"We were small people, our parents grateful to have survived": my memories of a 1950s childhood

"I had a rollercoaster journey from Airfix kits to the Beatles", writes Michael Wood

Vintage illustration of a family gathered around a wooden table assembling and painting a blue model airplane together.

Published: October 28, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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There comes a point when you start to see your own life as a part of history, not just the family story. I grew up in the 50s, during the postwar baby boom, born in the early days of the NHS, in the place of its birth, Manchester.

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In my early years the city centre was still scarred by the Blitz (during which my mum had spent a terrified night crouching in the massive marble portico of one of the big banks off King Street). Later I became aware of the impact of the war on my parents’ generation. Dad had been working in Haslar naval hospital on D-Day. Uncle Syd was torpedoed and sunk off Tobruk. Uncle Bill was at Dunkirk, D-Day and the march to Berlin. So close in time, yet another world to us.

We were small people. Our parents grateful to have survived. After the war, people got married and went back to working as clerks or shopkeepers, growing dahlias. They asked for, and expected, little. As for us kids, we grew up with Airfix kits, war comics and films starring Kenneth More and Alec Guinness: Reach for the Sky and The Bridge on the River Kwai. That the war shaped us was obvious – though it never occurred to us at the time.

I went to a Victorian primary school on the edge of Moss Side. Then, when we moved out to Wythenshawe (which became one of the biggest council estates in Europe), I went to Benchill Primary School. There we had an inspiring head teacher called Mr Thomas, and committed young teachers from the first postwar intake. I was one of the first two pupils to go from Benchill to Manchester Grammar School, and on to university.

Books were our thing. My first steps in serious reading came from the travelling library that visited Wythenshawe on Tuesday nights. One of my first books was the Penguin history of Alexander the Great (I took the battered copy with me when I retraced his journey on film 35 years later).

Our horizons were narrow: grandpa’s house for tea on Sunday, holidays in Llandudno. Looking back now, we were not working class, but lower middle. Of course, nobody told us that, but it was inescapably there: class anxiety, frugality, deference, keeping your head down, keeping your business to yourselves. In time I recognised it as a habit of mind. But for years I never quite understood what it meant.

All these thoughts came flooding back recently when I read Geoff Dyer’s memoir, Homework. Dyer, of course, writes like a dream, and when recalling his own upbringing, the result is captivating: closely observed and very funny but also touching – almost heartbreakingly so with his mum. His book is a snapshot of what life was like for the postwar generation who, as Harold Macmillan memorably said, had “never had it so good”.

Dyer’s was a sixties childhood – a bit younger than me – but the key things remain, and are now the stuff of social histories by the likes of David Kynaston and Peter Hennessy. This was a period of huge change: in a few years moving from rationing to a multicultural, consumer-driven society; from collecting PG Tips cards and making models to record players and the Beatles. We got our first telephone (I still remember our number). They were years of growing social mobility, car ownership, public service TV (The Great War, Ways of Seeing, The Ascent of Man). For the first time, ordinary people could go to university and have opportunities our parents never had.

Historians now tell us 1945–79 was a period when the gap between rich and poor narrowed, to be followed by the Thatcher years when it widened again, and in whose aftermath we still live. At home (London now), I still find myself in small ways doing what my parents did: not quite ‘make do and mend’ (I don’t darn my own socks!) but throwing nothing away if it is still useful (and sometimes when it isn’t). I’m still a bit deferential (doctors and solicitors are always to be looked up to) and still enchanted by the worlds opened up by books. How true is it that we are made by our parents, and their generation? More so, I guess, than we ever imagine.

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This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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