My six-year-old daughter is reading Dorothy Edwards' My Naughty Little Sister and Bad Harry and something is puzzling her. Her brow furrows as she points to the text:
"Bad Harry lived quite near to us. There were no roads to cross to get to his house, and he and my sister often went round to visit each other without any grown-up person having to take them."
We already know that the narrator is a "little girl" and her sister is "littler": from the dialogue and her behaviour with Bad Harry, she's clearly three at most. "How can she do that? Why can't I do that?" asks my daughter. Then she offers her own reply. "Children can't do that these days, can they?"
With her reading just taking off, my Year Two girl is becoming immersed in children's classics which all have a common thread: their protagonists – existing 40 to 80 years ago - enjoy a far greater freedom than she, as a 21st-century child, does today.
So she loves Joyce Lankester Brisley's Milly-Molly-Mandy books, published from 1928, in which the heroine trots all over the village running errands for her family before progressing to camping out all night with her friends, sledging, and "keeping house" – which involves toasting bread on an open fire and frying bread and dripping – when her family go out one night.
Roald Dahl's 1975 classic Danny the Champion of the World is another favourite, in which nine-year-old Danny heads off in a Baby Austin to rescue his poacher father at two in the morning. Astrid Lindgren's 1945 Pippi Longstocking isn't so revered, but she's intrigued by a heroine who can live alone with a monkey and a horse and later take on a shark and bandits who threaten to kill her by picking them up and tossing them into a boat. Dipping a tentative toe into witchcraft, meanwhile, she is currently enjoying Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch series, first penned in 1974, in which the hapless Mildred Hubble is afforded freedom by being able to fly on a broomstick, perform spells and just be at boarding school. But it is the more prosaic settings that she loves best, such as the urban world of Catherine Storr's 1955 Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf: Polly is able to take the bus and train to her grandmother's on her own, visit the zoo and answer the door when her mother is out, but the familiar domestic setting reassures her when a hungry, talking wolf turns up.
Watching her enjoy these books – and ask why she can't walk to school alone like Milly-Molly-Mandy, or play by herself in the street like My Naughty Little Sister – has made me question whether she loves them precisely because of her more restricted lifestyle.
Like many modern parents I suspect I am overprotective – a trait compounded by having covered stories such as the Soham murders and the murder of Sarah Payne as a former Guardian news reporter. Though I know child abduction by a stranger is extremely rare – the most detailed Home Office figures date back to 2003 when there were 59 successful child abductions, and there is no evidence that the actual incidence, as opposed to reporting, has gone up – I also know that in freak instances little girls can be bundled into white vans when they run away from their older brothers. And I'm not unique in being concerned: a survey conducted in June by the charity Play England, part of the National Children's Bureau, found that only 40% of children play outside today, compared with 72% of their parents. So curtailed is some contemporary children's freedom that according to the survey of 2,000 children and 2,000 parents, a third of six to 15-year-olds had never climbed a tree or made a den.
According to Maria Nikolajeva, professor of education at Cambridge University and a specialist in children's literature, part of the appeal of these classic texts – and the likes of Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven series - is precisely the fact that the characters, unlike modern children, have the opportunity to roam free. This "exotic" freedom empowers the protagonists – and by extension the reader.
"Children being empowered is the main premise of all children's literature," she explains. "This idyllic world that once really existed is now like Narnia to a contemporary child. It's a utopia, something that adult readers long for and have nostalgic feelings about and that offers children a freedom they can't have in real life – we would never allow contemporary children the freedom offered by E Nesbit or Arthur Ransome because of the way society is today. These books endure exactly because they offer something that the child doesn't experience or isn't allowed to experience. Through the empowered protagonist, the reader experiences a second-degree vicarious empowerment."
The example of Ransome, whose 1930 Swallows and Amazons charts the adventures of four siblings who sail off alone in a boat to camp on an island one summer holiday, points up just how removed these adventures are from the experience of contemporary children. While their mother stipulates that they eat sufficient green vegetables and mentions not setting their tents on fire, she only asks that they let her know they're alive "every two or three days" and allows them to set sail despite seven-year-old Roger being unable to swim.
In a later book in the series, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, the quartet drift out from a river outlet on the Norfolk Broads and end up sailing to Holland. As Dr Diane Purkiss, lecturer in English at Keble College, Oxford, explains: "It's very plain, when you read it as an adult, that they are in mortal danger: at one point in mid channel, they're nearly run down by a steamer and at another point they're beating into the wind and nearly get swept under the waves. It's too much for any child." As the physical danger of We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea shows, being given excessive freedom doesn't mean children don't experience danger – but they do have to learn to negotiate it.
For a child of an earlier era, fairy stories provided their characters with this opportunity and so educated their readers. "Think of Red Riding Hood or Snow White," says Purkiss. "In these, little girls go into the woods and encounter various menaces. Once these would have acted as warnings about the sort of people they might meet but now, because we're so bothered about terrifying children, we have watered them down."
One classic that deals with child abduction quite explicitly – and in a way which may now seem shocking to modern parents - is CS Lewis's 1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A classicist drawing on the myth of perpetually priapic fauns kidnapping girls, Lewis has Mr Tumnus lure Lucy to his cave with food that would have seemed particularly lavish to an evacuee (and post-war readers dealing with rationing), and woo her into a Rohypnol-like trance with flute-playing and stories - before admitting to the "rather frightened" little girl who asks to leave: "I'm a kidnapper".
The faun repents and takes Lucy back to the safety of the Wardrobe but the threat – compounded by the White Witch then capturing Lucy's brother Edmund – remains. "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is a book about adult menace to children – and how to manage that menace," says Purkiss, who runs the children's literature course at Oxford. "The children have long talks about whom they can trust: a robin? A beaver? Tumnus? It's exactly the kind of debate that storytelling can give to a child to allow them to satisfy themselves about who they can trust."
Just as every modern parent faces the dilemma of when and how much they warn their child about strangers (as Purkiss puts it: "Do you scare the pants off them or will that disable them in a crisis?"), so they have to decide how much menace their child will find bearable. Says Purkiss: "Do you pick out books like Milly-Molly-Mandy – in which there's this totally secure world and the biggest problem is an uncomfortable play-date – or Clever Polly, in which there is menace and the girl has to outwit it?"
In fact, children tend to make the decisions themselves, reaching a point when they want more powerful child characters – whether ones who can manoeuvre boats through rocks, or – as in the case of the Secret Seven – foil incredible villains.
And so my six-year-old - who was terrified of trolls, giants and wicked fairies for far longer than many of her peers – is now tiring of Milly-Molly-Mandy's gentle world and delighting in that of Polly, in which a bright little girl subverts conventional fairy tales. The clue as to who will win – I keep reminding her - is in the title. We even managed to read the chapter in which the wolf finally succeeds in abducting Polly and imprisons her in his basement kitchen without hiding under the duvet. Well not too much.
Swallows and Amazons, Alice in Wonderland and Narnia may be some way off. But, with a taste for freedom – and, now, a touch of danger - I might have to steel myself for a run of Enid Blyton.
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10 January 2012 9:51AM
Not what you meant, I think.
10 January 2012 9:58AM
As 10 year olds, we used to walk to Saturday Morning Pictures at the cinema with no adult supervision and watch films about gangs of kids on bikes outwitting and overpowering nasty gangsters. As an 8 year old I also walked a mile to school on my own or with other kids.
I'm 40 now, and if I let a child do that, I'd be admonished by other parents.
10 January 2012 10:08AM
It's pleasing to find a parent actively encouraging reading today. Most simply plonk their offspring in front of a television or something computerised, and expect silence and invisibility until the next meal is due from the microwave. How novel, both literally and metaphorically, to envisage the possibility of broadening horizons by dipping into the childhood classics and showing the world outside the home, e.g. Enid Blyton's propaganda, warning people about the dangers of gang membership in her series on Five and Seven children terrorising the neighbourhood — led astray by those dangerously subversive ringleaders Timmy and Scamper. It reminds me of my own childhood when I read about being kidnapped by pirates intent on finding buried treasure. Had it not been for such books, I would never have been inspired to dig for gold at every possible opportunity and lurk with Ben Gunn in the undergrowth.
10 January 2012 10:17AM
Tellingly though, as part of a generation myself reared on Enid Bylton and other old-school children's authors who encouraged the trapping by ingenious means of smugglers and Nazis and assorted other ne'er do wells - this has had no impact on serious crime; if anything serious crime is on the rise; which I think says something...
10 January 2012 10:18AM
True and very, very sad. I used to walk 2 miles there and back to primary school in the early 1970s; we all did. It's unthinkable today and we've lost something as a result - not least the fact that our kids (mine included) learn independence at a far later age.
10 January 2012 10:22AM
I'm 40 and I wasn't allowed to play outside either. I wasn't even encouraged to play outside the front of my house - I had to use the back garden. Lots of solitary play and imaginary friends but it is sad that I longed to escape the cosy home I had. I dreamt of camping or going to boarding school and longed for some freedom like the characters in books I read. Admittedly in the days when children did roam more freely there were paedophiles around, and murders, accidents/illness did occur so it was not entirely safe then.
10 January 2012 10:25AM
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10 January 2012 10:39AM
I am 50 and I wasn't allowed to play out either. I didn't walk to school on my own (though when I was in my last year at primary I went there on my own by bus). I didn't camp out in the garden.
Perhaps I did have a little more freedom than my own children, but it is not simply a case of 'in the good old days we were all roaming freely and now children are locked up inside'.
One of the reasons that children in children's books are so often orphans is to get the parents out of the way. It's something children enjoy as a fantasy and have, oh, since at least the Edwardian period when E Nesbit's books were written. The freedom that Ransome's characters were allowed seemed utterly extraordinary to me as a child. And it would have been extraordinary when the books were first written too.
The books under discussion are fantastic, but let's not get caught up in the canard that we are imprisoning children when in past generations they were allowed to roam freely.
10 January 2012 10:45AM
While the thrust of this article is surely right, I think there's some exaggeration going on. It's surely a mistake to assume that the idyllic worlds presented in children's books from earlier in the twentieth century - even the ones that aren't overtly fantasy - are all realistic. Books like the Famous Five or Swallows and Amazons were popular in their day because they presented fantasy situations, not because they reflected their readers' real situations. I don't think many children even sixty years ago spent their time sailing off to smugglers' coves and the like. Even Milly Molly Mandy's bland adventures in her twee rural existence would have seemed exotic and exciting to many of her readers. And Danny Champion of the World is hardly supposed to have had a normal upbringing - his unusual situation is rather the point of the book.
Of course the article has a point about the relative freedoms even of urban children today compared to those a few generations back. It's telling that William Brown, who stereotypically spends his days running riot through the countryside stealing apples and setting his dog on rats, is actually portrayed as living in a suburban commuter town presumably on the outskirts of London, where I doubt many children behave like that today. Those stories were originally conceived as satires on adult society, not as children's books at all, and therefore lack the starry-eyed idealism of Enid Blyton and the like - at least to begin with. That's pretty revealing. My point is just that one shouldn't push the point too far - if the impossibility of the freedoms enjoyed by the protagonists of old children's stories are part of the appeal today, then they surely were back then as well, at least to some degree.
10 January 2012 11:02AM
Bloodydoorsoff
Wessexboy
Luxury! You people had it really soft. I used to RUN 20miles to school through 6 feet of snow, even in summer, with a rucksack containing 2 copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And on the way back I had to make a 10 mile detour to feed my grandfather's Rotweilers!
Who was it who said that a man's age is inversely proportional to the distance he used to walk to school as a child?
10 January 2012 11:05AM
Sorry that should be "proportional", not "inversely proportional". Innumeracy strikes!
10 January 2012 11:17AM
No, but we were trained to. We were ready to go off at any instant and pit our young wits against spies, foreign espionage agents and serious criminal gangs. That was the point. Few got the actual opportunity, the rest of us had our feet up, so to speak, ready to "scramble." Unfortunately you have to say the war has been lost, the criminals have won. It would be sheer madness to train our kids to go up against today's career criminals. They wouldn't stand a bloody chance.
10 January 2012 11:20AM
It's worth making the point that the heroes and heroines of many children's books - as of older fairytales - have parents who are absent or dead, and instead have various types of guardian who are neglectful or actively nasty. This is what gives them their independence and often their motivation. Not true in all cases of course (e.g. Milly-Molly-Mandy) but enough to be significant.
10 January 2012 11:21AM
As a kid of 7/8 I was free to wander the local area as I saw fit. If I left the road I had to let one of my parents know, but they never stopped me.
Now I know kids who can’t go further than the end of their driveway without direct parental supervision and go forbid they should make their own way to school!
No wonder so many are becoming neurotic teenagers.
10 January 2012 11:25AM
Now 47 ranged far and wide as a kid, increasing in distance as I grew. Most kids I knew did and the one greatest change I can see, apart from the hysterical portrayal of danger in the media is the domination by motor vehicles of our streets.
Even crossing the major trunk road that divided the suburban town I grew up in was a breeze, hardly any traffic, and nothing parked at the side of the road for miles, so seeing and avoiding the infrequent traffic was given barely a thought, by children or adults.
Children as they grew where expected to be able to take care of themselves out and about all day in woods and fields, and in my own case with cousin and younger brother battling the watrefall of grand union cana lockgates for days on a rubber dinghy when we couldn't make our own, usually rubbish, rafts. How happy we were for pvc.
Look at the picture above - what's not in it? Bloody cars parked both sides of the street and idiots on mobiles driving at thirty down the middle.
We have given up the ability of children to play unattended for our abilty to drive, and so we have corralled them. Look at the recent Grand Designs with the Brighton co-op, children of all ages playing together under the houses, no cars, no danger, lots of play.
10 January 2012 11:44AM
The caption does not seem to match the picture. All I can see is five children siting on a kerb, apparently doing nothing apart from passing the time of day. Not much different from siting on a sofa watching TV.
10 January 2012 11:48AM
Are you the missing fifth Yorkshireman?
10 January 2012 11:57AM
While I don't doubt that older generations were more free range (although I suspect sometimes that this has more to do with urban vs rural/suburban upbringings) I think this can also be understood in terms of genre, where protagonists always have more exciting lives than you do. They live dangerously so we don't have to!
(On reflection I say JonathonCR makes a sonewhat similar point.)
10 January 2012 12:02PM
David 91
Re:
It's pleasing to find a parent actively encouraging reading today. Most simply plonk their offspring in front of a television or something computerised, and expect silence and invisibility until the next meal is due from the microwave.
Are you a parent? Do you actually know any parents?? Where do you get your mis-information?