Brothers and Sisters (21 page)

In this photograph, Granville Stanley Hall is all beard and authority, the epitome of an eminent late-nineteenth-century American.

Born in 1844 in a small Massachusetts village where sheep outnumbered people by a ratio of eight to one, he could trace his family back to the
Mayflower
on both sides, and he had a particular passion for climbing hills. His father was a broom-maker by trade, and Granville took obvious pride in being perhaps one of the few people able to say in the early years of the twentieth century that he himself had made, ‘and can still make, a broom’. He is also credited with founding the discipline of educational psychology.

At first glance, Granville Stanley Hall seems like precisely my kind of man—class poet on graduation, pursuer of a polymathic career that bounced around divinity, literature and philosophy and let him settle, briefly, in a Chair of English before he travelled to Germany in 1875 to study the new science of experimental psychology. He was the man who invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to visit America in 1909. He was the man who undertook a formal and academic study of tickling, during which he coined two seductive and lamentably under-utilised words:
knismesis
, for a light, feathery kind of a tickle; and
gargalesis
, for the ‘harder, laughter-inducing’ kind. Who wouldn’t warm to someone whose scientific surveys asked about the way laughter spread across a child’s face, about which features were ‘first and what last involved’? Who could help but be drawn to someone whose published work declared that ‘in 107 cases laughter or tickling results from merely seeing a finger pointed with movements suggesting tickling; slow circular movements of the index finger, then stopping these and thrusting it toward some ticklish point, especially if with a buzzing sound, make many young children half-hysterical with laughter’? Or that ‘adult men more often laugh in o and a, while children and women laugh in e and i’? Surely anyone whose contributions to human knowledge include a taxonomy of tickling, an anatomy of laughter, must be a force for good.

Which is why it’s such a shame that Granville Stanley Hall is the villain in this story, given that it was just one statement of his that did all the damage to the Anglophone world’s perception of only children.

According to Hall—a man with two siblings of his own, a man who’d spent all his childhood summers in the company of a large and exuberant country family—‘being an only child is a disease in itself’. He wrote that as part of a study undertaken in the late 1890s, and given that it stood as the sole study of only children for several decades, it simply kept being cited, giving it the patina of currency, accuracy, inviolability. In a 1928 paper that drew on Hall’s work, the writer declared that ‘it would be best for the individual and the race if there were no only children’.

Even now, more than a century after Granville Stanley Hall wrote those nine fateful words, most stories about only children—and even the positive ones—at least nod to it. It’s a singular sentence that allows us to see what someone described as an event as rare as the birth of a star: the birth of a prejudice.

I am five years old and dressed as a frog. My outfit comprises a kind of romper suit made of yellow (for tummy) and green (back) taffeta lining with hand-sewn sequins (the water droplets of a frog recently emerged from a pond); green tights; green felt flippers tied onto my hands and my feet (more sequins; more water drops); and the headdress. This is a green taffeta skullcap with two modified ping-pong balls decorated and sewn on for eyes. There are possibly also more sequins.

It is bespoke, it is a miracle of amphibianity, and it is the last word in under-six elegance. In 1976, I wear it to the Austinmer Public School Frolic; I believe myself to be the belle (or at least the batrachian) of the ball. We follow it up with a gorgeous mushroom-coloured mouse suit the following year which employs a slightly heavier weight of taffeta lining, a reprise of the skullcap design with a new set of ping-pong-ball eyes, and a tubular stuffed tail of such pleasing weight and length that I can still feel the satisfaction of spinning fast on the spot to make it swish around.

The pièce de résistance, however, is achieved for the 1982 Austinmer Public School Book Week Character Parade, which I attend as the web from
Charlotte’s Web
: a navy-blue bodysuit onto which is attached a miraculous web French-knitted out of silver twine (the glorious extent of which isn’t apparent until I hold my arms out like a T-square) with the words
Charlotte’s Web
French-knitted in the centre and a glamorous spider hanging to one side, as if she’s just finished spinning. She’s made of two grey pompoms, with pipe-cleaner legs and dazzling beaded eyes. I can’t remember if she had eyelashes or not, but in my memory she does.

This is how my family does costumes, thanks to two parents of vast imagination—a mother who’s an artist with a history of creating fabulous outfits, and a father who’s an engineer with hidden talents in ping-pong-ball adaptation, French-knitting and pompom fabrication.

I watch the other kids arrive in their shop-bought superhero outfits, their shop-bought cowboy hats and holsters. My flippers sparkle. My tail swings round. My silver web shimmers in the sunlight. Unique.

In this photograph, Bi Kaiwei looks thin to the point of gauntness, his eyes closed and his mouth tight. He lives in Wufu, works in a chemical plant there, had a little girl, Bi Yuexing, who was thirteen years old. His daughter, his only child; she was killed in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.

If it’s impossible to write about only children without invoking the single-person ghost of Granville Stanley Hall, it’s also impossible to write about only children without invoking the billion-person population of China and its famous—or infamous—one-child policy. ‘Have fewer children; live better lives,’ the government slogan declares. And in 2008, the world was paying particular attention to some real lives behind that phrase. On the one hand, the stories were about those only children killed in Sichuan’s rubble—more than seven thousand, some said. On the other, with the Beijing Olympics imminent, they were about the pianistic prodigy Lang Lang. As the young Chinese superstar who would be centre stage when the Games began, he embodied not only the happy-endings of international opportunity and success but also the worst kind of pressures and expectations that Chinese parents—and often, people suspected, any parents—were suspected of harbouring for their lone offspring. Here were Lang’s parents paying half a year’s salary to buy their two-year-old son a piano. Here was Lang’s father moving thousands of miles with the young boy to pursue his musical education while Lang’s mother stayed behind and kept up her job. Here was Lang’s father, furious that his son had missed two hours’ piano practice, thrusting pills into his son’s hand and insisting he take them or throw himself from their tiny balcony. Because missing practice meant certain failure. Because failure meant death—there was no going home and admitting that your little boy was not going to be an international megastar.

A father advocating his son’s suicide: the suspected story of China’s suspect little emperors and empresses—as their millions of only children were tagged—writ large.

The problem seemed to be one of many eggs and just one basket. In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, some bereaved parents expressed their grief in terms of having had to pin their every hope on just one child. ‘And this is the return we get,’ said one mother.

Children mourned in the language of profit and loss, of capital and investment.
This is the return
.

In the photograph of Bi Kaiwei, he is holding a photograph of Yuexing; you can see how tightly his fingers clutch its glossy edges. His body looks rigid with grief, as if his entire being was focused on the little girl in the picture, the mess behind him where she died. When the Chinese government announced it would lift its one-child policy for parents whose children had died in the quake— provided they weren’t too old to try again, or hadn’t already been sterilised—I wondered whether he and his wife could or would try to have another child. Because in in the first stories that reported the children’s deaths, and the later policy reversal, the implication was that the parents’ grief would have been less, or could be lessened, if they were no longer restricted to having just one son or daughter.

The implication rubbed and jarred: if I died, these stories suggested, my parents would feel better if they had someone else to fall back on. If something happened to my child, I would feel it less if I had another one. They were strange ideas for an only child to think about—strange ideas, too, for the mother of one. As Bi Kaiwei’s wife would know: pregnant with another child by early 2009, ‘I feel this is the return of our daughter,’ she said. Yet, she continued, ‘even though I’m comforting myself, telling myself this is her, I still don’t feel very cheerful. I’m very depressed.’ She and her husband visited Bi Yuexing’s grave every day.

I am four years old and standing in a cupboard in the laundry. This cupboard can be, variously, a shop, a lift, a bank, a travel agency, depending on my mood, but today it is what it is, a broom cupboard, and I am pretending to be Alice.

Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard is the imaginary friend of a character in Russell Hoban’s book
A Birthday for Frances
. Frances, in the book, is a badger.

Outside the cupboard, my mother is doing the ironing. If the cupboard was a lift, she’d say, ‘fourth floor’ or ‘haberdashery’ from time to time. If the cupboard was a bank, she’d say, ‘Five dollars in change, please.’ But when the cupboard was home to Alice, she simply let it be home to Alice.

She does not, fortunately, subscribe to Dr Spock’s theory that children invent imaginary friends to make up for some deficit in their lives. Perhaps it was a shortfall of ‘hugging and piggyback rides’, he suggested, recommending that any child still nattering to an imaginary being by the age of four should be shipped off to a ‘child psychiatrist, child psychologist, or other mental health counsellor [who would] be able to find out what they’re lacking’. At the age of four, I am not and never have been deprived of either hugs or piggybacks. At the age of four, my own gallery of imaginary friends is not only intact, I also like to pretend that I am the imaginary friend of a badger out of a book. And no one tells me I shouldn’t.

If imaginary friends were symptomatic of a problem, then the problem was thought to be more pronounced and more common among only children. Of course it was the lack of siblings, the lack of conversation between peers, the lack of interaction in long days. We were lonely little souls, deprived of real conversation with real playmates and desperately trying to make some up for ourselves. Best not to talk about it; best to hope we grew out of it as quickly as we could—with or without the assistance of Dr Spock’s retinue of experts.

I can’t remember what being Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard required me to do, other than stand in the broom cupboard. I can remember the sound of my mother’s voice as we chatted through the door, the sound of steam as her iron went on gliding and surging, gliding and surging. And Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard is still part of our family, referred to and remembered in the way of Percy the Parrot (whose adventures my father channelled for me), the Six Fairies (channelled by my mother), and Mrs SeeWee, my imaginary neighbour in the garden who lived beyond a doormat that sat— inexplicably—in the middle of a bed of sasanquas for years.