The Story of Childhood: growing up in modern Britain
Libby Brooks Bloomsbury, 352pp, £8.99
ISBN 0747583439
The average person's picture of the average childhood - in so far as such averageness exists - seems so distorted by fears for the child's safety, happiness and "innocence" that it is almost enough to put off the as-yet-childless woman from procreation. Life is no longer a gift: it's a nasty trap into which any small person can fall should they stray into the path of an adult. Better to keep kids away from life, our culture seems to say, and wrap them in a bubble of unknowing.
There's a problem with innocence, in that it requires being sheltered from reality. Sheltered children may have the most wonderful life up to 18, but they can prove so unattuned to adulthood's responsibility and its moral grayscale that they retreat into a world in which everyone is required to do the real donkey work of life - making decisions, getting on with people - on their behalf. You spend only a small part of your life as a child, and most of it as an adult, so isn't it best to be well prepared when you get there?
It depends on what you mean by "prepared", suggests Libby Brooks, in her study of nine British children and how the adults in their lives seek to manage the world around them. Like Ashley, you can have seen more reality than anyone ought to bear by the age of 15, and still be rapidly approaching adulthood with few of the skills that will make your grown-up life any less chaotic and poverty-stricken than your childhood. One of 13 children, Ashley has raised himself on the streets of Peckham; his stoned memory of helping out his long-departed dad in his job as a bus conductor is all the more tragic for how it makes being "normal" seem like the very measure of innocence.
By contrast, several of the other children Brooks follows have one great advantage: middle classness. Lois and Nicholas, both Londoners, have parents who are sensible and measured and, significantly, do not run out of cash - at least, not so you'd notice. These children are extraordinarily articulate: they talk to Brooks and their parents like peers, and yet are well equipped to observe the conditions of their lives as children. Not only do they appreciate the structure and the boundaries given to them by their parents, but they're able to tell you why. They are trusted: not only by the adults in their family, but by adults in general, because they are middle class. They have a maturity that comes from not being insecure, whether economically, socially or emotionally.
There is one unhappy exception included here: another 15-year-old, Laura, whose academic parents have been divorced for so long that she doesn't believe their break-up has had any effect on her life. It's only when she casually drops into a conversation with Brooks that her two older siblings ganged up on her when she got on well with their mum's boyfriend that you realise just how much it did. Laura has tried to kill herself more than once; the most recent attempt was between visits from the author.
For all her privileges, Laura is, like Ashley, someone who has seen too much and no longer wants to see anything at all. She was bullied so viciously by girls she describes as "street rats" - at a school that sounds entirely unsuitable for her - that she ended up in hospital. Now her mother has paid to have the loft converted into a miniature ivory tower, with its own en suite bathroom and a £400 dressing table. "Princess Laura", as Brooks ruefully calls her, will never have to leave it if she doesn't want to.
Brooks's book, her first, is very much the work of a journalist. It reads like a series of newspaper articles and quite unlike one of the many other books she cites, As If, Blake Morrison's lyrical and sometimes queasy book about Jamie Bulger's killing. Luckily, she is a very good journalist: she knows exactly how to elicit information from the children she observes without making them suspicious or scared of her motives. Sometimes she drifts into cod-sociology gubbins: I was flummoxed by the statement that "the arena of childhood will situate some of the most exciting ideological battles of this century", and that "progressive thinkers must begin their interrogation of that territory now".
That is a particular shame because the rest of the book is written with enough grace and clarity to be read by the children she writes about. Whether they should or not depends on how "innocent" (or sheltered) we, the adults, would prefer them to be.
Lynsey Hanley's history of the council estate will be published by Granta Books next January
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