50 years ago today
A memoir by Derek Perry
My parents gave me the name 'Derek'. I was born in 1948 in Selly Oak, an industrial suburb in south-west Birmingham. I was the second of four children, brought up by our parents in a 'prefab' until we moved down the road to a 'proper' council house. I passed my Eleven Plus and went to a better sort of school. I won a place at London University and left home. This memoir describes some of my experiences.
I began writing this memoir in 2017, over fifty years after the events it describes, with all the hindsight, revision, and re-invention that this entails. I began publishing it in a blog and updated it occasionally. You can access my original blog at: https://50yearsago.today/about/
I may present myself as a knowledgeable and confident observer but be assured that I was confused and uncertain. In 1967 I was 18 years old. I had just left school and expecting to go to university. I was on the threshold of becoming an adult, a bewildering process for any young adult, especially a working class youth from Birmingham. Britain was in the process of unprecedented social and cultural change which would sweep me along with it.
It is now over fifty years since the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, fifty years since homosexuality was de-criminalised, half a century since new laws were introduced promoting equal pay and making racial discrimination unlawful. At about this time, censorship was relaxed, abortion made legal and the contraceptive pill became easily available. In 1967 we saw massive demonstrations against the war being waged in Vietnam by the USA. In a few months time, in May 1968 there would be a near revolution in Paris with other uprisings across the world including Czechoslovakia. The British Empire continued the decline it had suffered since the 1940s.
This memoir recounts my recollections from fifty years ago. I will attempt to re-imagine what I was doing, thinking, feeling, reading, watching, experiencing at that time. I did not keep a diary at the time so I cannot be certain about dates or names in some cases. It will be how I remember it, but I will try not to make things up. This is a true story. I will only use real names with permission.