Songs of Innocence (13 page)

The 1920s were a time of collective denial, of a sort of national attempt to find meaning, or at the very least joy, in a world that was badly soiled. This was an age in
which survivors’ guilt touched every adult, particularly the men, and in which children experienced a dislocation – a feeling that they could never quite know, or understand, what ailed
their parents. In many households, the psychological scars of war and its aftermath were unspoken but ever-present.

For the Llewellyn family, the tension that lay just under the surface of everyday life became increasingly hard to deny. Hermione, packed off to boarding school at the age of thirteen, was
surviving quite well until her letters from home suddenly stopped: ‘As the weeks passed, I grew frightened . . . huge carbuncles appeared on my thighs and before long I could not walk or run
normally. When one burst, it was so enormous and frightful that it hit the ceiling. Bunny [the school matron] insisted I tell her what I was thinking about. She said one’s mind can affect
one’s body.’
⁸

The matron phoned Hermione’s grandparents, and was informed that her parents had separated. No one knew where her father was, and her mother was seriously ill in an asylum in Bristol. She
had descended into mental illness, from which she would never recover. The response – both from the matron at Hermione’s school and subsequently from the family – was indicative
of a fundamental change which would ultimately come to alter the mindset of all Western societies. Somehow, humanity had begun to creep in. The work of Freud and his contemporaries, which had made
little impact on the wider public when it had first appeared in the early years of the twentieth century, was now beginning to be absorbed into the fabric of human interaction. What was happening
– perhaps little recognized at the time – was a portent of a huge, almost geological, shift. Until this point, judgements about human beings and their inherent flaws had tended to be
made through a prism with a distinctly religious tint. As the Enlightenment debates about
whether children were ultimately born good, needing protection from the corruption
of the world, or evil, needing stern instruction to enable them to operate by a moral code, demonstrated, the world’s view of the child – indeed, of mankind itself – had up until
now been largely biblical. Now, the notion of the child as an individual began to creep in. This philosophy was still nascent, of course, and the theories of human development which had begun to be
accepted were largely driven by biological determinism – each child had to go through certain stages of development, and if those stages were not passed satisfactorily, then disaster could
strike. If each hurdle were not, as it were, jumped, then the child’s development could be arrested.

That Hermione’s school matron had already absorbed the theory that physical ailments could have psychological causes is interesting. Perhaps the recognition of ‘shell shock’
after the war was helping the notion of the psychological to creep further into the public consciousness; perhaps she was a woman ahead of her time. But, certainly, there was a new awareness
surrounding issues about mental health. Hermione’s father reappeared, and did his best to help his ailing wife towards a cure. The standard procedure among the wealthy classes at the time
– and the one the Llewellyn family adopted – was to take the afflicted one to Switzerland for a cure. Hermione, now aged twelve, was removed from her boarding school to spend her days
– and nights – helping to care for her seriously disturbed mother. But to no avail: ‘Our nights became terrible. When it grew dark she had hallucinations and thought dreadful
creatures were crawling across the walls and ceiling of her bedroom. She dared not go to sleep lest they harm her . . . my father and I took turns to sit up all night in her bedroom to try and
comfort and reassure her, but gradually we both grew exhausted from lack of sleep . . . eventually our kind and clever Swiss doctor persuaded our father that she should move to a nursing home at
Nyon on Lake Geneva.’
⁹

The importance of this growth in psychological understanding for the way humans saw – and still see – their children can hardly be overstated. It was the
beginning of a profound change in attitudes to children and childhood which would gather pace throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And its profundity sprang from the new sense, ushered in
by Freudian psychology, that a child was neither a blank slate upon which to be written nor a creature of biblical sin, but an individual. The notion that children had psychological needs, as well
as physical needs, would bring deep and lasting change in the way they were reared. And indeed it was not long before these new ideas began, tentatively at first, to extend their roots into the
world of parenting. In 1929, the
Guardian
reported that the Chelsea Babies’ Club was hosting a series of lectures on child psychology for mothers. The aim, the paper said, was to give
middle-class women access to the sort of advice which those from poorer backgrounds were already receiving in state-aided welfare centres: ‘One of the chief duties of a mother is to teach her
child to grow away from her and to become an individual,’ the article explained. ‘The child must learn to do without his mother as early as possible, though still regarding her as his
best friend . . . one of the most important conditions of successful child development is that of absolute harmony between the parents, which will not easily be achieved unless both parents have
lives of their own.’ Even more strikingly, the article also explained that a mother would not be a good mother – and indeed could suffer mental breakdown – if her own talents and
desires were thwarted. A professional mother with a life outside the home was considered entirely a desirable thing.

Changing children

Why this new focus on children? Perhaps the shrinking of the family had led parents to begin to see their children’s individuality, just as
the
growing influence of Freudian psychology had led to a new, more child-focused approach to parenthood. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that the experience of the average child changed
overnight. Yet it did change, incrementally, over the following decades. Children, increasingly, were permitted to hold opinions, and even to express those opinions in public. During this period,
the
Guardian
ran two long pieces of advice to parents from a fourteen-year-old girl named Catharine Alexander: ‘If your children are artists and you live in a large house, try to give
them each a room to work in. If you live in a small house, don’t all cram into one hot, stuffy little room . . . The children become pasty and white and spotty and have bad complexions. The
parents become consumptive and die off in the end,’ she advised.

If there were to be fewer children – and there were, thanks to the international birth control movement, pioneered by Marie Stopes – then they were going to be
stout, uncomplicated children who breathed plenty of fresh air and developed healthy lungs and chunky calves: ‘Send them to school as soon as possible, where they will be punched and cuffed
into shape, and sent back to you a happy, strong, healthy, ordinary child . . . I should let your children have fairly large appetites, for it keeps them strong and healthy,’ Catharine
Alexander advised. And Sir Frederick Truby King, who was fast becoming the childcare guru of his day, had rather similar thoughts: ‘Ask any capable farmer what steps he takes to ensure the
health and safety of the mothers of his flocks and herds, and he will tell you free range in the open air and daily exercise are the first essentials, and without these both mother and offspring
suffer . . . Pure air and sunshine have almost as much effect on the health and strength of both mother and child as good food . . . Regulated sunbathing is highly beneficial.’
¹⁰

The children’s literature of the period tended to reflect two ongoing trends: the continuing sense that the healthy, wholesome
child was a country child; and the
fear that the nation would soon be swamped again by war. So the Walker children of Arthur Ransome’s
Swallows and Amazons
novels were allowed to rampage cheerfully across the Cumbrian
countryside with little parental control; yet in the background lurked always a sense that this was an idyll that could be lost. Mr Walker was always away – or about to be called away –
because he was a naval commander. In one notable episode, a telegram to his base in Malta about whether the children should be allowed to sail to an island on Coniston Water brings the response:
‘BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN.’ Richmal Crompton’s William Brown, meanwhile, lived a rather more suburban life, his scrapes generally of a lesser
order – the Walker children drift out into the North Sea in one memorable sailing episode in a later novel, and find themselves in Holland, while William’s most violent episodes are
mere scraps with the Outlaws’ arch-enemies, the Hubert Lane-ites. But a key feature of both Ransome’s and Crompton’s works was the stable family life to which the children always
returned. The Walker children always greeted the arrival of their father with unbridled joy, despite his long absences, while William’s family – aunts, siblings, placid mother and
forbidding father, are treated with a sort of humorous acceptance. In an age of fear and uncertainty, the emphasis on the importance of family, of hearth and home, tends to grow. And that was
certainly a feature of this particular era.

While the urban poor – or at least some of them – now had access to clinics and while the mothers of Chelsea could attend lectures on childcare, the mother who was bringing up her
family in the rapidly expanding suburbs had Truby King by her side. His book contained a picture of a boy, aged four, ‘reared according to the principles advocated in this book’. He was
blond, his hair combed to one side and shining, and he was wearing well-pressed shorts with a shirt and tie. Everything about him spelled healthfulness and wholesomeness.
¹¹

There were shades, in all this, of the political future of Europe in the coming decades. Marie Stopes and her birth control campaigners were not only about helping parents
to bring wanted children into the world, but also about ensuring that the wrong kinds of children were eliminated. The birth control movement was connected to a growing interest in eugenics, and to
the general fearfulness of the age.
¹²
Its proponents were fired up by the Malthusian belief that population growth would always outstrip the
supply of food and other resources, and would be counteracted by war or by disease. Stopes had joined the Malthusian League, whose motto was: ‘Non Quantitas sed Qualitas’, or ‘Not
Quantity but Quality’, in 1917. Later, she left to form the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. She opened the first birth control clinic in London in 1921 – in
Holloway, not far from where Sidney Day and his rumbunctious, impoverished family were eking out a living. Indeed, Day acknowledged that numerous babies were a fact of life in this district:
‘Me dad . . . loved his pint, they all did. That was all they had to do, let’s face it – drink and make babies . . . Me poor mum, what with all the washing, ironing and cooking,
she was worn out before she died, poor old sod.’
¹³

In May 1921, at a meeting in the Queen’s Hall, Stopes lectured her audience on the perils of allowing ‘wastrels’ to breed. Over the coming years, the pre-war fear that the
quality of the population was inadequate to the task of maintaining an empire would again come to the fore. In 1931, a Sterilization Bill would be unsuccessfully introduced in the House of Commons,
and during the 1930s a number of eminent people would promote the view that population must be regulated in order to ensure good stock. In 1934, an official committee would recommend the voluntary
sterilization of people considered mentally or physically defective.
¹⁴
Lloyd George had opined that it was impossible to run an A1 empire with a
C3 population, and he was not alone. In 1935, the BBC would broadcast a
debate involving G. K. Chesterton, Bertrand Russell and the psychologist Cyril Burt, on the motion
that: ‘Parents are Unfitted by Nature to Bring up their own Children’. Burt explained that, in his opinion, many parents were unfit not merely to raise their children, but to have them
in the first place.

These two enthusiasms, for psychoanalysis and for birth control, were combined in a series of lectures Stopes gave about sex education, and in particular about ‘cleanliness, disinfection
and chastity in the home’. The idea that children should be taught about sex was now beginning to grow, and was spelt out in two slim volumes published by the British Hygiene Council:
What
Fathers Should Tell Their Sons,
and
What Mothers Must Tell Their Children
.
¹⁵
The first volume focused mainly on the risk of venereal
disease: ‘Alcohol diminishes control over the lower nature, so that it may safely be said that it is a large factor in the causation of venereal disease. Alcohol is not needed by the young,
and they are much better without it. The best moral school is a good home, where high ideals are inculcated by example.’ The second, illustrated with a reassuring line drawing of a mother
reading to a well-groomed and clearly hygienic boy and girl, both with sensible knee-length socks and well-brushed, shiny hair, gave advice mainly on the evils of masturbation – for boys
– and of sex outside marriage – for boys and girls: ‘If very unfortunately a boy or a girl has attempted to live a married life before marriage, that is to say if they have
prematurely and wrongly used the sacred powers of their body, it is only too likely that such young people may have injured themselves.’

At this time, widely held beliefs about heredity and biological determinism – which had been growing in the public consciousness since Darwin published his
On the Origin of Species
in 1859 – seemed to sit quite comfortably alongside the notion that a child could be formed, or its development distorted, by circumstance. Indeed, Freud had done a great deal to popularize
the idea that the human
personality was formed by an interaction between biology and nurture. And Truby King helped further in promoting the view that there could not only be
good or bad nature, but also good or bad nurture. In 1909, he had given a lecture on ‘Parenthood and Race Culture’, part of which was reprinted in his classic baby-care book: ‘The
decadence of nations is threatening many lands. France, with its declining birth rate, has already become a second-class power . . . the decay of Greece and Rome was not primarily due to a
falling-off in the prowess of the phalanx and the legion, but to increasing luxury, lessened exertion, lessened contact with the open air, a growing cost in the standard of living, and an
increasing selfishness, which expressed itself in a disinclination for the ties of marriage and parenthood . . . if we lack noble mothers we lack the first element of racial success and national
greatness.’