The Story of Childhood (8 page)

When Lois shows me this photograph she examines it
carefully. ‘It should be cropped a little bit higher, above the tummy button.' Lois was six when it was taken, four years ago. ‘We just decided to take our clothes off because we wanted to play around on the beach. It didn't feel funny stripping – it felt normal.'

Would it feel different now to be photographed like that? ‘Yeah. But I don't know the difference between then and now.' Is it because the way that she feels about her body has changed? She thinks carefully. ‘It's like the story of Adam and Eve, when they eat from the tree of knowledge. They already knew they were naked, but then they got embarrassed.'

A week later, Lois is sitting outside at the round patio table, alert for pollen falling in her tea. She wears a purple sweatshirt and jeans. This is how she has changed over the past year. When she was nearly nine, her hair was shorter, and she was probably drinking orange juice instead of cranberry and raspberry. Next Sunday, Lois will turn ten. Sometimes it feels different. She's looking forward to it, because she's going to be a two-digit number.

Her sixteen-year-old cousin has been visiting. She's very, very grown up. She wears miniskirts, and likes pink. She has this boyfriend called Charles. He collected her and went on the train with her. But in some ways she was quite childish, like she enjoyed burping.

It's hard to tell whether sixteen is old or young to have a boyfriend. ‘I saw these people on TV and they looked about my age but they had boyfriends and that was really weird. No one in my class has one. This girl in my old school said, “I just divorced my husband”, and he was fourteen and she was eight. It was quite funny but of course I didn't believe her.'

Her cousin is different to the girly girls in Lois's class at
school. ‘They're really extreme. They're trying to be like teenagers and they're really mature.' She treats the word suspiciously. ‘They wear things off the shoulder, and have handbags as schoolbags. My friend Amy asked one of them, “Why are you so mature? You should enjoy being a kid.” And she goes, “It's not my fault you're stupid.” And Amy goes, “All we're trying to do is be a kid. I don't want to be older than I really am.” But that's what girls in my class do.'

Lois can't imagine being twenty or an adult. ‘Adults have to look after younger people. I just like being a child because you can do whatever you like really. Not
whatever
you like. You can't drive a car, you can't smoke, but you can't do much funner things when you're an adult. You can get a job but that isn't really fun, apart from if you like it. I wouldn't like to be at an age when I could smoke because I don't think people should smoke. And you can go to jail. You can't as a child before you're ten. And then you go to children's jail.'

Lois used to like dressing up, but now she's a tomboy. ‘Personally I think I'm ugly, but I don't care how I look at all,' she declares. ‘I get these shadows under my eyes I really don't like. On other people I can't see them but on me they stand out.' Curiously, Lois doesn't think she looks ugly in her mother's photographs: ‘It's just different.' She does look different on a gallery wall. In life, Lois is busy trying out who to be. On film, that stare cuts cleanly through all the awkward guises and poses and they fall away.

‘If I look really bad in photographs I do mind. But I don't normally.' Really bad is hard to define. It's not the same as how she looked in the camera fight she had with her cousin, where they snapped each other wearing silly faces. ‘That was funny. But if I look really tired that will remind me of being
really tired, and that just makes me feel weird. Like on
Holby City
when someone's having a heart attack, if their chest hurts then your chest starts to hurt.'

Lois doesn't think it's important to be pretty, and being pretty is associated with the girly girls, of whom she is not one. ‘I don't really care. I just think, “Have a fun time.” Normally if I look in the mirror and I don't look right I don't care because I can't be
bothered
to make myself look right.' It's not about the way that people look in magazines, she says. It's more about brushing your hair.

Lois says that she always looks really serious in her mother's photographs. It's true that she's seldom smiling, more often shown drifting off into contemplation. And when she does confront the camera it is with that serrated stare. In another image, one of the few to include her brother Kester, they stand side by side in football kit at the edge of a pitch. Lois has her arms by her side, fists stretching her cuffs; Kester is touching his tummy, the place where his hands often rest in life. They look wary. ‘The one of me and my brother, I heard someone say it reminded them of Holly and Jessica because they were wearing their football shirts, but Kester was wearing an Arsenal shirt. Also it's two girls about the same height and they weren't sisters. I'd seen it on the news and I was very interested, because it said on the news once: “Why those two people? They were once innocent little babies.” I always think of that when I think of someone evil, they used to be babies. Maybe they've had a really sad life.'

The photograph of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, posing in their Manchester United shirts hours before their disappearance, has become instantly recognisable across the world. It was one of many released during that torpid
summer fortnight before their bodies were found: holiday snaps of Jessica, posing with feigned languor, cropped top riding up over slim tummy; bright, blonde Holly, grinning wide and toothy, a little Marilyn. There was an appetite for the onslaught of imagery that followed their disappearance and it went beyond any altruistic desire to assist the police investigation. The public feasted on the family albums of the nearly dead girls. They confirmed what tragedy, and what childhood, ought to look like.

Western culture has been looking at children for centuries, in particular since the Enlightenment heralded a rejection of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin and infant depravity. Phillipe Ariès based much of his thesis that childhood existed as a distinct stage only from the seventeenth century on contemporary images of children. He argued that prior to this time the young were solely depicted as miniature adults, or in biblical or mythic contexts, as the Child of the Madonna or as cherubim.

Critics of Ariès have noted that only aristocratic children were thus portrayed, and that often their depiction in mature finery was related to future marriage arrangements. Portrait painters were commissioned to indicate a child's potential power and wealth in order to achieve a good match. It has also been suggested that the change in the way that children were painted was due to a new emphasis on physical realism in art. But what is clear is that, as the idea of childhood transformed, images of children made that manifest.

By the eighteenth century, portrait artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir John Everett Millais were bringing their craft to bear on the visual representation of childhood innocence. Even then, the images were equivocal, drawing out the desirability of those who were thought to be unconscious of desire. Millais's
Cherry Ripe
, for example, portrayed young Edie Ramage in an ill-fitting, adult-styled dress, her gloved hands neatly pressed between her legs and towards her vulva, eyes at once appearing hazy with adult satisfaction and widened in childish ignorance.

While many of those artists dismissed their efforts as genre painting, the market for child portraiture was expanding, as the middle classes took to the form. By the end of the nineteenth century, their paintings had entered the mass-media market, with portraits like
Cherry Ripe
being reproduced in popular magazines. Another Millais painting,
Bubbles
, which captured a dreamy boy dressed in a velvet jacket and knickerbockers, appeared on Pears Soap advertisements.

The appetite for commercial publication of images of children was growing, and illustrations of innocence began to be mass-produced. The artist Kate Greenaway became renowned for her watercolour depictions of children, which first appeared on greeting cards. Mabel Lucie Atwell designed a whole host of child-related products, from posters to handkerchiefs. Cicely Mary Barker, creator of the Flower Fairies, became a sensation with her first set of postcards, drawn when she was only fifteen. The advent of photography further democratised the genre, eventually allowing adults to make images of their own children.

The Romantic poets, particularly Blake and Wordsworth, are believed to have greatly influenced Charles Dodgson, the celebrated photographer of children who, under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, wrote the Alice books.

Dodgson was fascinated to the point of obsession with what he termed ‘child nature'. From 1856, when he purchased his first camera, he embraced the developing art-form as a means not only to achieve proximity to children, but to capture their essence. Over the next two decades he took
hundreds of photographs of children, some classic portraits, some featuring props and costumes, and others naked.

This devoted amateur became one of the finest photographers of children of his age. ‘Child photographic portraiture was still in its infancy,' notes Dodgson's biographer Morton N. Cohen, ‘and he showed the way to capture innocence and youthful bloom. Not even [Julia Margaret] Cameron's photographs of children challenged Charles's superior art. His studies of children reached the apex of the genre in the earliest days of photography and retain their authority today.'

Dodgson's pursuit of intimate friendships with children, in particular with beautiful young girls, has latterly been the subject of unfavourable speculation. Perhaps it was the case, as Virginia Woolf wrote of him, that at the core of his being was ‘a hard block of pure childhood [that] starved the mature man of nourishment'.

In
Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture
, James R. Kincaid revisits Victorian images of children, including those taken by Charles Dodgson. He suggests that their latent sexuality was a function of the way that innocence itself had become desirable, at a time when adults and children were thought to be separated by one's corruption and the other's purity. By continuing vociferously to deny children any sexual feelings, he argues, contemporary society similarly eroticises them.

Kincaid believes that, because we won't acknowledge any collective involvement in sexualising children, ‘a form of allowable cultural pornography' has developed – the best-selling memoirs of abusive upbringings, the fictional renderings, the titillating media coverage of paedophiles. ‘Such frenzied denunciations of the villains, such easy expressions of outrage, such simple-minded analyses of the problem of
child-molesting as we love to repeat serve not simply to flatter us but to bring us once again the same story of desire that is itself desirable, allowing us to construct, watch, enjoy the erotic child without taking any responsibility for our actions.'

Childhood, André Breton once observed, is the only reality. And it was photography's claim to realism to which Charles Dodgson deferred when he insisted that his pictures of ‘child friends' – including those
sans habillement
, as he put it – were in essence innocent. As he wrote in a letter to the mother of two sisters he photographed naked, posing as castaways: ‘Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred.' And so it is that images of children often manufacture a reality of childhood that only exists in adult fantasy.

Sometimes Lois remembers images instead of realities. When her grandmother died, at first she found it easier to remember the photographs that Sue had taken of her mother when she was dying, rather than the living woman. ‘Now I can kind of remember what she looked like, but I remember the photographs too. She had white hair. She was really tall for me and most of the time I saw her knees because I was a baby.'

Lois's room has an elevated bed, with a desk space underneath it. It's cosy like a cave, and thronged with stickers and drawings. There are cat ornaments everywhere. They all belonged to Lois's Granny Cats, her mother's mother. ‘We called her Granny Cats because she loved cats. She had about nine.' Lois quite likes cats but she doesn't have a favourite animal. Granny Cats died when Lois was four. ‘It probably takes a year to get used to it. I still think about her a lot, and I still cry about her. When she died, I felt like it was everyone else's fault.'

The night before her grandmother's funeral, Lois was bouncing on her mother's bed. She fell and cracked her eye socket on the bedpost. The swelling grew large and livid. At one point her eye went red. The injury has left a tiny dent below her right eye that you only notice if you know to look for it. The death and the mourning, the fall and the healing, are documented in a series of photographs. In Lois's mind's eye they are the same.

She keeps the cats because her granny gave them to her. She will never throw away anything that her granny gave her, even if she's grown out of it. She spreads open the
Animal Did-You-Know
? book she made on the floor of her room. They're not her best drawings, though. She just did them really roughly. There's a penguin, koala, grizzly bear, giant panda, lion – which she did really, really roughly – and a fox. Lois designed one for the mosaic in the community garden at the end of her road. Kester designed a rabbit, which sits calmly beneath Lois's leaping effort. They once had a real rabbit as a pet, but it died of scaredness when a real fox got into the garden one morning.

Lois likes to keep diaries, but her new one has practically nothing in it. This entry is from her first diary: ‘It was my mum's birthday. I went to the hairdresser, then we went to Jane's house on the train. Here is my ticket.' She reads out an experiment she tried: ‘Babies find it hard to write so I tried writing with my foot. Do you think it feels the same for babies if they write by hand and we write by foot?' She translates the scrawls below: ‘My name is Lois. I am nine years old. Hello. This is me writing with my right foot. This is me writing with my left foot.' The transition from babyhood – which, for Lois, ends at four when her grandmother died – into childhood is a recurring subject of speculation. Innocent babies are spoken of indulgently, even the
baby who becomes a murderer. And emergence from babyhood feels like a challenge well met, in contrast to the snare-strewn path through adolescence.