Songs of Innocence (27 page)

In the last year of her life, Maria would change, literally before the eyes of everyone who knew her, from a happy, healthy child into a thin, frightened shadow, depressed – according to
her doctor – and often bruised. She was used by the Kepples as a drudge, dragging heavy bags of coal from the local shop. A neighbour would hear her mother slapping her and calling her a
‘dirty little bitch’ after she had apparently soiled herself. Yet the feeling that the authorities knew what they were doing seemed to prevail – her teacher, who had seen Maria
hysterical at the prospect of having to go to her mother’s, said later that although she had felt the procedures inhumane, she assumed they were for the best. Even when social workers saw
Maria with a blackened face and an eye that was just ‘a pool of blood’, they accepted the Kepples’ explanation that she had had an
accident on her scooter.
The neighbour who had reported these injuries then confronted Maria’s social worker, demanding to know if she really believed the story. She allegedly replied: ‘Well, knowing the family
I would say that Maria has had a beating.’ Yet still nothing was done. A few months later, in December 1972, Maria’s social worker, Diana Lees, would see her, very thin and suffering
from an infection and persistent diarrhoea, and soon after that would learn from a message left by the neighbour that Maria was now ‘more or less like a skeleton’, unkempt and dirty.
Miss Lees did not return the call. On 7 January 1973, the Kepples arrived at the local hospital with Maria’s limp body in a pram. The post mortem showed she had bruising all over her and a
fractured rib which had begun to heal. She weighed just thirty-six pounds – ten pounds less than the normal weight for an eight-year-old. William Kepple was convicted of manslaughter and
eventually served a four-year sentence.

It was the public, not the authorities, who were initially outraged when the details of Maria’s death emerged. Neighbours and other locals queued to get into the public inquiry which was
subsequently held, and many gave evidence of the abuse they had seen the girl suffer. Yet while the inquiry was swingeing in its criticisms of social workers – that they failed to communicate
properly, or to draw properly the lines of responsibility for Maria’s care – its final conclusion acknowledged that something new was happening – that although the state was at
the sharp end of the public anger about Maria’s death, it was not felt to be the only culprit: ‘It is upon society as a whole that the ultimate blame must rest; indeed the highly
emotional and angry reaction of the public in this case may indicate society’s troubled conscience,’ it said.
⁴⁴
It was not enough for
the state, representing society, to assume responsibility for those such as Maria. When Dennis O’Neill died at the hands of his foster-parents, social workers were held to have failed him.
When Maria Colwell died at the hands of her stepfather, nearly twenty years later, society as a
whole began to question how it treated its young. The case would spark
decades of legislative reform, and yet the messages which came out of this inquiry would become depressingly familiar: childcare professionals needed to communicate better; they needed to be better
trained. Each time another child died, the same failings would be found to be to blame.

And yet things
were
changing. Child abuse, as a concept, was at this time relatively new. Terrible abuse had always occurred, of course. But now the notion of child abuse as a
‘syndrome’, the abuser as someone suffering from a recognizable condition, began to grow. The term ‘battered child syndrome’ had in fact been coined some ten years before
Maria’s death, by a University of Colorado paediatrician named C. Henry Kempe. Kempe set out the symptoms of this condition – abusing parents would often bring their children to
hospital with injuries, expressing apparently appropriate concern and saying they had occurred accidentally. Such parents were not incurable psychopaths, he believed, but were suffering from a form
of psychological disturbance which could – by logical extension – be cured. In November 1969, a Home Office pathologist called Professor Francis Camps had told the Royal Medical
Psychological Association that he expected the phenomenon to die out because it was essentially a social disease: ‘Very nearly all injuries to children come in lower social class families.
There is a high proportion of unemployed fathers amongst attackers,’ he said.
⁴⁵
Camps believed a lack of self-discipline could help to
explain the rise in child injury.

The recognition of the problem would not stop it from happening. Over the next decade and more, every child death from abuse would lead to the same discussion: twenty-one-month-old Tyra Henry,
battered and bitten by her father while in local authority care in 1984; three-year-old Heidi Koseda and four-year-old Jasmine Beckford, both starved and beaten by their stepfathers in the same
year; four-year-old Kimberley Carlile, killed by her stepfather in 1986;
sixteen-month-old Doreen Mason, who died in similar circumstances in 1987. The list would go on. And
every time, the same questions would be asked: why did the various agencies that dealt with these children – for almost all were known to social services – not talk to one another? How
could warnings from neighbours and others have gone unheeded?

It would seem, in many ways, as if each death demonstrated that nothing had changed. It would seem, too, that the outrage engendered by these deaths ran in a similar vein to the outrage which
had been sparked by the death of Mary Ellen Wilson in nineteenth-century New York; that it had its roots in the notion that the child was endlessly vulnerable and in need of adult protection. And
yet with each renewed outbreak of public revulsion and outrage, children as a corporate body would garner a little strength. The radicalism of the early 1970s was beginning to trickle down, and
children would never be seen in quite the same light again. From now on, a child would be less and less an appendage of its parents; more and more an individual in its own right. It would take
another twenty years or so before children would have those individual rights enshrined in law, but the process had begun.

8
 Eighties to ASBOs

Natalie Dowse, born on the south coast of England in 1970, would later recall little of this radicalism. Yet she would remember a childhood that was free from many of the cares
her parents had faced: ‘My mum played an important role with her own family. Her father died when she was fourteen, and she looked after her younger siblings. She helped her mother –
from fourteen, she always cooked Sunday roast. When she was seventeen, she went to work full-time, as a secretary.’
¹

Natalie’s parents had met through a rock band in which her mother’s brother had played, and their world did not seem so far removed from her own world as maybe their parents’
had to them: ‘They lived in a council house and on a Sunday the kitchen was converted for band practice. Nan just let it happen, she was quite good like that – I think it was quite a
noisy household.’

There was a sense, by the 1970s, that children were being brought up by parents who were somehow more youthful than the previous generation of parents. Parents who had experienced war only as
children, and who had been afforded the opportunity to be young themselves before settling down. This was leading to a gradual narrowing in the generation gap, with some parents, at least,
beginning to relate to their children at least partly in a way which betokened friendship rather than authority.

‘We used to go out often as a family on Sunday, in the car,’ Natalie recalled. ‘I remember we’d listen to music and all four of us would sing along. My dad would play
ELO, Doctor Hook, things like that. Even now – my parents still say they don’t really want to grow up, they still buy music – my Mum will get a CD sometimes, and I’ll copy
it.’

For Natalie, there would be wider opportunities too. Unlike many teenagers of their parents’ generation, she and her sister did not feel the need to work to earn pocket money. On the face
of it, then, it might look as if the sky was lightening around childhood as the 1970s drew to a close. Yet in reality the opposite was the case. A combination of factors – the apparently
growing incidence of abuse, fears that television, divorce and the modern world were corrupting children and drawing them to violence, a sense of uncertainty about where childhood was headed
– were combining to create a sense of impending crisis in the world of the child. There was something in it, too: the 1970s were a more dangerous decade for children, in terms of
vulnerability to crime, than any other before or since. The child murder rate rose to an all-time high of 200 a year in 1974 – about three times the level at which it would officially stand
in the early years of the next millennium.
²
Natalie and her sister would follow strict rules about where they should and should not go when they
left the house alone: ‘When I went to comprehensive school, there was a short cut through the woods to get there. It took forty-five minutes to walk there by the road, but if you went through
the woods it took twenty. We had to walk through together – never alone. We pestered our parents because we didn’t want to walk the long way round. There had been incidents –
someone I knew had been attacked. So I knew it could happen.’

For girls, the 1970s were a time of flux. Most had never read the works of Shulamith Firestone and her like, of course, and so were
largely unaware that as female
children they were thought to be living a life weighted by multiple oppressions. Yet there was a sense of a desire to grasp opportunities that were just out of reach; a sense that the role of the
girl was changing. When Natalie told her school she wanted to study art, the response was not enthusiastic: ‘I remember they were setting up work experience, and we had to go and see a
teacher masquerading as careers adviser. I sat there and said I’d like to do something creative, or go to art college. And the teacher said: “What about hairdressing? That’s
creative.” I had a friend who wanted to be a hairdresser, so I said: “OK, maybe I could be a hairdresser.” I spent three weeks sweeping up and making coffee. I was probably quite
timid, and I didn’t have the strength to say it was really boring for me. I remember having this conversation with my dad while we were doing the washing up: “I’m really confused,
I thought I wanted to go to art college but now I think maybe I should be a hairdresser.” And he said: “Well, you’ve wanted to go to art college for a long time. So why
don’t you go to art college, and if you don’t like it you can go into hairdressing?” He wasn’t going to tell me what to do, but he was giving me the strength to do what I
wanted.’

Natalie, who had always been artistic, would take A-levels, go to art college and spend her life creating extraordinary, intensely coloured pictures of sunlit childhoods that were perhaps not
unlike her own. While the images her mother would have seen while growing up had been of perfect family lives, the young Natalie would be fascinated by strangely androgynous Soviet gymnasts such as
Olga Korbut and Nadia Comǎneci, who competed in the Olympics during the seventies, and by the tough, muscular girls who were pictured manhandling huge horses over fences. Later, her
artist’s studio would be full of her pictures of them – frozen images painted from television screen grabs, exuding a strangely alluring mix of glamour and sadness.

‘I had a book with Nadia Comǎneci’s picture in. I was told they went to sport schools and I thought that was really exotic and special. I think a lot of
girls wanted to be her – she was magical, doing amazing, dangerous things. I wonder if children associated them with being children – Olga Korbut was actually seventeen years old at the
1972 Olympics, but she looked pre-pubescent. And I used to beg and beg and beg to have a pony. My friend had a horse, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t have one. I remember
putting little notes under my dad’s pillow, so when he pulled it back it would say: “Please can I have a horse?”’
³

The gymnasts were pure political propaganda, of course – a Cold War instrument designed to show the West how invincible the Soviets were. But something happened in the translation: the
message that was being sent was quite different from the one that was being received by little girls in the Western world. To them, these were images of children exercising undreamed-of powers.
These were girls who did things girls had not previously been seen so publicly to do; girls with superpowers. A gymnastics craze swept the United Kingdom, and tens of thousands of little girls
queued to join, hoping they might be admitted to this newly empowered cadre of females.

The reading material available to girls at the time reflected this change, too. Now it was acceptable, maybe for the first time in many social strata, for girls to consider their future careers.
Noel Streatfeild’s
Ballet Shoes
– actually written before World War Two – was enduringly popular, telling the tale of three sisters who dream of a life on the stage or
– in one case – of flying aeroplanes. By the end of the book, career glory appears to beckon for all three, and they vow to put their names in the history books. Similarly,
White
Boots
told the tale of two girls striving to become champion ice-skaters – and underlined the message that hard work and determination were the keys to success. There was also a whole
genre of ‘career novels’ in which girls became seamstresses, hat-makers, publishers’ assistants. In most
cases, though, the endings of these novels were
just the same as the girls’ mothers’ endings – most of their heroines finished up marrying the boss – or better still, his handsome son – before settling down to a
life of domesticity.
⁴

While comprehensive schools were now throwing most girls into the company of boys, the private school system was still largely segregated. And it was struggling to chart an appropriate course in
this newly ambitious atmosphere. The selective girls’ schools had been founded, back in the late nineteenth century, by women who were closely linked to the suffrage movement, and so they had
their roots in a kind of traditionalist feminism which had little to do with the separatist, angry brand which was now growing up. Heather Montgomery, born in 1969 and attending a private school
run by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust in Surrey, found that while she was encouraged to excel academically, the range of career options on offer still seemed strangely limited: ‘If
you were a scientist, then you should go and be a GP. If you were arty, you could join the BBC. You have to remember, the teachers at my school trained twenty or thirty years earlier – I
don’t think there was anything at my school that would have been unfamiliar to a visitor from the fifties.’
⁵
Heather would go on to
Oxford, where she would meet a very particular breed of girl whose education had been similar to her own: ‘We had been educated to compete with men in the workplace, and certainly to compete
academically, but the downside was that I didn’t meet boys until I went to university. The girls were all beautifully groomed and very socially competent – until you put them with men.
They were really strong academically, but socially quite gauche. They found it very difficult to sit in tutorials and be taught with men. They tended to defer to them.’