And then there was Bowlby. It is perhaps significant that my copy of the Spock handbook has long since disappeared, ripped up maybe by a creatively playing child, but John Bowlby's Pelican (3s. 6d., first published 1953) is still with me. Child Care and the Growth of Love was not a manual but a sombre discussion of the effects on children of maternal deprivation, aimed mainly at social workers and those professionally concerned, but also widely read by mothers in search of up-to-date enlightenment, and it struck fear into the heart. A warm, continuous relationship with the mother throughout its early years was essential to a child's mental health, one was told. A ‘mother-substitute’ was grudgingly allowed, but she too must be permanent and reliable – no transient carers or fly-by-night au pair girls, by implication. Leaving any child under three, even for a short period, was a major operation only to be undertaken for good and sufficient reason. The mother who had been thinking of slipping off into a job thought again, more responsibly. And those of us already committed to 24-hour, 365-day childcare suffered appalling guilt if we sloped off for a unencumbered shopping expedition or a blissful hour in the library. Fathers were shunted to one side, though granted a certain use in infancy – ‘as the illegitimate child knows’. Their prime role was ‘to provide for their wives to enable them to devote themselves unrestrictedly to the care of the infant and toddler’. He was there as an economic and emotional support.
Bowlby's dire histories of children traumatized by maternal deprivation were, of course, all drawn from institutionalized cases. But his warnings of the social effects of child neglect – the ‘social succession’, whereby the neglected child grows up to become the neglectful parent – certainly ring true fifty years later. One valuable result of his influence was a revolution in attitudes towards hospitalized children – the realization by the medical world that children get better sooner if their parents are with them as much as possible rather than if visiting hours are rigidly restricted, as had been the practice. But the average mother of the well-tended child took his admonitions personally and was accordingly caught in a double bind. If you succumbed to the temptations of employment you risked damaging your child's psyche and creating a social psychopath; if you festered at home in the face of your inclinations and abilities you compromised your own future.
The perception of childhood has undergone a metamorphosis. When I look at photographs of my own parents as children, I see them as a different kind of being from my own young, or the children of today. They are subsumed into the culture of another world – differently treated, differently understood. One day in 1911, my grandmother summoned a studio photographer to take a series of family portraits at her home. The family is posed in various different combinations on a wide chintz-covered window seat: my grandparents, my mother, aged nine, her brother Basil, a few years younger, and Rachel, the baby, about two. My grandfather wears a formal suit, my grandmother is tight-waisted and high-necked, the children are sashed and pin-tucked and knickerbockered. They are beautiful photographs – technically impressive products of the wide-angled lens of the time, dreamily elegant in the arrangement of adults with children, children on their own. All the children have bare feet. Not, I think, to save the chintz covers of the window seat, but in line with a curious fetish of the day.
Another set of photos comes from the other side of my family. My paternal grandmother was a keen amateur photographer, and a very good one too. Her six offspring were her favourite subjects. There they are, in rich sepia, on a Cornish beach, at the same period. The children, ranging from three to about twelve, are stark naked. They have been carefully posed against effective backgrounds, the goose pimples almost palpable, an occasional edge of white protruding beneath them indicating the concession of a towel as padding against the rocks. Photographs such as these would today have high-street photo-developers reaching for the police, in line with one of the twentieth century's most curious inversions, whereby sexual inhibitions are largely non-existent, but the nudity of children can arouse consternation in some quarters. A hundred years ago, a naked child was considered charming. Obviously, there must have been a perverse sexual fascination for a perennial minority, but these implications would not have occurred to the vast majority of people, certainly not to that enthusiastic amateur photographer in 1910 or thereabouts, displaying her brood to best advantage in a Cornish cove. I have always suspected that the insinuations about Lewis Carroll's interest in photographing semi-nude children are entirely misplaced.
Lewis Carroll's insight into the nature of childhood and a child's perception remains unique. Alice in Wonderland has been variously interpreted down the years – as a philosophical game, as linguistic play and challenge, as a gloss on Victorian beliefs, as a coded skit on the figures and fashions of the day. Its fantasies have been sternly and soberly re-assessed in the light of other times and allocated appropriate sexual symbolisms: that rabbit hole with its lubricating pots of marmalade, all that growing and shrinking, the phallicism of Alice's elongated neck. Some of the wilder shores of Alice criticism make for entertaining reading, and the scholarly decoding of the nonsense verse and of many teasing textual references is endlessly absorbing, but for me the great revelation of this extraordinary work is its skewed world in which the beady eye cast upon anarchy is that of a child, as is the sceptical questioning of apparent irrationality. The blizzard of baffling and confusing instructions and information that falls upon every child everywhere assumes a Carrollian texture.
A fine instance of a book illuminating real life. Read Alice in this way and children take on a new significance. But Alice has not always been understood thus. In the early part of the century Carroll was stock reading – most middle-class homes would have had his work on the bookshelf – but appreciation focused on the humour, the fantasy world, the Tenniel illustrations. The time was not ripe for a radical view of childhood. In the literature of the day – both for and about children – childhood is a golden age, a happy dreaming time set apart from the rest of life, essentially different because children are indeed different from our adult selves. They are a privileged sect, temporarily occupying this cherished nirvana of childhood, through which we all pass, but which we must, regretfully, leave behind. It is childhood itself that seems sacrosanct and unreachable, rather than the status of being a child.
This may seem a fine distinction, but it is a crucial one. When childhood is given this aura and turned into a transient Elysium, then children are infected by the mystique. The child of the 1920s and '30s, the Edwardian child and the late Victorian child, were all inhabitants of this never-never land, rather than being the potent figures of our own times. Bare feet, romantic clothes, dreamy expressions. Indeed Carroll himself saw them thus, when he lapsed into the standard perception. The last paragraph of Alice in Wonderland slides into another language: ‘the simple and loving heart of her childhood… the dream of Wonderland long ago… her own child-life, and the happy summer days’.
Famously, the conception of Wonderland took place on a ‘golden afternoon’ on the Thames near Oxford in 1862: ‘the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars…’ The inspiration seems to elide with that mystical concept of childhood as the lost paradise, but somewhere along the way Carroll's own idiosyncratic imaginative vision took over, vastly to our benefit, thus contributing an entire imagery and phraseology to the national culture. And a fictional child who can be interpreted to the satisfaction of generation after generation of subsequent readers.
Perhaps our radically revised view of children owes more to the demise of the designated nursery than to anything else – Freud or Spock or Bowlby or theories of Alice. It is one thing to see your child for an hour or so after tea (as my mother did), quite another to have them at your side twenty-four hours a day. Childhood may well be a condition apart, but unremitting contact with its peculiarities somewhat tarnishes its dreamy golden image. Most significantly, the whole relations
hip between adults and children has changed, reflecting the century's political inclinations. It is now much more egalitarian. Indeed, there are plenty of homes in which children would appear to have the upper hand; we jump to their tune, rather than the other way around. Their needs and requirements dictate the pattern of family life; many households, for fifteen years and more, are run to suit the children's diaries. Children are weighty consumers, the target of advertising and retailing, and are a huge financial investment: it costs around £100,000 to feed, clothe and house a child, we are told – much more if private education is involved. And the investment in terms of aspirations and expectations can never have been higher; today's children must be bright and achieving – out with docility and conformity.
A revolution in perceptions, it seems to me – the perception of children by parents, the relation of children to parents. And indeed to other adults. When we are under the same roof, my granddaughters join me in bed for a ritual early morning cup of tea and chat. For me, the notion of getting into bed with my grandmother would have been astonishing. Adults have lost their mystique, it would appear, their apartness, their unapproachability. And as for children, they are what they have ever been – a source of anxiety, pleasure, expense, and that genetic investment made without thought or consideration. But today's child is also viewed nervously, seen as a potential time-bomb, an unstable substance requiring the most informed and delicate handling. And thus they have acquired a power of which they must be unconsciously aware. They sense that we grown-ups walk a tightrope every day in our efforts to get things right.
So what has happened? Well, Freud happened most of all, I suppose. Certainly, Freudian theory drove childcare pundits of the Bowlby school, but the notion that childhood experience directs subsequent behaviour has reached a far wider range of parents than only those who read childcare books or know about Freud. It has somehow come to seem obvious, from the mid twentieth century onwards. Obvious, powerful and disturbing in its implications. Children are no longer seen as creatures of a different order, miniature or potential adults, but as ourselves as we once were, the alter ego that we have forgotten and cannot recover, but watch with interest.
Children are the aliens who live amongst us, deciphering our mysterious codes, learning to conform to the bizarre requirements of our society. They are Alice, the voice of reason and rationality; we adults are the cast of perverse and unpredictable characters with which she is surrounded – the White Rabbit, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter and the rest of us. We have to view children with awe, it seems to me, as the valiant navigators who learn the language and acquire the maps, while contending with everything that is thrown at them. I'm not sure that I thought of my own children like this – too busy at the time on the rockface of child management – but it is the vision of childhood I have since acquired, from observing and thinking. And writing for them. Writing for children seems an act of extraordinary temerity. You are offering to those without any literary tradition a product that stems from adult experience and a complex web of cultural influences. You are inviting them to share some of your concerns and interests – or at least you are if you write without patronage and from the assumption that children are not second-class citizens, but simply ourselves in this opaque and provocative other incarnation. And you have got to find a voice and a language with which to make your concerns both approachable and compelling. You can reach them through narrative; everything else that you are trying to do must be subsumed within the story, the seven-eighths of the iceberg which, you hope, will leave the child feeling that it has heard a good story but one with tantalizing and rewarding whiffs of something else, a rich and indefinable flavour.
In one corner of the big nursery at Golsoncott stood the grand piano – a huge sombre presence with a cavernous space beneath, where I once hid, when I was six, scared witless by George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. When I look at that Victorian classic today, I can pick up an echo trace of its sinister power – not anything to be identified in the text, which now seems entirely anodyne, but some reverberation of one's own ancestral self, the child who inhabited another world, and who saw and heard things in a way that is no longer possible. Just occasionally there is a jolt of startled recognition, prompted by objects that are eerily charged with meaning. The Blüthner grand is still with the family, housed now in a light and cheerful room in north London. Watching my granddaughters play it, I feel that there should have been some counter-beam of awareness so that, crouching beneath it back then, I might have caught a rippled message from a time, place and people yet to come.
Marriage, children: the central intimacies. Matters which are entirely personal but coloured always by the customs of the day. The houses that shelter these shifting manners, all this engagement, stay the same, but not quite the same. They, too, accommodate, acknowledging the times. At Golsoncott, the dressing-room and the nursery became a spare bedroom and an artist's studio. There were no more formal wedding line-ups in the photograph albums. My grandmother's wedding dress survives, a rather tattered confection with a twenty-inch waist: her great-great-granddaughters have been allowed to try it on and very fetching they appear, if oddly out of step, their own look so much that of another time. Their childhoods are lived in a vastly different family climate. That crumpled yardage of satin and lace is an eloquent and exotic link across a hundred years. It has resonance – about how they lived then, about how we live now. Just as a house bears witness to private lives, to public events – Golsoncott, and a million other houses.
The Knife Rests, the Grape Scissors and the Bon-Bon Dish
On each recovery of Golsoncott, each return to the place now safely stashed away in the mind, intact and inviolate, I review the familiar landscape of the house. A left turn out of the vestibule, past the gong stand – the cloakroom door now facing me and, behind that, the red-tiled floor, the wall of pegs slung with old raincoats, riding macs, gardening aprons, sou'westers, my aunt's hunting bowlers, the rack of walking sticks, the dog leads, everything tinged pink with Somerset earth. A right turn and into the dining-room, whose windows peer through a shroud of wisteria out across Roadwater valley towards the rolling skyline of Treborough Common and Kingsdown Clump. Here we ate and lived, during my adolescence, the arctic space of the drawing-room abandoned at the outbreak of war and reoccupied only for ceremonial occasions – Christmas Day, family christening parties, formal teas. Here in the dining-room my grandmother played Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky 78s that clicked and clumped from within her adventurous purchase of a radiogram. Here Rachel worked at wood engravings at the fireside. Here, each evening, I laid the table for dinner, abiding by an inexorable formula – the correct selection of implements and impedimenta from the sideboard and the silver cupboard.
For forty-five years, the sideboard was simply that, to me – an infinitely familiar object, its glass top cracked right across in one place, the right-hand cupboard devoid of its key. Sherry decanter and silver biscuit box in the left-hand cupboard, napkins and napkin rings in the top centre drawer. Now, it has acquired a further identity, alien and impersonal: the probate inventory required me to see it also as a nineteenth-century mahogany serpentine-front sideboard, with raised pierced gallery back, cross-banded border decoration, fitted central and cutlery drawers, side cupboards with ivory escutcheons, on tapering square legs and spade feet, seventy-two inches wide. Possibly. But for me it remains just the sideboard, and I know exactly where everything should be, within.
The silver cupboard was set into the wall of the pantry, a small walk-in cupboard with deep shelves and a steel door with double locks. Never locked, in my time. It had a cold metallic smell – sometimes I get a whiff of it from silverware emporia in Islington, but subtly different, because the cosseted goods on display there are far removed from the tarnished contents of the Golsoncott shelves, mostly unused and unpolished, blackened, dusty and eventually inscrutable, as we discovered when at last the place had to be dismantled.
W
e emptied the silver cupboard and the sideboard and spread their contents out on the dining-room table. Candlesticks, serving dishes, sugar bowls, milk jugs. Sauce boats, sugar tongs, ashtrays, salvers. Fish slices, a tea caddy, an ivory-handled crumb scoop. And other items, entirely mysterious, unseen for decades. Subliminal recognition came surging forth. Those were knife rests, that was a pair of grape scissors. And this was a bon-bon dish. ‘A what?’ said my daughter. There were the napkin rings: my grandmother's with her initials in baroque entwinement, my aunt's with her name in neat italics – Rachel. Her great-great-niece, aged six at the time, was helping with the glum dispersal process. You can have this, we said, because you are Rachel too. Delighted, she squirrelled the napkin ring away with her possessions. But a few minutes later she was back: ‘What's it for?’
It had come to this. Time was, life could not proceed appropriately for a family such as my grandmother's without ownership of sauce ladles, knife rests and ivory-handled crumb scoops. Now her descendant did not know what a napkin ring was for. The battered and baffling array of metal in front of us seemed suddenly to be a potent symbol for eighty years of social change. It was no longer a set of once essential objects but provided the fringe furnishing of a significant narrative.
The trauma of the middle class occasioned by the death of domestic service took place during my adolescence, in the late 1940s. The wholesale departure of household servants had of course been an early effect of the outbreak of war, but the absence of staff during the war years seems to have been subsumed into the general climate of deprivation and perceived as simply one of its grimmer manifestations; in that halcyon future ‘when the war is over’ things would surely go back to normal. In fact, the writing had been on the wall since 1918, for anyone who cared to read it. At the turn of the century the Edwardian female domestic service workforce had numbered 2,127,000. By 1931 the census showed 1,332,000. Wages for women in domestic service and in retailing were among the lowest in all categories of employment. The 1914-18 war offered women the opportunity of work in industry – better paid and without the irritant of subservience to the gentry. The inter-war years had already seen a flight from the nation's drawing-rooms and sculleries. That said, in the early 1930s nearly one in five households still had one full-time servant living in. Most middle-class homes took it for granted that there would be someone to mind the children, do the washing-up, see to the garden.