The Year of the Child

BEL MOONEY

The Year of the Child

For E. M. and G. M.

with love from their child

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Spring

1 Denise

2 Mandy

3 Gemma

Part II: Summer

4 Donald

5 Andrew

6 David

Part III: Autumn

7 Keith

8 Moya

9 Melanie

Part IV: Winter

10 Rajesh

11 Wendy

12 Douglas

A Note on the Author

He lives in his childhood. He must be observed rather than analysed … in an endeavour to ascertain the conflict through which he passes in his relations with grown-up persons and with his social environment. It is clear that this approach will lead us away from psycho-analytic theories and technique into a new field of observation of the child in his social existence.

MARIA MONTESSORI The Secret of Childhood (1936)

BORN YESTERDAY

Tightly-folded bud,

I have wished you something

None of the others would:

Not the usual stuff

About being beautiful

Or running off a spring

Of innocence and love –

They will all wish you that,

And should it prove possible,

Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then

May you be ordinary;

Have, like other women,

An average of talents:

Not ugly, not good-looking,

Nothing uncustomary

To pull you off your balance,

That, unworkable itself,

Stops all the rest from working.

In fact, may you be dull –

If that is what a skilled,

Vigilant, flexible,

Unemphasised, enthralled

Catching of happiness is called.

PHILIP LARKIN

Introduction

Once, I asked a five-year-old what he wanted to be when he grows up. A train driver, I guessed, or a soldier, a sailor, or a sweet-shop man. He did not hesitate. ‘A daddy,’ he replied, ‘because you have to be a daddy.’ In that second the future unfolded: the repetitive pattern most of us scribble on our own clean slates. The tiny child watches, absorbs what is around him, grows, and usually imitates in words and deed what he has seen. At the age of three the little girl mirrors her mother’s gestures. By ten the boy estimates his future according to the measurements he has learnt. They grow older; they leave school and childhood behind, usually heading surely towards a re-enactment of the same process: to produce another small soul who will one day say that, yes, he must be a daddy.

As this book progressed, the cycle became all the more obvious. A truism it may be – a Wordsworthian as well as a Freudian perception – but it surprised me nevertheless that I should start by being committed to a book about children as individuals, and end by seeing them all (despite their very different backgrounds) as united by near-helplessness in the face of the forces that surround them. Of course there are some children who break away: who leave their mining villages to become successful playwrights, or who bring disgrace to their public school by ending up in prison. But those are the exceptions. My intention was to write about those children who are not exceptional, or, rather, who do not seem so. The book is intended as a celebration of ordinariness.

People do not, as a rule, consider their own lives to be worthy of any study, nor would they agree with Yevtushenko’s words:

No people are uninteresting,

Their fate is like the chronicles of planets.

The mother of one of the children in this book sat in a Cardiff club and said: ‘I hope you’ve found something out that interests you, because I can’t see what could possibly be interesting to anybody in our life. My first husband died, and my second husband beat me up and I’ve got four ordinary kids. Who could possibly be interested in that?’

Another mother, from a very different social background, wrote and said, ‘I am afraid we are very dull and ordinary parents.’ It is never the case. On a train journey, frozen for a moment in the frame of the speeding window, you can see a woman hanging out washing in one back garden, a man mending something, a hooded pram in a yard, a boy kicking a ball, an old man with his hand on the fence, and know that within each house is being unfolded a small and passionate drama of everyday life. It is that sense that I set out to convey in these chapters: the conviction that whatever happens matters.

What happens does not happen just to the child in isolation. It is too easy to get articulate older children to talk into a tape-recorder; what I wanted to do was write about the whole lives (as much as possible) of children who are not articulate, and of their families – at a certain point in time. Maria Montessori wrote: ‘… whether we go to the origins of human life, or follow the child in his work of growth, we always find the adult not far away. The life of a child is a line joining two adult generations. The child’s life, which creates and is being created, starts in one adult and ends in another adult. It is the lane along which he passes, skirting closely the lives of adults, and the study of it brings fresh rewards of interest and light.’ In this book (particularly in the early chapters) as well as observing children we hear the voices of adults, because it is they who are shaping the children’s lives, at school and at home.

But what sort of ‘study’? I am not a sociologist nor a psychologist: the form of this book is straightforwardly journalistic. During one year I spent time with twelve families, from twelve different parts of the British Isles, moving on as the months passed. There are four sections in the book, as there are four seasons in the year – each one representing both the season itself, and the stage of development of the children. Spring is the time of growth and hope, from birth to four or five, when the child’s world is that of the home, when he/she is surrounded by voices but cannot speak for himself. Summer is the time of flowering – between the ages of five and eight, when most teachers will confirm that children are outgoing and loving, forming friendships quickly, and coming for the first time under the influence of adults who are not family. Autumn is the third stage, representing not so much a dying as a cooling, taking the child from nine to thirteen – a difficult time of change. Children start to worry, about school, friends, themselves, ceasing to be as confident and starting to form their own judgements. Winter is the teenage years, when the world exerts its pressures: exams, sex, parents, what people think, what to do, what to be…. The child has to cope, for the first time, with the knowledge that he or she is getting older, growing up. The book starts with the birth of a baby, and ends with a boy who is sixteen and has left school – whose childhood has ended, and who can speak for himself.

The twelve children in the book represent as accurate a cross-section of British kids as one could get – without the sociologists’ samples, studies and statistics. I chose them randomly, in that whichever child I found was the right one, since articulacy or special talent or confidence were not criteria that mattered at all. I do not make comparisons, but so that it is possible for them to be made, I chose the children from three social groups. Market research categories are simplistic and often misleading, since class cannot be defined purely by income, but the three groups divide roughly as follows:

(1) unskilled and semi-skilled working class;

(2) skilled working class and lower middle class;

(3) professional middle class.

In each of the four sections there is one child from each group, so that, although the children are separate and unique individuals, the shared threads of differing opportunity and expectancy run through the whole narrative. Types they are not; typical they are.

This book is not, though, simply about individuals at a particular moment in their lives, it is also about growth, development, change. I see the ‘year’ of the title as the state of childhood itself: a dog has its day and a child has its ‘year’, and when it is over it is gone forever. Each stage does symbolize a loss, although I would not be sentimental enough to dwell on this at the expense of an appreciation of the gains. Most parents spend their time vacillating between two emotions: the desire to see their children at the next stage – walking, talking, reading, playing in the school football team, going to the first disco – and the impossible wish that they could stay where they are. More than one parent used the word ‘innocent’. As I talked to all these children, and to their friends and families, the experience did crystallize into what seemed to be an exploration of that loss of innocence which is at the root of human experience. Innocence may be a fantasy, yet like all myths it is imaginatively essential, and carries with it the need to generate the next generation, and the next, to see the whole process happen again.

It is not a process which I see as sad. Though winter may be bleak, the seeds of knowledge and understanding lie beneath the surface. What they produce may be understandable anger, it may be predictable success, or it may simply be the sort of acceptance expressed by Philip Larkin at the end of ‘Coming’:

It will be spring soon,

It will be spring soon –

As I whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.

Spring

1 Denise

It was snowing. Joan Robertson sat in the smart sitting room of her comfortable council house in Southfields, in the heart of a characterless area of South London, bored, looking out at the blizzard. Gary and Tracy, thirteen and twelve, were at their comprehensive school, Kim, who is ten, was at the special school for spina bifida children in Putney. There is nothing to do when you are expecting a child, except wait, and worry – especially in the light of the past. So the first slow cold months of the year were swallowed by the waiting, with the visits to the clinic the only thing Joan could look forward to, because they at least made the whole thing more real.

Geoff dropped her off at the South London Hospital for Women, an imposing red-brick pile opposite Clapham Common. Joan joined the thirty or so women sitting in rows in the small, aptly named waiting room, muttering, ‘It takes ages.’ The women’s faces were blank; they sat with arms crossed loosely across their swollen stomachs, waiting for their names to be called. Mrs Ahmed, Mrs Ngosi, Mrs Brown: they each shuffled in their unbalanced way across to the scales, removing their shoes, gazing uncomprehendingly at the mysterious kilos, sitting again, waiting to be summoned through to the cubicle area. There more women sat in rows, some wearing dressing gowns, with the blank patient look of people who have grown used to time.

After one and three-quarter hours Joan is called. She heaves herself up on to the bed, baring her arm for the nurse to take her blood pressure. The woman, who is plump, jolly and in her mid-forties, looks at Joan. ‘Have you been resting?’

‘Why? Is it up?’

‘Yes, a little. I’d prefer it down a bit – but you’ve always had a problem with the blood pressure, haven’t you? Mind, it could be something to do with the sitting waiting out there.’

Joan nods and sighs: ‘Yes, it can be frustrating.’

Nurse smiles, ‘24th March, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Another four weeks! Any complaints?’

‘It’s still moving a lot. I think he’s going to be a footballer.’

‘Well, you’re an old hand at this game, you should know what to expect.’

‘Yes, but it’s so long since the others that I’ve forgotten.’

Dr Vedivathi, the registrar, rustles into the room in a saffron sari, looks at the notes, then feels Joan’s abdomen. The stomach looks impossibly swollen, white with a tracery of fine purple lines, and bluish mottling, so stretched that it might burst when the black ear trumpet is pressed into the skin.

The doctor listens – hears the tiny impatient throb of the foetal heart. Her brown hands press Joan’s flesh, Joan’s own hands following. ‘What’s that bit there?’ she asks. ‘Is it his shoulder?’

‘No, it’s the head, look, you can feel it. And the shoulder is there, and the feet there.’

‘My husband says it’s going to be a boy.’

Joan complains that she has been feeling sick, despite her diet of ‘plenty of fish, greens, protein’. But it is one of the unpleasant aspects of pregnancy the staff expect, so they say little.

That night, the children come home from school to find their mother sitting listlessly watching television, still feeling sick. Tracy longs for the baby to come because she wants to take it out in its pram. Gary appears to be indifferent, but wrote, ‘The baby is going to be a boy’ all over the about-to-be-decorated wall upstairs. Kim arrives in the special bus from the spina bifida school and walks unevenly into the room, leaning heavily on her sticks. Her face is bright and pretty, with fair hair curling on her cheeks. She asks, ‘How’s Fred?’ using the friendly name they have already given to the foetus inside Joan’s womb.

‘He’s fine.’

Kim sits on the floor, laying her sticks beside her: ‘I hope he’s not moving about too much and kicking you.’

‘Oh, he’s always moving, Kim.’

‘Well, if he hurts you I’ll bash him one.’ She clenches her fist and grins. ‘Anyway, I hope he won’t scream too much at night and keep me awake.’

‘All babies cry and keep you awake.’

Kim is turning the pages of the mother-and-baby magazines on the coffee table. She holds up a picture of a baby being born, and Tracy says, ‘Ugh, I’ve seen that on TV – it’s horrible, with all the blood spurting out. I’d rather see a baby in its clothes.’

But Kim points to a photograph of the mother holding the newborn child, the father smiling gently. ‘Oh, I think that’s lovely.’

Joan Robertson is thirty three, with shoulder-length blonde hair framing a round face. She married Geoffrey when she was nineteen and he was twenty, when they had worked together for nine months at a television rental firm in South London. She was a supervisor in the service department, and he was a television engineer.

‘Well, we always wanted to have four children, that was our aim. But after having Kim, and the shock of that, we decided that was it, we didn’t want any more. But you know, I am one of four … and I just thought it would be nice to even it up. Geoff took a lot of convincing – that I would be able to have these tests, and that if this baby was spina bifida it would show in the tests. Even though we’d had the tests there was still a slight possibility that we could have another spina bifida baby.’ She grimaces, and rubs her stomach. ‘So now I keep thinking, Is that his feet I feel moving?

‘Before we got married his mum said that Geoff wasn’t over-keen on children. And when I mentioned it to him he said, I don’t know – but I wouldn’t want them for a while. But after we’d got married, the first thing we wanted was to have a baby. I don’t know why you feel like that. I suppose it’s an extension of your love for one another, to have a child. We got married in September and Gary was born in July the following year. We had an unfurnished flat; we were quite happy with what we had. But I’d made my mind up before not to let the babies take over. When we went to our friends and there was baby clothes all over, and everything stood for Baby, with toys and nappies hanging about, I thought, no. Although I wanted a baby I said I wouldn’t let it interfere with my life like that. I had Gary, then Tracy a year later, and it was a lot of work, but as soon as Geoff came home I used to devote my time to him. We’d always have those few hours to ourselves, even after Kim. I think it’s important. People may laugh, but husbands do get jealous, the children are getting all your attention, and not them.

‘It must have been just after Christmas last year that I decided. I was working at the South London Hospital taking blood samples – and that didn’t help, going on the maternity wards, thinking, Aren’t those babies lovely? Kim was mad about babies. We’d take her out in the wheelchair, and she’d see a baby in a pram and say, Oh, Mummy, look at that baby. Why can’t we have one? And Geoff and I would look at each other. It’s a funny urge … this maternal instinct. It comes and goes. I used to see friends with babies and feel nothing. Then I’d think I’d love a baby. Then the feeling goes away and you think no more of it. But with me, the last few months before we decided, yes, we’ll have another baby, the feeling grew stronger and stronger, and it wouldn’t go away. And of course, knowing that I could have the tests gave me greater hope that this baby would be … well, as perfect … as it could be. I don’t suppose, to be honest, we thought about the first three babies. But after having Kim, it makes you think hard. So you know what you’re doing. With the others Geoff just dropped me off at the hospital and came back when it was all over. But with this one he wants to be present at the delivery. He seems more involved – like going and getting a cot – he’d never have done that! It’s being that much more mature. But you know, I think we’re going to worry more about this baby – being older. When we were that young we just got on with it!’

As February passed into March the weather grew colder. The waiting room at the hospital seemed fuller each time, the women all the more cumbersome for the weight of their damp coats, woollen hats and scarves.

On 17th March 140 women passed through the ante-natal clinic, all waiting for their babies. Joan took her place, but only had to wait for half an hour this time before she was called.

The consultant, Miss Sibthorp, looking like a kindly primary school headmistress, examines Joan. Blood pressure down; still too heavy, for despite her recurring sickness she cannot lose weight; baby moving constantly, punching and pushing through her flesh.

Miss Sibthorp says that there will be no clinic the next Friday – Good Friday, when the baby is due. But if Joan does not go into labour during Easter, they will induce immediately afterwards, sparing her more waiting. She smiles with relief.

At school, Tracy daydreams about the baby, looking out of the window, guessing that it must be a boy, hearing her teacher tell her sharply to get on with the work. The day before, her teacher had set the class to write an essay about Easter. In large round letters she wrote:

I like Easter best because of the eggs. It is a very happy moment for people because my mum is having a baby. I want a baby boy because girls get on the nerves they are very messy. But it will be a very happy moment for my mum. I think it will be one of the happiest days of her life. I can’t wait to take the baby out in his or her pram…. That is why I am going to enjoy Easter.

In the comfortable, gold-coloured sitting room she and her mother indulge themselves, poring over Book of Life issues on conception and childbirth.

Joan says: ‘To me it’s just a thing that moves. I won’t let myself imagine it. I’ve got the cot and everything waiting up there, but I won’t let myself think about when it’s born. It’s not a baby. I can feel it but I can’t imagine it. It’s just a thing inside my swelling belly. Not a baby. It moves, so I know it’s there. Until I see it as a baby in my arms, I don’t want to think too much. I admit I’m afraid.’

Each day throughout her pregnancy Joan has risen at seven o’clock, woken up her disabled daughter Kim, taken her to the bathroom, washed her, changed her nappy, powdered her, and helped her dress. Then Geoff takes over, giving the children breakfast and putting Kim on the coach which takes her to school, whilst Joan rests in bed, waiting for the sharp morning kicks. Geoff does not leave for work until lunch-time, then works until about midnight, driving a heavy goods vehicle for a dairy in North London. He is tall and good-natured, with a quick temper his children have learned to know.

‘I left school at fifteen, I was never good at school. Looking back, that’s one thing I regret – I mean, what’s always let me down is reading and writing and things like that, though I can do anything with a car. I mend cars as a sideline for a bit of extra cash. Look at me – I earn a hundred pounds a week for driving a lorry. Now Gary, he’s interested in history, but what’s the point? There’s no point in learning these days. All you’re going to have to do is push a button. Though sometimes I wonder if I might have done better if I’d learnt more …. I floated about a good deal after I left school, even went in the army for about a year. I didn’t reckon me time there – I was in the wrong mob to start with. I was in the Grenadier Guards, when I wanted to be on the mechanical side. Didn’t like the toy soldier business – all the tourists coming and screwing you with their cameras. I jumped the wall a couple of times and came home and got taken back, but eventually they kicked me out on medical grounds.

‘Joan always left it up to me what I did. I mean, I have come unstuck sometimes, and Joan’s known that was going to happen, and she was right. I mean, Joan’s got her head screwed on right. I don’t mind telling you I think the world of Joan. I love bringing her something home as a surprise.… I like giving her those cuddly toys: she’s got a wardrobe upstairs with loads of them on top. I know it sounds silly, but I know what her face will be like when I give it to her. I suppose over the fourteen years of marriage we’ve had our ups and our downs, but my marriage has been brought closer together with having Kim.

‘As soon as we got married we wanted children. It was the ‘in’ thing. That’s what brings marriage together – kids. Without them