Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (19 page)

I had hundreds of soldiers in a large rusty circular tin that stayed in the damp back room – cowboys and Indians, Confederates and Yankees, knights whose legs and arms moved and could be swapped over, called ‘Swap-its’, Russian soldiers with a red star in the middle of their grey winter hats. I had bought the six Russian soldiers in Millisle and played outside Minnie McFall’s caravan in the sand. The knights on horseback were so intricate and such a delight to look at that my mother put them on display with all the best china in the china cabinet. Two knights, the Red Rose of the House of Lancaster and the White Rose of the House of York, were on parade on the top shelf. We weren’t allowed to go near the china cabinet, or feed the gas meter which was just behind it. And when you wanted to play with the knights you had to ask for the key and remove them with a very steady hand from the glass cabinet, which always seemed to tremble and shake with all that china. I can still
remember the smell of the china cabinet. All the smells that I have experienced in this life, the lavender in the quiet fields beyond Sainte Maxime, the close-up smell of drying sea-weed on those wild gull-squawking shores north of Santa Barbara, the fragrant smell of leather in the market in Hammamet with mint tea in the background, but I can still smell the inside of that cabinet with greater ease and with greater clarity than any of them, as if I have just leaned into the cabinet and breathed again. Don’t ask me to describe the smell; it must have been some kind of cleaning material that had evaporated in a glass container over many years.

All the soldiers eventually found their way into the fort. It was a generic sort of fort though it looked like Fort Laramie, from the Wild West, on the black-and-white television. But my mother told me that her daddy had been to a fort like that in India. George Willoughby she called her daddy, just in case I thought it was George Bell: my cousins Myrna and Jacqueline’s brother. My father knew of George’s days in India and this might have given him the idea that guided his craftsmanship. British soldiers of the Raj patrolled that fort at night in the corner of our front room, but no shops seemed to sell models of the enemy, whoever the enemy were. But that didn’t matter to me, a boy with a fertile and vivid imagination, in a damp, crumbling mill house, who could spend hours on the floor and not be bored. I often didn’t want to go out. I was happy in there: sometimes my mother had to make me go out and play on the street.

But one Thursday in July when I was about eleven we were going to my Uncle Terence’s and my mother told me that I was now too old for the fort and the soldiers. She was tired of cleaning my kneecaps with Vim because of the amount of time I spent on the floor. ‘You’re too old to be on your hands and knees all the time. You’re too old for that sort of childish nonsense.’ It was all done in a matter-of-fact sort of way, as if it was no big deal. The fort got in the way in such a small house. We kept it in the back room, where the wallpaper hung in great damp swathes from the slimy green wall with the damp running down in rivulets. The fort was
going rusty like the metal container with the soldiers, like the tools we kept there, like everything else in the house. It had to go and it was loaded into our car. I don’t know who loaded it into the car, perhaps my brother. I was told that the poor children up in Ligoniel would love it. I was told that I had had my enjoyment. It was somebody else’s turn. I was assured that the children up in Ligoniel weren’t as well off as we were. They had no missile sites, or garages with lifts that could be wound up, or forts made at work by their fathers in good jobs. I knew that they were from big families, families sometimes with no work, Roman Catholic families. ‘Too bloody idle,’ our neighbours liked to say when Big Terry wasn’t about (I learned later that my Uncle Terence was himself a Catholic, and that, of course, was a big issue in those days in Belfast, although some days looking back now I can’t really understand why).

There was a steep hill at the end of Lesley Street; we called it ‘the dump’. I suspect that it wasn’t an official refuse site. I remember old settees with rusty springs sticking out and bags of open tin cans with large black crows picking at them. My mother told me to leave the fort out on the dump. She told me that it would be found, and that one of the boys from Ligoniel would have a childhood filled with imagination because of that fort: the fort that my grandfather had fought in, and my father had made.

My uncle came with me as I laid the fort out in the middle of a hill of refuse. Dust and hairs, human and dog, filled the cracks, ingrained and dense like thread. But it was well looked after. That’s another expression my family liked. The fort, the car and the front step that my mother would wash every couple of days on her hands and her knees, a white froth on the pavement outside the house swept away by basins of cold water. All well looked after, all cared for. Loved, if you like. It was a very Ulster Protestant way of thinking about these things.

So I carried the fort and left it in the middle of this long slope filled with human debris. A beautiful handcrafted artefact that had been at the centre of my childhood: that still was at the centre of my childhood. That perhaps was the problem. My mother decided that at eleven I shouldn’t be in
the front room on all fours with cowboys and Indians and Russians with the red star on their caps. I walked back up the slope with my uncle, who talked about our dog being humiliated by a rat in Barginnis Street. ‘That dog of yours can’t bloody well fight,’ my uncle said. ‘It’s embarrassing. It’s not a dog at all.’

We all sat in my uncle’s front room, my Aunt Agnes, my father, my mother and Terence’s mother. There was a crucifix on the wall as you came in. I had only ever seen one in the Rocks’ house. I never understood what it was doing in my Uncle Terence’s house before Kevin Rock explained. My mother always said that it was something to do with Terence’s mother. I didn’t know what though. But I couldn’t stop thinking of the fort. I was always told that I was spoiled compared to some of the boys in my street, and especially compared to the boys at the top of the Ligoniel Road. I always thought that meant Catholic boys with their big families and their crammed houses, the same size as ours but packed with five or six of them to a bed, where they would sleep top to tail. They would run into their own house in the afternoon to dip dry bread in the sugar bowl that stayed in the cabinet in the front room, or they would nick a few spuds from the back of the potato lorry to roast in an open fire up the fields; they would beg food. ‘You are spoiled rotten,’ my mother would say in our back room with water running down the walls, ‘and don’t forget that.’ Deprivation is, after all, always a relative concept. I knew that I had more toys than any of them but I didn’t want to give the fort away.

I don’t know where I got the hammer from; it must have been from the toolbox in the back room of my uncle’s house. I must have had to search for it. It was a big heavy claw hammer. I hid it up inside my coat and said that I was going out. The fort was still there, just as I had left it, in the middle of the dump. No deprived child had got there yet. I sat down on the slope beside it. I suppose that it was almost like playing again. The first blow flattened two or three of the metal ramparts. The second removed one section of the metal steps. I sat on the dirty stones among the piles of rubbish and hammered away. I wasn’t emotional about what I was doing. It was a cold act. I was just determined
that no child, no matter how deprived or how needy or how hungry, would get my fort where my grandfather had fought for the British Empire, where Davy Crockett, whose father came from County Londonderry, had held out against the Mexicans at the Alamo, where my dreams of lands far away from cold damp mill houses that turned everything to rust had been nurtured.

I was obviously engrossed in my little frenzy of destruction because what I remember next is my father and uncle standing over me. They must have wondered where I had got to. My father looked almost puzzled, perhaps a little hurt that he had a son who could be like this. I looked up at them. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I needed to explain my actions, to justify myself. I remember what I said quite clearly. ‘It’s dangerous,’ I said. I remember those very words just coming out. ‘Those sharp metal ends, they could hurt somebody. You can’t just leave it here. Somebody might cut himself on it. I was just making it safe for them.’

I was led away by my father and my uncle, who didn’t say anything or even look at each other. ‘Let’s just leave it here the way it is,’ said my father eventually.

‘But it’s ruined now,’ I said. ‘It’s ruined.’ I was crying by now, sniffing loudly, wiping my nose on my sleeve. I remember looking down at the trail of smeared, green, thick mucus along my sleeve and thinking that there was just so much mucus. My voice as it sounded then is clear even now. It was a whining, imploring sort of crying that accompanied my excuses. But why I was crying I don’t really know: perhaps it was being caught red-handed, the guilt of the whole thing, the fact that there was no way to hide my shame. Or perhaps it was just my way of showing them that I was still a child, who needed to dream, whose time had not come to leave these particular things behind.

This is a memory from my childhood but a memory that defines some of the more negative aspects of my own enduring character. I become attached to my possessions, they are part of me, I cannot give them away, I cannot recycle, I cannot hand them over. But how do we break the emotional bond with material objects? And how do we stop materialism feeding into concepts of self-identity and self
worth? How do we stop people feeling insecure when they cannot define themselves in any other way except through purchase or display? If we are going to do something about global warming then we will need to change many deeply ingrained habits. Some of this will not be easy. I know: believe me, I know.

This book was always going to be a journey, a journey in uncharted territory, maybe even a little stop–start at times, but I felt that some slow progress was being made. I now knew certain things. I knew that attitudes were generally positive towards low-carbon-footprint products and that people were, inside, relatively green (in some domains at least), but I also knew that people didn’t really pick up on carbon footprint information in the time it takes to make a supermarket decision. The idea behind carbon labelling was (in principle) a good one, an empowering one. It allowed ordinary people to act in accordance with their underlying beliefs, but the actual mechanics of carbon labelling – how the information was represented, what kind of icons were used, what kind of numerical information was included, how the label looked – all needed a little bit more thought. Even those with the right underlying attitudes, the majority of the respondents, weren’t attending to the information in that 5-second or 10-second envelope that is critical to the purchasing decision in the supermarket. And perhaps people didn’t really care quite enough to find the carbon label icon in the necessary time frame. Their attention was not automatically drawn to it.

The research so far had also thrown up something else that was quite interesting. It allowed me to identify a certain group of people, between 10 and 20 per cent in the original sample, in which the two types of attitude (explicit and implicit) did not match, and it is to these individuals that I now turn. When I started thinking about this group a few
months ago when I first saw the results, I called them ‘the green fakers’. However, I grew to dislike this term; it is unkind and unfair, unfair to them and unfair to me because when I asked Laura to run me through the experiment I discovered that I was one of them. In order to understand these people (and myself) I needed to understand a bit more about how these two attitudes are actually represented in the human brain, and in order to do this, I needed to consider in much more detail the limitations of the research that I had done so far on underlying attitudes. I suspected that this held the key to a lot of the important issues.

The research so far on attitudes was, of course, exploratory and by necessity purely descriptive. It didn’t really consider how the explicit and implicit attitudes were related within the individual. Were they significantly correlated or were they discrepant? Could there, in fact, be some level of ‘dissociation’ between them? (‘Dissociation’ is one of those psychological terms that seems so complex but at its heart is very simple – it just means ‘being separate’ or ‘lack of connection’, although I will discuss in a moment how psychologists use this term to refer to different states.) And if there are marked discrepancies within individuals, what are the psychological consequences for ordinary people (and me) of attempting to understand and explain their everyday actions concerning green choices in supermarket shopping? Furthermore, if implicit attitudes are largely unconscious, unlike explicit attitudes, can we rethink the role of unconscious impulses in everyday behaviour? Could we, in fact, look for evidence of the unconscious breaking through, perhaps as Freud (1901/1975) had done over a century earlier with respect to slips of the tongue? Any attempt to answer these questions will require a much fuller description of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and a consideration of the new research into how thinking and speaking are represented and generated by the human brain. Interestingly, this will involve not just the analysis of speech itself (as Freud had done), but the analysis of human communicative behaviour more generally, because current research in psychology suggests that speech and the accompanying hand movements must be considered
together
to understand more fully speakers’ underlying thought processes.

But first the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes. There is now a
major
controversy within psychology about the relationship between these two constructs. Many psychologists maintain that the representations underlying explicit and implicit attitudes are, in fact, dissociated. According to Greenwald and Nosek (2008:65):