Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

by Gervase Phinn

  I thought of the strident television programme about rowdy and disobedient children I had seen recently. Those interviewed, who had little good to say about the younger generation, ought to meet this polite young student, so mature for his age.

  ‘I hope that my children speak about me in the same way as you speak about your father,’ I told him.

  ‘That’s really down to you, isn’t it?’ replied the boy, smiling broadly.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I replied.

  No Sort of Childhood

  I met Richard McCann at a writers’ reception in London. He struck me, at first meeting, as a good-humoured, confident, gregarious and unassuming young man, and we chatted about a number of inconsequential things until I got around to talking about his book, Just a Boy.

  When I was just a boy I thought that all children had parents like mine: loving, funny, generous and ever-supportive; I thought that all children had mothers who told wild and wonderful tales, fathers who cracked jokes, played tricks and teased them gently. For as long as I could remember, since I was a small boy, I always felt valued and loved.

  I discovered that Richard McCann’s childhood could not have been different. One cold and misty October morning in 1975, at the age of five years old, he woke up to discoverer that his mother had gone forever. She was the first of the thirteen victims of the notorious ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, Peter Sutcliffe. Richard was told that his mother had been taken to heaven and he would never see her again. It was only when he was sixteen years old that he discovered where she was buried. His life had changed forever after his mother was murdered, for the tragedy was to trigger years of neglect, deprivation, abuse and pain. It led to drug addiction, a suicide attempt and prison. The child had already been placed on the ‘at risk’ register, and was sent to a children’s home following his mother’s death. After some months, he and his siblings were placed with their often cruel and violent father, who found he was unable to cope with four traumatised children. Richard has since forgiven his father for the harsh treatment he received as a child.

  ‘It has been found,’ wrote His Holiness The Dalai Lama, in The Dalai Lama’s Book of Love and Compassion, that ‘those children who grow up in homes where there is love and affection have a healthier physical development and study better at school. Conversely, those who lack human affection have more difficulty in developing physically and mentally. These children also find it difficult to show affection when they grow up, which is a great tragedy.’ Few would disagree with these words.

  What, then, is so remarkable about Richard McCann’s inspirational story is that he not only survived a life of terrible deprivation and abuse, but he created for himself a life for which he so yearned – a life of security, compassion and love. He now uses his experiences to help others who have been subjected to neglect, and those who have rock-bottom self-esteem and little expectation from those around them, to show that they can achieve anything in life.

  My wife and I recently heard Richard speak to a large group of adolescents in a comprehensive school in Doncaster. I have observed many a lesson as a school inspector but never have I seen young people so engrossed. Several were moved to tears. ‘Life is sometimes uncomfortable,’ he told them, ‘sometimes so painful it becomes almost unbearable, but you must never let those setbacks, however terrible, hold you back. Things in life sometimes don’t work out the way you expect but, with self-belief, determination and perseverance, you can overcome.’ His unflinching and unself-pitying account of his life should be read by every parent and teacher, and young people in schools should have the opportunity of hearing him tell his inspirational story.

  Suffer Little Children

  I was once prevailed upon, by an infant school head teacher, to play Father Christmas. Nervously, I donned the bright red costume, cotton-wool beard and Wellington boots, and, after a strong cup of coffee, entered the hall to find row upon row of open-mouthed, wide-eyed children. They squealed in delight when they saw the familiar red coat and white beard. Everything went well until a rather grubby little scrap asked if she could sit on my knee.

  ‘No, Chelsea,’ said the head teacher, firmly. ‘I don’t think . . .’ She was too late; the child had already clambered up, and now clung to me like a little monkey. The unpleasant smell of the unwashed emanated from her. She gave me a great big hug.

  ‘I love you, Father Christmas,’ she whispered in my ear.

  ‘Come on down, Chelsea,’ said the head teacher. ‘I don’t think Father Christmas wants children on his knee.’

  ‘Now, you be a very good little girl and sit on the floor, Chelsea,’ I said, in my jolly voice, ‘otherwise all the other children will want to climb up.’ Chelsea stayed put and held fast like a limpet. I chuckled uneasily, and left her until the child’s teacher managed to prise her off.

  Later, in the staff room, the school welfare officer, who had sat at the back of the hall, proffered an opinion. ‘I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’ she said, ‘to have children on your knee. You have to be so careful these days.’

  I feigned ignorance. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘In what way do I have to be careful?’

  ‘Well,’ she told me, ‘people might get the wrong idea.’

  ‘How could people get the wrong idea?’ I asked. ‘I was in full view of an entire hall of children, seven members of staff and you.’

  ‘It’s just not appropriate any more,’ she said.

  A newly qualified member of staff told me later that, when she was training, a college tutor strongly advised the students that, when they became teachers, they should avoid cuddling a distressed child. People might get the wrong idea.

  I read a newspaper report of two elderly women, Betty and Brenda, who were innocently taking photographs in a park near the paddling pool before being warned not to do so because people might get the wrong idea.

  ‘We don’t allow parents to film their children in the school Nativity play any more,’ I was told by one head teacher. ‘We’ve had complaints from some parents. It’s all very worrying.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, with a degree of sarcasm in my voice. ‘People might get the wrong idea.’

  I was in church recently, for the christening of my great nephew, Giles William. The priest read from Mark, Chapter 10:

  People were bringing little children to him, for him to touch them.

  The disciples turned them away, but when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ Then he put his arms around them, laid his hands on them and gave them his blessing.

  Perhaps one of the disciples should have had a quiet word with Jesus later and advised him not to touch the children. After all, people might get the wrong idea.

  Miss Reece and the Chicks

  I walked down the school corridor in the infant department with Miss Reece, a newly qualified teacher. If she was at all daunted by the presence of the school inspector, she certainly didn’t show it.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, Mr Phinn,’ she told me, in a pronounced Welsh accent, ‘if you think my lesson plan bears any resemblance to what I am doing today, then you have another think coming.’

  ‘Really,’ I said, rather taken aback.

  ‘I did have a lesson planned for this morning and it was fab’lous but the head teacher says I can’t do it because it’s illegal.’

  ‘Illegal!’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes indeed, illegal,’ she informed me. ‘He said that, under some new regulation from OFSTED, live creatures cannot be taken into the classroom any more. What with the bird flu and such he thinks it’s against the Health and Safety Directive. So, I can’t show the children my chicks. They will be so disappointed because I promised the children I would bring them in this morning.’

  ‘Well,
it’s the first I’ve heard of such a directive,’ I said. ‘Were the children going to handle these chicks?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they’ve just hatched out and are in an incubator,’ the teacher told me, stopping at the classroom door.

  ‘I should bring the chicks in,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s all right. I will have a word with the head teacher.’

  ‘Oh good!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ll go and get them. Would you let the children in out of the playground? I’ll only be a minute.’

  The infants had lined up outside the classroom door, ready to be told to enter.

  ‘Right, children,’ I said, ‘you may go in quickly and quietly.’

  ‘We’re not supposed to speak to strangers,’ a little girl with great bunches in her hair told me pertly. ‘Where’s our teacher?’

  ‘She will be here in a minute,’ I told the child.

  She eyed me suspiciously. ‘Well, I hope she is,’ she said peevishly.

  At that moment, Miss Reece appeared with the chicks.

  ‘Who’s this man, Miss?’ asked the little girl.

  ‘He’s a friend, Bethany,’ said the teacher, smiling in my direction. ‘He’s come to see my chicks.’

  Once inside the classroom, the little children gathered around the teacher’s desk excitedly. In a small incubator, four tiny yellow chicks cheeped and scratched.

  ‘They look as if they have just hatched out of their eggs, don’t they, children?’ said Miss Reece. ‘All soft and fluffy and golden.’

  ‘I love those little chicks, Miss,’ said a small boy with a face as speckled as a hen’s egg and bristly ginger hair.

  ‘Could I hold one, Miss?’ asked a small girl.

  ‘No, Chloë,’ replied the teacher, ‘they are very small and delicate and would get very frightened if you were to hold them.’

  The small boy stared for a moment at the chicks and then at his teacher. Miss Reece was wearing a fluffy yellow mohair jumper.

  ‘Do you know, Miss,’ he said, in that loud, confident voice only possessed by young children, ‘you look as if you’ve just been laid.’

  The blush from the teacher’s neck rose to her face and the school inspector nearly fell off the chair, laughing.

  Reading Without Tears

  I was sent a book recently by the eminent Irish educationalist, and wonderfully named, Dr Finian O’Shea. I had mentioned in one of my talks that I collect old reading scheme books and primers, and Dr O’Shea very kindly sent me a copy of Reading Without Tears or a Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read. It was published in 1861 by the author of Peep of Day, one Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, the daughter of a wealthy Bristol banker and a woman with great religious fervour.

  Winston Churchill learnt to read with the aid of Reading Without Tears and, in his memoir, My Early Life, noted wryly that, ‘it certainly didn’t justify its title in my case’. And is it any wonder? This influential and popular work of stark realism certainly does not reflect the intention of the author, who stated in the preface, that, ‘great pains have been taken to render this book pleasing to children’. I can only assume that the Victorian nursery-aged children who were given this text were made of pretty strong stuff, for it is full of the most amazingly gruesome accounts of the hazardous injuries and violent deaths of naughty and foolhardy children.

  The book begins rather tamely enough, where the early readers are required to read dozens of everyday words and simple sentences such as, ‘I had a bun’ and ‘Nan ran to a log’, and are given help in learning the alphabet:

  D is like an old man leaning on a stick.

  E is like a carriage with a little seat for the driver.

  F is like a tree with a seat for a child.

  G is like a monkey eating a cake.

  Then we get to meet a singularly nasty little boy called Bill, and a number of accident-prone children:

  Bill hit a pig.

  Bill hit a kid.

  Bill will kill a pig.

  Bill is a big lad.

  Bill has a bad dog.

  Get a rod. Hit a dog.

  Jack hit his neck.

  Dick hit his hip.

  Tom got a bad kick in the neck.

  The author gets into her stride when it comes to infant mortality. When the wagon gets stuck in the snow, the little sisters freeze to death, and when Jack falls from the high tree, his neck is ‘snapped’ and ‘he is killed on the spot’. A disobedient child drinks poison and dies in agony – ‘the poison has destroyed him’. One particularly grisly account involves William, who played with gunpowder with dire results. His father, Mr Morley, rushes up the stairs on hearing a loud noise.

  What a sight! All his children lying on the floor burning.

  The doctor says, ‘The children are blind, they will soon die.’

  A century and a half later, material for emergent readers, thank goodness, is very different. These bright, informative and entertaining picture books and early texts enrich life, they take children to places they may never visit and introduce them to characters they may never meet, and the early reader grows to see reading as a pleasurable activity.

  In the post with Dr O’Shea’s gift came another book, this one produced by the Book Trust. Treasure, a Book of Ideas celebrates learning in its broadest sense with advice for parents and teachers on how to give children the very best start in reading: a curiosity about life, an eagerness to learn and a lifelong love of books. Thankfully, Reading Without Tears is not a recommended text.

  In the Reading Corner

  The reading corner in the small Dales school had a hard-backed teacher’s chair, a small square of coloured carpet, two large cushions and a bookcase full of assorted books. I had agreed to read a story to the sixteen bright-eyed children, and selected a story from The Tales of Peter Rabbit, the children’s classic by Beatrix Potter. The selection of this book, I found, was singularly unfortunate, and I came to appreciate just how shrewd, bluntly honest and witty the Dales child can be.

  John, a serious little boy of about seven or eight, with a tangled mop of straw-coloured hair, was clearly not very enamoured with the plot. I arrived at that part of the story when poor Peter Rabbit, to escape the terrifying Mr McGregor, who was searching for him in the vegetable garden, became entangled in the gooseberry net. The frightened little rabbit gave himself up for lost and shed big tears. It was the climax to the story and when I had read this part to my little nephew Jamie and my niece Kirsten, their eyes had widened like saucers and their mouths had fallen open in expectation of the capture of the poor little rabbit by the cruel gardener. But John stared impassively at me, with tight little lips and wide staring eyes.

  ‘What a terrible thing it would be,’ I said, ‘if poor Peter Rabbit should be caught.’

  ‘Rabbits! Rabbits!’ cried the angry-faced little lad, scratching the tangled mop of hair in irritation. ‘They’re a blasted nuisance, that’s what my dad says! Have you seen what rabbits do to a crop?’ I answered that I had not. ‘Rabbits with little cotton-wool tails and pipe-cleaner whiskers,’ he sneered, ‘and fur as soft as velvet. Huh! We shoot the buggers! They can eat their way through a crop in a week, can rabbits. Clear nine acres in a month! Millions of pounds’ worth of damage when it’s a mild winter. No amount of fencing will stop ’em.’

  ‘We don’t shoot rabbits on our farm,’ announced a little girl of about ten, with round rosy cheeks and closely cropped red hair.

  ‘Don’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘We gas ours!’ she told me. ‘That stops ’em, I can tell you.’

  ‘Nay, Marianne,’ retorted the boy, curling a small lip, ‘gassin’ doesn’t work.’ Then, looking me straight in the eyes, he added: ‘Never mind poor old Peter Rabbit. It’s Mr McGregor I feel sorry for – trying to grow his vegetables with a lot of ’ungry rabbits all ovver t’place!’

  ‘Perhaps I should read another book,’ I suggested feebly.

  A Favourite Book

  I am frequently asked, by children in the schools I visit, which is
my very favourite story. I tell them I have read a good many books in my time but the one story which I love the most, one which brings back such happy memories of my childhood and one which I wish I had written myself, is The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. It was my grandmother’s favourite story and was read to me when I was small. It is a powerful, poignant and simply written narrative about a mean-minded Giant who forbids the little children to enter his beautiful garden to play.

  One Easter time, when visiting a small rural primary school in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire, I read The Selfish Giant to a group of eight-year-olds. The children sat in a semi-circle around me on the carpet in the reading corner and listened intently as I recounted the tale.

  ‘My own garden is my own garden,’ he tells the children, ‘and I will not allow anyone to play in it but myself.’ When spring comes, the Giant’s garden remains cold and barren and a great white cloak of snow buries everything. The Giant cannot understand why the spring passes his garden by. Summer doesn’t come, and neither does autumn, and the garden stays perpetually cold and empty of life. One morning, the Giant sees a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall, the children have crept into his garden and every tree has a little child sitting in the branches amongst the blossoms. They have brought life back to his garden, and the Giant’s heart melts. He creeps into the garden but when the children see him they are frightened and run away. One small boy doesn’t see the Giant, for his eyes are full of tears. The Giant steals up behind the child and gently takes his little hand in his. Many years pass and the little boy never comes back to play in the garden. Now very old and feeble, the giant longs to see his first little friend again. One day the small child returns.

  Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, ‘Who hath dared to wound thee?’ For on the palms of the child’s hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of the two nails were on the little feet.