Take the Toys from the Boys

Spring time. I'm kneeling on thick pile carpet, opening a small 'toybox' door in the bedroom wall and feeling like I'm about to enter Wonderland. My mum is nearby, hoovering the landing of our big house. I’m four years old and all is well.

I say ‘our big house’ because that’s what we call it. We actually live in a damp bungalow up a dirt road two miles away. My Mum cleans houses every morning. It's 1958 and everyone still remembers the war, including me, and I wasn't even there. It's in the air though. It can’t be hoovered up or dusted away, it’s staring at us from lovingly framed photos. Husbands and sons lost in action. Wives and daughters no longer with us.

But life must go on and it's okay to bring your child to work in this new coastal town of Peacehaven. Consequently I'm growing up seeing how the other half live. Behind this 'secret' bedroom door is a vast collection of toys that I'm somehow allowed to play with while my Mum scrubs the kitchen floor. There's no judgement on my part, no ‘man the barricades’ class consciousness that I develop later at art school. Just sheer delight.

My Mum seems happy here too, maybe because every appliance works and she can breathe easy for a few hours. Maintenance is an issue for The Morleys.

In our bungalow everything needs fixing, including my Dad who’s still addicted to the Dexedrine they gave him to stay awake on bombing missions in WW2. My three elder brothers, a tree-climbing, knee-grazing, den-building gang have gone feral, maintaining themselves out in the fresh air with Boy Scout zeal. I join them sometimes but me and my Mum prefer to stay inside where we can 'do drawing'.

My Grandad, who lives nearby with my Gran, is a builder. He trains my Dad to be a surveyor, but my Dad is always turning up late onsite, so he gets him an office job as a quantity surveyor. There aren’t many perks to this job other than the glossy architectural magazines he brings home when they’re out of date. Once again I get to see how the other half live, marvelling over these futuristic buildings that prophesy the coming of Kraftwerk and their technically perfect beats.

As our family grows in size my Grandad saves enough money to build us a house. This is THE most exciting news in the world. We all go to see the plot of land he's bought in neighbouring Saltdean and leap around it like monkeys who’ve just discovered an orchard full of apples. Several months later we discover that, in the ‘must make ends meet’ spirit of the fifties, his team have built two semi-detached bungalows on the land. Not only do we have to cram ourselves into one of them, we have to keep the noise down because the party wall is only one brick thick.

Leaping ahead I open that same toy box cupboard door in 2023 and discover Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, the theory goes that none of us can concentrate properly on spiritual things, which could be as simple as listening to music or icing a cake, until we’re confident we have a roof over our heads. A dry roof.

I couldn't watch whole of that BBC programme about children in Ukraine. I saw enough to know that the women are maintaining their families in freezing shacks and bombed-out flats. They're keeping their children's hopes alive while wondering if their men folk will ever come home. It's unbearable. What can we do?

I come to the same conclusion that I come to every time I think about war. Take the toys from the boys.

Simply give women all the jobs that require political decision making, in every nation, and see what we have by March 8th 2024. I suspect we'll all be housed and have space to imagine, and create, a peaceful future.