Freedom Child

Today

I've been down in Brighton this weekend for a singing workshop on Bach's B Minor Mass. About 100 of us collected in the village Hall at Alfriston and worked hard to bring some shape to the piece.

One of my neighbours, a thin, jumpy woman of about 70, asked us if we could give her a lift on the Sunday as the trains weren't running. She'd cycle to the flat from Hove, she said, if we could take her from there. No problem.

Once in the car she had much to say about the modern trend to over-protect our children. "Children need freedom more than they need protecting from - what are they called? -paedophiles" she proclaimed. "Why, when I was a child my mother never worried if I was camping in the woods. And we didn't even have a tent." Liberal or culpably negligent? Hard to say.

In My Day

I was brought up in London which, to an extent, automatically curtailed freedom. We lived on a main road and our large garden that provided most of what we needed in the way of a play environment. However, Mamma and Daddy did take a relaxed attitude over many things, allowing us to walk or bus to school unattended, for example, from the age of about 7.

The most memorable occasion was during the Summer of 1954 when I was about 6 and my brother about 9. Mamma was away all day at the Proms and Daddy gave Chris the wherewithal to take me to Hastings. Why he did this I've no idea. Perhaps we were nagging for a seaside trip or maybe he was trying a social experiment.

Anyway, off we went. Chris had return tickets and we caught the train from East Croydon to Hastings. I remember only a few things: that the weather was rather dampish and sitting on the beach not as much fun as I'd hoped. That Chris bought as a bag of plums to share and I didn't want any more after I discovered a maggot in one of mine.

And finally, that, somehow, the return tickets fell out of my brother's pocket and were lost. And he didn't have enough money for any more. Talking this over with him the other day he said he thought that we must have been older, but I don't think so because the impossible then happened: Chris burst into tears and my security was shattered. Some kind person took pity and bought us the tickets we needed. (Why should she have believed us? we must have looked trustworthy).

Was my father culpably negligent? Or did we learn some self-reliance from the episode? Who knows? Perhaps all we learnt was to burst into tears when all else fails.

Anyway, I think that our car passenger must have been so restless as a child that her mother let her go just to preserve her sanity.