The sunshine today, well when I say sunshine I mean lack of rain, well when I say lack of rain I mean I was able to sit outside in the garden wearing only a light kagoul rather than the kind of waterproofs worn by North Atlantic fishermen, you get the point. Anyway, for the first time we have been aware the kids are off school.
We know this because small groups of pasty faced children are hanging around aimlessly. They have probably been sent out to “get some fresh air” while Mum gets on with the housework. And they have no idea what to do.
Only a few years ago there would have been the constant hiss of skateboard wheels outside as the close has a nice slope. Not far away there is a grassed area, not a park, just a piece of spare land the council keep tidy by running a mower over it once a month. There will be no games of football or cricket going on. Girls seem to fare better than boys, they can still be seen organising games, playing with pieces of folded paper to find out who they will marry, texting each other, doing child things. The boys just hand around like addicts doing cold turkey because they have been separated from their playstations or X boxes.
On TV earlier this week I heard someone talking about how much education children used to get just from being out and about in the holidays. How right that person was, we learned by osmosis and so what we learn, as it was experienced rather than just memorised, provided a foundation on which to build. Those “what I did in the hols” essays were not quite the cop out they seemed.
In the Shropshire village where I lived as a child the children, boys and girls would go along at the start of the holidays and help the farmworkers. Usually this involved stacking bales that the combined harvester had belched out. The bales were too heavy for one of us so we worked in twos and threes, probably for two hours in the afternoon. At teatime Cyril Griffiths, the original Jolly Farmer or Tom Nicklin, not so jolly but a world away from Farmer Palmer, would give us a shilling each.
Exploitation, the political correctness police would scream today, but it wasn’t. We did not work hard, we were supervised by the fathers of our friends and we learned about the workplace, about not taking liberties with machinery and about having respect for people who know the job.
Sometimes I would go out with my Dad, taking a friend along for company as there would be a wait in the car while Dad saw whoever he needed to see on behalf of the newspaper. There would be lunch in a cafe on these jaunts, and visits to interesting places, Ludlow Castle one day, with a guided tour by the curator in exchange for the promise of a small feature in The News Chronicle. That was the day I learned what an oubliet was ( from French “oublier”: to forget, a kind of dungeon where people are imprisoned when they are to be forgotten) Another day I got to have a ride in a coracle. Chris Jarman whose Dad was head lad at a horseracing stables would take us there to help. This usually involved shifting horse manure and there was no pay but a drink of home made lemonade and an enormous slice of cake.
Graham, who became my friend when the family moved back to Manchester used to help his uncle in a Greengrocers shop. For someone who would become an engineer that might not seem relevant but he learned people skills. And he can still spot a dodgy King Edward at fifty paces. Later we earned pocket money by caddying at the local golf club and learned a lot about relationships in the world of business.
Everything is a learning experience.
Everybody over, I guess thirty, will have similar memories. After that the world started to change. For some reason people became more selfish and fearful. And we abandoned our children. Not intentionally, the nanny state came poking her nose in. Where we had all learned from our parents how to bring up children, now we were lectured by experts who used words like “parenting” and learned the theory of good parenting at Portakabin University which specialises in offering degrees in such things. Parents had no business getting involved in the rearing of children, such things should be left to nanny, nanny always knows best. Tick the boxes, follow the rules and do as you are told. Forget the past, everything in the past is bad. Nanny promised she would take us forward to a Brave New World.
And why were people so ready to abandon their social history and give nanny power over their lives?
Because, maybe, they were all obsessed with climbing the property ladder.
When people speculate on why society seems to have so many problems, pulling those problems apart to examine them in forensic detail is the wrong approach. You just have to join up the dots if you want to see the big picture.