The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (26 page)
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Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
18. A. A. Milne (1882–1956)
The Pooh stories and
Now We Are Six
both offer endless fuel for speculation: are all the animals Jungian archetypes? Is Christopher Robin a sort of Christian God figure to the animals? Has Pooh got the right approach to life, just floating through like a Taoist monk? Should we feel sorry for Piglet or is his pathetic nature merely irritating? And why hasn’t Christopher Robin got any friends? Is he in fact a sad and isolated character, seeking solace in his collection of furry toys?
19. Beatrix Potter (1866–1943)
Her illustrations are simply superb. Again, there is plenty of room for imaginative interpretation of these tales, which are sparse and never sentimental. Some, like
The Tale of Mr Tod
, are really quite dark. It was Graham Greene’s contention that Beatrix Potter, whose style he praised for its ‘gentle detachment’, must have suffered some kind of crisis between the earlier, simpler tales – for example,
Peter Rabbit
(published in 1902, with 50,000 sales in its first year) and
Tom Kitten
– and
the more complex and disturbing later ones, like
Pigling Bland
and
Mr Tod
. ‘Miss Potter must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius,’ Greene wrote in a 1933 essay. Potter refuted this suggestion, writing to Greene to say that she was not a fan of Mr Freud’s theories and the only ordeal she had been through at the time was an attack of the flu. However, a recent biography has suggested that she had been traumatized by the death in 1905 of her beloved publisher, Frederick Warne.
20. Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
Recently I was reading
Watership Down
to my children. Each evening I struggled through a few pages, regularly losing my temper because of the kids’ inability to sit still and listen. One evening I allowed myself to be provoked to the point of throwing the book across the room. The following night I happened to see an old paperback Penguin copy of
The Thousand and One Nights
lying around, and we started to read ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’. Two pages in I looked up to see three enormous pairs of eyes staring back at me in rapt wonder. This is the stuff! Precious jewels, caves, genies, bodies being cut into four pieces and hung on the cave walls, thieves being killed in boiling oil. There’s a lot of sex in the tales too, and wine-drinking, feasts and dancing girls, and couples who ‘enjoy each other till morning’. In fact, the tales give a good idea of everyday life in Medieval Islam. The N. J. Dawood translation in Penguin is probably the best, although the Richard Burton one, while peppered with archaisms, is perfectly readable. Sensual, fantastical and thrilling, the tales also offer a satire on religion: every rogue claims ‘it is Allah’s
will’ when he is simply following his own self-interest. The final great thing about the tales is that there is not the faintest hint of Puritan morality: both Aladdin and Ali Baba are hopelessly lazy and shiftless. They become rich by pure good fortune. Things just happen: hard work is not necessarily rewarded. Fate can work in mysterious ways.
A word on the art of storytelling: reading from books or putting on a DVD has taken over from the old custom of telling stories from memory. The important thing is perhaps not so much the books themselves but the stories, and stories really are best told without reference to a book. The book introduces a barrier between the teller and the told. Sometimes, perhaps on a camping trip when I have lost the torch, the children have demanded a story, and I’ve had to fall back on my own resources and make one up on the spot. After the initial fear, you let go, and the story comes into your mind with surprising fluidity. The children remember such stories more intensely than the book-read ones. The other easy thing is simply to tell a story from memory, something like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for example. It’s actually more fun to do this than to read it from the text, because you start to add your own embellishments.
Philip Pullman puts it well:
I believe we should begin young with storytelling. We should encourage teachers to tell stories – I don’t mean read from a book, I mean tell from memory, and I don’t mean reciting parrot-fashion either, I mean having the story securely in your head till you know it as well as your own address or phone number. Every young student I have taught, I have encouraged to do this… if you put the book away and it’s
just you in front of a class of children, in front of those thirty pairs of eyes, then you do feel very naked, very vulnerable at first. And all of them who did it said, ‘Well, it really worked, I was amazed…’ Every teacher should have room in their heads to carry one story for each week of the school year.
We might read something like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and then memorize the component parts. We can also get the children to join in at certain points. What is interesting is that the kids seem to find it easier to concentrate when there is
no
book. The satisfying thing for the adult is the sense of fun and creativity. It’s fun to perform your own bespoke version of the fairy tales, and it’s creative to make up your own. The other night, I made one up for Henry about a big tractor and a little tractor. The little tractor never gets used to feed the cattle and sits sadly in the barn until one day the cows flee to a small field in the corner of the farm. The big tractor is too big to get through the gate, so at last the little tractor is called to help. They seemed to enjoy that and the next day Arthur said to me:
‘Daddy, you should write down the story of the tractors.’
‘Really, Arthur, do you think so?’
‘Yes, and then we can sell them.’
So now I have.
Finally, I would like to offer a tip for the parents: always carry a good book around with you. This means that wherever you go you will never be bored. I recently had a very successful idle parenting moment, and I thank the fact that I had a book with me. I arrived at Castle Cary train station with three children, but we missed the train to London. There was an hour’s gap till the following train. I was filled with dread: how was I going to entertain them
for an hour? Then I remembered my own philosophy. We walked into the waiting room. I sat down and got out my book. It was
The Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley. I started to read: ‘[O]ne bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.’ The children played quietly at my feet. After half an hour or so a lady sitting next to me leaned over and whispered: ‘I just want to say that I think it’s wonderful that you are managing to read a book while looking after three children!’
So you see: idle parenting works.
Don’t Fret About Computers, or Towards a Tao of Parenting
Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection – for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery – then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion. It is a beautiful thought.
Mr Wimbush in Aldous Huxley’s
Crome Yellow
, 1921
Children are forgetting how to play. Or they are never learning in the first place. This is the great concern of those of us who worry about our screen-dominated age. Over-stimulated almost from birth via the telly and the computer, children become accustomed to an intense blast of colour, sound, music and words – and to living life at one remove. Frightened by neurotic parents who believe what they read in
the papers and consider the real world to be fraught with danger, kids retreat into ‘safe’ virtual worlds where there is no knee-grazing, no frozen water, no trees, no wood, no nails. Just a screen and a mouse and splendid isolation. Is this our vision of the future?
Well, I hate computers. I would rather use a quill, a pot of ink and the Royal Mail. The first draft of this book, for example, was written by hand with an inkpen. But I’m not fanatical about my neo-Luddism. I use a computer for emails and sometimes for buying books. I admit I check train times on it and watch YouTube clips occasionally. However, everything that a computer can do can be done with more pleasure by the old ways. It is simply more enjoyable and more satisfying to write and receive letters than emails, or to speak on the phone than to communicate via email. It is more fun and more pleasurable to browse a second-hand bookshop than to buy books on Abe. That way you may chance upon hidden gems or chat to the owner of the bookshop, who may be full of sage advice and suggestions. It is a convivial experience and full of adventure. Buying online is lonely, predictable and frequently frustrating. It is more satisfying and much faster to plan your train journeys with the help of a real timetable, and easier still if you go into the station and consult with the clerk. My small selection of reference books is far superior in terms of quality of information, and often speed of access, than Google searches or unreliable Wikipedia entries. Books give a physical pleasure too, and you may stumble across other fascinating entries as you look up your particular reference. Books don’t need batteries and they don’t crash or lose their broadband connection when there’s a gust of wind.
It seems that the geeks have taken over the world: the anti-social loner used to be a type to be avoided but now he is a
type we are all encouraged to be. The medium is the message: blogs tend to bring out pomposity. Email is rude. Computers are intrinsically geeky – afraid of nature, awkward in company, anti-sensual, ill, pale and lacking in style – and therefore tend to bring out similar traits in their users.
My other objection to screen worlds is that they are almost all funded by corporate advertising. This helps the world’s biggest companies to grow yet bigger, as they are the ones who have the funds to plaster their brand all over MySpace or YouTube or Facebook (notice the Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ quality of these names). The potential for small businesses is further reduced, and instead of risking starting our own small enterprises we are driven to settle for jobs with the big corporations. Tesco in the UK, for example, employs over 250,000 workers – and they are all people who 200 years ago would have been employed in small shops or indeed would have been running their own.
Screen-based lives tend to hasten the growth of the mega-machine rather than increasing individual freedoms – which was always the great claim of the Internet. From an everyday point of view, screens are bad because they create an infinite variety of wants in the child: ‘Can I have, can I have?’ The stream of adverts also encourages in the child, from very early on, a vague belief that it is best to be rich in order to acquire all this stuff and be happy. We should all work to recreate an age when children could play, when they were pushed out of the house at 9 am with a hunk of bread and were not seen again till teatime. Even in my urban 1970s childhood we would go out on our bikes all day, with no adult supervision at all. This kind of childhood creates resourceful characters. TV programmes can be good, but are they as much fun as a picnic lunch in the treehouse? No. Are they as good as sitting
around the fire in the evening, telling stories? No! There are finer pleasures, deeper pleasures, and cost-free pleasures, out there beyond the screen.
In her unsentimental and drily comic
Lark Rise to Candleford
Flora Thompson paints a vivid portrait of life for the rural poor in Victorian England. Living on just ten shillings a week, they managed to enjoy themselves, and certainly their childhoods were more free than today’s. It was a world of outdoor loos, no running water and a pig in the garden, and although they suffered from a lack of festivals and dances, the people were strong and happy. They had not been softened and weakened by civilization and an excess of comfort. The same applied to their children:
Around the hamlet cottages played many little children, too young to go to school. Every morning they were bundled into a piece of old shawl crossed on the chest and tied in a hard knot at the back, a slice of food was thrust into their hands and they were told to ‘go play’ whilst their mothers got on with the housework. In winter, their little limbs mottled with cold, they would stamp around playing horses or engines. In summer, they would make mud pies in the dust, moistening them from their own most intimate water supply. If they fell down or hurt themselves in any way, they did not run indoors for comfort, for they knew all they would get would be ‘sarves ye right. You should’ve looked where you wer’ a-goin’!’
We may also take inspiration from the Yequana: ‘They do not make pitying sounds when a child hurts himself,’ writes Liedloff. ‘They wait for him to pick himself up and catch up…’
This attitude makes children strong, as was the case in Lark Rise:
They were like little foals turned out to grass and received about as much attention. They might, and often did, have running noses and chilblains on hands, feet and ear-tips; but they hardly ever were ill enough to have to stay indoors, and grew sturdy and strong, so the system must have suited them. ‘Makes ’em hardy,’ their mothers said, and hardy indeed they became, just as the men and women and older boys and girls of the hamlet were hardy, in body and spirit.
