The Story of Childhood (14 page)

Attachment theory has since been much qualified, particularly by those who believe it blamed mothers for
everything that became of a child. But Bowlby himself was attuned to the effects of the wider environment on babies. He believed that, even if the primary care-giving connection was imperfect, resilience could be fostered through subsequent relationships.

Conversely, a strong primary relationship is necessary but not always sufficient for successful development. And so it is with Allana that, beyond the intimate influence of her mother, powerful forces are acting to disrupt her progress. The question here is not whether biology is destiny, but how much race and class are. A genuinely interactionist understanding of human development must also take in social inequality.

It is estimated that nearly three million children in this country are living in poverty. Children from lower-income families tend to have worse health, lower educational attainment and earlier contact with the police, while lone-parenthood and ethnicity compound underlying disadvantages. Before the age of two, the attainment gap in all areas of cognitive and emotional development is already evident in deprived communities.

The government's commitment to ending child poverty has benefited many, but its focus on paid employment as the route out of poverty has its limits. Concern remains that families in low-paid, part-time, insecure or transitional employment remain at significant risk – over half of deprived children have a working parent. And, despite the commitment to provide ‘security for those who can't work', families for whom employment is not, and may never be, an option are entrenched in poverty.

Levels of income support remain inadequate: ‘safety net' benefits for a lone parent with children aged between five and eleven in 2005/6 were only £160 a week – £29 less than the government's poverty line of £189.

Can Gloria challenge all of this with loving kindness and determination alone?

On the following Saturday afternoon, Allana is anxious in a pink gauzy dress with fairy wings. She wears the same alarmed expression that appears whenever she is unsure what the world wants from her. Allana has been at a friend's fancy-dress party across the road. When Gloria went to collect her, the other mums said she hadn't spoken a word, just sat on the swing, not being pushed. Gloria tells Allana to lift up her two arms, and the dress comes off like a stain.

She begins a sedulous examination of her party bag of sweeties and cheap treats. She opens a mini-egg, but the chocolate has softened. It's another hot day, hotter indoors, despite the fan in the living-room. She sucks the chocolatey goo out of the silver foil, unimpressed. Gloria empties the bag on to the floor for her and collects the rest of the chocolates to put in the fridge before they melt too.

There is a small orange plastic bomb, filled with sherbet. Allana empties some on to the table. Sienna arrives at her side, vibrating with curiosity. ‘You have to eat it all up,' advises Allana, as though it were an unappealing vegetable, while managing to scoop most of the delicious dust into her own mouth. A little more and a little more is poured until the container is empty and Allana, with the elegant self-deception of an alcoholic, expresses surprise. ‘There no more in there Sienna,' she tells her sister sternly. ‘You e't it all up.'

It is so hot indoors, and Allana wants to play outside. So Gloria opens up the pram shed for her, and she fetches her bike – pink to match her scooter and with stabilisers – then rides up and down the thin concrete yard. It is bright and breezeless outside. Gloria has taken a chair out on to the landing and watches her from there.

Allana has a green notepad which she leaves by the staircase, and sometimes she stops off to make jaggy scribbles in it. She doesn't try to make letters. Three early-teenage boys wander in from the street. They huddle by the stairs and bang open beer bottles on the metal railings. Allana cycles over to watch them through the bars. They ignore her, and after some minutes slouch off down the alleyway, beyond the sun's glare.

Gloria and some of the other parents had a meeting with the council about building a play area. There are twenty-five kids on the top floor of these maisonettes, and the overgrown concrete square at the back of flats that is designated theirs just isn't big enough, certainly not for a slide or swings.

Malcolm, the new councillor, is helping their campaign. He's a good man. Gloria has always had terrible trouble with damp and silverfish. The council told her that she'd have to pay to get them removed, but Malcolm got on the phone and now the men are coming on Monday to do it free of charge. It's a relief, she says, because she couldn't afford to pay for it herself. Allana doesn't mind them, but Sienna gets really freaked out. When the council refused to remove the abandoned fridge outside the gate, Malcolm came with a friend and took it away himself.

Back upstairs, the party bag is the magic porridge pot, never emptying. Now there's a bottle of bubbles. Allana tries to blow some herself but she can't direct her breath gently or evenly enough and keeps breaking the meniscus across the wand. Gloria takes over and makes an expert string. ‘I pop them!' shrieks Allana, jumping up on the spot and clapping her hands together to catch the falling globes.

Gloria holds the wand against the fan, and a bubble stretches and strains huge in the air-flow. ‘Do that again!' commands Allana. ‘Here it comes …' Sienna gets a turn,
and proves almost as expert as her mother. It becomes a competition: ‘I can do it! I can do it, Mama!'

Back to the sweeties. Two lollypops down, Allana opens a small packet of Gummi Bears. Gloria tells her to eat them slowly, so she repairs to the balcony, where she crams as many as she can into her mouth at once. Earlier in the week, they all went on a Family Centre trip to Bournemouth. It only cost £8.50. Tomorrow they're going to Weston-super-Mare. Gloria isn't even sure where that is, but it's worth it for the outing. The coach leaves at 7.30 a.m., and she's not sure how she'll get these two ready in time.

Allana is becoming increasingly frantic, as she devours a pastel-coloured sweetie necklace out of view on the balcony. Sienna's dad is coming to pick her up. Allana wants to go with him too, but she's staying at her nanna's instead. Gloria is sitting in tonight, getting ready for the early start. As the hour approaches, Allana whispers something horrible to Sienna about the evening's arrangements. Sienna's face crumples and she runs to Gloria for comfort.

Sienna is getting her clothes changed before her father arrives. ‘You're a poo-y,' announces her sister. Gloria starts to brush Sienna's hair, and opens a box of hairbands, asking them to name the colours and choose their favourite. But Allana won't be distracted. There is more pushing, then kicking, and Gloria takes Allana to sit on the naughty step until she's calmed down. She always has her naughty five minutes. Last week, she was down the club with Sienna's dad and tipped a full ashtray into his pint. It was hard not to laugh.

Gloria got the naughty-step idea from a
Supernanny
episode. The hairbands game is the sort of thing that PEEP taught her – how they can learn from something that's just happening along the way. Like every parent, she's discovered a lot since her first-born arrived. The most important thing
she's realised is that you should give everything a try, even if it doesn't work the first time.

It is all too easy to interpret theories about the importance of early-years care oppressively. Just as genetics-based concepts can be seen as letting bad parenting off the hook, so parent-oriented developmentalism may exonerate society.

It cannot be incumbent on Gloria alone to parent her children out of poverty. Without structural equality, no amount of parenting skills – whether instinctive or taught – can break the cycle of deprivation. To suggest that when poorer parents fail it is purely a question of individual responsibility is to ignore how social disadvantage works.

But it remains the case that genetic theory is more open to manipulation in pursuit of ugly agendas. Take that New Zealand study, which uncovered the interaction between a particular gene and maltreatment in childhood. On one level this is heartening: neither a rotten genotype nor a rotten upbringing need ruin a life. But what about the child who has both? If science can identify individuals as irrevocably lost causes, then is the socially responsible option to lock them up and throw away the key? Society has never been much inclined to help children like this, and if genetics offers an empirical basis for writing them off completely, then the community needn't exercise its collective conscience at all.

The nature/nurture debate may be gaining welcome nuance, with a degree of consensus now that genes do not act independently of environments but respond flexibly to them. But the potential for studies like the one in New Zealand to be employed in the pursuit of regressive and authoritarian policies remains troubling.

Of course, any study can be manipulated in pursuit of a political goal. Moral conclusions do not follow directly from
scientific evidence. But traditionally genetics have been used to bolster more conservative agendas, perhaps because nature has been seen as more restraining than nurture. As genetic engineering advances, however, there is always the possibility that biology will end up being more flexible than culture.

Similar vigilance must be exercised when considering the flipside of the law of lost causes: the excuse of exceptionalism. This is the idea that through talent and determination children can transcend their circumstances, trouncing inequality by sheer dint of will, and so obviating the need to tackle social exclusion. Here Stephen Pinker may have a foothold, when he contends that blank-slate theory is just as likely as a theory of evolution based on Darwinism to entrench inequality and determinism.

Exceptionalism is a fantasy that is only ever applied – again – to the children that society is least willing to take responsibility for. There are one in a million Billy Elliots or Samantha Mortons or Tracey Emins. On very few occasions do ability and application alone provide a route out of poverty, and on fewer occasions do children possess such copious gifts in the first place. Inequality is inherent in the capitalist system, and meritocracy is its partner in crime.

The children that this country has most difficulty accepting are those that the sociologist Charles Jenks called the ‘unexceptional disadvantaged' – the ones who can't dance or act or paint their way out of the cycle of deprivation. But they are no less deserving of care because they will never go on to thrill the audience at Covent Garden.

A few weeks later, Allana is climbing up on to the bench in a bus shelter in the city centre, kicking against the reinforced glass: ‘I break it!' Again and again, she likes to test the boundaries of the physical world – and adult tolerance. Gloria
ignores her and goes to check the timetable, leaving Allana in charge of Sienna, who is asleep and gaping in her pushchair. Tenderly, she arranges her sister's blanket and strokes her hair. She does not stir. Allana was in trouble again last night: ‘Fuck's sake, I can't do it!' she said as she was struggling to put some clothes on a Sindy.

The journey to the Snakes and Ladders play warehouse is an adventure in itself. The interior of the bus offers a new domain of physical challenge and entertainment. There are also strict rules that must be adhered to.

Gloria finds a nook for the pushchair behind the driver's cabin, while Allana heads up to the back of the vehicle. She's looking for a front-facing seat next to a hanging strap. (The back-facing seats next to straps are positioned too low for her to reach up.) Both seats are taken. She regards the occupants jealously, and makes a few pointed remarks about not being able to reach from her height-retarded, back-facing perch. But the two men are talking into their mobile phones and don't seem to realise that they're sitting where she should be.

She moves off into one of the two-seater rows and buries her face in the seat. Sometimes she looks out of the window. Sometimes she sings: ‘Wah, wah, wah.' One of the men alights and Allana dives to claim her position. ‘I reach up.' She grasps the strap with firm satisfaction. ‘I gon' go on the one next to it.' She tells herself to hold on when the bus starts moving again. ‘Bus goin' now.' She refuses to move when the bus is in motion, and won't even slide along from one seat to the next on her bottom.

On the walk from the bus-stop to the Snakes and Ladders building, Gloria keeps calling to her to keep up, but Allana hangs behind the pushchair, grabbing ever more preposterous handfuls of flowers and leaves, only to throw them up into the wind. The boundaries set by walls and other people's
gardens don't matter. Anything that can be reached can be ripped at.

It's not Allana's first time here, so she propels herself through the entrance gate while Gloria is still paying. The Snakes and Ladders warehouse comprises a vast, primary-coloured and multi-storied play area, with a scaled-back version for threes and under, and a café space where adults can sit and chat, or even read a book, and wave occasionally to a child up on high. The air is prickly with body heat and plastic. Everything inside is soft and wipe-clean.

Shoes come off. Gloria goes in with Sienna and Allana climbs by herself. She's curious, but cautious. There are bigger, quicker kids, who push past. The top floor is not explored immediately – she climbs one level, returns to the ground floor, then up to the second floor and down again. Even with this studied gradualism, the top level when first reached feels overwhelming, and she starts crying for her mummy. Gloria lifts her up tenderly, and carries her across the intimidating wobbly floor.

Eventually, both girls settle on a route: up the spongy ramp; across the net; along the rope bridge; through the hanging mats with cartoon faces; and down the wide, blue, wavy slide which takes four children at a time. Sometimes they race on the way down: ‘Ready, steady, go!' Allana always says it, and she always pushes herself off slightly ahead of ‘go'. When the sisters get to the bottom of the slide they're not dizzied for a second; they spring upright and run for the ramp again.