An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
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to the greater forces of earth’. Since then the world’s population has multiplied fivefold. Humankind propels the atmosphere. It has unwittingly created a geological age which the meteorologist and chemist Paul Crutzen named the anthropocene.
Modern western European childhood is a by-product of industrial revolutions, thus an invention of adults. It is protracted, an antechamber to longed-for adulthood, a mere waiting room before we achieve the real thing. Whilst it is hardly an abuse, it is a temporal space where communitarianism and generational apartheid are enforced. Its characteristic condition is attritional boredom, a boredom that foments the desire to escape, no matter how, and to punish the captors. Until the era of enclosures, rural diaspora and urbanisation, childhood had been the province of the lettered classes. Thereafter, throughout the nineteenth century childhood, like recreational drugs in the later twentieth century, became gradually democratised, available to all save the very poor (who needed it most). The change is readily ascribable to a succession of education acts which ordained the free provision of schooling and ever more elongated compulsory attendance. Schools occasioned a concentration of coevals: the child spends most of his time with other children.
We take for granted the existence of commercial stratagems to confine children to a specifically infantile ghetto, to prolong the age of play, to emphasise their separateness, to profit from an exclusive and imposed subculture. Yet these stratagems are of comparatively recent foundation. They devolve from the invention of childhood. They are conditional upon mass production, the separation of home and work, the statutory compulsion to submit to education after the end of physical childhood. They extend childhood, they inhibit its elision with adulthood. Not least because what follows is of course another commercially determined niche age, an even more recent created parenthesis: when my parents were teenagers there were no such persons, they often reminded me, as teenagers. We are persistently shocked when children go straight from Lego to legover. We shouldn’t be. It is as though there is a collective will to stunt them with toys, to prolong infantilism and delude ourselves about states of innocence. It is as though we creepily wish to put the pituitary gland on hold and keep them kiddies for ever. The ‘us’ in Toys ‘
When, after they had both died, I sold my parents’ house, I got rid of a cupboardful of toys which had collected decades’ dust, and a bookcase of Eagle annuals, Tiger annuals, Buffalo Bill annuals and so on. I picked through tins of broken pens and perished erasers. I wondered where my model cowboys and Indians had got to then recalled that I had lent them to Roger’s younger brother when I had ‘grown out’ of them and had never bothered to get them back. I excitedly anticipated that the past would come rushing back. Each of these rusting tarnished pieces of metal or plastic is, surely, a potential trigger, a mnemonic of some bright day in 1959, a correlative of a particular sensation. They were however doggedly mute. A brown and cream Dinky Austin Atlantic even prompted a chronological anomaly, the recollection that when I was about twenty I had met what wouldn’t have then been called an Austin Atlantic anorak who collected lifesize editions of that pseudo-American tourer. It took time in that house whose purpose was finished to realise that this was a pitiful and self-pitying exercise: I was trying to freeze myself, to transport myself back to the land of yore, to dream days which had, actually, been no such thing. I was trying to do to myself what parents do to their children.
A further persuasively significant foundation of childhood was the separation of workplace from home and the consequent separation of children from adults. Thitherto children routinely enjoyed prepubertal sex. They also endured incestuous liaisons, were bound in endogamy, or something closely related to it: life was, after all, as predatory adults realised, short.
Ci-gît le fils, ci-gît la mère,
Ci-gît la fille avec le père,
Ci-gît la soeur, ci-gît le frère,
Ci-gît la femme et le mari,
Et ne sont que trois corps ici.
The Levitical taboos on incest – which don’t extend to cousins – were widely ignored. Notably in remote fastnesses and the backwoods. Hence, no doubt, the plentiful supply of village idiots, victims of primal concupiscence and of a feast of recessive afflictions: respiratory problems, developmental stasis, albinism, seizures, club feet, renal and hepatic failures, tons o’ snot, pallor, involuntary urination, jabbering, short life etc. Improved economic conditions, increased longevity, embourgeoisement, urban propriety and internal migration appear to have lessened the incidence in Britain of intrafamilial intercourse save among Muslims.
This prosperity and civility which encouraged sexual restraint (and moral repugnance at the absence of such restraint) were enjoyed by an ascending proportion of the populace which now lived in disgusted fear of the feral inbreds at the gates, whom they longed to hang or to transport at the first sign of a mare’s slashed belly or burning rick.
Rather than rape its own children this new middle class beat them instead. There, that’s a kind of progress.
The anthropocene childhood has changed. But only so much. Like education, which is, astonishingly, still symbolic of it, childhood may have become increasingly ‘child-centred’ rather than ‘adult-centred’ aka ‘sadist-centred’ which is the form of education still practised in preposterous faith schools with their mission to beat the biddable into superstitious submission. But ‘child-centred’ childhood still remains within the ghetto of adult creation. The ghetto that children yearn to escape from is now more gadget-strewn though hardly cushier. Childhood is the condition of wanting to be someone else. In play we seek to emulate the behaviour of adults, our wishfulness caused us to become grocers or soldiers, cowboys or tractor drivers. (Evidently a generationally biased list of models. Today’s children long to be body-piercers, security consultants, the mutant subjects of the tattoos themselves.)
Rather, we ought to yearn to escape the ghetto. But when we have escaped we discover that its pull is that of the superstition that tempts the atheist, the tenderness that infects the murderer. Childhood tugs at our sleeve all our life. Look at moron executives bonding through paintballing, look at the queues in airports wearing kiddie clothes, look at them unabashedly reading J. K. Rowling. (Would an adult of my childhood have read Richmal Crompton – and in public?)
Such infantilism is a pathetic refuge. It signals a forlorn effort to be a child again, despite the bulbous evidence of the body distended by sweet comforting childish foodstuffs and the actual children who clamorously demand more, more. It’s a delusory rebirth which can convince only those with a capacity for faith and credulousness. The recall of childhood from a distance – as though peering into a glass cabinet whilst wearing a sterilised mask and surgically scrubbed gloves – is different. It does not imply a denial of adulthood, it is not a soft self-abasement which sweeps us sartorially and mentally backwards. Nor does it imply that what is recalled was actual and enjoyed an existence beyond the laboratory of our imaginings.
There were projects that never, so to speak, came to fruition, never could have done. At the age of eight I began to conjure up the future, year by year. This prospective speculation was of the lowest grade, a series of acquired banalities which did not come to pass. Nonetheless it remains potently limpid. For instance, when I was ten – still a long way off – I would definitely be going on very long bike rides through a sandy terrain of broom, gorse and scattered pines (I sense the sea was close by, though it was not visible). The sun shone. I would be laughing and picnicking with healthy, Aertex-clad coevals apparently plucked from the pages of Enid Blyton though I did not then recognise that source. We would compare bicycles in amiable competition: the merits of Campagnolo and Simplex gears and their superiority to Sturmey-Archer, drinking flasks, brake systems (cable, calliper brakes were old hat), tyre makes and pressures etc. This fantasy was partly learnt from advertisements of the period, again unacknowledged. Partly from frequenting Hayball’s cycle shop and scrutinising the ranks of Rudges, Hercules, Raleighs, BSAs. The fancy stuff like Dawes and Claud Butler were hung