Sue also commented:
'I thought that when you grew up, there was automatically a World War, because My grandparents had one when they grew up, and so did my parents. Jolly, eh!'
Jolly indeed, and it reminded me of two more childly perceptions I hadn't mentioned:
The ineluctable kidnapping
When I was a child, I was convinced all children got kidnapped at some point in their lives. It was the 1990s, in France and Belgium a time marked by the terrifying, and enormously mediatised, abductions and subsequent deaths of a number of young girls by Belgian kidnapper Marc Dutroux. I was hardly ever allowed outside, we had endless stranger-danger type talks, short TV programmes, classroom discussions, etc. Clearly, I heard so much about the whole thing that I ended up thinking at the same time that it was an inevitable fact of life, yet that it was my duty to somehow avoid it when - rather than if - it happened.
The terror lasted well into my teens, and I wasn't the only one. In fact my closest friend was so scared of being kidnapped, too, that at the age of 14 or so, she confided in her psychologist about it (she was seeing a child psychologist for other, though not entirely disconnected, reasons). The dialogue, as she recounted it to me, went something like this:
Friend: When I walk down the pavement, I'm scared of walking on the curb side, because a car might pull in, open a door and take me. But I'm scared of walking too close to the buildings, because then a door might open there and take me.
Psychologist: I think you should walk bang in the middle.
We do find it funny today, but I remember that at the time we took that advice extremely seriously.
The Eternal German War
A friend of mine, as progressive and liberal left as anyone, was walking down the street with his then-5-year-old daughter, and suddenly the child said, pointing at a homeless lady: 'She should just go back to her country!' My friend, horrified to hear that, proceeded to tell his daughter that it was an extremely cruel and unfair thing to say; I don't know who's put that idea in your head, he said, but [cue long clumsy impromptu political lesson about economic inequalities more or less tailored for 5-year-olds].
'Plus', he added, 'not everyone's got a country to go back to even if they wanted to, you know! Maybe this lady comes from a country that is at war.'
Upon which, the five-year-old gravely nodded. 'Ah!...' she said, struck with sudden, empathetic understanding. 'Germany...'
I actually love those two childly perceptions because they interpelate us as children's authors too - where could they possibly have got the idea that Germany is permanently at war and that being kidnapped as a child is something like a fact of life?
Sue's comment also shows how much childly perceptions are generationally variable, and I wonder what childly perceptions are developing as we speak. What are today's tiny kids believing about the world, about themselves?
About door closers?
-------------------------------
4 comments:
I love these posts!
Your terror of kidnapping reminds me that, when I was a child, there also seemed to be an awful lot in stories, programmes and films about kidnapping. I didn't particularly fear it myself (despite my mother's best efforts while the Moors murderers were at large.) However, in all on-screen representations, the kidnapper always seemed to grab the kidnappee from behind and put a hand over their mouths and this always seemed to enable them to easily overpower their victim, even when the victim was quite a strapper.
I was convinced for a long time that 'to kidnap' meant 'to come from behind someone and put a hand over their mouths.' I always found this quite odd, thinking: But, but, but.. You could bite, kick, stamp on their feet...
My mother did better than this, though. Her childhood was during the '30s and she shared a bed with her widowed mother and two sisters (they slept head to toe.) The door of the bedroom was at one side of the bed, the window at the other. My mother always wangled the spot in the middle of the bed. Her reasoning, as she told me, was that if 'murderers' came in through the door, they'd murder whoever was on that side (murderers always murder the person they come across first.) If they came in through the window, whoever was on that side would be the unlucky one. They wouldn't, she felt, notice the small girl tucked away in the middle.
She seemed to feel that 'murdering' was a profession whose practioners roamed about the country, seeking opportunities to practice their craft... which in the age of psychological profiling, turns out to be not so far from the truth. But I always admired my mother's ruthless attitude towards surviving and relatives.
I love these posts! I shared the one about every generation having a World War.
I remember thinking, when in car, that the slight 'whooshing' sound made by the compression of air whenever we passed a car coming in the opposite direction was made solely by the other car, and proved it was going much faster than ours.
Also, with meditative piety, on hearing of a mid-air collision: "Isn't it strange? When you die in the air you come down, but when you die on the ground you (i.e. your soul) goes up. Fair, I suppose."
(My father helpfully recorded many such observations in a little notebook.)
I love that, Catherine! In the event of an air-crash, souls must be falling and rising and passing each other in mid-air.
I do like hearing how these odd cultural echoes get translated through young minds.
I can recall nights of practising how to lie curled up in the right kind of secretly open shape in bed so that the Nightly-imminent Murderer's Long Dagger Blade would stab through the gap and into the mattress and not into me.
I also practiced "not moving a muscle" and light breathing so he would not know he had missed.
So I admire your mother's forward planning, Sue Price.
Also, re planes. I find it hard to escape the illogical thought that is only the concious and waking will of those on board that actually keeps the plane in the sky.
Post a Comment