Until the Harshness of Life Destroys Those Peaches and Cream

There are songs one hears once and never forgets, and there are songs one hears for half a lifetime without ever really hearing them. Wayne Fontana's 1966 hit Pamela, Pamela fell into the second category for me. I have known the song for decades. It was pleasant, catchy, nostalgic, unmistakably of its period, and I never thought very much more about it.

Then, for no particular reason, I listened closely to the words.

There in what sounds at first like a lightweight piece of 1960s pop is a remarkably good line about growing up and losing innocence: "the harshness of life dims those peaches and cream." That is quite a thought to find hiding in a pop song from 1966.

There was another surprise. I had always vaguely associated the song with Wayne Fontana himself and even wondered whether Pamela might have been someone from his own family. But Fontana did not write it. Pamela, Pamela was written by Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc, who was already producing an extraordinary collection of songs for other performers, including For Your Love, Bus Stop and No Milk Today.

Even more remarkably, Gouldman was only about twenty when he wrote Pamela, Pamela. Here was a young man barely out of adolescence himself writing nostalgically about childhood as though looking back across a lifetime.

Fontana apparently did not immediately recognise what Gouldman had given him. A contemporary interview records that Gouldman's earlier version had quite different words, including the philosophical thought, "Let the world change as it will and it must." Gouldman then produced the familiar version with its childhood memories, Laurel and Hardy and sticky red lollies. Fontana initially thought the result sounded rather like a nursery rhyme and preferred one of his own compositions. Fortunately, he lost the argument.

The nursery-rhyme quality is precisely what makes the song work. Gouldman constructs a child's universe from small things: school, sweets, films, ribbons, stories, childish crushes and those first mysterious conversations about kissing. Nothing very important is happening by adult standards, yet everything is important because childhood has not learned the adult hierarchy of significance. A sticky red lolly can be an event. Then Pamela begins to grow up.

She is impatient. Everything is new and she wants to experience what childhood has so far kept beyond her reach. She wants answers, as children approaching adulthood always do. The trouble is that every answer has a price.

That is where the peaches-and-cream image becomes much more than another piece of clever song writing. Peaches and cream suggest freshness, youth and innocence. Then comes "the harshness of life." We do not need to invent some terrible fate for Pamela. The song gives us no grounds for doing so. Perhaps nothing catastrophic happens to her at all. She merely grows up. That is enough.

Experience accumulates. People disappoint us. Adults turn out not to possess the wisdom children attribute to them. Love proves more complicated than a first kiss. There are betrayals, illnesses, failures and deaths. Dreams encounter mortgages, work, ageing and the thousand compromises out of which ordinary life is constructed.

The peaches and cream begin to dim.

There is something universal in Pamela's impatience. When we are children, adulthood looks like liberation. Adults can stay awake. Adults have money. Adults drive cars. Adults choose where they go and what they do. Nobody tells them to finish their homework and go to bed. The child sees the freedom. The adult eventually discovers the bill.

Freedom comes with responsibility, knowledge with disillusionment, love with the possibility of loss and independence with the discovery that ultimately one must carry oneself. None of this makes adulthood bad. It merely makes it very different from what the child imagined while impatiently waiting to get there.

Perhaps this is why nostalgia becomes stronger with age. We are not necessarily nostalgic because childhood was objectively wonderful. For many people it plainly was not. We are nostalgic partly because there was once a world in which we had not yet learned everything that would later hurt us.

That brings me to something peculiar about my own hearing of the song. For decades I thought Fontana sang that the harshness of life destroys the peaches and cream. He does not. Gouldman's word is dims.

Perhaps my hearing was simply bad. Yet having finally discovered the correct word, I find myself thinking that the incorrect one expresses something true that the gentler original does not.

To dim something is to reduce its brightness while leaving the thing itself intact. Turn up the light again and perhaps its old brilliance will return. But I am not convinced that this is how innocence works. Innocence depends partly upon not knowing.

Once you know certain things about the world, you cannot unknow them: T. S. Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" Gerontion (1920). Once the child discovers betrayal, cruelty, mortality and the frailty of people previously imagined to be indestructible, there is no intellectual road back to the condition in which these things were unknown. We can become wiser, happier, kinder and perhaps even better people. But we cannot become innocent in precisely the same way again.

What survives is memory. That may explain the extraordinary emotional power that childhood memories sometimes acquire late in life. We think we are remembering the toy, the television programme, the schoolyard, the family car, a Christmas morning or a particular song on the radio. But perhaps what we really miss is the person who experienced those things before much of the world's harsher knowledge had arrived.

The object may still exist. The consciousness that first encountered it does not.

In that sense, perhaps the peaches and cream really are destroyed, although their memory remains. Indeed, memory may become sweeter precisely because what it remembers cannot be recovered.

This also makes Pamela's impatience to grow up rather poignant. She wants the answers because she does not yet know what knowing the answers costs. The adult listener knows something she does not: the border into experience has no return gate.

There is no reason to become gloomy about this. Innocence is lost partly because something valuable replaces it. Experience can produce judgment, resilience, compassion and wisdom. A seventy-year-old who possessed precisely the understanding of a seven-year-old would not represent a triumph of innocence.

But every gain has its price. Perhaps that is why an apparently slight song can become more interesting after fifty or sixty years. The record has not changed. The listener has. Me.

At twenty, a line about life's harshness may simply be another lyric. Decades later one has accumulated enough evidence to understand what the songwriter was getting at. Parents have died, friends have disappeared, ambitions have succeeded or failed, relationships have changed, bodies have aged, and the apparently limitless future has acquired boundaries. Death could be any day now. The song has been patiently waiting for the listener to catch up with it.

There is a wider lesson here. We have an unfortunate tendency to assume that profundity must announce itself as profundity. We look for philosophy in philosophy books, social criticism in serious essays and reflections upon mortality in suitably gloomy literature.

But human beings put their deepest concerns everywhere. They put them in jokes, detective novels, westerns, science fiction and popular songs. Sometimes the philosophical wine comes in a very cheap bottle.

That is what struck me on returning to Pamela, Pamela. I had heard the song countless times but never really asked what it was saying. It had occupied a little compartment in memory marked "1960s nostalgia" and remained there.

Then one day the compartment opened. Suddenly the childish images were not merely quaint period decoration. They established a lost world. Pamela's impatience was not merely something connecting one verse with another. It was the hinge upon which the whole song turned. Childhood is protected partly because there are things it does not yet know, while Pamela desperately wants to know them.

Then comes knowledge. Then comes experience. Then comes the harshness of life. Gouldman says it dims the peaches and cream. For most of my life I heard that it destroys them. After thinking about the song properly for the first time, I am no longer sure that my younger ears got it entirely wrong. You cannot recover innocence by remembering it. You can only remember what it was like when you still had it. Not bad philosophy from a twenty-year-old songwriter. And not bad for a record Wayne Fontana initially thought sounded like a nursery rhyme. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEaFQk4FuL0