Making men out of boys

There was a time not so very long ago when boys were taught to be men. Efforts were made in those just forgotten days to ensure that if you were born male you learned skills and acquired a clear understanding of what being a man was all about. It was straightforward, unquestioned and it worked.

Men used to live by the skill of their hands. They made new things and fixed old. They maintained their houses, cars and motorbikes. They knew how to grow food and how to hunt and fish. They dressed like men, walked and worked and played like men.

Their jobs had names that are becoming as unfamiliar to us as calloused hands and ingrained dirt. They were fitters, turners and carpenters; blacksmiths and wheelwrights; ploughmen and woodsmen; wheel-tappers and shunters; masons and glaziers; tailors and cobblers; riveters and welders. They walked the line. Out of the ground beneath their feet they won coal and copper, tin and lead. They built bridges and railways, ships and trains and when they ran out of room here in Britain they did it all over again all over the world.

If you learned the lore of manhood and managed to pass your Manliness Finals there were all sorts of manly futures to be looked forward to:

Steam-engine driver
Engineer
Miner
Inventor
Cowboy (riding the range – not ripping old ladies off for shoddy plumbing and unfinished driveways)
Explorer (actually mapping new countries – not just being followed about by TV crews, up mountains and through forests we’ve all seen anyway, from our couches)
Sheriff
Astronaut (with the hope of actually going somewhere, like the moon, or maybe even Mars, and not just endlessly orbiting the Earth in a shuttle, a spaceship that, let’s face it, always looked a bit … well, clumpy)

All these proper, manly jobs and dozens more besides were there for the taking, provided you’d done your manly homework.

Part of the education of boys came from reading tales of brave and selfish deeds, or hearing from fathers and uncles and grandfathers about how other men had changed their lives, met their challenges, reached their goals and faced their deaths.

It was simple, honest stuff about standing up straight with your shoulders back and eyes to the front like a soldier. It was about making light of physical hardship and keeping going until the job was done. Being a man was about comradeship and standing by your friends whatever the circumstances. It meant understanding  that sometimes it was more important to die a hero than to live a coward’s life. It was about always having at least one pair of clean underpants in your backpack when lesser types were kicking up something fearful.

Somewhere along the line we’ve forgotten – or discarded – the value and importance of being manly men. Somehow that whole way of being was ridiculed, then eroded and finally discouraged. Being an old-fashioned man in the time-honoured way became outdated, outmoded and forgotten.

Manly men were hunted to near-extinction in these British Isles, along with all the other wild animals that once roamed the quiet places of the land – the bear, the board, the wolf. There’s always talk these days of bringing back the Wild – reintroducing the beasts we’ve lost. Eccentric landowners stock their private forests with boar. Others lay plans for loosing packs of wolves in the high lonesome glens of the far north. No one mentions men. No one talks about bringing back the sort of men who once roamed the world, lived defiant lives and damn the consequences.

But the urge to be a man like men once were is a primal thing and lives still in the unformed hearts of boys.

Maybe it’s just me and maybe I’m hopelessly wrong. Maybe the place for men like men used to be is somewhere in the past. Maybe it was all misguided and led to nothing but trouble. But it was something – something easily understood and worth getting out of bed in the morning for. It was as clear and clean and straight as a well-ironed shirt-collar and it gave boys something to live up to. It was a certain standard to be met in an uncertain world.

Maybe it’s too late for me. But at least I know what I’ve missed out on – what I haven’t become. It’s not too late for our sons, though. Some of what’s required if our boys are to know once more what some of manhood is about is to let them hear the old tales and learn what men are for and what men can do. What’s encouraging for the future of mankind is that there are so many to choose from. All of them demonstrate the qualities you’d want in your heroes – selflessness, devotion to brotherhood, stubborn resourcefulness and refusal to quit regardless of the consequences.

Read more Amazing Tales For Making Men out of Boys by Neil Oliver (Penguin, £8.99) www.amazon.co.uk