by Sarah Moss
I should have been trying to write the conclusion, which troubles me because I am not sure that the book is in any way conclusive. Behind my laptop, birds that might have been kittiwakes flickered across the sky and I watched some kind of gull dive-bombing the sea. From the boat, on a still day, you can see the other half of their lives, transmuted by water, bubbles streaming off their feathers as they glide and turn like seals after fish. I craned to see the swans but they were somewhere else. I opened the acknowledgements. Last but not least I thank Giles Cassingham, although for what I cannot say.
‘Hey, you.’ Giles sat at the table reading a gardening catalogue while Moth, frowning, concentrated on spooning porridge into an envelope which also contained a missive from the Child Tax Credit people, who wish alternately to shower us with rubies and to hold our oatmeal in security against what we owe them, depending on no factor that we have been able to isolate. ‘The power’s back. I made you some tea.’
‘He boiled too much water.’ Raph spoke from under the table.
‘Mummy likes two cups in the morning.’ Giles’s gaze flicked over my off-off-white Victorian nightdress and cardigan outfit.
‘But then she boils it again anyway so the second one is fresh. Do you know there are children in Africa dying because they haven’t got any water? I bet their mummies don’t drink cups of tea.’
Moth turned the envelope upside down and watched as porridge fell slowly to the floor, followed by a parachute of official communications. Giles actually packed these letters, a whole kitchen table’s worth, and brought them from Oxford because he thought we might deal with them while on the island. Giles’s sparkling career is founded on his ability to use observations about the present behaviour of puffins to predict their future movements. I suppose it is necessary, if also delusional, to believe that people have more capacity for change.
‘All splat,’ said Moth. ‘Again!’
Giles passed him another envelope.
I sipped the tea, which was tepid and stewed. ‘There are also children in Africa who have air-conditioning and satellite television and chauffeurs, you know. It’s a continent, not a refugee camp.’
‘Why can’t we have satellite television?’
Giles stood up. ‘Because it’s an instrument of late capitalist excess that rots the brain and promotes American cultural imperialism. Anna, if you can take over here, I’ll go talk to Jake.’
‘No deal,’ I muttered. ‘Oh, all right then. Raph, think of the carbon footprint of a television. You can’t worry about global warming and want lots of big gadgets.’
He crawled out from under the table, through Moth’s fallen porridge, and stood up. ‘Why can’t I?’
‘Why?’ added Moth. ‘Moth wants jam.’
I sat down. ‘Eat your porridge, Moth. Because making electronic equipment uses lots of energy and makes lots of toxic waste.’
‘What kind of toxic waste?’
I had forgotten our new policy of not giving Raphael the basis of any further forebodings about the present and future state of the world.
‘I don’t know. Moth, love, don’t put porridge in your hair. Or in your brother’s hair.’
‘Porridge in hair! Mummy clean it.’
I ran an old baby muslin over Moth’s hair. He pushed it away. ‘Peepo!’
I held it over my face and flapped it up on to my head.
‘Peepo!’
‘Mummy, you look really silly like that. Are you going to stay in that nightie all day?’
I ate some of Moth’s rejected toast.
‘No. In a minute I’m going to go upstairs and reappear in one of my fabulous designer porridge-scrubbing outfits.’
Moth started trying to brush his hair with a jammy knife.
‘Do you want to wash the floor, Raph? I think you might just about be old enough to do it all by yourself if you’re really careful.’
‘What, with the big bucket?’
I lifted Moth out of his highchair and frisked him for concealed porridge.
‘If you think you’re grown-up enough not to spill it.’
The garden is Giles’s idea. I’ve never seen much point in extending housework to cover parts of outside, especially now we’ve got the beach on the doorstep to give the children a nodding acquaintance with what Giles persists in calling the Natural World, as if the human habit of making shelters and arranging for people to buy food they haven’t grown and read books they haven’t written is in some way unnatural. Giles says I kept the children inside far too much in Oxford, wrapped round each other on the sofa, working our way like termites along the bookcases. Giles says Moth is far better off eating foxgloves and birdshit and getting wet in the great outdoors. Giles spends his days alone, working.
‘Come on,’ I said to Moth. ‘Let’s find some clothes for Mummy.’
It takes a long time for Moth to climb the stairs, and much longer if you try to hurry. I stay behind him, hands poised, and try to use the time to think about my book. In the hall below there are admirable Victorian tessellated tiles in white, black and a shade of red that reminds me of butchers’ shops, of cut flesh, and the banisters are spaced for grandeur and not child safety.
‘Raph?’ I called. ‘Raph, do you want to come into the garden?’
After a pause to greet the cracks between the floorboards on the landing, and another to poke all the flowers in the carving on the chest of drawers, we reached my bedroom. Moth climbed on to the bed, smearing porridge on the pillow. The jumper I’d been wearing all week had some soup on the sleeve but the chances of encountering anyone who would care were approximately the same as those of the swans turning into princesses and performing pirouettes along the beach. Moth handed me a sock.
‘Moth in a garden too?’
I shook yesterday’s knickers out of my jeans. It’s not really a garden. We have crocuses and a few foolhardy and stunted daffodils in June. And Giles, who against most interpretations of the historical evidence believes in self-sufficiency with regard to fruit and vegetables up here, has found some hardy dwarf apple trees on the internet. When he finished the last of the four boat trips required to bring them from Colla, Jake came to consult him about roofing timbers and the Research Fellow in History found herself failing to dig holes for Icelandic trees while her offspring licked birdshit off pebbles.
‘Moth eat worms in a garden,’ said Moth, sitting down on my bare foot. I wriggled my toes under his bottom and he giggled. I didn’t seem to have another sock.
‘Raphael?’ I shouted. Sometimes this house is too big, although mostly I enjoy the way the stone walls muffle infant rage. There were clean socks in Giles’s sock drawer, folded into pairs, so I put one on and held out my hand to Moth. ‘Come on. Let’s go plant some trees.’
I’m working on what to do with Moth while I attempt anything other than interactive childcare. It never arose at home. In Oxford, I mean. If I was at work I was working and if I was at home I was attending to the children, performing constant triage to read to whichever one seemed likely to have a tantrum first. Finally the far shores of supper, bath and bed, a few curtain calls relating to misplaced teddies, drinks of water and/or the necessity of reaching a clearer understanding of momentum and inertia before going to sleep and then intellectual life re-established itself, at least until Moth woke for the first time. No one expected me to plant trees. No one expected Moth to entertain himself. I’d never planted a tree. I could hear the rhythmic slap of Raphael’s space hopper in the paved yard at the front of the house.
‘Moth? Do you want to come and see how the trees grow?’
Moth continued to stagger across the tussocks, trampling nascent daffodils in the quest for birdshit. Perhaps it contains some nutrient crucial to toddler development that is inexcusably missing from my cooking.
‘Moth? Shall we do some digging with Mummy’s big spade?’
No response. I followed him.
‘Mummy’s big sharp spade?’
He looked round. ‘Sharp
spade?’
I nodded. ‘Very sharp.’
‘Very sharp spade.’
A pause.
‘Moth very sharp spade.’
He turned back and trundled towards the sharp spade. Getting him away from the birdshit and towards my intended field of operations could only be progress. I yawned and stretched. Hours to go until bedtime. I tried to think about digging a hole in the ground.
Moth stalked around the trees, each muffled with a burlap sack, and seized the handle of the spade. He couldn’t lift it.
‘Moth very sharp spade!’
‘Yes. Moth, love, do you want to help Mummy dig a hole? A nice deep hole for the trees to put their roots in?’
He began to drag the spade across the grass, a hunter so proud of his mammoth that he can’t wait for back-up.
‘No. Moth spade.’
‘But the spade is for digging holes. Shall we dig a hole? Moth and Mummy?’
‘No.’
‘But Moth, look. This is how we use a spade.’
I took hold of it. He pulled it back.
‘Mummy put it back. Moth spade.’
‘But look, love—’
He cast himself to the ground and flung his arms out. The screaming suggested an innocent who had just seen Herod’s minions coming his way.
‘All right, all right. Moth spade.’
He had already drawn the next breath and eyed me as one might the minion being told that this particular child was in fact a girl.
‘All right, Moth play with the spade. Mummy will find something else.’
‘Moth spade.’
He sat up beside it and began to stroke the haft.
‘Hush, little spa-ade, don’t say a word, Mummy gonna buy you a mockin-bird.’
There was a trowel in a trug by the bundled trees. It had as little impact on the matted roots of the turf as one might have expected.
‘If that mockin-bird don’t sing, Mummy gonna buy you a diamond ring.’ He leant forward and kissed the spade’s handle. ‘Moth’s love. Sleeping now.’
I wondered whether, once the spade slept, I could reintegrate it to the adult world.
‘Has the spade gone to sleep?’
‘Shh.’ He patted it. ‘Quiet, Mummy. Spade sleeping.’
I knelt up to get more weight on the trowel. I might as well have been digging with a spoon. The space hopper had fallen suggestively silent.
We had a kind of potato omelette that I told Giles was frittata for lunch. It would have been better if I’d either boiled the potatoes first or started frying them about an hour earlier than I did, but one advantage of a boarding-school childhood is that Giles can and will eat all but the worst misjudgements. In theory, I disapprove of cooking. It’s not a coincidence that ready meals and supermarkets appeared at the same time as equal opportunities legislation. In practice cooking means that you can hide in the kitchen wielding knives and listening to Radio Four and still be a Good Mummy, thus achieving a variety of domestic servitude which is still not, I believe, what Mary Wollstonecraft, Emmeline Pankhurst or Betty Friedan had in mind. It’s even less fun here, where I can’t get Radio Four most of the time, vegetables come seasick from Colla once a week and the olive oil that Giles is accustomed to dribble over my more questionable creations like a kind of upper-class ketchup is probably more expensive than heroin. Which might in any case be more effective.
After the frittata I walked off while Giles was still making coffee. I learnt that from him. You don’t say, do you mind if I go work for an hour or so and will you settle Moth for his nap and include Raph in whatever you’re doing next? You don’t even say, I’m just going to do a bit of work, if that’s OK. Even this will be construed as a negotiating position. You just leave the room as if it has not occurred to you that someone will have to tidy up lunch, change Moth’s nappy, spend half an hour hanging over the cot patting his back while Raph slides down the banisters yodelling as taught by his godfather Matthias, clean the loo, help Raph with the Lego that Moth will eat if he can and make a casserole before waking Moth, who will otherwise sleep all afternoon and stay awake all night as though he were a denizen of one of those vine-wreathed Mediterranean cultures in which adults appear to want no time at all to themselves. I sidled round the house, abstracted my laptop from the luxury green holiday cottage/building site, where I would be too easy to find, and headed along the shore towards the old village. It’s barely a hamlet, really; the remains of twelve stone cottages, none larger than the kitchen in Colsay House. They were abandoned gradually from the late nineteenth century, and only the most recently inhabited one still has most of its roof. It’s been a weak summer so far, and I’ve wondered if I might be able to light a small fire in the hearth, but the village is visible from the big house and the last thing the working mother should do is send smoke-signals revealing her whereabouts, so I make do with fingerless gloves and a coat, which gives me the regrettably accurate feeling that I am always on the point of leaving. The house also has a kitchen table, sheep droppings on the floor and a framed photo of a young man in a Second World War uniform on the wall, but I can usually get internet access from a room with an intact ceiling, which is all I really need.
I opened the introduction, which I usually avoid because it’s not very good. I find it hard to justify beginning. I do it unoriginally, with the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who is the amuse-bouche of more than one other history of childhood. The Wild Boy was found sleeping rough in the woods around Aveyron, in the French Alps, in 1797. He was about twelve, had a deep scar from ear to ear, and had no clothes or words. He’d been stopping in at local farmhouses for food for several years, but no one knew, or admitted to knowing, where he’d come from and when he’d left. He became the perfect subject for philosophical experiment, a human being raised without society (they ignored the people who must have given birth to him, breastfed him, stopped him eating foxgloves and birdshit when he was too young to know better and, several years later, slit his throat and left him for dead in the woods). Jean-Marc Itard, who made it his life’s work to civilize the Wild Boy, wrote:
How could he possibly be expected to have known the existence of God? Let him be shown the heavens, the green fields, the vast expanse of the earth, the works of Nature, he does not see anything in all that if there is nothing to eat; and there you have the sole route by which external objects penetrate into his consciousness.
– Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 39
I stared at it for a bit. God or food, which would you look for on a mountainside?
‘Mummy?’
‘Jesus Christ, Raph, what are you doing here?’
‘Mummy, do you want me to make you a dynamo for your laptop? You could sit on it and bicycle the wheels and that would make the energy for the processor. Then you could get lots of exercise while you were writing.’
‘No, I couldn’t, because I don’t get enough writing time to use up a grape. Supposing I could get a grape. Raph, please go find Daddy. Please let me write. Just while Moth sleeps.’
His hair was felted at the back where he sleeps on it and his top, bought two sizes too big three years ago, stopped short of his belly button.
‘It would probably have to be fitted somewhere, it wouldn’t be possible to move it around, but I could design it, quite easily. You’d have to go quite fast to power a game or something but for word-processing you could probably generate what you needed while you typed. I could even set it up so you could divert the power to the oven or an electric heater. I could look on the internet and find the materials …’
He was looking out of the window as he spoke, across to the untenanted henhouse and the roofless pigpen.
‘Raph, please. I’m sure it would be lovely. Just let me look at the introduction.’
‘We could put a gym in the blackhouse, couldn’t we, so people could actually use their own energy. There could be a treadmill – that’d be quite easy
to build, some kind of hamster-wheel like the Romans used to make slaves do to lift cranes.’ He began to whirl his hands in circles, like those people who used to walk backwards in front of planes at departure gates. ‘You could do it with a bench-press, actually, only the mechanism would be bulky, but that wouldn’t matter.’
The juxtaposition of Romantic expectation and Lockean subsistence economics deomonstrated here lies at the heart of this book. The Wild Boy’s wildness is shown to exist not, as the early nineteenth-century reader might expect, in his spiritual connection to land-and skyscape, but in its absence. This is not a child ‘trailing clouds of glory’ but an infant homo economicus, a being whose potential as consumer and producer must be liberated by a highly theorized syllabus. And it is homo economicus with which the more popular literature on childhood, and especially the new genre of parenting handbooks, is overwhelmingly concerned. Parenthood is no longer merely a biological state; it has become an undertaking in which it is possible to fail, and it is the possibility of failure that opens a space for the institutions that offered to replace failing families and communities.
