The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  Lois likes to keep diaries, but her new one has practically nothing in it. This entry is from her first diary: ‘It was my mum’s birthday. I went to the hairdresser, then we went to Jane’s house on the train. Here is my ticket.’ She reads out an experiment she tried: ‘Babies find it hard to write so I tried writing with my foot. Do you think it feels the same for babies if they write by hand and we write by foot?’ She translates the scrawls below: ‘My name is Lois. I am nine years old. Hello. This is me writing with my right foot. This is me writing with my left foot.’ The transition from babyhood – which, for Lois, ends at four when her grandmother died – into childhood is a recurring subject of speculation. Innocent babies are spoken of indulgently, even the baby who becomes a murderer. And emergence from babyhood feels like a challenge well met, in contrast to the snare-strewn path through adolescence.

  She takes another diary outside into the garden. It’s a sunny afternoon. Her mother gives her a bowl of chopped-up orange and grapes. She doesn’t like orange but, when she was in infant school, she would rub a piece of apple against a piece of orange and the apple would taste really nice. Lois reads on: ‘Bank Holiday Monday. It’s not fair. I have to wear a T-shirt that says “Girls Rule”.’ She adopts a prissy voice. ‘It’s not like I’m a girly girl. I’m a tomboy. In the summer holidays I’m going to Spain—’ she laughs, ‘—I’ve written Spair – so I’m going to get my real passport. We’re supposed to be going to Cambridge today, but Dad has lost his wallet so we might not go. YES! But if we don’t go I hope he finds his wallet.’ This is Top Secret.

  ‘26 May 2003. This is really bad. My dad can’t find his wallet. The day he lost it he went to the fair. Someone could have stolen it and used his credit cards. If he cancels them it will take ages to get it back, and he lost it on Friday so someone will have already used it. If he finds it I will write back …

  ‘He found it! Today we went to Lee Valley Park Farm and Mum bought me a sheep called Bleet and Kester a pig called Max.’

  Later, Lois takes a walk down her street to the community garden. She is wondering how trees know only to grow one ring in their trunk each year. On the way she spots a snail shell. Once there was something on the ground and it was a syringe and there might have been drugs in it. She’s not allowed to play in the street on her own, because of cars, but not because of strangers. ‘I know this is a weird thing to say but not many strangers come down our road.’

  On the walk back, she finds a ladybird on a wall, and coaxes it on to her finger. It runs quickly across the plain of her palm and she has to move hand over hand over hand in order to give it enough surface area. When she gets back to the house, Kester wants to hold it too. She lets him. Lois and Sue make their photographs in the gaps between the ‘smile’ moments. ‘All of us experience difficulties growing up,’ says Sue, ‘and that’s natural and part of it. Not representing them seemed very strange to me. It made the difficult moments seem even bigger because they were things you couldn’t look at or talk about.’

  It is just those ‘smile moments’ that pervade commercially today. But there is another style of image that pillages the viewer’s interior sense of what childhood ought to look like. Photojournalism is adept at using children to tell the story of collective suffering, from the bulbous-bellied infants of the Ethiopian famine to the desolate orphans of the Asian tsunami. And, while these pictures are far removed from the Romantic vision of childhood, they share with it an understanding of adults’ desire for innocence, and their vested interest in preserving it.

  Sometimes, one image of a child can sum up an entire disaster. The shot of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, photographed naked and burning as she ran from a napalm attack on her Vietnamese village in 1972, is now genuinely iconic. Phuc spoke as an adult of how she had later felt exploited as an anti-American propaganda tool by her government, before she fled to Canada: ‘I realised that the picture is a really powerful tool to promote peace and that in a free country I could control the picture, rather than being controlled by it.’ She now works as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador and runs a foundation supporting child victims of war.

  Phuc survived, unlike Mohammed al-Durra, the twelve-year-old killed by Israeli bullets as he crouched with his father behind a metal drum in Gaza City in 2002. His death was charted in a series of shocking stills that circulated round the world. Venerated as the first child martyr of the second intifada, his photograph still appears on posters across the occupied territories.

  Perhaps most memorable in recent times are the images of Ali Ismail Abbas, who became the child face of the second Iraq war. In April 2003, during the final, frenzied days of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Samia Nakhoul, the Gulf bureau chief of Reuters news agency, was visiting Al Kindi hospital in downtown Baghdad with her photographer. The place was swamped with casualties from the coalition bombing campaign that was devastating the capital. Nakhoul asked a nurse to show her the worst case they had received, she recalled later. She was led into a side room. There, a woman was keeping vigil by a low bed where a young boy lay under a curved metal cage. His head was thickly bandaged; both his arms had been roughly amputated at the shoulder. His torso was horrifically burnt, the remaining skin crisped darkly around exposed and weeping flesh.

  Nakhoul learnt that twelve-year-old Ali had been asleep when an American missile hit his house, killing his father and pregnant mother, and fourteen other members of his family. He implored the journalist: ‘Will you help me get my arms back? If I don’t get my arms back, I will commit suicide. I wanted to be an army officer when I grow up, but not any more. Now I want to be a doctor – but how can I? I don’t have hands. What can I do?’

  The following day, almost every British newspaper, as well as many others around the world, carried Ali’s pleas alongside his agonised image. An unedifying scrum ensued around his hospital bed, as reporters clamoured for further heartbreaking soundbites. Within days, four British newspapers had launched separate fundraising appeals, and when he was finally airlifted to Kuwait, it was reported to have been authorised following a personal intervention by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

  Still it is impossible to unravel why it was Ali in particular, of all the children horrifically maimed during the conflict, who generated such a powerful response. His injuries were catastrophic. He was a beautiful and articulate victim. He was not the only one. But a concatenation of circumstances suddenly placed him at the very top of the hierarchy of suffering.

  In her book Compassion Fatigue: How the media sells disease, famine, war and death, what journalism professor Susan Moeller writes about starving children might also be applied to Ali: ‘An emaciated child isn’t yet associated with the stereotypes attached to its colour, culture or political environment. They personify innocence abused. They bring moral clarity to the complex story of famine. Their images cut through the social, economic and political context to create an imperative statement.’

  Children like Ali offer the opportunity to tell a story – perhaps even one with a happy ending – in a context where no straight narrative exists. It is a story that prompts feelings rather than thoughts, which can be a relief when the political circumstances are intractable. The newspaper appeals on his behalf were hugely lucrative, raising hundreds of thousands of pounds. Those donors witnessed the corruption of childhood innocence, and they acted upon it. In doing so, they took up a moral position that is far from clear. Because it is only the children who are arbitrarily deemed blameless for whom sympathy is felt.

  In the occupied territories, for example, the brutalising effects of the second intifada on children have reached far beyond malnutrition, loss of education and family breakdown. Before the Israeli Army’s disengagement in 2005, the Gaza mental health programme believed that the majority of local youngsters were suffering emotional problems as a result of the conflict. In early childhood, this manifested in speech disorders, bedwetting or uncontrollable crying. But as the children grew older, their fear and distress distorted into
rage. They displayed far higher levels of aggression than their peers brought up in peaceful environments.

  In a place where ordinary dreams withered, children aspired to martyring themselves for the cause. Play mimicked the activities of the Palestinian fighters. Throwing homemade bombs at Israeli troops became a rite of passage. And, in displaying too much knowledge, and insufficient innocence, those young people crossed the Rubicon, turning from children we feared for into children we were afraid of. Similarly, had ‘Little Ali’ lost his arms in an Iraqi resistance attack on Western troops, the donations would not have been forthcoming. Images of childhood are appealing because of what adults project upon them. A child who is an active subject is impervious to projection, denying the fantasy.

  Lois remembers the Ali photographs vividly, and describes his injuries with mild relish. ‘His family had died and he was lucky to be alive but he actually wanted to be dead,’ she recalls. ‘I think that was because all of his family had gone and he felt really upset so he thought, “There’s no point in being alive if I’m really upset.” I felt sorry for him because I thought I’m lucky to have a family. I think he was going to get some plastic arms in London.’

  On the morning of her tenth birthday, Lois woke at a quarter to seven, though she wasn’t supposed to get up until half past eight. She’s wearing the stripey dungarees that her parents gave her. They bought her a Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD too. She’s been to Sainsbury’s to choose a cake, a scarlet-iced dragon with a thick body curving round a treasure of bright lollies. Her auntie and uncle sent fifteen pounds, instead of the normal ten, because today she’s a two-digit number. She got a lava lamp from her brother, though it was actually her mum who chose it for him. Time is moving more slowly than normal. On a day that’s been thought about and waited for so intently, how can there ever be enough of the now to fill up the minutes? It’s a day that feels ever so slightly precarious. If something were to go wrong, as all manner of things might, would it spoil everything?

  Grace calls. Grace is Lois’s best friend, but she moved away to Devon. There is a photograph of the two of them in her mother’s portfolio, arms around one another, heads bent exclusively. ‘I’m wearing her clothes and she’s wearing mine. They used to call me Grace and her Lois, and they used to say, “You’re sisters right?” No-o-o-o [we’d say]. “So you must be cousins.” No-o-o-o. “But you look so alike.” But I think we look very, very different.’

  They chat a little awkwardly. Lois is distracted. Then Grace asks her what she wants for her birthday. ‘Mum, what do I like?’ she calls. Lois asks this often, whether it’s about pasta sauces or presents. There’s comfort in someone else having your needs listed in their head. Sue always starts off by saying that she doesn’t know. But Lois is certain that really she does.

  When she comes off the phone she explains that she didn’t actually expect Grace to give her anything. ‘She lives such a long way away that the post would probably cost quite a lot.’ Someone else has given her a card-making kit, with stick-on beads and shells. Lois examines it as carefully as she does all her gifts, and starts about making Grace a card of herself, wearing her new dungarees. She fiddles in her mouth. This morning, she woke up with a wobbly tooth as well as a birthday.

  Last week, the Easter holidays ended and Lois went back to school. ‘I was quite excited in some ways, because I saw all my friends, but we could just have lots of sleepovers instead.’ The last sleepover Lois went to, she had only half an hour’s sleep. ‘Normally we play Xbox, Xbox, Xbox, mess up each other’s beds, eat sweets secretly, Xbox, Xbox, Xbox.’

  Lois is in her final year at primary school. Sometimes school is boring and sometimes it’s really exciting. ‘I don’t think they pressure you enough. I’d like it more if they pressured you. You can’t work when they say, “If you get really high marks it doesn’t matter, it’s just different people.” She mimics a trendy teacher. Lois tries out lots of different voices and she’s very good at them. ‘At my old school I got pressured more. This school is much more comfortable.’ Unlike Rosie, Lois revels in competition.

  Her party friends Sotira, Nicky and Amber arrive all at once, bringing parents and presents. The next stage of the day begins. The girls jostle round her, examining each other and each others’ gifts, touching, pushing, snatching, laughing. Lois has known Nicky since she was two and a half. ‘She gives me teddy-bear huggles now and again and she squeezes the breath out of me.’ Now Nicky wants to hold the puppy that Amber has given Lois. The puppy’s fur is very soft and Lois scrunches it into her face, breathing through the bobbly pile. She can hold it once Lois has written a name on the collar. Nicky creeps up to tug it away. Lois shrieks. Nicky runs down the garden. Amber says she has one just like it except it’s a golden retriever.

  After lunch at the café in Highgate Woods, Lois thinks she feels phlegmy. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a hot day. She’s been worrying about getting ill for her birthday all week. The girls run across to the playground, but on the way Lois trips over and makes grass stains on the knees of her new dungarees. She cries quickly, briefly. Everything is too much. She wanted to wear them tomorrow and now she can’t.

  Sue says she might be able to get the stains out overnight, but Lois still doesn’t want to go on any of the climbing frames. It’s too busy in the playground anyway. It’s time to go home and watch the video that she chose. On the walk back to the car, the girls swing downhill arm in arm, poking and hugging each other. They talk about living in different countries, football teams, and brothers and sisters. Amber likes being an only child. Her sibling is her cat. You can actually feel really close to animals.

  Next weekend, Lois is the only girl at football practice. She wears a professional strip. She runs with her elbows out to take up more space, but she’s still slighter than the smallest of the boys. Nobody will pass to her. Her team loses.

  Back at home, she takes her tea in the Manchester United mug that Grace sent her for her birthday. She is righteously indignant at her treatment on the pitch. ‘Loads of people said I was rubbish and they kept shouting at me to run up the pitch when they’d said I was in defence. I couldn’t score because they never pass to me. This boy said I was rubbish and then a second later someone passed to him and he was about an inch from the goal and he couldn’t score.’ She takes a lolly from the bowl of sweets left over from her birthday cake.

  Boys are rude about girls who play football because they don’t know any better. ‘Arsenal girls team is actually the best in the world, but all the professionals are men so they think that girls can’t play. Girls football is much bigger in America.’ She knows that from the film Bend It Like Beckham.

  This week, she has been looking through her mother’s portfolio again. There are some exquisite images of Lois taken in the shower. Wet hair flat against her scalp, a welter of possibilities contained in her slick limbs, she could be boy, girl or amphibian. In one, a droplet of water hangs from her earlobe like an earring. She is naked, obviously, though not shown below the chest. As a viewer, you want to wrap her in a towel and keep her in this charmed moment. You know that she will slip through your fingers, down the drain, and out into the ocean.

  Can Lois see a link between these photographs and the ones of Madeleine Schneider that caused so much trouble at the gallery? Lois says she wouldn’t like to be in a newspaper with people writing nasty things about her. She worries that Madeleine might have felt ashamed of the photographs afterwards, or ashamed of herself.

  ‘I’m actually copying this from mum a bit but I think [Betsy’s] pictures are a bit cold and in other pictures children are naked but they’re really warm loving pictures and I think it’s the same [with the ones of me]. But Betsy didn’t make Madeleine take her clothes off and it’s the same here.’

  Lois says she doesn’t really think about strangers looking at her photographs. Basically, photographs are fine so long as the person being photographed is fine. How would she feel if her mother had tried a project like that wit
h her? ‘Weird, but she wouldn’t have done that,’ she says confidently.

  Of course, Sue can only insist that she is not taking advantage of her daughter, or their intimacy. ‘She’s not a grown-up and she doesn’t understand all the implications. So all I can do is respond to what she feels comfortable with, and hope that I’m looking at things that are worth looking at.’

  Not only through design but also through circumstance, Sue takes the pictures that fall outside the parameters of family snaps. ‘When I’m at her birthday party, because I’m organising it, I’m not the person taking pictures. I deliberately started thinking about the pictures that aren’t in family albums.’

  Photography, Susan Sontag once observed, does queer things to our sense of time. Before the advent of the camera, the vast majority – those who could not afford to commission portraits – had no record of what they looked like as children. ‘To be able to see oneself and one’s parents as children is an experience unique to our time. The camera has brought people a new, and essentially pathetic, relation to themselves, to their physical appearance, to aging, to their own mortality.’

  But family photographs do not only exist as a faithful record of time passing. Many of the most typical scenes tell fibs. The beaming group around the turkey will be bickering by plum pudding. Picnics don’t only happen when the weather is dry. It isn’t natural for everyone to be looking in the same direction at the same moment. Family albums keep secrets, and weave staged episodes into a true story. You could buy one at a jumble sale and invent a whole new history for yourself.

  Since the camera became affordable to all, photographs have emerged as the dominant record of family life. People describe their favourites snaps as ‘irreplaceable’, as though they were memories themselves, rather than images of remembered events. As Roland Barthes argues in his book Camera Lucida: ‘Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory … but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.’