When being banned is a badge of honour

It’s not an affluent area but it is rich in culture – non-British culture, to be more exact. It has one of the city’s best known fruit and vegetable street markets, where those who know their exotic produce go to get it and those who fancy something different browse and marvel at strange, gnarled roots before taking some home and cooking them like potatoes.

For the same sort of reason the area is also attractive to a breed of politically-aware, left-wing Brits who see it as the real world, while despising the wealthier areas, such as nearby Greenwich and Blackheath.

The public library in Deptford, if it’s still there, has an unusual section. Somewhere between Archaeology and Cooking, there is Banned. The subversive, dresseddown sneerers like nothing better than a bit of controversial literature, particularly when it has been given the seal of disapproval of the British authorities.

There you would find a rogues’ gallery of works that have at one time or another been labelled unfit for human consumption. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is included, of course, that exquisitely written, thought-provoking tale of an aristocratic woman brought down by love and lust for a humble gamekeeper.

By today’s standards Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not really shocking at all, but in its time it was scandalous (first published in parts of Europe in the late 1920s, it became the subject of a highly publicized UK court case before finally being approved for publication in full there in the early 60s). The author, D H Lawrence, not only had this lady off her pedestal and onto the floor of the gamekeeper’s cottage, he had the man using the f word and the c word, not to mention some lavatorial vocabulary, all designed to convey the fact that humans have bodily functions and sexual instincts, the only thing separating us from the animal kingdom being that we do the latter for fun, not just procreation.

Those were relatively puritanical times, as the tale of country and western singer Kitty Wells demonstrates.

In the early 1950s there was a popular song called Wild Side of Life, in which a man sang about honky tonk angels, by which he meant young women of easy virtue who spent their evenings at cheap bars where country (honky tonk) music was played by live bands.

Wells, an old-fashioned wholesome, bible-quoting Nashville girl, decided to stand up for the reputation of these girls by writing and recording God Didn’t Make Honky Tonk Angels, which put the blame on the men who led the girls on with sweet talk and promises, designed to get their wicked way.

Wells’s message was controversial at that male-dominated time, and her song was banned by many radio stations. NBC, in particular, was troubled by the lyric, “It brings back memories of when I was a trustful wife”. She was obliged to change “trustful” to “trusting” before the ban was lifted, presumably because the powers that be thought trustful meant trustworthy.

It shows how strict (or biased, opinionated, prejudicial) the decision- makers were at that time.

A half-hour listen to music radio in Trinidad and Tobago shows just how far we have come along the road of liberalization and freedom of expression.

Hidden amid the thick mud of slang and deliberately skewed pronunciation on the airwaves we find the one-track mind that has prevailed among the young – and the not so young – since the Garden of Eden fig leaf affair – a scandal that never made it to the courts and the media only because it predated such things.

It has always been there, of course, contained in jolly, wholesome- sounding folk songs and the dark, steamy utterances of the old blues singers, whose Holy Grail in many cases seemed to be seducing underage girls.

The authorities can’t control what people think about, but they can stop us singing about it and glorifying it in film, on TV etc.

Sometimes, though, those who seek to dictate what is and isn’t permissible have to take into account the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times they live in. Thus Lady Chatterley got waved through in the end because, as a sexually frustrated poet once said, sex began in 1963. Lawrence had been helped by pioneers such as Elvis Presley, who wiggled and writhed in a provocative way to the outrage of the prim and protective but without actually causing the breakdown of society.

The wigglers and writhers of the carnival, not to mention the singers whose pearls of dubious wisdom blurt through the overworked speakers, should be thankful that t h e a u r a l m e s s d i s - g u i s e s t h e m .

Or perh a p s t h e y k n e w that already.