Looking Back: Were the 60s swinging for you?

But was it really better in the ‘Swinging Sixties?’ or do we look at that time through rose tinted spectacles?

Being a schoolgirl in the 1950s was very much like living in Victorian times. You were under the influence of your parents and the restrictions of school which, if they were anything like those at the convent school I attended, were considerable.

Suddenly with 1960 the monochrome world was lifted and it was as if everything had burst into colour. It certainly had on our television screens!

However, on the other hand, it seems that not many of us can actually really remember very much about the time. As the saying goes ‘If you remember the 60s, then you weren’t really there!’

It’s not usually the things we have done that we regret when we are old, but the things that we haven’t done. The Swinging Sixties seems to have been part of the latter for many people.

However, we would have been influenced by the new fashion trends. I remember spending evenings shortening my skirts once Mary Quants mini skirts had exploded onto the scene and being desperate to afford a PVC coat.

Liberation was the word. Hemlines were up with stockings, corsets, girdles and roll-ons all obsolete. Tights were in.

And where liberation was concerned, the pill was the most revolutionary thing to come out of the 60s. For once women had a choice about sex and conception. It was a time of ‘free love’ with slogans around like ‘make love not war’.

It was actually a pretty violent time with the murders of President Kennedy, his brother Robert and Rev. Martin Luther King. Unrest in Northern Ireland and on university campuses with protests against the Vietnam War.

But one milestone was the 1960 trial of Penguin books when they won the right to legitimately print Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

We’d been reading it with plain brown paper covers on for ages and trying not to let our parents find it! Come to think of it, we didn’t find their copies either!