When I was about 13 or 14 I was, to use an anachronistic term, being groomed by the local vicar, (a married man with children a few years older than me).
He would arrive at the house & ask permission for me to accompany him on one of his parish visits – These old folk like to talk to a young person & they don’t often get a chance. Off we would go, me riding pillion on his large scooter, which was decked out to resemble a powerful motorbike with the addition of metal cowling & an oversize windscreen. At some point – especially going up a steep hill – his hand would grasp my knee to make sure I did not fall off.
I found all this (including the stilted conversations with the old folk) excruciatingly embarrassing, but it seemed like one of those helpful, caring things one was supposed to do.
It all ended one day in the school summer holidays. My mother & I were outside, she wearing apron & yellow rubber gloves, washing a window, me doing a bit of weeding. He arrived, delivered his usual spiel - & my mother, after giving me a swift warning look, told him a lie about us having some other engagement to go to.
Somone must have warned her.
We never spoke about it; in my innocence & naivety I think I just thought that, for once, she had taken pity & relieved me of a chore I so obviously disliked. Even a few year later, when we had moved away from the town, we heard that the vicar had been required, by the parish council, to relinquish his living & someone said ‘He must have gone too far this time’ I still did not think of myself as having been at risk.
I have another memory, dating back to when I was eight or nine. We were at a daytime social function in what counted, for us, as a posh house, a large double-fronted Edwardian villa with bay windows. There were lots of mothers & children & I think fathers were there too – which means it wasn’t a child’s birthday party. An older man, perhaps an uncle or grandfather who lived in the house, was sitting in an armchair near the fireplace. One of the mothers, coming in from the kitchen, looked across & said Now "Susan" you’ve been sitting there long enough, give "Uncle" a rest & come & play with the other children.
My face must have registered some kind of surprise at her tone – a bit too bright, like Joyce Grenfell. He likes to put his hand in your knickers, confided the girl standing next to me, keen to display her worldliness. Although this astonishing idea made little sense to me I remember a vague feeling of relief that I was far too big, well past the age where I could be expected to sit on anyone’s knee.
I’m not sure what age I was when I was sitting on a wall with my best friend when a girl we knew went past, carrying some shopping. It’s probably for that old man, said my friend, the one who lives in the corner house on the council estate. She’s allowed to go round & help him. She gets paid for it. If she likes you she might invite you to go round with her sometimes – he’ll give you half a crown. She won’t ask us though.
My friend – who had older brothers & bohemian parents - may have understood whereof she spoke. I still was not completely clear about what was being implied, but the words dirty old man hovered unspoken between us. And I was surprised by the new idea that a man that old could still be dirty.
The point of telling these stories is not to prove that child abuse existed even in the staid & upright world of 1950s happy families, but to illustrate that it did, that it was dealt with in some ways, accepted in others, & that that is instructive.
Middle class mothers (perhaps fathers too) had their own information networks to pass on warnings, & warnings off, did their level best to protect their children from danger which did not come from strangers. If they knew about cases of girls from less fortunate backgrounds – well that was all very sad; maybe their mothers were inadequate, too ground down or ignorant to care; perhaps those half crowns provided a welcome, much needed, supplement to the family budget, helped to feed all the other children; perhaps it was just one more demonstration of the grimness & horror of poverty, of not being respectable.
And economics must explain the lack of action against those of their own class, in an age when wives & children depended on the father’s income to maintain a decent standard of life, to avoid destitution, even if that father had distressing urges.
Above all there would be the shame, & not just for the perpetrator but for the victim too. I am not even certain whether any action could have been taken in an era when even the law may have felt that children were either not competent, or should not be asked to give evidence & be subject to cross examination in court about such matters. Far better to try & forget about it all, to keep it a secret. A girl after all would suffer the added disadvantage of being damaged goods in the marriage market.
We tended to hear less about the threat to boys – but then homosexuality was still the great unmentionable to many. But judging by the seeming lack of action in response to complaints to the police about George Brinham, the same sense of tact, distaste or perhaps plain helplessness applied also to those who preyed on boys.
And then the 1960s burst upon us – Lady Chatterly, the Pill & the Beatles first LP, the first wave of babyboomers experiencing the hormone rush of adolescence; an important function of the pop industry seemed to be to make little girls scream & wet their knickers; I don’t remember too much open concern being expressed about their being at risk from predators. Hunter Davies felt no need to include the groupies in his account of the life of the Beatles.
There must be plenty of now elderly men hoping that the focus of blame for the exploitation of the more vulnerable amongst them remains firmly fixed on the latter-day BBC.
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