Suffer the children.

Tahitiennes in mission clothing

It had all gone quiet outside.

I sat cramped up between the toilet bowl and the wall.

I kept my head down.

I was thus invisible to anyone able to look in through the window.

I had thought it through.

This was rebellion.

I had locked myself in the toilet.

No amount of pleading or threats would change my mind.

I wouldn't go to church.

I wouldn't go to church.

I wouldn't go to church.

"You have to get them when they are young." 

The Jesuits would say.

I knew that I disbelieved young.

I had been taken to church.

I had been taught to say my prayers.

I never ever had a clue about what the point of it all was.

I had sat through hour after hour of hymn, prayer, sermon.

I successfully dropped out of Sunday School.

There were shocked silences when my brother announced to the family:

"Simon doesn't believe in God."

I must have been about eight years old.

I felt alone.

I had had enough of keeping up appearances.

I was prepared to deal with the fall-out.

I was fortunate that I had the parents that I had.

My friend feared admitting disbelief to his Jehova's Witness parents

He preferred to feign belief rather than be left alone.

Colonisation of childhood

I was thinking about the term "colonisation". 

I was thinking about the term "childhood".

According to Neil Postman literacy changed European visions of childhood.

"Literate man" was adult man and adulthood had to be earned.

"It became a symbolic, not a biological achievement. From print onward, the young would have to become adults, and they would have to do it by learning to read, by entering the world of typography, and they would do it by learning to read. And in order to accomplish that they would require education. Therefore,  European civilization reinvented schools. And by so doing made childhood a necessity."

What is the line between upbringing, education, colonisation? I wonder.

Does one beat belief into a child?

Does disbelief come from literacy?

I remembered images of Amazonian "Indians" dressed in Mission Wear.

I fell upon an article entitled:

"The Colonisation of Maori Children."

http://www.kaupapamaori.com/assets//SmithL/nga_aho_o_te_kakahu_matauranga_chpt8.pdf

How much does school disconnect?

How much does (our) literacy deny?

I read:

"Maori beliefs about children can be located within a world view in which language, landscape, time space, relationships and technology were all interconnected. Children themselves were markers of history and repositories of knowledge...Children were also known to have participated in politics and decision making of community life."

Maori culture and their relationships with their own children were fundamentally threatened by schooling.

Within what world view would we locate our beliefs about children?

What would so called "digital literacy" disconnect?

Would the destruction of Amazonian forest, and the disappearance of Amazonian peoples have anything to do with "our" literacy, "our beliefs", "our education", "our" disconnections?

Beach-wear battles.

"And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."

Genesis 3:7

"When I was a child," he would say, "I fell off the steps of a bathing machine and had to be rescued."

"What's a bathing machine?" I would ask.

"Well ladies used to wear long dresses to go for a swim and they would be taken out to bathe in a sort of beach hut on wheels which was pulled by a horse."

"I remember being in the bathing machine and suddenly I fell off the back. I almost drowned"

I listened to the explanations but was unable to process what I was told. 

It all seemed so unlikely. 

I couldn't understand  it at all. 

My father had almost drowned in the preservation of his aunt's modesty.

I couldn't understand it at all.

I was unable to imagine the beach lined with horses and huts on wheels.

I gave an invisible shrug of my shoulders and went back to building the sandcastle.

Costumes, suits and trunks.

"Oh you can't go on wearing that swimming costume. It's dreadful!"

My father was a little upset that my mother was critical of his "swimming costume". 

What strange words they are:

• "swimming costume"
• "swimming trunks"
• "swim-suit.

Those words became a battleground between generations.

There was a cold war between mother and daughter-in-law.

The swimming trunks horrified my grandmother. 

"......" (sharp intake of breath)

The swimming costume embarrassed my mother.

"Oh you can't go on wearing that."

My mother triumphed.

My father's chest would be thereafter bare.

We were in the 1950's for goodness sake.

We were no longer in an Edwardian age.

My grandmother maintained a dignified, disapproving silence.

I suspect that my father was fearful at first.

I suspect that my grandmother said prayers, willing God to intervene.

I suspect that my mother felt rather smug.

I listened to my mother's story.

I was unable to understand the strong emotions.

I went back to building the sandcastle.

Sundays in summer.

The following day the sun rose.

We were greeted with a perfect English summer's day.

My thoughts were fixed on that sandcastle.

I would feel upset, frustrated, angry.

It was a Sunday.

We wouldn't be going to the beach.

NO BEACH, NO FOOTBALL, SUNDAY BEST, BOILED EGGS FOR TEA, BIBLE STUDY, 

CONTEMPLATION, PRAYER, LETTER WRITING, SUNDAY SERVICE, SOLEMNITY.

I developed a deep loathing for Sundays.

Beach-wear battles

My friend Maha reminded me of these stories.

She writes of her personal battles with beach-wear.

http://blog.mahabali.me/blog/parenting/the-colonization-of-propriety/

She talks of her daughter yearning to play with her in the sea.

"I watched my girl in the water with her dad. And her looking at me with a yearning in her eyes. And I thought, “I could have that. Give her that”. And I saw no loss of dignity in that."

I was brought back to those beach-wear battles between my grandmother and my mother.

I was brought back to those feelings of utter frustration as a child.

I remember all that was forbidden. 

I remember the embarrassed silences.

I remember the boiled eggs.

I think of the joy of the child frolicking in the waves with his or her parents.

That thought makes me happy.

I think of the hurt that my grandmother must have felt.

That thought makes me sad.

Fall from Eden.

The sun is shining now.

We shall be going to the South of France soon.

There will be people in various states of undress.

Nobody will give a fig.

There will be no risky bathing machines.

We shall swim, lark around and build sandcastles every day.

I want my children to have the freedom that I never had.

Post Script.

I went back and read what I had written.

I read, "Nobody gives a fig."

I thought of Maha.