Milk and Static - 2

I'm a bit obsessed with recalling and recording the past at the moment, especially the time when I was on the cusp of adolescence. Another of my current manias is to think about my life in terms of the music that I associate with specific periods, events and moods. It's a bit of a nostalgia thingy, but I think I'm trying to capture as much of it as I can before age, distance, time and alcohol finally wipe my synapses clean of the ability to recall anything from more than thirty seconds earlier...

Not all of the milkmen were as affable and likeable as Martin. Thinking about it, this is not really a surprise: the demographic of that profession was predominantly white, working class, and aged 25-45 (or so), and a lot of them, I suspect, were just doing this job until something else came along. Back then, I had the idea that being a milkman was something of a vocation - that you signed up to be a milkman for life, and grew old doing it; I had seen older men on the floats, usually bespectacled, with that greased and combed-over-flat hair that only men in the mists of middle age sported. Out of that demographic, there must have been plenty who liked the idea of finishing by lunchtime, maybe spending some time in the pub or the betting shop, or in more shady pursuits.

Anyway, I worked for a number of them, and Martin was the only one who I liked. The others were a mix of the distasteful, the actively nasty, and the incompetent. The distasteful one was called Lawrence, I think: a little dark-haired guy with glossy black eyes and centre-parted hair; he wore his white milkman's jacket buttoned up, and it always seemed too tight, even on his little torso. He had quite a high voice, and a gurgly giggle, and he had a special 'mockery' voice that he used to laugh at us milkboys, at stupid motorists, and at customers who had displeased him or messed him around with their money on 'collection day' - this voice was gurgly, like his laugh, but it also had elements that referred to mentally ill and disabled people - usually this voice sounded like "oggle oggle oogle", and would be accompanied with a lot of eye rolling and tongue waggling.

It's a bit odd to think back now to how widespread and acceptable this mockery of the mentally ill and disabled was back in the early 70s - how integral it was to the culture that I grew up in. I remember that I embraced it fully in my innocence, along with the casual, widespread and deep-seated racism that was also thick in the air. My mum tells me that I came home from the milk round one day and said that "They [the ethnic minorities who lived in the tower block at the end of our road] should all be bricked up in there with their gold top milk". This from an 11- or 12-year-old boy in an overwhelmingly white, working class neighbourhood. I can only assume that I was repeating prejudices and terms of abuse that I had heard the milkman say - I know that I said it in a way that echoed the authoritativeness of a knowing adult who had the weight of experience and belief behind their utterance.

I still find it hard to accept that, even in a culture where racial stereotyping and racist abuse were acceptable, even on mainstream TV, I could think these things, even at the most superficial level of aping an adult's speech or beliefs. But I know that I did say it, and that it must have drawn on some embedded beliefs about the 'alienness' of these groups; what's most troubling is that this utterance implies that I was echoing the kind of 'exterminatory' language that the Nazis employed to demonise and marginalise the Jews and other 'undesirable' groups. This is troubling because it indicates how easily, how surreptitiously, these kind of messages can be imbibed by children as they're growing up - imbibed from adults, from their peers, from the images and words on TV, in the papers, in comics.

Obviously, I want to believe that there was some innocent little me at the centre of this, and that I didn't really say - and certainly that I wasn't responsible for it. And I do think that that's true: that I didn't make a moral choice about saying this thing; it was something that I picked up, that was 'programmed' into me. It was only later (around 1975-6, when I was 13-14) that I learned about the Holocaust, and watched "Roots" on the TV, that I began to see my attitudes 'from the outside', and was able to make some kind of moral judgement about them. I guess that was when I began to be a 'moral' being, and to step outside of the unquestioning, programmed, stimulus-and-response basis of my beliefs and behaviours. I suppose this happens to different people at different times, and that there are layers and layers of 'automatic' behaviours and beliefs that have been laid down like rock strata in the first few years of life, some of which you do become conscious of, and which you can examine critically, and others that are so deeply embedded that you can never escape them: the things that are so intricately wired in to your brain and body that you can never fully escape them.

There's a 'cyclical' element to this as well, I think: it seems to me that I moved beyond being a mere automaton in the mid-70s, when I discovered that the truths and shibboleths of my existence could be questioned, deconstructed, and remade. Thus I gradually constructed/evolved a new worldview, one composed of a secular humanism (if that's not a tautology...), empathy, relativism, tolerance, a romanticised socialism, bits of Marxist analysis, an innocent belief in altruism and the perfectibility of man, and an optimistic view of human nature and of eternal progress towards a more enlightened world. I can see now that this worldview was, in a way, just as artificial and 'context- and culture-bound' as my earlier unenlightened beliefs - in the sense that the late 70s (for me) embodied an upward arc of progress and enlightenment, dominated (at first, anyway) by leftist Labour governments that (so I perceived) were dedicated to the welfare state, to redistribution, to equality, and to the kind of grooviness that I wanted to see. Hence Thatcherism and the 'death of socialism' were a shock to me, and my socialist worldview was eventually smashed to pieces by the fall of the Soviet Union and the 'New Labouring' of the old Labour party; the beliefs that I had built up, and which occupied me for so long that they had become almost wholly habitual, were destroyed, and I had to realise that they I now had to reexamine them and rejig my moral universe. (Which I guess I'm still working on at some subconscious level...)

So, anyway, there were some milkmen that I wasn't keen on... (This started out as just another blob of nostalgia, and seems to have gone somewhere very different instead. Oh well. Back to simple sensory recollections...)