Jack and Isobel, the Young Couple

There was near a whole lifetime together as a couple before me and my brothers came along and turned us into the Smart family.  For the era, they had an unusually long courtship, explained by the war and post war austerity -,an austerity that all but rationed marriages, certainly the type of big one my parents waited for.  And then there was an entire decade of marriage, in which producing kids turned out to be a problem.  Only sorted by pioneering fertility treatment by the NHS, my parents had campaigned to establish. My brother, Ian, arrived in September 1958, near exactly ten years on from their wedding day, me in 1959 and David in 1961.  Thereafter, my parents lives changed, I'd like to think for the better. But before they were far from a dreary  couple.  In their 20's and early 30's, they travelled all over not just Scotland, but all over Europe, and by train in the pre package holiday era, when, even for wealthy people this was unusual. But very rare for two working class kids who had lived through the hungry 30's and survived WW2. 

At the time and a good thereafter, age aside, I could never understand why my parents were never too excited by the Beatles and the 60's revolution. I now think this may have been because, for them, the 1950's were pretty revolutionary .  We grew up on tales of their honeymoon on the Italian lakes and at Menton in the South of France. And thereafter, regular trips to Paris, Italy and Spain.

Even in the dreary 1940's they were pioneers, social and political. Both were young and active members of the Labour Party when Clement Attlee's radical Labour Government was swept to power in the 1945 General Election landslide.   The greatest government in the history of the UK. not just establishing the NHS, but putting in place the welfare state, free secondary and higher education, and a whole lot more we now take for granted, or used to   But this was their revolution. Lennon-McCartney had nothing on it. Nor V I Lennon...Their's was a popular peaceful, democratic revolution. Jesus Christ, not Karl Marx their inspiration.