When i was a child of six or seven years old I would troop into school assembly every morning, along with several hundred other pupils and sing hymns such as All Things Bright And Beautiful and Glad That I Live Am I.
I knew that these songs were about God and the world that he had created but it never occurred to me that they had anything to do with religion.
Religion was something that a few grown-ups got involved with (a very few in the area where I grew up). It had nothing to do with us, we just enjoyed starting the day with a sing-song.
It is a well-worn nostalgic cliché these days to say that the world was simpler back then but actually there’s a better word for it: it was uncomplicated.
We live in a society now where everything is questioned, from the simple school assembly (outlawed in many schools because it may offend somebody or other), to the chemical composition of a sausage.
We can’t just warble a hymn or eat a sausage; a fuss has to be made and whole industries full of busy-bodies have grown up around these fusses. It’s not so much political correctness as political complication.
All of which leads me up to one of the few bits of cheerful news to have emerged from this troubled week.
Children’s comics are enjoying a comeback. Sales are up by two thirds in five years. To be fair the surge is being led by comics tied in to TV series such as Dr Who.
But older titles like The Beano and Dandy are holding their own too. Was there ever a more delightful window into an uncomplicated world than the children’s comic?
I haven’t looked at a copy of The Beano or Dandy in years but I can’t believe that they have escaped the clutches of the Politically Correct fuss-pots.
I’d be amazed, frankly, if Dennis The Menace is still getting thwacked with a large slipper at the end of all his escapades although I suppose it’s possible that Little Plum, the Dandy’s er, “Native American Indian” child is still talking about “um wigwam”.
The comics I grew up with, those two titles plus Seventies debutantes Cor!, Whizzer & Chips and, best of all, the rip-roaring, war-mongering Victor, recognised no boundaries of social, political or racial correctness because they were comics: they required the young reader to identify a shorthand language associated with the fact that they were funny, exciting and designed for children.
They were not supposed to be regarded as a serious depiction of the world and no child that I ever encountered even remotely considered them to be.
The comics were also timeless: even when I was reading them, in the sixties and seventies, the Beano and Dandy had a whiff of post-war austerity.
The streets where the Bash Street Kids played and the school in which they were taught (complete with mortar-board wearing teachers) were as much a part of the distant, romanticised, past as the hedgerows and skylarks and “Arab desert rangers” we sang about in those precious school hymns.
This was part of the fascination and the genius of comics: they remained unselfconsciously frozen in times which were much more interesting and inspirational to our young minds than the times we were living in.
This is a notion that the PC brigade with their super-polished, up-to-the-minute sense of “appropriateness” have utterly destroyed. Any comic set in the past now would have to have all unpleasantness vacuumed out.
The most anachronistic of all the comics back then (and my personal favourite, long-gone) was the Victor.
Its tales of machinegun toting, lantern-jawed Second World War warriors ordering the “Hun” to “eat lead” would have the entire New Labour benches up on their hind-legs these days but it wasn’t the war stories I liked the most.
My personal favourite was the immortal Alf Tupper, “The Tough Of The Track”, an arc-welder working in a railway-arch who transformed himself into a champion sprinter in the evenings and at weekends.
He was, in modern terms, the most unlikely athlete, existing on a diet of fish ’n’ chips and so devoid of sponsorship, or indeed much money of any kind, that he’d have to scrimp together a few pence to have a bath in a publicbathing-house (and couldn’t always afford the soap).
I particularly liked that Alf would read about athletics meetings in the “vinegar-soaked columns” of the newspapers his fish ’n’ chips were wrapped in.
I was a voracious reader as a child – Enid Blyton, the great Robert Bateman, MR James’s ghost stories – but I can honestly say that the wildly anachronistic world of Alf Tupper ignited my imagination and shaped my humour and general outlook on the world, more completely than almost anything else I encountered.
This was what comics did and what, hopefully, even with all the restrictions our namby-pamby masters have placed on them now, they are doing still.
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