (no names, no pack drill) who would use the slipper, the strap or the ruler if you so much as made a blot with those horrible runny pens on your exercise book. No-one ever complained. No-one suggested that school was meant to be a happy place. We learned and we survived.

The bus journey to the grammar school was also a trial of survival. You had to make sure that you didn’t make eye contact with the person sitting opposite, or you would get the searing response, ‘who you lookin’ a’?

I became expert at determining whether my interlocutor was a Liverpudlian or an Evertonian (it was VERY important to know the difference). When questioned, ‘who do you support?’ you had to tailor your response and make sure that you gave the right answer or there was another beating up on the way. The same went for your choice of answer to Catholic or Proddy, or Kennedy or Nixon? Answer wrongly and you were for it. The middle ground was not allowed.

But the experience which sticks in my memory most about living in that area was that of setting out on the journey to school via the back-entry (an alley-way between the gardens of the back-to-back houses) each morning. I don’t know why you would have to leave the house that way, there was a perfectly functioning front door and even though everyone knew what awaited us in the back-entry, it was never suggested that we should changed the domestic habits of a lifetime.

Right in the heart of the network of these entries you would come across Dick. Dick was there every day and all children (and adults) knew him by name. As you approached him he would ask, ‘would you like to have a look at this?’ and I am sure that I don’t need to give you three guesses as to what he was holding in his hands.

My response, because I had been brought up properly, was to say, ‘No thank you, Sir,’ and move briskly on. This routine happened every morning and no-one ever thought to do something about him. My mother said he wasn’t ‘right in the head,’ and that was that.

So all this leads me to the question: Are our children really any less safe than when we were kids? Was not our upbringing, albeit tough, quite a good preparation for life’s trials and tribulations? Do we really need to protect our children quite as much as we do? Or are the dangers of increased mobility, the Internet, bullying, child abuse and murder much worse than ever before? What do you think?

Will you join with me, in a little poll about children’s safety today? I have set it up to accompany this article and hopefully it will make interesting reading and may prompt you to consider your own child safety policy.
The link is:www.squidoo.com/child-safety.
Thank you for reading this and best wishes.

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