The Story of Childhood (21 page)

So did Jeremy deserve to get in trouble? ‘Well, actually I was the one to get into trouble, because he didn't bring it in that day and they thought I was telling a lie. Which was really, really unfair.' Poor Nicholas, carefully balancing the ethics of loyalty and obedience and still getting a row at the end of it.

He says that people learn about right and wrong from their parents, their teachers, and other relatives. Has anything ever surprised him by being wrong? ‘Well, my dad is always really cross with me for not hanging my coat up immediately I get in, and I think that's a bit, bit, bit odd.'

If he hadn't told the teacher about the Gameboy, would that have been the same as telling a lie?

‘Well, I've never told a lie,' says Nicholas confidently. Not ever? ‘Well, not that I can remember. Well, once my dad asked me if I had a vest on because he thought it was absolutely freezing and I thought it was absolutely boiling,
so I said I did because I didn't want to wear one. And then when I bent down to do up my shoelaces my shirt came out and he saw I wasn't wearing a vest. He absolutely shouted at me, but it was too late, because he found out at school so if we'd driven all the way back and there again I'd be an hour late and I didn't want to miss a whole hour's work because then I'd be far behind everyone else, etc., etc. That was lie, because it wasn't telling the truth.'

But some lies aren't as bad as other lies. ‘You can tell a white lie about a birthday present or something. I was once given a Bionical – a sort of plastic monster, and I don't really like them – and my mum said I had to write a really long thank-you letter, so I had to put in a sentence about me liking the Bionical, and she said that I could do that and I didn't get told off or anything.' And Santa is a lie, but it's lying to make people excited so it's sort of a white lie.

Truth and lies require some hefty negotiation. No wonder Nicholas prefers numbers. Why does he like them so?

‘I just do. Because I'm just very good at maths.'

But would he like numbers even if he wasn't good at maths?

Nicholas laughs and shakes his head. The proposition is impossible to contemplate. ‘I've
always
been good at maths.'

‘You just break their neck. I haven't done it on my own but I've watched Mum and Dad. After that we cook them.'

Adam's favourite animal up here in his bedroom is a fox puppet called Foxy. His favourite animal in the house is downstairs. He's a bald-headed sea eagle puppet called Beaky. Adam likes puppets, because with normal teddies you can't really move their arms, but with these you can move them wherever you like. His very favourite animal isn't here at all. He's in Spain because Adam lost him there last August. He was a monkey. Monkey's loss was a blow, still deeply felt.

There are other animals about the house: a snarling stuffed badger and a number of birds, preserved with wings spanning grandly. In a perspex box on the landing window-sill there are two stick insects. Adam had three, but one died. He feeds them brambles, and they can eat ash as well. The little round things at the bottom of the box are eggs, but they never hatch.

He peers out of the window into the back garden, which slopes down to a neighbouring farm. ‘I've got two goats out there; Coco which is the black one, and Butter the white one. We don't milk them because they're boys. We have a sheep, but not here, at a friend's.'

Adam is seven years old. He has dark hair and pale skin, taut across elfin features. He lives with his mother and father in an etiolated hamlet which straddles the border between Shropshire and Wales. Home is an isolated, oak-beamed house built at the base of a disused lime kiln quarry and reached along a bumpy track. It is not the kind of place you could arrive at by mistake. The scooped-out hill has been densely coppiced, and today the grey white sky is etched with the stick arms of hazel trees, leafless still in cautious early spring. The air is cool and clean.

Adam slips his feet into the wellies that stand ready in the front porch beside two bigger pairs. He goes to the woodshed, where a clutch of young chickens are cheeping under a heat lamp. One jumped out of the pen and froze to death. It's hard to tell which is which so they don't have names.

Beyond the woodshed there are more permanent pens, where hens and roosters strut and call. ‘Some in there we got out of an incubator. One of them hatched before everyone else, and we called him Early Bird. There's two Indian Runner ducks, and three Black Sussex, three Bantams and two Apenzellas. The one with the blackish feathers on his tail, he's a male and those two are female.' You can't tell which eggs come from which. ‘The ducks had two babies but we sold them. We had four, but one got squashed by the mother or father, and the other froze.' He speaks of death with a light Welsh lilt, without sentiment or surprise. Adam is interested in animals at all stages, breathing and beyond.

Further up the hill, the trees tighten around the path. He's been exploring all through there, where the lime quarry was. In the stone outhouse, where they keep the hay for the goats, is a rusted pail brimming with discoveries. He found a shoulder-blade, some bits of metal, an old tile that
says ‘France' on it, and – he thinks it was from a house – a padlock. It didn't have a key with it. His favourite discovery is a sheep's skull. It's still got some teeth. He twirls his fingers through the eye sockets. The bottom jaw is cracked.

On a continuum of concern that extends from Turkey Twizzlers to
Grand Theft Auto
, adults worry that children's bodies and minds are being fed the wrong things. As an only child, growing up in a rural community, with his own chickens in the yard, and without access to television, Adam might be thought to embody the last outpost of untrammelled childhood. Anxieties about media violence and nutrition offer two discrete examples of how contemporary child-panic shapes the experience of childhood.

The encroachment of adult knowledge is seen as selective and distorting. So a child can simulate mass murder on the computer screen without understanding how a chicken nugget is manufactured. But what do we mean by ‘adult knowledge'? Are children really incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality? Or can they manipulate eating and watching to create an identity free of adult assumptions about innocence and dependence?

Back indoors, Adam has a glass of juice and two oat cookies. At school today he did the Romans, literacy and PE. At PE they had dance. There's a lady on a tape who's speaking and you have to do what she says. Because his school is so small, different ages are taught together. It's four to five in the little class, sixes to nines in the in-betweens, and in the older class it's tens and elevens. But they all play together at lunch-time.

The rooms in Adam's house are long and low. Off the
living-room is a play-room, with a worn oak trunk for toys and a desk for Mum and Dad's computer. Normally after school, he comes in here to practise piano on the keyboard by the wall, and after that he watches a bit of telly. It's not a real telly because Mum and Dad don't let him have one – probably because every day he might go down and switch it on, and he might turn it up too loud – but he does have videos.

Adam's parents haven't owned a television licence for over ten years. It was mainly a reaction to the amount of trash they saw being pumped out, and the ease with which people ended up watching it for hours on end. It also gives them a degree of control over what their son is viewing. They can censor videos in advance, and it means that they don't have constant battles over what he wants to watch.

Adam likes
Chicken Run
, and Christmas cartoons. Some of his friends have television
and
DVDs. He'd like to have television so that he could see football matches, and tennis. But he's got every single one of
The Lord of the Rings
. He likes the battle scenes best, but his friend Stephen isn't allowed to watch them because they're too violent. His favourite, favourite character is Legolas, but he likes the ring-cursed creature Golum too. Adam's Golum impression is uncanny, because he too is small and slim, and when he hunches and hisses it's unsettling.

The imaginative life of children is full of violence. It would seem that in childhood a degree of violent fantasy can be beneficial. From Hallowe'en ghouls to
Doctor Who
, children often choose to expose themselves to frightening material, although we do not know whether that has more to do with its taboo, rather than its therapeutic, properties.

Writing in 1968, in the early days of public anxiety about
the effects of violent media, the psychiatrist Anthony Storr concluded in his monograph on aggression that ‘to forbid a child to watch television or read stories in which violence occurs is a fruitless prohibition more likely to cause anger than to prevent it'. Surveying the evidence, he found nothing to suggest that mass media provoked delinquency in children who were not already predisposed to it. ‘It is the crudity and vulgarity of horror comics, television serials and some pornography which should invoke our condemnation,' he declared, ‘rather than their contents.'

Media-related child panics have a rich history. Plato proposed to ban the works of the dramatic poets from his Republic, because the children he imagined educating there would be ‘young and tender … when any impression we choose to make leaves a permanent mark'. And in nineteenth-century London, social reformers fretted about the popularity amongst poor children of ‘penny gaffes' – cheap theatrical productions of murder and melodrama.

But today's panic exists in the context of a broader adult unease about the proliferation of technology, particularly in the domestic setting. It is estimated that three quarters of children in the UK now have their own television, while one third have their own computer. And they are frequently more competent navigators of new media than are their parents.

In his influential book
The Disappearance of Childhood
, published in 1983, the media critic Neil Postman offered a gloomy assessment of the future of youth in an electronic age. His conservative reading of technological change played on growing fears about children's passive consumption of new media, demonising television in particular.

According to Postman, childhood as we know it began with the invention of the printing press in the early 1400s. In the
medieval world there was no need for a concept of childhood, he argued, because everyone shared the same information environment and so existed in the same social and intellectual world. But the printing press created a new kind of adulthood, which had to be earned. ‘It became a symbolic, not a biological, achievement,' he wrote. ‘The young would have to
become
adults, and they would do it by learning to read … Therefore, European civilisation reinvented schools. And by so doing, it made childhood a necessity.'

According to Postman, the advent of television traduced this gradual learning curve. He bemoaned the fact that ‘not even the ten-year-old girls working in the mines in England in the eighteenth century were as knowing as our own children. [They] know everything – the good with the bad. Nothing is mysterious, nothing awesome, nothing is held back from public view … in having access to the previously hidden fruit of adult information, they are expelled from the garden of childhood.'

Responses to new media have always been contradictory, and underpinned by the huge challenge to adult authority they represent. Television was initially celebrated as a means of bringing the family together, and as an educational resource. But, like so many of the media forms that have come after, it was soon viewed with suspicion. Television was no longer seen as a medium for inter-generational harmony, but rather a means of transmitting forbidden adult knowledge to passive youngsters in ways that neither the state nor parents could control.

Even today, despite concerns about children's active engagement – be it their use of Internet chatrooms or the distortion of language through text messaging – the primary focus of anxiety remains on children's position as passive consumers of violence.

And this notion of passivity has an understandable appeal. As children's access to media of all kinds becomes harder than ever to control, either centrally or within the family, adult authority is continually diminished. It is telling that Neil Postman failed to highlight the way that children's use of media not only granted them access to the adult world, but also denied adults access to the child's world. Just as he viewed the printed word as the only way of ring-fencing adult knowledge from unready children, so adults' slower adoption of new media leaves them excluded from the communities that children themselves are creating.

One way of bolstering this fading authority is to argue that children are passive viewers, who can be protected through censorship alone. It is certainly less threatening than the idea that children might be actively colluding in their own ‘corruption' – that they are not being ‘expelled from the garden of childhood', as Neil Postman would have it, but leaving it willingly. And when that garden contains the ideal of childhood innocence, and the dependency and incapacity that it assumes, who can blame them?

Surely the concept of ‘adult knowledge' – as complete, conclusive and essentially corrupting – is just as fantastical as the ideal of childhood innocence. Knowledge is not always dangerous, just as ignorance is not always pure. To argue so is shamelessly to aggrandise the nature of adulthood, and to ignore what we know of the average goodness of children.

The author Lionel Shriver offers an altogether more confronting interpretation of the ‘hidden fruit of adult information' that Postman refers to. Her novel
We Need to Talk About Kevin
, which won the Orange Prize in 2005, is narrated by a mother, Eva Khatchadourian, whose son shoots seven of his fellow high-school students dead shortly before his sixteenth birthday. Questioned about her own attempts as a parent to
shield Kevin from violent films and games she responds thus: ‘The truth is, the vanity of protective parents … goes beyond look-at-us-we're-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates … Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood … The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic.'