Don't always blame the parents: the child is often just as guilty
MATTHEW PARRIS From a wedding or a christening nothing new is learnt, but funerals are different. A funeral or memorial service almost always teaches us things we never suspected about the dead. And I often find that such services strike me with new ideas, too. This happened last week at the Central Baptist Church in Bloomsbury, when I attended a memorial service for an extraordinary and wonderful woman, Christine Foss.
This is no place to repeat the many tributes we heard, though it's worth mentioning that about half a century ago Christine founded, organised and then for many decades ran the Overseas Women's Club. Still active and energetic into her nineties, she came to know me through recruiting me to her impressive list of guest speakers at the Club's regular luncheons.
At the memorial service there were messages and apologies from illustrious former guests of the Club such as John Major and Betty Boothroyd; and one of the Club's favourites, the BBC's Richard Baker, was in the pews with me. Christine would write to you with a formal invitation, then (before you had time to refuse) back this up with a series of telephone calls which did not cease when you surrendered, but continued every few days until the date of the luncheon — just to make sure you had not changed your mind or forgotten. She had even bullied Harold Wilson into maintaining an engagement, on the eve of a general election, with one of the few audiences in London where no one had a vote.
But nobody ever regretted coming. Christine's own company made the proceedings even more fun — for she was more than a forceful woman with a flinty glance, a twinkling eye and iron will; she was also a warm and steadfast person. She had spent the war years looking after Jewish children evacuated to the English countryside. I used to curse those insistent phone calls. Now I shall miss them.
It was just one remark, however, that really set me thinking at the Central Baptist Church. One among a series of speakers paying moving tributes to Christine took us through her very early life and told us that, at a very young age and 'after an unhappy time with her parents', she was taken to live with a close relative whom she came to adore, and who helped bring her up.
On hearing that phrase 'after an unhappy time with her parents', I know what most of us would think. We would blame the parents, of course. 'Poor little Christine. Her mum and dad must have been rather intolerant, unloving or unkind,' we would say to ourselves — though we had never met the couple.
Well, perhaps. But this time I reacted differently. In very old age it is sometimes easier to imagine a person as they were as a child than during the prime of their life. I could imagine Christine as a child of four. To some parents — to people of a certain type — that little girl would have been absolutely impossible. They were the wrong parents for her. Maybe they did make her time unhappy; but maybe, too, she made theirs unhappy? Poor parents, I say.
There's a piece of topsy-turvy folk wisdom that says that the reason small men are more pushy is not that in youth they've compensated for being small, but that God, on realising how pushy they were going to be, made them small to limit the damage. I think that gets it the right way round. Instead of thinking of Christine, or any other baby girl, as a piece of human putty at birth, awaiting her parents' moulding hands — hands with the capacity to make or spoil her, to shape her character and give her life joy or sadness — why not turn the tables? Why not think of the young couple as newborn into parenthood, and Christine as the fait accompli, the arrival, the guest who comes to stay: a person in her own right, with her own character, her own capacity to shape her parents' lives, mould their personalities and give them joy or sorrow?
The world is as full of parents wailing 'Where did we go wrong?' as of parents taking personal credit for the fine, upstanding individual their son or daughter has become. Both may be wide of the mark. Upbringing may have had less to do with their offspring's personality, for good or ill, than they think. If writers like Matt Ridley and Stephen Pinker are right (I find them intuitively persuasive), then since the 1960s the science of genetics has changed its estimates of the balance between what we are born with and what we are taught, but somehow failed to impress upon social science the implications. Parents are still encouraged, by teachers, politicians, counsellors, the Church and parenting textbooks to believe that in terms of personality and aptitude, the newborn baby is a kind of blank slate.
Few have ever suggested that, so long as a growing mammal is kept warm and properly fed and exercised, the physical potentialities of the newborn baby — height, build, skin colour, hair colour, sense of balance, speed of reactions — are determined predominantly (or, sometimes, at all) by upbringing or environment. So why we should so readily suppose that temperamental and intellectual aptitudes are mostly shaped after birth is a mystery. But we so often do. Yet studies in the last halfcentury point to the conclusion that in humans even such qualities as cheerfulness, willpower, sense of humour or tendency to depression are hugely influenced by a child's genetic inheritance.
In part mischievously, I proposed above that, rather than see the infant as putty in its parents' hands, we should consider the child as the fait accompli, the parents as the unmoulded putty, and look at what the child does to the parents. But the truth lies halfway. There are three individuals in the relationship, each capable of influencing, none capable of moulding, any of the others. They may or may not get on with each other. We may as well berate the infant Christine for her failure to make a go of her relationship with her parents as berate them for giving her an 'unhappy' start to life.
Anyway, I'm glad she was a cussed child. Along with other, lovely qualities, Christine's cussedness took her far, and enriched the lives of thousands. Even in her old age I could hear that furious squawk from the cot, echoing through an amazing life ... and rejoice.
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