The Story of Childhood (7 page)

If everyone starts off as children, and those children are increasingly confined to school and home, what sort of adults will they grow up to be? The psychiatrist John Bowlby, who studied the mental health of child evacuees after the Second World War, famously described an infant's ‘failure of attachment' to a primary care-giver, and the impact that has on the quality of its future relationships. I wonder if annexing children's territory and fencing its borders with fear will result in an extended failure to attach: to other adults, to the environment, to the capacity to be alone.

In examining how children balance risk-taking with self-preservation, psychologists have found that the capacity to take care of oneself is closely associated with self-esteem. The developing child must internalise the conviction that she is a being of value, and that she is worth protecting. But when that development also takes place in an atmosphere of anxiety, containment and surveillance, what else do children internalise?

If a consequence of child-panic is confinement, then a consequence of confinement would seem to be anxious children who are making unrealistic assessments about the dangers posed to them by the outside world. Most to be feared are the constrained and cautious adults that this generation could become.

One thing is certain: watching a wedding without children is not much fun. ‘Let's go and have an adventure in my secret tunnel!' Rosie springs from the arms of her tree and scythes through the undergrowth beyond the maintained parkland. A stream runs behind, and the trees along the broken pathway bend to touch fingertips. It smells of growing and decay. She is hidden, while the world is visible. ‘I can hear cars and I can see more wedding people. There are lots of ladies in red dresses. There's a dog in that bush.'

After a time, Rosie returns to her arboreal vantage point. ‘Livvy thinks you get married when you kiss so she thinks Mummy and Daddy are married again and again every time they kiss. Mummy and Daddy love each other.' She beads the thoughts together relentlessly: ‘And I love my ex-boyfriend, James. But he dumped me. So I found a new boyfriend. Sam – he's ten years old. He's at the school Daddy's going to teach at, and his parents are friends with my parents.' Rosie was dumped because she was nagging
James about going on a date and he didn't want to. ‘But we're still friends. So that doesn't matter. I'm just planning who I'm going to marry.'

She kicks against the trunk. ‘Look no hands! I'm going to get married in fifteen years. It's in April, because one of my best friends is called April, and I was going to have it in January because that's my birthday but then I thought it's going to be very cold.'

There are other places to visit in the park. Rosie wants to sit in the cage – a bench in a brick shelter with high iron bars around it – but it is padlocked. Instead, she poses still like a statue on an empty pedestal by the Hall. There are gaggles of teenagers arranged across the park, and Rosie observes them surreptitiously. Sometimes they call from one group to another on their mobile phones, and sometimes they shout.

Now she has a stitch. It might be telling her to sit down. It has been a golden afternoon, with late light, She chooses to rest on the bench that can be reached by walking round one flowerbed in a particular way. Perhaps the stitch is telling her it's time to go home. Rosie prefers the long way home.

But on the short way she discovers a huge tree branch, as long as two of her, which she drags along with all her strength until she's exhausted. In the midst of this effort she backs into some nettles and stings her calves. She can't find any dock leaves. Rubbing her ankle, she picks off a smaller twig from the branch. She will take that home instead and label it to remember this day for ever.

‘A snap is what families take, when things are just happening. A photograph makes people think.'

It's Saturday lunch-time, after swimming, at the kitchen table. ‘By the way,' says Lois, working her jaw, ‘if you want to know why I'm eating strangely, I'm pretending to be a giraffe.' Lois is having pasta. Pasta makes you faster. Her brother Kester is banging round his mother's legs as she stands by the stove. Today is one of those days when it's hard to make a decision. Does he want cheese? ‘Uh, 50-50, I want to phone a friend, I don't really know!' Lois and Kester used to fight a lot more than they do now, though they still support different football teams.

Lois is almost into double figures. She lives in a long, slim house in London, with Kester, her father Damian, and her mother Sue. She loves Manchester United, and still misses her grandmother, who died a long time ago. Lois doesn't approve of skirts. She likes to wear T-shirts and jeans and she ties her long hair back at the nape of her neck.

She is medium height in her class and lean, her body braced for the stretch into adolescence, with nothing to spare. Her voice is lower than you expect it to be. When Lois grows up she might be an artist, or a runner, or a footballer, or a detective. Or a photographer, because both her parents are photographers and, basically, so are all their friends.

She is looking through a selection of her mother's prints, and comes across a photograph of a child's face in close-up. Lois's own face, at the age of two and a half. This, says her mother, is the record of when Lois first said, ‘Take a picture of me now.'

Her features must have still been setting in the clay softness of her toddler skin. But in the shutter instant they have been fired firm. As she comes towards the lens her gaze is steadfast and searching, thrown out beyond the frame and into the world. She seems to be moving most sure-footedly towards life.

‘I was two and a half!' Lois shrieks. ‘I look about a million! Some of these pictures I think, “That was me?” It's really weird. It feels like another person.' Her mum has been doing proper photos since she was two or three. She can remember what was happening when she took them, but can't always remember what age she was. ‘Sometimes I'll say to her, “this is quite interesting,” or, “this is interesting light, take a photo,” like there's one of me feeding my leg, and stuff like that. But she decides how, because she is a photographer so she does know best.'

Most of the pictures Lois likes are half in darkness, half in light. ‘Like the picture of me hugging my dad. It's like heaven and hell.' She likes the ones that remind her of some happy time. ‘I don't know if they remind older people of being little. Say there was a picture of Tintin it might remind them of watching Tintin and that might make them think.' And when she has grown up? ‘I think they'll remind me of all the things I liked and all the things I didn't like, and what happened. It's probably hard to remember as you get older.'

Lois knows that strangers see her photographs in exhibitions, and she doesn't mind it. There's a difference between a photograph and a snap and, it would seem, the
potential for exposure in each. ‘A snap is what families take, when things are just happening. A photograph makes people think. Like there was this one with a clock and a face, and the message was “Don't waste your life”.'

Sue uses other models too. But much of her work concerns her daughter. She says she wants her art to ask questions about childhood. As a mother she asks questions of herself. Theirs is a working relationship that is continually evolving, she adds. She is Lois's mother first, her chronicler second. The photographs happen in the gaps between the scheduled significances and unexpected dramas of growing up, between the birthday party and the bloody nose. They show still moments – once tears are dried, comfort administered, explanation offered. So in pictures, Lois clutches a cup of tea, a bruise blooming under one eye, having caught her face on the side of a table. Lois folds her arms fiercely in a blue bikini, after an annoying swimming lesson. Lois stares past the crusts she hasn't eaten (nobody wants curly hair). She is also a girl with a mighty ability for pitching herself into her own thoughts. A number of the images have been taken while she is elsewhere, looking out of the window, or into water, her back curved in concentration.

In fashioning this portfolio of progress, Sue insists that the act of photographing does not intrude on their relationship: ‘I started taking the pictures when she was little because I thought she was wonderful and I really enjoyed her and the way she was with herself. But it is a very small part of what goes on between us. We spend most of our time doing other things.'

‘The question of privacy doesn't come at the time I take them,' she explains. ‘It comes when I start to select them. She reached a certain age where she would say, “I don't want that to be shown.” But it's fine between us [that I've witnessed
and documented the moment]. It's not a question of whether the photograph should have been taken, it's a question of whether it should be made public.'

At the very base of fears for and of our children is the ideal of childhood innocence, and the terror of what might stem from its corruption. It is images of children that have always made this ideal flesh.

From the inception of the Romantic ideal of childhood, mainstream media has craved, promoted and fetished images of innocence. The form has developed – from eighteenth-century portraiture by Reynolds, Mills and Gainsborough; through the mass-marketed illustrations of Kate Greenaway and Cicely Mary Barker; to cutesy Athena baby posters and toddler advertising. But the substance has sustained. These bodies are physically attractive, but not to be sexually desired. And these creatures inhabit a space that is not only the necessary past of every adult, but a collective past to be viewed with nostalgia and a sense of loss for what may never be returned to.

Images of children rarely reveal the reality of childhood. Although the most popular commercial images of childhood today are photographs, they do not portray real children. Instead, these images exist to sell, to entertain, and to reinforce fantasies. Adults crave the spectacle of innocence precisely because of what it does not show: the rawness of sexuality, the inexorability of change, the certainty of death.

Consequently, there is nothing so resonant and nowadays, in the case of images of naked children, so dangerous. The recent proliferation of accessible child pornography subverts in the most obscene fashion the pleasure that adults derive from looking at children. It need not be a guilty pleasure to enjoy an image of a child. But we are all culpable if, in
censoring this one gratification, we conveniently ignore the locus of adult pleasures that genuinely damage children.

Because here we can see quite clearly how our fears about childhood can divert attention away from genuine threats to children. We have reached a point in public life where the paedophile sets the standard for all of us. And yet, in terms of social policy, we have barely begun to negotiate their existence. For too many, sexual abuse is a reality of childhood. For all our adult looking, we do not see how this might be made otherwise.

In the spring of 2004, Sue Andrews exhibited a series of photographs of Lois alongside the work of an American photographer called Betsy Schneider at the Spitz Gallery in London. Schneider displayed a series of shots of her five-year-old daughter Madeleine which formed part of a project that she has been working on since the child's birth. The photographs, taken daily and then arranged into nine-week blocks, show the child full-length and facing the camera, in whatever corner of the family home she's been caught that week. In almost every frame, Madeleine is completely naked. ‘I wanted to show how the body changes over time,' Schneider explained later in an interview. ‘I also wanted to record the incidental changes which happen day to day: their cuts and bruises, dirt, drawings on themselves, temporary tattoos and sunburn. With clothes on, the work would have been more about what they wore each day.'

But we all know about the kind of people who are interested in children's naked bodies. A minor scandal ensued. On the day of opening, gallery staff expressed concern about the pornographic potential of Schneider's work. A rumour circulated that a seedy-looking man had been spotted photographing the nude images. The exhibition was immediately closed and
advice sought from the police. It later reopened, but with the offending display removed.

Schneider, a former assistant to Sally Mann, whose own photographs of her children have in their time prompted controversy, became the subject of an unpleasant tabloid campaign. Back in Arizona, her family were doorstepped. The
Sun
newspaper printed a shot of Madeleine next to an image taken from a child-porn website under the headline: ‘Can you tell the difference?' A few days later, the same paper claimed that paedophiles had ‘used mobile camera phones to snap full-frontal images of tot Madeleine Schneider' and uploaded the photographs on to the Internet.

Elsewhere, reactions were less sledgehammer but no less critical. Schneider was mocked for her naivety. Given the global climate of hyper-concern about child pornography, had she not considered for a moment that some people might find her photographs offensive? What about her child's privacy? Her defence that she always discussed her work with her – five-year-old – daughter was sneered at.

Given the furore, it's fortunate that Sue Andrews doesn't always take Lois's advice. She had wanted her mother to include in her contribution to the exhibition a photograph of her standing naked on a beach. In the image that Sue left out, Lois stands nude in the foreground, shading her eyes from the sun, pulling her lips into a grimace the better to show the recent loss of a front tooth. The shot halts just below her belly button. In the middle ground, a number of other figures paddle on the shoreline. They are blurred but clearly naked too. It was taken in Devon, on the day after Lois's family met to scatter her grandmother's ashes at St Ives. It was a hot day and, not having thought to bring costumes, the group decided to strip and swim.