The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  There is a wide poster of the solar system on the evenly painted wall beyond his bed. He’s not really interested in space, not now. ‘I used to be, one or two years ago, but now I’m into things like chess, and making crosswords and reading.’ He started to construct a crossword earlier today. It took over two hours and it’s not finished yet. One clues reads: ‘Chess is one of these (5)’, and the answer is ‘games’; another is ‘a parent (3)’, and the answer is ‘mum’, but not ‘dad’. It’s quite hard to find a way to make all the letters fit.

  Next March Nicholas is going to a chess tournament to play in the under-nines section. He may go on to play matches out of London. He likes to play chess with his granny. He normally beats her but she’s quite good. ‘I do get competitive,’ he admits. ‘It’s a competitive game.’ In the corner of his bedroom is his electric chess set. It’s a thick, seventies-style board, plugged in at the mains. ‘It used to be my mum’s, and when I started to beat her she said that I should play the computer.’ He switches it on, and it lights into life. A monotonal voice greets him: ‘I am Intelligent Chess Challenger, your computer opponent. Select your level.’

  Nicholas talks about his school, which he knows by the initials. It’s all boys. ‘You have to wear a tie which is striped, and you can wear a short-sleeved shirt or a long-sleeved shirt, and shorts or long trousers, and grey socks and you have to have black shoes.’ He prefers a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. He doesn’t get chilly knees. ‘For a start, when it’s very cold we have play inside, and I have a fleece.’

  He’s not certain what’s different about a private school because he’s never been to an ordinary school. An adult would know. You have to pay. He doesn’t know anybody his own age who goes to a state school. The only difference between the kind of person who goes to a state school and the kind of person who goes to a private school is that to go to a school like his you have to have more money. People might have more money if they work very hard, or they might have more money from their ancestors.

  His days are steadily ordered. The routine is solid and incontestable, a shire-horse of a week. ‘Monday I have after-school club karate, on Tuesday that’s when I have my piano lesson after school, Wednesday that’s when I have my flute lesson in school and we have Golden Time and then after school I’m free.’

  Golden Time is twenty minutes of free play, but minutes can be taken off as punishment for misbehaviour during the week. Once Jonathan got nineteen minutes out of twenty taken off, and the last minute is spent on tidying up so he missed it all. Nicholas normally has a game of chess or draughts with his best two friends George and Thomas, or maybe Charlie T. (‘I’ve got two surnames and two first names in my class: James and James, and Charlie T. and Charlie O.’ He offers a lot of his speech in parentheses. There is such a lot to observe and ennumerate.)

  Nicholas is older than both George and Thomas, but only ten days older than Thomas. ‘Thomas is taller than me. He likes chess but it’s not one of his favourite games. George is very good at suicide chess. (There are lots of different sorts of chess: baby chess, suicide chess, Greek chess, Scottish chess, Irish chess.) I only know Greek chess and suicide chess and normal chess, and George is really, really good [at suicide chess] and no one in my year can beat him. No one in my year can beat me at normal chess.’

  The routine trots onward. ‘On Thursday I have breakfast at school because it opens really early and I get there at quarter to eight and then after school we collect Emma. Me and my au pair have to walk up to her school, wait for about half an hour while I do my homework, and then Mummy comes. After school on Friday I have two hours of chess club ’cos I like chess, so I never do my homework on Fridays and I save it for the weekend.’

  He is manoeuvring the mince pie, which his mother has brought him, into his mouth. ‘And because we’ve got the Christmas play coming up we’ve got these after-school rehearsals and last Monday I had to go to that instead.’ He sits upright on the two-seat sofa, the plate on his knees. ‘Oh my!’ A morsel has fallen into his lap.

  The Christmas play is not the story of Baby Jesus. ‘I’m a citizen. There are twenty shepherds, twenty citizens, twenty angels, twenty travellers and there are six children’s songs. It’s for all of Year 3 and there are supposed to be a hundred pupils, although there are actually ninety-six. I just have to say my line when it gets to the scene that I’m in, scene three. I have a copy of who I am and everyone’s words and one of the songs.’

  He can’t really explain the plot. It’s the story of Jesus but it’s not the story of Jesus at his birth. ‘As a citizen I’m selling things, so I say, “Spiced wine, hot snacks, buy your hot snacks here!” ’ He sing-songs it in a clear treble. ‘And I don’t actually only know my own words. I know quite a few other people’s. For instance, I know: “I’m freezing”, “I’m exhausted”, “It’s freezing”, “It’s not been properly organised”, “So this is Bethlehem”.’

  Christmas is fun, but it doesn’t really start until the holidays begin. ‘There are three weeks now and another three at Easter.’ He drops in another casual calculation. ‘Last year it was two weeks at Christmas and four at Easter for some reason.’

  A week later, Nicholas is completing his practice at the grand piano. He has only just started learning ‘Good King Wenceslas’ but his sight-reading is keen and he stretches his fingers to span the three-note chords. He grins equably when his mother praises him. Emma loiters around the piano legs, darkly ignoring them both.

  The play was on Thursday. Loads of people came and it was videoed, which was pretty nerve-racking.

  By the window in Nicholas’ bedroom is a print of the Rembrandt painting Belshazzar’s Feast, in which a mysterious hand writes a message on a wall foretelling the destruction of the King of Babylon. ‘I’ve had it ever since I read this,’ he explains, knee-shuffling from the sofa to the bookshelf. He pulls out a hardback illustrated Bible. ‘It’s got 360 pages which is quite long. It’s quite good to read but it does take a long time.’ It didn’t really teach him any useful lessons though. It’s not like going to school.

  Nicholas isn’t especially religious. ‘We have to pray in assembly but that’s the only time. My mum’s mum goes to church but no one else does.’ He went round to his granny’s again yesterday, because Emma and his parents had parties to go to. Mainly, they played chess.

  This week, his books and games have been reinstated following the carpet-laying, but the room remains preter-naturally tidy. His favourite novels are arranged in series order: the Famous Five, Roald Dahl, and Lemony Snicket, Tintin, Lucky Luke and Asterix. He has a collection of Horrible Histories magazines in a separate rack. His Top Trumps collection is stored in a drawer beneath his bed. There is nothing on his floor that ought not to be there.

  People are coming to lunch later, and Nicholas thinks they may be having sausages because there were lots in the fridge. ‘It’s one of my mum’s old colleagues, and their children who are six and nine. Emma plays with the nine-year-old and I play with the six-year-old, because the six-year-old is a boy and the nine-year-old is a girl.’

  Emma’s a girl so she likes playing Barbies but Nicholas doesn’t. ‘She’s sometimes not nice to me, so I’m not nice to her. Sometimes she wants me to play a game with her which I don’t want to play and then she tries to threaten me with telling my mum and everything. She sometimes pretends to hit me but I’m stronger than her.’ He likes being at school with only boys. He did go to a mixed nursery school. ‘There seemed to be more talking and I had less friends,’ he recalls.

  His school breaks up for the holidays next Wednesday, but Emma’s goes on until Friday so he has two more days than her. ‘My mum’s mum is coming for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then we’re going to my dad’s parents in Oxford for four days.’ Otherwise he might see friends from school, but mainly he’ll just laze about, and try to avoid doing too much piano practice.

  You do more fun things towards the end of term, things to do with Christmas. ‘So i
n maths you had this Christmas tree and there were nine baubles, four going down each way, and you had to fill each bauble with a number from one to nine and each side had to add up to twenty-one. And in English you had to do some writing about Christmas dinner.’

  Ever since he started at prep school, Nicholas has had an au pair who stays one year. ‘Before I used to have a nanny and she had a daughter who came with her after school and she was called Emma too, so we called her Big Emma and my sister just Emma.’

  It depends what sort of person the au pair is. ‘If it’s someone who can’t speak much English then it’s weird. The au pair we have now speaks quite a bit of English. She comes from Germany. She’s got her own room. She eats dinner with us, so it’s like having an extra mum or dad really.’

  ‘She works twenty-five hours a week (not including baby-sitting), so she’s free from seven o’clock onwards. I’m not exactly sure what she does then – watches television in her room or something. She’s called Marta. She’s slightly shy. She’s not really, really chatty. For instance when she’s watching television, she’s not also talking.’ (Nicholas doesn’t watch much television, only about half an hour a day and sometimes none at all. He likes Blue Peter because it shows you all sorts of different things you can make.)

  His nanny looked after him from when he was about three months old, but she didn’t live with them. ‘We still see her sometimes. She lived in a flat. It’s better to live in a house than a flat. In a flat you only have one bedroom, one sitting-room, one kitchen and one bathroom. In a house you have three bedrooms normally, one or two bathrooms and a bigger sitting-room, so there’s more room.’

  Nicholas hasn’t written his Christmas list yet. He doesn’t know what he wants. Nor has he really thought about what to get the rest of his family. ‘Everybody has the same problem – they all seem to have everything already.’

  He got more excited about Christmas when he was younger, he says. ‘Now that I’m eight, I’ve worked out that Father Christmas is just your mum and dad – the same with the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and everything.’ There is the sliver-thinnest of pauses here while he waits for an eleventh hour, faith-restoring piece of evidence to the contrary. But none is forthcoming. ‘Because reindeers can’t fly and – I mean – there aren’t such things as elves, and no one could have that many presents, and no one would come down a chimney really, because some houses don’t have chimneys, and it’s impossible to go through the doors because they’d be locked.’ He is becoming increasingly exasperated.

  ‘I started thinking about it when I was seven. It just sort of made sense to me. I didn’t feel disappointed, but it makes Christmas a bit less exciting. Emma still believes.’ He sounds almost envious of her unvanquished certainty. ‘Mum told me not to tell her.’ So why do adults tell children about Father Christmas in the first place? ‘Because they have to make up some sort of excuse for how presents get in your stocking.’ Or perhaps, less generously, they want to bribe some best behaviour – though Nicholas never really believed that Santa could see whether he’d been good or bad. ‘Actually, I’m very rarely naughty. And when I am naughty it’s usually because my sister’s annoyed me.’

  Another eight-year-old, the New Yorker Virginia O’Hanlon, did believe in Santa Claus, until she heard the poor children of her neighbourhood claiming that he didn’t exist. When she asked her father, he was understandably non-committal, suggesting that she write to the local newspaper for a definitive answer. Her letter, written in 1897, appeared on the editorial page of the New York Sun with a response from the editor, and was reprinted every Christmas until 1949 when the paper went out of business.

  ‘I am eight years old,’ it read. ‘Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?’

  The editor replied: ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give your life its highest beauty and joy. Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.’

  Nicholas, being more partial to observable phenonema, might prefer the methodology of the scientist Richard Dawkins. In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, he calculates that Santa would have to travel at many thousand times the speed of sound in order to visit every home in the world. Dawkins concludes that the fact no one has ever heard a sonic boom on Christmas Eve disproves the saint’s existence.

  Finding out the truth about Father Christmas is one of childhood’s looking-glass moments: a rude recognition not only that all things are not possible, but that grown-ups may tell lies, even if they are lovely ones. Anthropologists might place this shift in status – between the young child who believes, and older children who do not – within the array of initiation rites which mark the passage into adolescence.

  But Christmas-time has always been a precarious fantasy. The modern festival, with its emphasis on homely rituals and lavish spending, was a Victorian creation, a response to the rigours of industrialisation. The domestic sphere was reimagined as a distinct moral realm, in an attempt to shore up family and community against the fragmentation brought on by urban capitalism. At the heart of this haven was childhood – in the process of being liberated from the exploitation of the factory, idealised by the age as a time of innocence and enchantment.

  Charles Dickens noted in Sketches by Boz, published in 1836, the prevalence of cynics who ‘tell you Christmas is not to them what it used to be’. And so it is that contemporary celebrations are frequently denounced as materialistic and unspiritual. Gift-giving and get-togethers have become freighted with social meanings far removed from the simple benevolence espoused in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, ‘when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave’. We even owe Santa’s ‘traditional’ red and white garb to an advertising artist at the Coca-Cola Company, who first depicted him wearing it as he quenched his ‘thirst for all seasons’ in 1931.

  Rather like childhood, Christmas offers a focus for what people most dislike about life: commercialism, fractured families, long working hours. But the dream of a perfect festive time – propped up by the frantic efforts of exhausted adults – is remarkably persistent, a veritable triumph of hope over experience. In the bleak midwinter of stress and excess, it bridges the disconnection between the public display of family we envy of everybody else, and the private disappointments that lurk behind our own turkey and trimmings.

  Now it is the day before the day before Christmas Eve. The kitchen table is bright with coloured beads that pop into plastic frames to make pictures. Emma is working on a ladybird. Nicholas has constructed an elaborate geometric pattern. At the piano end of the long sitting-room stands a laden Christmas tree. His favourite decoration is the star, or maybe this shiny green bauble. To the side are the children’s advent calendars, the cardboard windows hanging open like broken promises. This is a scene best viewed on a snowy night through a frosted window. It feels rich and snug, as though the whole home has been insulated with red velvet.

  Nicholas has been to the cinema with his dad. He might like to be an actor, but he doesn’t think being famous would be very good. ‘Everyone would know you and everything and you’d have loads and loads and loads of money, too much really.’ It is possible to have too much money. A google or millions of pounds would be too much. A sensible amount would be a few thousand pounds, something like three thousand. He calculates. ‘Well, more than that really, maybe £300,000.’ Everyone should be able to afford a house and a car.

  He retires to his bedroom. It’s cold outside, and Nicholas is wearing a smart navy fleece. His thick hair looks warm like a hat. It’s a Tuesday morning, but he’s here at home because the holidays have arrived. He had a friend round yesterday. T
hey played draughts and watched television together: Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, Blue Peter and Newsround. Nicholas doesn’t think that people his age know what’s happening in the news: ‘I don’t know anyone who watches it apart from me.’ In the news this week, someone has made a robotic dolphin that goes a metre under water and it can do all sorts of tricks.

  Outside his bedroom door, Emma is getting in a muddle with her carolling, and a chorus of sweet hallelujahs vowel-slips into ‘hallelooloo’. Nicholas laughs hard, twisting on the sofa, aware of how he is laughing and aiming for a note of grown-up derision. ‘Emm-aaa,’ he calls, ‘can you stop that please?’

  A tooth is wobbly. He doesn’t know how many baby teeth he has left, but he does know that he’s got eight big teeth. Two of them are his top front teeth and they look a little large for the rest of his mouth. When a tooth is ready, it gets extremely wobbly and then it comes out. ‘I’ve swallowed nearly all of them. I’ve swallowed six out of eight. I only realise it when I’ve brushed my teeth!’ He doesn’t like going to the dentist, but he’s not scared of it.

  There is a troop of monkeys at the feet end of Nicholas’s bed. He’s had George, the biggest one, since he was two. He got nearly all of them for Christmas, except for the smallest one. He definitely used to like them, but not so much now. He would play at throwing them in the air and catching them, and would imagine that they could talk when he was very, very young.

  His earliest memory may be that, or it may be this one. ‘It was when my sister was born and my mum left me at home with my nanny and I watched videos all night!’ It’s not every day your sister is born. ‘She went at about one o’clock in the morning, and she came back at about eight o’clock the next night, and Emma was born at about one o’clock. I was two and a half, and you get excited about things like that when you’re young.’