The Story of Childhood (4 page)

Mrs Round announces that the morning's task is to Colour the Square. The children scatter round the tables, but it's not easy deciding where to sit and Rosie tries three different places before finally settling. Each table collects worksheets and tins of lead and coloured pencils. Mrs Round explains that you have to colour one section of the square at a time to make it balance. Nobody can understand what she means, and there is mass confusion.

The discussion at Rosie's table turns to relationships. ‘Everyone calls us boyfriend and girlfriend. You're just a girl and you're my friend,' says Malcolm, the noisiest boy in the class. He plays his words staccato, and is almost double Rosie's size. She is half-listening, but the red lead in her pencil keeps slipping down. ‘You two LOVE each other,' teases one of the class princesses, because she can. ‘Stupid girls,' blares Malcolm, ‘you should never trust them.'

‘You have to make the patterns balance within each square,' insists Mrs Round, meaninglessly as far as the class is concerned. A long line of the befuddled snakes towards her chair. In a final attempt to achieve conformity of purpose, she strides between the desks, peering over hunched shoulders. Rosie turns to look into the teacher's face: ‘I made a little mistake.' She has a disconcerting ability to appear both abject and impenitent at once. ‘I think we're going to leave this activity,' Mrs Round concedes huffily. ‘You don't understand what you're doing.' Malcolm collects in the worksheets.

At the end of the morning, Rosie's group returns to its own classroom second, because they weren't sitting best. Away from the numeracy imperative, back in their own space with their own teacher Mrs Ashley, it is much easier to keep
quiet and sit still. They hug the familiar like a blanket. Everybody in the room is white-skinned. Each table takes turns to collect packed lunch-boxes and walk to the canteen. Hardly anyone here takes free school meals.

The canteen is chattery but a prayer is said before eating together. It's for God, to say thank you for all the food and drink we have and we're very lucky to have it. Rosie believes in God. Some people believe in God and some people don't. Rosie is taught about the gospels at school. Mummy and Daddy tell her that it's a story, and only what some people think, which upsets her. Rosie likes these stories, and she likes certainties. She tells Livvy that you have to believe in Jesus to go to school.

Rosie arranges herself next to Emily and Chloe. She has a pink rucksack with a lunch-box compartment in the base. She sticks the straw into her orange-juice carton and eats the yoghurt first, carefully adding Smarties to the pot. The coloured dyes bleed into the creamy dairy. Today she has salami sandwiches, which she examines too carefully, alerting one of the dinner supervisors. This lady removes the salami and gives Rosie back the plain bread. Lunch is a swift affair, the supervisors implacable, then it's coats on and outside.

The playground is a tarmacked L-shape. Perhaps on account of health and safety requirements, it is also barren, with no area hidden from adult view. The noise is shrill and deafening, like an alarm. An enormous knowledge hangs in the air: that anything can happen now; that rules will be made and broken, reputations won and lost, friendships begun and ended and begun again across the long, long minutes of the lunch hour.

The sky is wetly metallic, and the air is cold, but these children are feverish. Beginning in 1970, the British folklorist Iona Opie spent over a decade observing children at
play in a state primary school near her home in Hampshire. In the resulting book,
The People in the Playground
, she describes the ‘continuous Saturnalia' of break-time. ‘Children already seem to know that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”,' she writes. ‘[In the playground] a kind of defiant light-heartedness envelops you. The children are clowning. They are making fun of life.'

Rosie locks raised hands with Chloe, and they push each other back and forth, fierce and snarling, then slow, balletic. Some other girls cluster round to cheer on their favourite, and begin to tangle too. Suddenly the combat becomes a multiple hand-clapping, rhyme-chanting game. A boy runs by and Rosie and Chloe give chase, are chased, half-hoping to be caught. Chloe is one of the princess girls, and the boy wants to catch only her. Suddenly she turns on him and gives him a violent hug, then stalks off, flicking her glossy wedge of chestnut hair, bottom out. Rosie returns meekly to the rhyme with another partner.

Play, of course, is not only about playing. It is identity-settling, hierarchy-refining, gender-constructing work. Although Rosie and her schoolmates organise naturally into single-sex huddles, the most exciting moments come when a boy or a girl breaks across the divide. Another observer of play, the American academic Barrie Thorne, chronicled these contacts, describing such cross-boundary penetrations as ‘borderwork'. In her book
Gender Play
, she describes how children would deliberately provoke these clashes, sometimes within an organised game of capture and rescue, but often in the more casual episodes of chasing that punctuate playground life.

In some cases, she noted, catching would result in the aggressive affection that Chloe showed her pursuer, but other times it would involve contamination. ‘Pollution rituals', by
which certain individuals, often of lowly social rank, are deemed to have ‘cooties' or ‘germs', were strictly organised according to gender. Both boys and girls could give cooties to one another, but boys did not give cooties to other boys. All girls, no matter what their status, could contaminate boys. In one elementary school, Thorne learned that cooties were known as ‘girl stain'.

Rosie swings her arms wide, clapping in the air, slipping away from the group and into her own world. Then someone decides she's under arrest. They're a smelly animal. One boy faces into a corner of the school building. ‘I've just got nobody to play with,' he sobs. As time gets short, activity gets wilder. Boys are piling on top of each other. Too soon for Rosie, and not nearly soon enough for others, comes the whistle. They line up by class and file back indoors.

For the first part of the afternoon Mrs Ashley does writing with the Orange Group. The other tables read and draw. Rosie announces that she's going to make a kissing book. ‘Who's in it?' asks Jamie, blundering into her mantrap. ‘Is Jamie too long?' she ponders aloud, measuring out the letters on the page. ‘Oh no!' he groans, hand across eyes. Now she draws an elaborate front cover for another story book. It's to be called ‘My Tropical Island'.

Mrs Ashley counts one, two, three and stop talking. Rosie's table misses out on a sticker for being quietest first because she's still chattering about palm trees. ‘Rosalind!' curses one boy, but soon they're laughing together again. She's good at bringing people round. She is confident without needing to be noisy. Everyone listens when Rosie talks, in a voice that is soft but prevailing.

It's time to move up to the base, a raised section of the classroom with benches around three sides and a chair for the teacher. There is only room for a limited number of bottoms
on the premium space around the edges, so there is pushing. Chloe is sitting with her arms tight around Rosie. ‘Chloe, can you leave Rosie alone please?' Rosie isn't Pears-Soap-perfect like the other class princesses, but they enjoy having her close.

This is the very end of the school day and it's sharing time. Announcements are made. One person is adopting a penguin. Another has a new baby cousin. Someone's next-door neighbours are having a barbeque. When Jamie stands up, he explains that his gran has asked him to stay the night with her after her birthday party. He uses wide arm gesticulations, and sometimes strokes his face. It's easy to see why Rosie loves him. ‘So it's the Dog and Duck, then back to hers and who knows what we'll get up to,' he concludes. Rosie and Chloe don't have any special news, so they perform their four-and-twenty-blackbirds handclap instead. ‘We've been practising it for a long time,' they tell the class. Everyone goes home with forms for the end-of-term trip.

A few weeks later, the summer holidays have set in, and Rosie is adjusting to the wobbly rhythm of play plans that can last all week. Her father is downstairs. She's made a washing line out of a skipping rope tied between the top of her bunk and the knob of the tall bureau in the corner.

Every year at the end of school there are reports. Both years Rosie has been a very good girl, and had excellent art. ‘That makes me very proud. It's very hard work.' Rosie has a way of nodding when she speaks to add emphasis. It feels funny not being at school. ‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think I need to go to school and then Mummy and Daddy tell me I don't have to because it's the holidays.'

When Rosie plays in her room she makes full use of the space, both horizontally and vertically. She scales the bookcase
like a climbing wall, to the top shelf where her secret diary is kept. She bounces on the ladder up to her bunk-bed, and reaches across from the end of it to the bureau where some other toys are kept.

She is fiddling with the end of the skipping rope that is attached to the bureau knob. In the new house her parents are going to have a study, so they'll put all these things in there. The most exciting thing about moving house is that they'll be sleeping on the floor. ‘I'm going to be the moving photographist,' says Rosie, clambering along to the other end of her bunk, ‘and I can stick them in a special book of my first moving and that's going to be one of my favourite books when I'm really, really old.'

Livvy is idling in the doorway of Rosie's room, frowning beneath her dark fringe. It's one of those days when she wants to be everywhere her sister is and have everything she has. They bounce balls together. Rosie can spin hers between two fingers but Livvy can't.

Livvy laments a disparity. Rosie's diary is hidden in some secret place, but everyone in the family has seen Livvy's so it's not a secret any more. She wants to get another one but Mummy and Daddy won't let her out on her own until she's ten and that's a long way away.

In an attempt at mollification, Rosie counts the money in her Sindy tin. She has 23p. ‘And you know what?' she announces cheerfully. ‘That's enough to buy two things, one for Livvy and one for me. Maybe some toys or jigsaws or magazines.' Unassuaged, Livvy continues to make sad eyes at no one in particular.

Both girls know that ten is the age when they can walk to the shops unaccompanied. Ten is also when Mummy says they can wear nail polish on special occasions, but just for fun she thinks they should wait until thirteen. Ten was also
the age of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman when they walked to their deaths in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham. Adults understand intellectually that it is impossible to monitor every moment of a young life. But the fierce love of parenthood ushers in fear over risks real and imagined. Childhood is becoming a place of confinement.

In his classic comparative study,
One False Move
, published in 1990, the transport and environment researcher Mayer Hillman found that, in a single generation, the ‘home habitat' of a typical eight-year-old – the area in which the child was able to travel without direct adult supervision – had shrunk to one ninth of its former size. Tim Gill, a writer on childhood and former director of the Children's Play Council, has likened this to a generation bred in captivity. Under threat, he concluded, is what naturalists would term survival mechanisms and psychologists would call resilience.

Hillman, who compared children's independence and mobility between 1970 and 1990, found that traffic levels had doubled in that twenty-year period, with cars capable of being driven faster and accelerating more quickly. He contrasted this with what he believed was an over-reporting of incidences of child assault and abduction by strangers, in order to understand why parents had become so much more anxious.

He also discovered that, because of the huge extension in restrictions on their behaviour since the 1970s, fewer children were being killed on the roads. But this had serious consequences for their social and physical development. Lack of exercise was one. But Hillman was also concerned that young people were no longer able to engage in an important aspect of childhood: getting into mischief, making mistakes, and learning from their own experiences. Indeed, as adults
come to pathologise the presence of young people on the streets, branding them ‘hoodies' and ‘yobs', the definition of childhood mischief is itself changing.

It can be argued that, since the seventeenth century, the trend amongst the middle classes has been to subject children to increasing control and surveillance. As children were excluded from the workplace and corralled into schoolrooms, their essential vulnerability came to be emphasised, along with the need to isolate them from the temptations of the adult world. But it would now seem that children have internalised this view to such an extent that they are afraid to venture beyond the front door.

A study undertaken by the Green Alliance and Demos in 2004 found that children's interaction with their local environment is in sharp decline. Interviewing more than one thousand children aged ten and eleven across the country, it found that the majority no longer considered the street a suitable place to play, while beliefs about the inherent hostility of public spaces were commonplace. Danger was often the first thing the children mentioned when talking about being outside the home.

Direct personal experience informed children's fear of traffic, with many being able to give examples of accidents or near accidents they had been involved in. But although fear of strangers was just as keenly felt, they were unable to articulate how that threat might operate in practice. Some children mentioned the risk of being kidnapped or killed, and others implied a sexual dimension to the danger. Many also talked about their fear of becoming lost and therefore more vulnerable to strangers and criminals. For a large number of children, the only outdoor space they were sure was safe from strangers was their own garden.