DIARY
IAN JACK How innocent was your childhood? Answer with tick: (a) more innocent than that of today's children; (b) less innocent; (c) more or less the same. I have been reading pieces and watching television pro- grammes that pretend to answer this ques- tion ever since the murders last month of the little girl in North Wales and the two boys who had gone fishing in the Wirral. This is known in the trade as 'talking-point' Journalism, as in: 'Everybody's talking about these murders — the wife couldn't stop last night — so we'll have to find some way of echoing what they're talking about.' In television, this usually means that the cry goes out: clear the studio and bring in the women! Any kind of women will do magazine editors, chartered accountants so long as they can be described as 'moth- ers' and therefore more learned about chil- dren than men, and (with luck) more open- ly fearful. In statistical fact, the number of children murdered by strangers seems not to have grown over the past 20 years about half a dozen cases annually in Eng- land and Wales — and, if innocence isn't what it was, we need to find other explana- tions.
Itend to think of my own childhood in the 1950s as Eden before the Fall: a life wrapped in the insulating tape of the Eagle comic, Children's Hour and Hornby trains. But the Wirral murders reminded me that the shadows and nightmares of the adult world did intrude. There were some fields on the edge of our town in Lancashire where we would go for Sunday walks. My Parents always looked solemn when we Passed a particular spot. There was adult talk of poor wee souls and wicked men. Two children had been murdered there a few years before, perhaps during the war; or perhaps it was only one, or perhaps the children or child had been (as my parents would mystifyingly put it) merely 'inter- fered with'. The fields became ominous in my mind. I can never think of them now without getting them confused with the black, raging night at the beginning of David Lean's Oliver 7Wist, which must have frightened me around the same time. Chil- dren today will be left with more explicit memories: mothers crying on television at police press conferences, colour pictures of the dead, distress and lively horror brought to their own living-room. In that sense, they may be less innocent, but I wonder if they are more troubled and frightened than chil- dren have always been.
More horror. Last week, my partner (probably the best reason for getting mar- ried is the avoidance of this word) bought some cuddly toys for a friend's child. They were rabbits, or objects that could pass for rabbits, and I noticed that like a lot of our own children's toys they had only a couple of stitches where their plastic eyes should have been. 'It's so kids won't tear them off and swallow them,' my partner said, and couldn't understand my revulsion at their eyelessness. Memory, once again, is to blame. Forty years ago, at the height of the myxomatosis plague, the postman's son and I found a rabbit shivering in an old quarry. Its eyes were shut tight. The postman's son said we should be merciful and handed me a stick to kill it. I couldn't, so the postman's son did. Thwack, thwack, a spasm of death, a sudden opening of the eyes. I didn't tell my partner any of this. In fact, doctor, you are the first person I have ever told.
Aleast childhood memories will not be a puzzle for Will Carling and the Princess of Wales. Evidence tendered by the News of the World suggests their child- hoods are a continuing part of their excit- ing present. Whatever we choose to believe about their 'secret trysts', the allegation about their exchange of gifts carries the depressing ring of truth. Allegedly, the cap- tain of the English rugby team gives the princess a two-inch china pig painted with a pink sweatshirt. Allegedly, the princess in return gives Mr Carling a troll doll wearing an English rugby shirt. As I write, Mr Car- ling is talking to lawyers about these and other allegations, though I can't see how an exchange of miniature pigs and trolls could possibly be construed as libellous in an English court before an English jury. I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen and Mrs Tiggywinkle, that this is normal adult English behaviour. Indeed, the heir to the throne himself sleeps with his teddy bear. The only question is why such a mutual love of cuddly toys did not sustain the Prince and Princess of Wales in their mar- riage.
In this matter of persistent childhoods, of the fear of growing up, the Scots aren't exempt from blame. Last weekend we took the children for a walk in Kensington Gar- dens and past the statue of Peter Pan which children now clamber over rather than stare at reverently — and I thought of J.M. Barrie and his entrapment in longing for children and childhood. In Victorian and Edwardian times this was a Scottish lit- erary speciality. Stevenson, Buchan, Ken- neth Grahame (and others such as R.M. Ballantine and S.R. Crockett, now forgot- ten) may have had more sophisticated ambitions, and sometimes they fulfilled them, but they are at their best as writers for children, and particularly for boys. There is a good PhD thesis here, maybe even a book — focusing, this time, on their Scottishness — though I suspect my heart will sink at post-Freudian interpretations of Calvinism, father figures, split person- alities, and all that repression that went on.
cottish writing today isn't like that. It's entangled with the gruesome, adult present — yo-ho-ho and a line of coke — and there is now so much of it that Giles Gordon, the literary agent, is quitting London to open an office in Edinburgh. There are, as Mr Gordon said in the Guardian this week, many fine young Scottish writers. It may even be, as he also said, that publishing in Scotland is 'more fundamental and serious' than in London. But I wonder if he was quite wise to add: 'For instance, a man phoned me this morning to tell me he had written a book on the Scottish blacksmith from 1647 to 1732, and would I be interest- ed in it? I told him . . . I'd take a look at it . . . to me, it will be more interesting than Jeffrey Archer.' My elder brother is, as it happens, an Edinburgh man and still engaged on his life's work, the history of a certain section of the London and North- Western Railway between the years, oh, 1847 to 1871. Certainly more interesting, to me and perhaps also to you, Giles, than Jef- frey Archer. I shall tell him to get in touch.
Arid now I'm off to Scotland myself, for a fortnight in a rented house at the foot of the Mull of Kintyre. If the weather is fine, it will be glorious — long, empty beaches, the sun sparkling on views of Islay and Jura. But I don't go in that expectation; too many summers spent pacing the wet decks of Clyde steamers. The wind will blast across from Newfoundland, the rain will skelp down, the windscreen-wipers will scratch all the way to the fish and chip shop in Campbeltown and back again. We're packing lots of cuddly toys.
Ian Jack is editor of Granta.
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