Dear Phantom 4 - Not an Easy Childhood

Dear Temple Cloud,

I left a note to Father Christmas saying this was the last time I’d be hanging up my stocking, as I would be a teenager by next year.  Okay, I’ve known Father Christmas was my mum since I was eight, and I think I’d suspected it for a long time before that, but I didn’t want to give up the ritual until I stopped being a child.

‘Father Christmas’ left me the fluffy teddy bear I had seen in a toyshop and thought was absolutely beautiful – and also some lipstick and mascara.  I love the bear; even if I’m not likely to drag him around everywhere the way I did with my other cuddly toys when I was little, he’s wonderfully soft to cuddle. 

I suppose my mum gave me the make-up to say, ‘There are fun things about being a teenager, too.’  But I don’t see the fun in make-up, at least when you have to be subtle about it.  It’s not like painting your face to look like a tiger or a clown.  As far as I can see from the teenage magazines in the school library, the aim of make-up is to look as though you’re not wearing make-up, so surely the easiest way to achieve that is not to wear make-up?

We’ve had a little snow – not enough to build a snowman, but enough to scrape off garden walls to make a few snowballs.  I asked my brother to play snowball fight, but he complained about how embarrassing I was.  I’m sure that’s the sort of thing teenagers normally say about their ten-year-old brothers, not the other way round.  Why is he so much better at being a teenager, at ten, than I am at nearly thirteen?

What did you mean about my being afraid to leave childhood because I wasn’t a very confident, secure child?

Yours,

Phantom of the Library

Dear Phantom,

One thing to look forward to about being grown-up is – no-one tells you that you aren’t allowed to have cuddly toys or play in the snow, or that you have to wear make-up!  I completely agree with you about the make-up, by the way – I still can’t see the point in it.  When you’re young, you don’t need it, and when you’re older, it doesn’t fool anyone.  I even refused to let my friends give me a makeover for my wedding day.

The only exception I would give would be stage make-up.  Even if you’re playing a character who looks like you, you still need your features outlined so that they are visible under the bright stage spotlights, or your face will be just a pale blur.  And if you’re playing someone who looks very different – the last few characters I have played include a frail elderly lady in a murder mystery, and a forest troll in a pantomime – then it’s more like face-painting at the village fête.  (Actually, I still do that, too!)

But going back to childhood and adolescence: I don’t think you have been a very happy child for most of the past ten years.  A lot of adults seem to assume that, unless you are a victim of abuse, or living in extreme poverty, or in the middle of a war, childhood is a happy, untroubled time when you don’t know anything about the problems of the world.  Mum says that when she was seven years old, in the 1950s, her biggest problems were briefly quarrelling with her best friend, and worrying about how Father Christmas would fit down the chimney now that her father had put a grille over it to stop crows nesting in it, and whether her rabbit who had supposedly ‘run away’ might catch myxomatosis (because her father was too much of a coward to tell her that her rabbit had died of old age).

When you were seven years old, in the 1980s, you couldn’t sleep for worrying about AIDS and pollution and over-population and the destruction of the rainforests.  Teachers in the 1980s seemed to think that primary-school children needed to know about and worry about all the problems of the world before they had learned to deal with their own personal problems.  And unlike the next generation of children, in the 21^st century, you weren’t in a position to campaign to solve these problems, so all you could do was worry.

Nevertheless, I think you were more anxious than most children of the 1980s.  At the same time that you were worrying about AIDS and pollution, you were also worrying about whether, as a Christian child in a multi-cultural school, it was a sin to join in the school celebration of Diwali.  But when I recently asked a Jewish friend who was at the same school whether she had felt uneasy about the school Nativity play and Christmas carols, she said that at seven, she had never thought about it.  So maybe it’s just us.

You weren’t always like this.  I don’t remember being a toddler, but from what mum tells me, it sounds as though you/we were a happy, confident child for the first three years of life.  When you resumed talking after briefly going mute while you concentrated on learning to walk, you talked in full sentences.  So if you didn’t like something, instead of throwing a tantrum, you could explain why you wanted to drop out of playgroup, or that you didn’t think it should be bedtime yet, or that you didn’t want to tidy your toys away. 

You were usually fairly amiable and reasonable, but you were confident enough to test the boundaries by sometimes saying, ‘No.’  And because mum and dad were also amiable, reasonable people, and didn’t assume that being a responsible parent means being authoritarian and hitting children for daring to express views of their own, they were willing to listen and sometimes let you have your way.

Of course, not everything was straightforward.  You were autistic, after all.  You hated loud noises, like fireworks, or the blender, or the lawnmower, or the vacuum cleaner.  You knew the lawnmower was dangerous if you got your feet too close to it, so you assumed that the vacuum cleaner, a noisy old Hoover shaped rather like a lawnmower, was dangerous too.  Whenever mum was vacuuming, you climbed up on the sofa and pretended that the sofa was a ship and the vacuum cleaner was a sea-monster.

You didn’t like being tickled or kissed or cuddled as a toddler, because it was overstimulating.  You grumbled that ‘cuddles make you hot and kisses make you wet.’  This is one example of how we have always been at the ‘wrong’ developmental stage for where people expected us to be.  By the time you were four and actually wanted to be cuddled, you were at school, and the teachers weren’t allowed to cuddle you for fear of being accused of sexual abuse.

You didn’t like playing with other children.  When mum first took you to a mums-and-toddlers group, the other parents there commented that you weren’t doing much to make friends with the other children there.  Mum thought, ‘Well, surely that’s what she’s here to learn?’ but other people had noticed that you weren’t typical for a child your age.  You decided to quit playgroup because all the activities you actually liked, like painting and making collages or playing with water or sand, were ones you could do at home, and you weren’t interested in the social side of being there.

You didn’t mind being around other children on a one-to-one basis, going to their houses or their being brought round to yours, rather than dealing with a crowd of people at playgroup.  But when you were nearly three and Mummy asked you to make a list of friends you wanted to spend your days with while Mummy was in hospital having her baby, you didn’t know what to say.  Your mind had gone blank and you could barely even think of the names of other children you knew, let alone whether you wanted to spend all day with them.

The only name that came to mind was, ‘Daddy!’  Mummy tried to explain that yes, Daddy would be looking after you, but he couldn’t be with you all day every day and give you your lunch, because he still had to go in to work.  You didn’t really take the words in.  You thought that Daddy probably needed to spend his days at the hospital with Mummy, without you, to make the baby be born.  You weren’t clear about how babies started (apparently the baby was ‘in Mummy’s tummy’ which you had thought meant Mummy must have swallowed the baby, but Mummy said no, mummies didn’t eat babies), but you were pretty sure that it involved mummies and daddies being together.  You hoped the baby would be a girl.  You wanted a sister, not a brother.

You were staying with a girl your age and her mother, making popcorn, when the phone call came to announce that you had two baby brothers.  You don’t remember the little girl and her mother, beyond their first names, but you remember how amazing it was seeing hard yellow kernels of maize, like the ones you had fed the pigeons with in Trafalgar Square when you went to London to visit your uncle, burst into fluffy white clouds.

You remember going to the maternity hospital with dad, walking along endless corridors carrying a box of Cadbury’s Roses chocolates, and wishing the journey would just be over so that mum would open the box of sweets and let you have some.  After all, sweets were for children, not for grown-ups, anyone could see that!

I don’t remember how we felt, seeing the two new babies (I’m trying to keep these letters anonymous, so let’s call them Engineer Brother and Artist Brother) for the first time.  Mum says that our first comment was that Engineer Brother ‘looks like a baby marmoset!’

What I do remember is, a few days before she went into hospital, mum asking us to test whether we were able to take the lid off a plastic tub, so that she could leave out a snack of some raisins or a piece of carrot or apple for us to have first thing in the morning.  After all, she might not be energetic enough to get up and make us a snack, after a night of looking after the new baby – or, as it turned out, babies.  From now on, we had to learn to be independent, and life would never be the same again.

I’ll write again soon,

Temple Cloud