Now that I have children of my own, I often think of the rules, pleasures and traditions of my own childhood, and of the war, which so largely determined them. I was born in 1939, so that all my earliest years were influenced by wartime or post-war austerities, and some of the habits of those years are with me for good. I still consider cream and chocolate as rare luxuries, and I can never bring myself to eat bananas, although I like them, because I have an irrational reverence for them and am always leaving them ╥for the children.╙ It is not that I missed these things as a child; I did not, because I had not known what they were like. My first banana was in fact a great disillusion, and for a long time I preferred those dried black ones; I also preferred tinned milk to cream. And I know people my own age who cherish a taste for dried fruit salad and dried eggs.
I also preserve a not wholly salutary parsimony about leftover food; I am forever putting solitary sprouts or small pieces of fried liver back into the refrigerator, only to throw them out a week later in despair. Even less fruitful are the occasions when I eat unwanted slices of bread and butter, which do nothing but threaten my figure and my health. But I simply cannot bear to put them in the bin. I make bread puddings from time to time, but the children loathe them, and I have to eat up all their leftover helpings, which leaves me exactly where I started.
It is my own children, and my attempts to discipline them, that make my recollections so disturbing. Sweets, for instance, are a constant source of anxiety. Part of me is convinced that it is bad for children to eat sweets every day (morally bad, I mean, and not merely bad for their teeth) and another part of me feels that it is wrong to make such a triviality a bone of moral contention. The result is that six days out of seven I let them get on with it, and then on the seventh day I turn on them and deny them and tell them bitter tales of the hardships I endured, confectionery-wise, when I was a little girl. (I despise myself for doing this, but all mothers do it, I think.)
Toys are another source of confusion and irrationality. Although I was never a tidy child, I was a great hoarder and collector, and this was doubtless a trait born of necessity, because I knew that if I lost things, they would be hard to replace. But nowadays toys are so beautiful and plentiful that it is hard to impose such a sense of necessity upon a child, and I often worry because my children (though small enough as yet) show no respect for objects at all, not even their own favourite ones; if I don╒t assemble the jigsaws and put the wooden fire engines together again nobody does, and moreover nobody cares. They aren╒t even sorry when they lose things, so why should I spend hours on my hands and knees looking for missing pieces? When I do, it is largely for selfish reasons, because I like a particular toy, or because I bought it myself.
In short, I worry that my children will be spoiled, and not because of my wicked indulgence, but because of the delightful affluence in England today. I suppose one could say that it would be perfectly easy to opt out of affluence, and to impose rigid family restrictions on ice-cream consumption and toy maintenance, but this is not so. I do not think it is good for children to be brought up very much more strictly than their neighbours, for one thing. And for another thing, I am far from admiring all my own meanness, because I can see how inconsistent they are. For instance, I buy yoghurt for pudding with a feeling of virtue, because it has no wartime associations, whereas I jib at buying ice-cream or opening a tin of fruit, which are cheaper and probably as nourishing. It is, I think, really difficult to know where to draw firm lines, amid so much diversity and choice; it is easy enough to say no when a child requests a bicycle or a rocking horse, but not so easy to draw distinctions between twopenny sweets, threepenny sweets, and no sweets at all. I really don╒t want my children to grow up thinking, as I do, that a bar of chocolate is a painfully vexed indulgence: on the other hand, I don╒t want them to yell with fury (as they occasionally do) when the wrong brand of confectionery is presented.
Like many parents of my generation, I am a constant reader of Dr Spock, and it is perhaps significant that the main point on which Spock and I part company is the question of affluence. Spock assumes a high standard of living. I know he says that little babies can sleep quite comfortably in cardboard boxes, but he also demands things which are an impossibility in many homes in Britain today, such as a constant warm steady indoor temperature. And his views on food are to my war-trained soul truly suspect. If a child doesn╒t like what it is offered, he says, offer it something else. I tried this for a couple of years, but finally the sheer wastage, the unpalatable scrapings I devoured to defeat the garbage, and the strain on my invention overcame me, and I abandoned Spock╒s advice, deciding it was clearly contrary to the strict economics of life: now if they won╒t eat it, they go without (or that╒s my principle, anyway).
But I doubt if I shall ever know whether it is reason that has triumphed or whether it is a dim memory of a horrific image called, if I remember correctly, a Squanderbug.
