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Tuesday 5 April 2016

Scared stranger

L. P. Hartley, an underrated, very English novelist, wrote The Go-Between, a beautifully observed story of corruption. Most good novels make mediocre movies but not here. The movie is even better; watch Michael Gough in a terrific supporting role.

Those who have not experienced book or movie may, nevertheless, be familiar with the novel's over-exposed first sentence: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

The foreign country called youth. Old age allows us to buy a return ticket to that destination, to wander briefly and to reflect on Hartley's truth. I discovered I was not merely younger, but someone else.

I believed I would die if I were tickled relentlessly enough. A quaint thought? I was an asthmatic child and asthma’s breathlessness seemed to prefigure a fatal, pulmonary implosion from tickling.

I believed adults were not only inexplicable but that they weren't interested. Within their ambit I might have been a toad, perhaps a slug - a small, unexceptional creature that didn't, by definition, deserve attention. I assumed this state of affairs would continue for ever.

I was told, probably by a teacher, I would eventually marry. I decided as a small act of rebellion I would not do so. A means of saying: you see, I can be different. The victory would be pyrrhic but a small price to pay.

I suspected all my thoughts – not just about sex – were impure and probably deserved punishment.

Terrified of the future I knelt at my bedside and prayed to an Obscure Being.

Eventually this over-sensitive shred of gristle withered and was reborn as someone else. One good thing – I no longer fear death by tickling. What I do fear deserves another post. Perhaps.

7 comments:

  1. "Eventually this over-sensitive shred of gristle withered and was reborn as someone else".
    Caterpillar into butterfly, eh? Have you any idea what started the renaissance, RR?

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  2. I haven't read him but did see and like the movie, long ago.

    You are quite brave to admit your childhood's ways. I don't think I would do that. Although I do remember a horror of tickling: really it was so awful because it deprived a child of all control and the ones who had it would not stop. (I also remember being very hot and dry in the Painted Desert in Arizona and feeling that I would soon swallow my tongue because I had seen a dreadful little school film that convinced me such things were common and a danger. So there's another odd childhood persuasion for you.)

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  3. Avus: I am not claiming that the newer RR was superior to the infantile one. More likely those extremes of behaviour, fears and thought processes I describe were replaced by others that were equally extreme. Social gaucheness, for instance, lasted until... you know, I really can't say when that departed if it ever did. So-called adulthood - which is marked by much more than the passage of time - only means there is more to occupy the mind and there are fewer periods of terrifying introspection that seem to characterise any honest assessment of childhood. I always worry when I read of someone's snap judgment that they had a happy childhood; I tend to wonder what memories are being shut out.

    Marriage is, of course, the large transformer since it forces the adolescent (or it should) to think stereoscopically instead of self-centredly. I was twenty-five when I married. The tragedy with certain marriages is when the man, and it frequently is the man, wants to go on behaving like a teenager and has merely replaced his mum with a bride.

    However two developments stand out. The first blessing arrived when school ended. I never understood the imperatives of school; if I ever thought about them in the abstract I only saw the processes as pointless. Whereas within a week at the newspaper, in the company of men and women united by the need to get sentences right, I knew I was among people I understood.

    The second development occurred during National Service much of which I hated - the forced matiness, the limited horizons, the draconian concepts of punishment. But eight months of five-and-a-half-day weeks devoted to understanding radio was a type of education I found myself grudgingly accepting. Afterwards I realised this disinterested instruction had changed the way I thought about the natural world; it helped me discard superstition and embrace a mathematical approach to phenomena. I was no longer just an ill-defined young man who simply read books and called myself liberal arts. It took several years to recognise the fact but I had finally taken on a minor form of intellectual rigour.

    While also learning not to be too solemn about things.

    Marly: Much of my response to Avus also applies. Your memory about swallowing your tongue immediately rang a sonorous bell; children are easily misinformed but in ways adults rarely appreciate. For some reason I was convinced as a seven-year-old there could be no more hideous a situation than to be required to sing solo in public. And I'm talking incapacitating terror here, augmented by over-hearing adults - those remote self-contained beings - talk laughingly about their own apprehensions faced with solo singing. But they laughing, me not.

    When V, for the first time, played a scale on the piano and asked me to duplicate it I did so as if it were the most natural thing. Later in that exhilarating and exhausting first day I realised, faintly at first then with growing excitement, I had outgrown a childish fear. I hadn't simply endured singing solo in public, I had wanted to do it. Finally, at age eighty, that part of me might now claim to be adult.

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  4. Thanks for that considered reply, RR. Odd how much we disliked our enforced military careers, but nearly everyone I now talk to seems to think it did them good.

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  5. Avus: Rose-coloured retrospection in many cases I suspect. Who can bear to say that the two years slipped by entirely without profit?

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  6. Hah, I like that response! And much of that is something I face now, with three children, ages 18-26. It is interesting, that gap between childhood and adulthood, though somewhat exhausting for the observer.

    I remember my father wanting to record me reading when I was a tiny little girl. It was, to me, humiliating and upsetting, and he could not understand why.

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  7. Marly: Definitely sounds like a variant of my fear. All the elements are there: the apprehension, an undefined sense of being upset, and an adult who - despite his other no doubt sterling qualities - simply didn't understand. How alien that world was; how convinced I was that things were stacked against me. Now we are both part of that world and must take care not to add to its lack of sympathy.

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