Sex, snobbery and secret agents combined in the person of James Bond, who became a household name during this interlude between Suez and Profumo, still in literary rather than cinematic form. But the nation was not yet in Bondage to 007. When Dr No appeared in April 1957, a young journalist (my father-to-be) accused Ian Fleming in the New Statesman of glorifying "the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanized, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude snob-cravings of a suburban adult". It was, "without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read", wrote Paul Johnson — but Dr No was tame compared to what was to come. Two years later, after Roy Jenkins had piloted the Obscene Publications Act through parliament, which put an end to censorship of the printed word (though not on stage), Weidenfeld & Nicolson published Lolita. More than half a century later, we are still unsure how to deal with Nabokov's subject matter: the sexualisation and abuse of children. Are the voyeurs of the internet age more depraved than the literary libertines of the 1950s?
Kynaston's montage technique, which creates a palimpsest of private and public sources, is once again deployed to great effect in this, the fifth in a remarkable sequence of volumes that will eventually cover the period from 1945 to 1979. It is, of course, indebted to the television documentary, a genre which was also born in these years. The author disguises his own, much more liberal views behind those of his chosen witnesses, but they do surface occasionally — as when he concludes from his account of Wolfenden that, despite signs of the "Victorian permafrost starting to melt . . . for the moment this remained a right little, tight little island".
What Kynaston seldom or never does is to make value judgments about the cultural or moral quality of the society he is describing, let alone to compare it to our own. The "affluent society" was still emerging from rationing and inclined to go overboard in its eagerness for "mod cons". However, as a child born in 1957 I was pleased to discover that creature comforts did not displace a selfless concern for and delight in new life. That year Panorama was already showing natural childbirth through relaxation, with a clip from a film by Dr Grantly Dick-Read, whose work inspired the Natural Childbirth Association, later National Childbirth Trust. The programme was denounced by tabloids as "REVOLTING" but it reminded me of the recent TV drama series Call the Midwife, based on memoirs and set in the East End of the late Fifties, which revealed another world — a world of poor, sometimes very poor, women at their most vulnerable, coping with childbirth. The solicitude of the midwives for their mothers and babies was real and unconditional. This was a society still culturally homogenous enough to care about its weaker members, with a welfare state still based on the contributory principle and still suspicious of wartime controls. Not everything about the Fifties was repressive or illiberal — it was also a time of great generosity of spirit. As Larkin wrote at the time: "What will survive of us is love."
