I don't know the answer to that, I was only a little sprog at the time, but something happened this week that made me ask the question. Fifty years ago now, it seems hard to believe, and how could it possibly have been better then than today?

I was brought up in a sleepy Hampshire town in what was (and still is) called a council house. A council house for those that don't know was a house built and provided by the local County Council at a low rental to families who couldn't afford anything better. But substandard it wasn't, it was new, well built, comfortable, ran to two bathrooms, and was a warm and a happy place to live, and the houses are still standing and going strong today, much as they were then.

But we didn't have double-glazing, or central heating, no one did, and we didn't care a fig about that. We didn't have window locks, or burglar alarms, or CCTV security either and we didn't need them because burglary was absolutely unheard of. We really did leave our houses unlocked, at least during the day and often at night too, everyone did, and we would all pop in and out of each other's homes perhaps occasionally borrowing a cup of sugar that we would always return the following day. That wasn't unusual, everyone did it.

And in the summer during the long hot nights we'd all sleep with all the windows wide open, secure in the knowledge that no one would take advantage of that and break in and steal our possessions and god forbid, violate the children. It didn't happen, leastways not in our sleepy town.

Every house was occupied, and permanently so by the same families, there wasn't the same coming and going there is today, and I can still walk down that street now and name who lived in every house. And every family had two parents and boasted numerous kids, baby boomers one and all. Thinking back, the dads all had pretty good jobs too, few of the mums worked, a doctor, a naval officer, a teacher, a nurseryman, an engineer, another teacher and so it went on. You wouldn't see that today.

And there were no cars, well except two, one held by the doctor for essential round's purposes, and one by the engineer, though that one would rarely move as he spent every weekend underneath, banging it with a spanner. He used to park it right over where we played football and that annoyed me intensely, I remember that.

There were no telephones, again except the doctor, and we'd all go in there and use his in case of emergencies, and offer him sixpence for the call, not that he ever took it, and what would be the point of a telephone anyway? We didn't know anyone else who possessed a phone, so who could we ring? Washing machines and refrigerators were beginning to appear; I remember my mother was very keen on those, though I never quite understood why.

We had TV of course, black and white, and two channels to pick from, though we'd still all rush to the Saturday matinee to watch the colour films. We'd watch intently to see if it were in Technicolor or Eastmancolor, for we all imagined we could tell the difference. Film buffs one and all.

And after school there was no point in rushing home to watch TV as it didn't start until five o'clock and when it did we would sit entranced at the Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, William Tell and Boots and Saddles, programmes that would be repeated ad nausea until we knew the dialogue off by heart. In truth we'd still listen to the radio as much as TV, though there was no commercial radio, and certainly none of that rowdy new music was ever broadcast. No, we were treated to the delights of "How much is that doggie in the window", or "I'm a pink toothbrush, you're a blue toothbrush." Heavy stuff indeed.

If we wanted to listen to that dreadful Elvis Presley, a singer our parents seemed genuinely frightened of, we had to go down to the coffee bar in the town and play the jukebox on Saturday mornings, which we did, in our hundreds.

And food was dodgy too, oh yes food rationing had finally ended in 1954 but by the end of the week there was another kind of rationing. Cash rationing, for we'd run out, and mothers were constantly struggling to feed the kids come Thursday night. Fortunately my father was a poacher so our food, and particularly meat supply, was propped up by wood pigeons, pheasants, rabbits and other unfortunate creatures he'd butcher in the countryside at night time and which were generally described as "wild game".

We ate them without a care in the world, course we did, though I always suspected the wild game was squirrel, a theory that was supported by the increasing line of tails hanging up in the garden shed. I saw a programme the other day about the Ministry of Food scouring the earth for cheap foodstuffs to fill the shop's shelves and surely one of the oddest things they came up with were tinned pangolin tails from Australia.

Now I am fairly certain that I never ate tinned pangolin, but I surely would have if my mother had placed it on the table for Sunday lunch saying, "it's very nice and it will make you grow up to be big and strong." One day we were so hungry we dug up and ate the potatoes my father had been carefully tending before they were really ready. They were small and sweet but when dad came home he went crazy that we should be so stupid as to dig them and eat them like that. Wasted, he said, Wasted! Roast ox heart was the thing I couldn't cope with. This huge heart would be set in the middle of the table, almost as big as my football, and I imagined it was still pumping, you don't see roast ox heart much now do you? I wonder why. Pizza, pasta, and Paella hadn't been invented, leastways not in Hampshire they hadn't, and garlic sounded like a lavatory cleaner, a noxious chemical to be avoided at all costs, and as for MacDonald's, that was a brand of Scottish shortbread we might see at Christmas if were really lucky.

So how could things possibly have been better then? Our cricketers still sportingly "walked" for a start, when they were out, without waiting to be sent on their way by the umpires, and our footballers wouldn't dream of writhing on the floor in mock agony, they'd struggle to their feet and try everything to carry on, regardless of a broken leg, or even a broken neck, it was a man thing, and no footballer would ever dream of running after a referee urging him to book or dismiss another player. How demeaning would that have been?

And we were certainly better cared for than today, everyone would care about each other, not just family and friends but everyone in the street, especially if someone was ill. And if a mother saw a child crying alone in the road, the mother, any mother, would rush out and comfort them and take them by the hand and lead them home, like worker ants caring for the young, all the young.

The other day I had cause to drive down that road in the morning and it struck me how little it has changed in fifty years, except the cars outside and until I saw the present day incumbents wobbling to the bus stop, and that was just the children. The parents, half my age and three times as wide, didn't so much wobble as roll down the road, all bleary eyed, big boned, glandular, dyslexic, and moaning that their children suffered from behavioural problems, all single parents, and you could see why, slovenly dressed, yawning and cursing as they lit their cigarettes. Of course our parents smoked, all of them, and drank too, yet there wasn't a single fat man, woman, child or dog who lived in that road in the fifties, despite their full cream milk, and full fat cheese diets and fried breakfasts every morning. So where's all that wobble come from?

In the fifties there were no drugs, almost no crime, certainly no burglary, no illegal immigrants, almost no single parents, no under age sex, leastways I never came across any, no public drunkenness, and no lack of respect for professional people.

There was illness of course, cancer was an absolute killer and anyone diagnosed with it surely faced an early death. TB too was still killing young people, my own otherwise healthy pretty aunt Norah died of TB aged just twenty-three, polio still wrecked hundreds if not thousands of lives, and then there was the dreaded diphtheria, the one spoken of in hushed tones by our parents as if it was Satan himself, diphtheria!

Now I can honestly say that I have never knowingly come across a soul who suffered from diphtheria and to this day I haven't a clue what form diphtheria takes. To me it always sounded like an outlying planet in the Dan Dare sci fi comics, but I do remember queuing up in our best togs on Sunday afternoon no less to be inoculated by the old doc who lived down by the cliffs, a harrowing enough event for a five year old, to queue shirtless to be jabbed by a blunt needle used heaven knows how many times before, though it must have worked, mustn't it? I shall always remember the words the doc whispered into my mother's ear when he spied my lean and very white frame. "Fine pair of legs he has Mrs C, stand him in good stead in later life," and he was right there too.

I suppose all that community caring was a throwback to World War II. It was after all, only ten years since Hitler had been defeated, yet that seemed ten lifetimes ago to us. So what if anything will ever bring back that caring society? A war I guess, though haven't we got a war on now, the Gwot? The What? The Gwot, the global war on terror, and it is a strange war isn't it, you don't really see the enemy, you don't really know where to find him (or her), and particularly puzzlingly, sometimes he lives in our very own streets. You can't pinpoint one particular country, and worse than that you can't really see an end to it. And all the while the feeling persists that perhaps we should be sitting down and talking to these people, to find an amicable way to solve our differences in the twenty first century AD, yet that idea does seem truly preposterous.

Britain has tried that before of course, sitting down and talking to real or perceived devils, heaven knows we tried hard and long enough to talk Uncle Adolf out of his silly ideas, a policy that almost cost us dearly in the end, but somewhere along the line dialogue has to be started. It seems to have worked with the IRA does it not?

So were the fifties really better than now? The answer depends on how old you are, and the answer is an unequivocal NO, and YES at the same time, for the truth is, the fifties were exactly the same as now, from the point of view that it is down to all of us to make the world a better place to live in, a more caring place, and with the technology at our disposal we have absolutely no excuse for failing. We could achieve that, couldn't we? Is it really beyond the wit and wisdom of the great and the good, and indeed the rest of us too, to make things happen for the better? Well couldn't we?