The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  Naturally, raising children is a significant element of care. Perhaps by recognising dependency not as an incomplete state but as a universal one, we can raise the status not only of those who care but of those who are cared for. Thus we raise the status of children, and finally grant them the respect they are due.

  Ashley says he doesn’t remember much from his early childhood. He’s sitting at a rickety table in the centre’s art room. In primary school, he was good. He never had a bad report. But as he got older, his behaviour got out of control. He used to like playing football. And he learnt to play pool from when he was eight or nine, because he went to the pub with his dad.

  He trawls for an earlier memory, grins. ‘Before that I used to go to work with him. I would ride on the buses with him all day. I would get my own seat on the bus, ’cos my dad was the conductor. I used to enjoy it. And lunch-time we’d go to this baker’s shop, the same baker’s shop, and get the same thing: steak bake, and then a cream roll.’

  He’s got a couple of teddies still. He hurries out the denial: ‘I’m not a little boy no more, I don’t cuddle them, I just keep them there for decoration.’ It makes him feel warm, he says. ‘I’ve got a dinosaur, I’ve got a big Pikachu, I’ve got a kangaroo, a Tigger, a Winnie the Pooh, and a Scooby-Doo.’ The Pikachu is the oldest. It got a couple of holes in it, so he had to stitch it. This is the first time that Ashley has done anything close to giggling.

  He says he was a fearless child. ‘From little I ain’t been scared of nothing really. The only thing I’m scared of is dying, but everyone’s going to die so I don’t talk about it.’ No one wants to die really.

  Does he mean that he’s put himself in danger in the past? He churns in his seat. That pained, twisty smile reappears. ‘Some of them … but that’s why I’ve stopped it, why I’m trying to fix up my life. There’s a couple of things I’ve done, leave it at that.’ His flat palm skims across the table surface.

  Ashley’s silences are tender and protective: of himself, of his family, of the friend who was murdered when he was still at primary school, of the consequences of his brother’s crack habit, of the times – and I surmise there have been a few – involving guns and drugs and imminent threat to his young life. What he doesn’t say is far more unsettling than what he does.

  Yes, he feels different from most people. ‘It’s different ’cos I can’t do certain things they can do. Like, say my mum had a bit of money, life would be a lot easier. But it’s a lot harder when you’re brought up on loose change.’

  ‘If you’ve got an easy home life, there’s no fighting in your household on a regular basis, it would be easier to get on in school. But if you’re going through a mad life then when you come to school you’re going to be upset from what’s happened. You might get into a fight at school, then they cuss your mum, but they don’t know what happened at your house, so you’re angry and you do something you might regret.’ He might even be talking about himself.

  ‘When I was little I wanted to be a judge or a lawyer or a barrister,’ he says, out the blue. ‘But it will be harder for me ’cos I’m coming from Peckham. Peckham kids, there’s not many of them in schools.’ He can’t even remember why he wanted to be a lawyer. But from little, he did well in school. ‘My mum used to tell me she wanted one child not to get a police record. But I flopped it for myself, I got myself arrested, all them times.’ He shakes his head, defeated, mumbles: ‘I just flopped it for myself.’

  Told across the table, Ashley’s story is hard to hear. But somehow it’s not the sort that would satisfy the voracious public appetite for tales of early misery, which has flourished over the past decade. Stories that prompt thoughts, rather than feelings, are not so palatable. So the contemporary experiences of un-children remain untold, while the bookshops are clogged with more easily digested trauma.

  In the months that Ashley was talking to me, the best-seller non fiction charts were dominated by: Just a Boy, by Richard McGann, whose mother was the first victim of the Yorkshire Ripper, ‘a graphic account of how four children lost not only their mother but their childhoods’; Sickened, by Julie Gregory, whose mother suffered from Munchausen’s by proxy, ‘a harrowing but compelling account of the way her mother stole her childhood’; One Child, by Torey Hayden, ‘educational psychologist helps an abused child back to life’; and A Brother’s Journey, by Richard Pelzer, brother of Dave.

  Dave Pelzer, the million-selling memoirist, has been described as ‘one of the most severely abused children in California’s history’. His own trauma tale, A Child Called It, which he followed with The Lost Boy and A Man Named Dave, documented his early childhood with a mentally disturbed and alcoholic mother, who fed her son from a dog bowl, ritually humiliated him and forced him to sleep in the cellar.

  In the introduction to his beautifully executed memoir Experience, the novelist Martin Amis wrote: ‘It used to be said that everyone had a novel in them … [now] you would probably be obliged to doubt the basic proposition: what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity … Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed. Experience is the only thing we share equally, and everyone senses this.’

  But the most successful childhood memoirs are not written by the already famous. And, while the occasional few have attracted literary esteem – like Andrea Ashworth and Frank McCourt, or the cheekily subversive Dave Eggers – the majority trade on crude honesty rather than stylistic ability.

  It has been estimated that one in fifteen adults in Britain has read a book by Dave Pelzer. Why is it that we would rather learn about a corrupted American childhood from the mid-1970s than contemplate how children live in the UK, here and now? Perhaps it is because such tales are only appealing after the fact, when they have been strained through the muslin of hindsight and spiked with psychobabble, providing the reader with a flavour of catharsis or there-but-for-the-grace gratitude, in a culture where voyeuristic maundering passes for emotional literacy.

  Reviews of Pelzer’s work on the Amazon website are instructive. There are many postings from people who were abused as children themselves, and who have found his model of healing through self-expression useful in their own quest for equilibrium. But while these books may offer individual succour, they are usually void of any lesson beyond the personal, suggesting no broader political imperative to prevent future harm.

  The popularity of these memoirs cannot be explained away by shared experience alone. As effusive in their praise on Amazon are those readers whose lives were untouched by maltreatment, who simply relished a book that made them cry and cry.

  It is plausible that, for sanitised Western adulthood, where encounters with the extremities of birth and death, insanity and cruelty, are strictly monitored, these memoirs – like horror movies before them – provide a last forum in which to explore collective fears.

  This is surely not what Amis had in mind when he wrote of the unanswerable authenticity of experience – titillation by artlessly rendered trauma. For the majority of readers who have not experienced abusive extremity, there is an ugly, near-pornographic component to this hanky-clutching appreciation.

  These testimonials of triumph over tragedy turn the capacity to survive into a moral imperative. We valorise the formerly abused who visibly triumph, just as we resent a child like Ashley who exposes how early damage can dislocate. Such books confirm adults’ preferred rear-view of childhood, whereby it is less challenging to interpret the antithesis of innocence as guilt, which we can easily attribute, than as knowledge, which might take us anywhere.

  Adults tell expurgated versions of their own small time to friends and strangers all the time, to seduce or to supplicate. Even an ordinarily unhappy childhood can provide a comforting rationale for adult failure as well as adult success. Perhaps these memoirs soothe our fear that no story of childhood ends well. Because it always ends up right here in adulthood
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  The following week, there’s more trouble at the door of the centre. Ashley’s brother is high again, threatening to stab the security man in the eye with a pen. He loses patience, and calls the police. Ashley waits passively, goes to the shop to buy Refreshers. On his return he distributes them to everyone who has crowded round, except for the security guy and the two newly arrived policemen. Despite the warnings, his brother was here yesterday, and he’ll be back again tomorrow. There’s nowhere else for him to go.

  Ashley is back in the art room, pondering how he drums up twenty pounds every day to buy skunk. ‘It’s either money I’m making myself or if I get a bit of money from my mum or dad I put it towards it.’ If you can’t support your habit then don’t smoke, that’s how he sees it. But he’s got enough to get his draw every day. And how does he make his money? ‘It’s bizznizz, innit?’ Leave it at that.

  A couple of weeks ago, he talked about ‘moving on or moving up in the game’. It depends on your line, he says. If you’ve got a lot of customers you move up. If you’re not making enough then you’re back to square one, living off the government.

  But it’s not really possible to live on benefits. If you want to make extra, you either get a job or find something else to do to make more money. He doesn’t know many people who don’t have something else going on. ‘My business, I’m looking to stop it soon, but for the time being it’s all right. I’m making the money but it’s nothing big.’

  Ashley delineates clearly between crime for its own sake and crime to earn. He is derisive about kids he knows who shoplift sportswear. ‘ ’Cos you shouldn’t thief clothes, that’s one thing I wouldn’t do. I just wouldn’t lower myself to that level. They’re not selling the clothes and making a business. They’re stealing them ’cos they want them that bad.’

  It’s not stupid to steal wallets, or things you can pawn, because you’re making money. ‘If you were going to prison for robbing a bank then good on you ’cos at least you tried.’

  There are other things he wouldn’t do. ‘I don’t do kids’ stuff any more, I don’t rob cars, I don’t rob wallets. I just do one thing. I would say it’s all right to sell weed, it’s not all right to sell crack. If you’re selling crack it’s a hard thing to do ’cos crackheads just go mad for it. It’s mostly Yardies that sell crack, and it’s mostly kids that sell weed.’

  He blows through his lips. ‘I don’t know, like, I don’t really think you could grow up normal in Peckham. You’d still have a little mad thing about you. It’s not that you’re going to turn into a crackhead or nothing, but the kids in Peckham, the community, we ain’t got much, we have to make do.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re a bad boy, but I wouldn’t really call it that. You’re just out there, trying to make paper. People are gonna get in your way then.’ He grimaces, gestures with one hand: ‘Just push them aside.’

  Nothing surprises him. No. He can’t imagine anything that would shock him. No. He’s laughing now. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Bad. The laughter evaporates. ‘I’ve seen too much.’

  Ashley scratches his crown, removing the baseball cap that is normally welded there. His hair is soft and curly. He looks much younger. He says he’s never without his hat. Only when he’s had a haircut. He likes a number one. Couldn’t he just get a pal with some clippers to do it? No, he says, appalled. ‘I’ve got my barber.’

  He has a lot of support right now: his mum, his girlfriend, Camila. He wants to do his education, he says, like he always does. And there’s one special, shining hope: ‘Barbados.’ He treats the word delicately, in case it dims with overuse. Then it all falls out in a rush: ‘I ain’t been there but I’m going there probably the end of this year or the beginning of next year, and I might be living over there. My mum’s gonna start saving the money and I’m gonna go over there for perhaps six months. I’m going to live with my godparents, and if I choose to stay I’ll stay. My mum’s planned it for a couple of years, but bills and that come up. She just wants me to get out of this life, misbehaving and that. She wants me to have a better life.’

  He reckons he’d enjoy it in Barbados. He doesn’t know no one over there, so it means he’d have to start new friendships. And if he goes to school, they’re still caning people. He laughs, his lovely face bright with a huge, unfettered smile. ‘I’d probably beat up the teacher!’ In his dreams. ‘They’re brought up getting caned so they’re not thinking, “Who is this teacher?” They’re scared of the teacher. Trust me,’ he articulates slowly, for effect, ‘when he picks up that cane and slaps it down!’ He bangs the table with his palm. ‘My dad said he used to be shook!’

  He doesn’t know how much his mum’s got saved. ‘She ain’t even looked at the flights. I think she’s going to do it when my passport comes through, and then she’s gonna find it on Easyjet.’ Ashley says he likes the sunshine.

  Lauren

  ‘They get it all wrong. They think that if you’re fifteen you can’t look after yourself let alone a child.’

  Lauren’s hands are blue. She’s designing a shoe for her textiles course and the dye gets everywhere. It’s going to be work, work, work for the ten GCSEs she’s taking this summer. The school told her she could drop some, but she didn’t want to. Lauren’s favourite subject is English. She loves literature – Dickens, Steinbeck – and that’s what she’s going to do at university. She’s been making this blue shoe as one of her final pieces for submission. She says she needs three sketch books too. Ollie, her baby son, who has been fidgeting amiably on her lap, is suddenly sick, and Lauren shouts to her mum in the kitchen to bring through the wet wipes please.

  It’s January now, at the long dark end of a short wet day. Lauren sits back on the living-room sofa in jeans and a jumper, her long blonde hair loose around her broad shoulders. She gave birth to Ollie on 5 August last year, three months before her sixteenth birthday. In the womb, he had been an unobtrusive passenger: ‘I wasn’t being sick, I’d only put a little bit of weight on, physically I felt fine. That was why I only found out when it was that late. Five months!’ She says it quietly now, disbelieving.

  ‘It was dead weird. I went after school to one of those clinics for young people in Manchester. I went for a test, when I would have been six weeks pregnant, but it said I wasn’t, so I just went with that. And then I kept going to the toilet all the time, and my friend said to me, “You’d better go for another test.” The doctor felt my belly and said, “I think you’re about four months,” and I was like’ – she makes a wide open mouth – ‘God!!!’ A surge of noise pounds through the ceiling. Her thirteen-year-old sister Danielle is up in her bedroom and she’s got her moshing music on. The four of them – three women and a baby – live together in this new-build council house in Gorton, Manchester. Down here the lights are low, and Lauren lays Ollie prostrate in his buggy for a nap.

  Lauren is a child who is also a parent, a totem for liberal despair and conservative vitriol. There is no more resonant a position in the current climate of child-panic. It is the ultimate adult encroachment, as well as a profound statement about what a young person is capable of. Her dual status attacks not only the idea of what it is to be a child, but also what it is to be a parent.

  The UK currently heads the European league table for teenage pregnancies. Should we blame poor sex education, a decline in moral values or a grossly sexualised culture for Lauren’s pregnancy? Is it worthy of blame in the first place?

  Lauren’s mum found out that she was pregnant two weeks after she did. She guessed of course. ‘I felt like I’d disappointed her – ’cos I’m the one in the family, “Oh Lauren this, Lauren that.” I’m good at school, I’m good at sport, I sing and that – and I cared what she thought. I didn’t care what other people thought, just my immediate family, but they was all right.’

  Lauren doesn’t know whether she’d have had an abortion if she’d found out earlier. You can’t really say, can you, unless it actually happens to you. By the time she knew she had three weeks left,
because the limit is twenty-four weeks isn’t it? And her mum said, ‘You can still go back to school,’ so it didn’t bother her. Now her mother looks after Ollie during the day, and on Saturdays her nan takes him until about six o’clock, so she can catch up on her homework. ‘I do make sure I go to school,’ she says seriously. ‘I don’t like to have a day off.’

  At school, everyone was all right to her face. ‘I don’t know if anyone slagged me off behind my back, but most of my friends said they knew already. They were like, “Oh can I feel your belly?” And the teachers were really good. I think if I’d been someone who was really naughty it would have been different, but I get on with them. They all love me. I love them too. They always stay behind to help me. When the baby was born they bought him lots of stuff.’

  Lauren’s boyfriend, who is two years older than her, was living here at the time, because he was having problems at home. He was really, really good, she says fondly, and he was there when Ollie was born, but then about two months ago he went a bit weird. ‘Like, I would go out on a Friday night and he was supposed to mind the baby but then he would just go out, and I found text messages on his phone from other girls. So I said, “Don’t you think you should just move home and we could spend some time apart?” and then after that I realised that it was better so I told him and then we split up.’ He still sees his son, but she doesn’t like to see him because he gets jealous when she goes out.