LAST week my son and I had a quarrel: one of those fierce, bad quarrels that arrive without warning, like a thunderstorm on a clear summer’s day, and then rumble on for ages, dying away, only to revive again in another violent flurry of thunder and lightning. The ostensible cause of the quarrel was the loss of the son’s Spanish textbook, which he announced with an air of vague detachment, as though it were some kind of natural phenomenon or act of God that had nothing to do with him.
This is never a good line to take with me, and I snapped straight into Rhetorical Indignation mode. “How did it happen?” “I dunno.” “But WHY don’t you know?” “I dunno.” “What makes you think that ‘I dunno’ is an adequate response, eh?” Silence. “Answer me, please?” “I dunno.”
I’m sure I needn’t go on. Those of you who are less-than-perfect parents will certainly be able to fill in the rest of the dialogue for yourselves. Suffice to say that the discussion moved with dangerous swiftness from the specifics of lost textbooks to the treacherous quicksands of generality (Your Attitude).
In the morning things were no better. We ate breakfast in baleful silence before leaving for school. During the journey I had another go at persuading him what a bad thing it was to lose your textbooks, with special reference to the astounding cost of his education, the contempt with which he appeared to treat this amazing privilege, the enthusiasm for learning of children in Africa who walk 12 miles daily to school where they have to share a single pencil between a class and can’t get any textbooks, etc etc. My son listened to all this with the polite expression of someone who has got stuck with a maniac at a cocktail party and is waiting for an opportune moment to flee.
We arrived at school and he got out of the car making, as he shut the door, a barely audible, insolent, wordless sound. I thought it was a “pfffff!”, but he tells me it was more of a “sheesh!” Whatever it was, it sent me — as it was meant to — into such an extremity of rage that it’s a miracle I didn’t crash on the way home.
Perhaps fortunately, we didn’t meet again that day. I had to go out in the evening, so I called Janet, who has looked after Alexander since he was 20 months and knows both of us perhaps better than we know ourselves. I told her that he was in dire disgrace, outlined a suitably penitential evening of homework and bed with no EastEnders or Corrie, and went off to my appointment.
By the time I got back, Alexander was in bed. Janet had spoken to him about our row, she reported, and what he’d said was: “What’s the problem? It’s just a book. She’s always taking her stress out on me.” Shrug.
In that moment, I had a sudden, vertiginous and extremely disagreeable vision of myself from his point of view. The trouble with being a parent — especially, perhaps, a single parent — is that these moments are rare. One’s responsibilities are so intense and exhausting — half grinding physical drudgery, half delicate diplomatic negotiation — that you simply don’t have time or energy to speculate about what your family must look like from the child’s point of view.
As a parent, one’s life is split into a kind of double narrative: before children, and after. Children find it extraordinarily hard to believe that there was a version of you that existed quite happily without them, not missing them at all, because they didn’t exist, hadn’t been thought of, just weren’t there. But the mirror image of a child’s incredulity about the independent existence of a parent is the corresponding blindness of parents to their children as autonomous beings, with narratives of their shared family life that are quite different from the parental ones.
Perhaps this is something that mothers suffer from more acutely than fathers, since our children were once part of our bodies. Or perhaps it’s just me. At any rate, in the moment after Janet reported that line about me transferring my stress, it struck me that until now it would have seemed as likely to me that my own leg should pipe up with a cool assessment of my failings of character and temperament as my son, who may be a hulking teenager, but whose sharp little heels I vividly recall — only a moment ago, it seems — drumming on the inside of my abdomen wall.
Clearly I am an exceptionally slow learner, for it has taken me 13½ years to realise that I am not the sole author of our family narrative. The independent television producer Tracy Jeune is well ahead of me. Starting this week on BBC Two is her remarkable series of six 40-minute programmes, My Life as a Child. The premise of the series is enchantingly simple. Over the past two years the BBC has given digital cameras to a score or so of children, aged 8 to 11, across Britain and asked them to record their family lives. The results were then collected, edited (“There was an awful lot of footage of computer games and sleeping guinea pigs,” says Jeune) and arranged into six episodes of three intercut narratives, loosely grouped by theme. So the first episode, Distant Dads, gives us family self-portraits of three children, Kris, Mary and Ellen, whose biological fathers all live abroad; the second episode, Three Fights and a Wedding, shows us three children negotiating a path through family conflict; the third, Moving On, looks at family relations in various states of flux — and so on.
The thematic grouping is lightly handled — the effect is of stories that fall naturally into a certain complementary narrative rhythm rather than of programmes pruned into shape by energetic editorial topiary — and the overall effect is one of startling naturalism. It is hard to think of a precise equivalent in recent television programming. The 7-Up series encouraged children to talk spontaneously, it is true, but the awareness of an adult interviewer and camera crew hovered palpably in the background. During a stint of several years as a television reviewer I remember being intensely impressed by a remarkable one-off documentary about children’s imaginary friends, and by Philippa Lowthorpe’s beautiful three-parter, A Childhood. Jeune’s point is that all previous attempts to chronicle the lives of children have been mediated through the perceptions of adults — however tactful and sensitive — and that hers is a unique experiment in recording children’s authentic voices.
Of course, the mediating presence of adults is here, too: not just in the skilful editing, but also in the relationship of trust between the families and the production crew, which led the families to allow themselves to be filmed in — so to speak — a state of nature, and in the initial selection of the children themselves. My Life as a Child is natural in precisely the same way that a carefully managed wildflower meadow is natural. It contains all the elements of uncultivated spontaneity, but artfully arranged so as to display them to their best advantage.
