A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser

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       Chapter One

       CHILDHOOD

       The very basics

      The first day of our holiday! And what a day – the sun has made the unprecedented move of coming out for a whole hour (no, really) and my children have missed it all by their own unprecedented move of sleeping until nine o’clock. Typical. I blame the mountain air.

      When I finally turf them out of bed with the cunning promise of hot chocolate – if and only if they manage to get dressed in something moderately presentable without being asked more than six times – it is well and truly time for a morning coffee. And so it is that we make our first trip down the road to Granny’s house.

      We have a somewhat perfect set-up here: we’re staying in my parents’ house, and my parents are not. Result. To cap it all, Granny only lives three doors down the road so we can see her as often as we like – without having to stay in her house. The reason this is such a good thing will become very apparent later. You’ve been warned.

      By the time we get there, our children have already said their brief hellos and are tearing down to the bottom of the garden. I am so happy to see Granny, and to be back in the place where I spent most of my childhood holidays: falling out of trees, getting lost, terrorising the cats and getting into trouble. A lot. For her part, Granny’s broad smile and sparkly eyes show she is over the moon to see us too (can’t think why – we are nothing but noise and mayhem) but she looks frail, unsteady on her legs, and generally as though life has just dealt her a nasty few months.

      ‘Well you look great,’ I say, giving her a big hug. ‘I thought you were ill? Are you malingering, or is there really something wrong with you?’

      She laughs, and prods her foot with the garden fork she’s holding. Why she has been gardening in her condition I can’t say, but that’s just the way she is. You can’t argue.

      ‘Oh well, it’s just my silly toe. Means I can’t walk, but you know, I’m fine apart from that. So who’s for coffee?’

      Ten minutes later my husband has been discharged, caffeinated beverage in hand, to play with the little people, leaving me alone to have a good natter with Granny. Shrieks of laughter and excitement fly up from the garden every so often – and the kids seem to be having fun too.

      Having fun: now there’s a thing. Surrounded by all of our incessant – and often quite unnecessary – rushing, working, worrying, buying, cleaning and general obsessive busyness, it seems to me that our children are left with remarkably little time for what being a child is surely all about: having FUN. Having the freedom to muck about, dig in the earth, find little bugs, stick them down their sister’s neck, and not worry about anything; being able to just BE.

      Granny notices this too.

      ‘Just look at that lot – happy as ducks in water down there, adventuring. It’s beautiful. You don’t see so many kids these days just playing freely like children should, without an adult or a piece of silly legislation to spoil it all for them.’

      There’s a pause, while I think of a neat way of asking the question that pretty much sums up the core of this entire book. Drum roll … Deep breath …

      Splish! A suicidal greenfly lands in my coffee.

      Fishing the squirming insect out with my little finger, I try again.

The big rush

      ‘Granny?’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘You know there’s a lot of concern these days about what’s happening to our children’s health and happiness, and that many kids aren’t having what we consider to be a proper childhood any more.’

      ‘Oh yes?’

      ‘Well,’ I pop my drowning friend on the corner of an old copy of National Geographic so he can take some time to reconsider all his life choices. ‘What do you think childhood is actually for?’

      There is a long pause, as she searches for a tactful way to answer this that won’t make me feel as stupid as a remarkably stupid person sitting a remarkably difficult nuclear physics exam.

      ‘Well,’ she offers at last, giving her coffee a little stir. ‘Firstly, I think childhood is for having TIME. Time to think, time to learn, to process, to experiment, to grow into yourself. There seems to be so little time available to kids these days for any of that. It’s all rush, rush, rush.’

      ‘Yes, but that’s just how it is in modern times, Granny, isn’t it? So much can happen at once, with email and mobile phones and BlackBerrys – that’s a kind of phone by the way, not a fruit – that we never get a chance to just stop.’

      ‘Exactly, and there’s your problem. Adults can rush about if they like, but rushing children means they lose that important freedom to play properly. You have your whole adult life for such responsibilities and constraints – they’re not for children. How can they learn through play, using their imagination, if they are stopped every twenty minutes to rush on to the next task?’

      OK, here I am guilty as charged, and, dare I say it, you quite possibly are too. My kids are constantly being told to ‘Stop doing that now, it’s time for …’ and if that sentence doesn’t end in ‘school’ then it’s ballet or dinner, or homework, or bed. Or something! We all know kids who are marched from pillar to post, in a supposed bid to give them the ‘best’ childhood, whatever that means.

      Granny isn’t done yet.

      ‘And it’s not just the pace of their lives that takes their childhood away. It’s also what they’re exposed to and how they are treated. Childhood is a heavenly time and you should try to make it last as long as you possibly can for them – so why dress your three year old up like a pop star or coach your little ones for university or stage school? There are plenty of years ahead for that, and the early years of childhood are not the time. You don’t need to cram it all in before they’re ten!’

The curse of worrying

      She stands up gingerly and hobbles to fetch a box half full of what looks like they might once have been ginger biscuits. When offered, СКАЧАТЬ