SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugarg-ecx.images-amazon.com/.../02/...of_Sugar_extract.pdf ·...
Transcript of SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugarg-ecx.images-amazon.com/.../02/...of_Sugar_extract.pdf ·...
Introduction
One late-August day, I receive a phone call from my Granny: she
has recently had an operation to improve the feeble circulation in
her leg and foot, and, although she is trying to sound upbeat
about it, she is clearly very under the weather, in pain and unusu-
ally weak. I decide immediately that a spirit-lifting visit is
required, so a week later I, my husband and our three children all
pile into the car for a 480-mile drive to the highest inhabited
village in the remote Scottish highlands, which Granny calls
Home and I call Far Too Bloody Far Away.
As we squash our bottoms into cellulite pancakes all the way
up the M6 and beyond, I am more anxious than ever to get there
and with every passing motorway service station I have a growing
regretful, guilty, wretched feeling that I should have spent more
time visiting her in the past. Like most pissed twenty-somethings
and self-obsessed thirty-somethings I have been too selfish to
make time to visit her; to connect with someone who, suddenly
in light of her illness, seems such a vital connection to my chil-
dren: through her, through my dad and then through me.
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As the car hugs the last few miles of mountainous road, my
daughter vomits into a carrier bag for the third time and
Granny’s village twinkles into view at the end of the final valley,
I sense that this visit is going to make quite some impact on
my life.
I just don’t know yet that it’s going to fundamentally change
how I raise my children, and how I feel as a parent.
Meet Granny … and what you’re in for
Before we meet her, I feel I should give you a brief description of
my granny, so you know whose child-raising tips you’re getting
along with my own.
Born on the 8th November, 1923, in chilly Aberdeen,
Granny was the second daughter and youngest child of a lawyer
and a teacher. Not a bad start, then. (Apart from the ‘chilly
Aberdeen’ bit, obviously. Brrrrr.) The story goes that her
parents were engaged for twelve years before finally being in a
position to tie the knot.
By the time Granny came along, her dad was fifty and her
mother forty-six, ages which would raise an eyebrow or two even
today. Nevertheless, two healthy baby daughters came along who
are now the proud holders of the title, Oldest Members of the
Family. (And also Most Likely to Buy Junk from Catalogues, but
we don’t mention that often.)
Granny met my grandfather when she was about nine years
old, on one of her family’s annual holidays to a village in North
East Scotland called Tarland. After a mere fourteen years of hide
and seek in the bushes, giggling on the tennis court, secret
liaisons, separation during the war and making sure they were
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very, very sure, they finally married in 1945. Blimey, he must have
been a catch! And he was.
My granddad was an impressive man: intelligent, sporty and
as handsome as any Hollywood star of the day – though, to be
brutally honest, a star who’d been eating rather a lot of pies in his
latter years – and when I knew him he smelled sweetly of pipe
tobacco, had white hair and bushy eyebrows, a huge model train
set in the attic and a musty study crammed with artefacts from
ancient lands and strange objects from his science labs. He ate
lots of cheese and biscuits by the fire in the evenings, and had
more stories of faraway places and eccentric characters to tell
than anyone I’ve ever met. He also carried a mystical air of unpre-
dictability that meant you never quite knew how far any childish
silliness would be tolerated before he’d make it very clear that he
wanted you out of his hair. Now, Lassie! In short, he was in every
way the perfect grandfather in my eyes, and I still miss him and
wish I had spent more time talking with him.
He died four years ago of a heart attack, just after walking the
dogs across the moor. All that cheese and biscuits didn’t help,
they reckoned.
I digress . . . Granny studied languages at Aberdeen University
but spent the last years of the war code-breaking at Bletchley
Park, a time she never talks about except to comment grimly on
the lack of mountains and fresh air and the intolerable excess of
English people. (I did once try to point out that Bletchley is actu-
ally in England, hence the English people, but that went down
like a lead balloon.) When she finally escaped back to Scotland
she completed her teacher training and then taught for two years,
before having her first child – my dad – and settling down into a
life of motherhood from then on.
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I’m not sure if this true, but certainly it seemed to me that for
at least the first twenty years of my life Granny thought I was a silly,
giggly, empty-headed, directionless ninny. Certainly my love of
daydreaming and making up dance routines when there was a
table to be laid didn’t help matters, but I think the clincher was
when I started watching Neighbours in my teens. That, dear reader,
in my granny’s eyes, won me the Idiot of the Year title hands down.
As a consequence of this grandmotherly disapproval, at least as
I saw it, we spoke very little; I didn’t really know her, and what I
witnessed of her quick tongue and lightning-fast reactions made
me a little nervous around
her. But about ten years ago
everything changed: in a
move that shocked even the
most radical, optimistic
thinkers in my family, I met
a fine young chap, got
married, had a baby, and all
but gave up work to stay at
home and be a Mummy. Ka-
pow. The New Liz was born.
Suddenly, Granny and I
found common ground:
motherhood. Our shared
experience of having kids
young, working hard to
keep the family together, our
children happy and healthy
and our outside interests
going without going bananasLiz, aged five, her brother Andrew
and Granny, 1979
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during the process created a bond between us that had been
woefully absent previously. We started talking on the phone
about schools, violin lessons, what my kids were up to and any
worries I had about them. The children sent her little pictures.
She sent them back letters in old-fashioned handwriting that
they couldn’t read.
What I gradually realised was so special about this growing
mother-daughter-like relationship was, crucially, that she was not
my mother. Mothers can say more to their daughters in one look
than the entire script-writing team of Desperate Housewives can
in a series. Oh, you feed your baby like that, do you? Oh, she still
sleeps in your bed, does she? Grrrr. My mum is actually brilliant
at letting me raise my kids my way but still, as we all know, the
subject of child-rearing can be prickly indeed, even in the
kindest, most caring hands where mothers and their daughters
are concerned. But a grandmother stands apart from this, and
can dole out advice, criticism and support free from any compli-
cating undertones. She’s your gran – just listen to the lady, and be
glad she’s still here sucking pear drops!
And so there grew, over a number of years, a camaraderie
between Granny and me that I never imagined I’d feel, and we
have become firm friends.
She’s still a tough cookie with a fierce brain though, and it’s a
brave person who contradicts her, or says anything stupid in her
presence. Allegedly . . . This lady suffers fools about as gladly as I
suffer my own stress-related dandruff, and I’ve learned a thing or
two about being idiotic in front of her. Thing one: don’t. Thing
two: see thing one.
I realised, as our friendship grew stronger, that I was in the
very lucky position of being able to ask my grandmother all the
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questions about her life, and about how she raised her children,
that many mums of my generation either feel they can’t ask, or
don’t have the opportunity to ask because their grandparents
have passed away.
This wonderful old lady, this suddenly ailing powerhouse, this
mine of information who had successfully raised four strong,
independent people, could be the key to answering the question
asked by thousands of stressed, confused, desperate parents every
day: how has it gone so wrong for our children and what can wedo to put it right?
If you need evidence that something has gone wrong – and
you’d really have had to try hard not to have heard any of this
before – then consider the following:
� In 2007, a Unicef report on the wellbeing of children and
young adults put the UK bottom of the league of twenty-one
economically advanced countries.
� The same report found that children growing up here suffer
greater deprivation, worse relationships with their parents
and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs and unsafe
sex than those in any other wealthy country in the world.
� Only forty per cent of the UK’s eleven, thirteen and fifteen
year olds find their peers ‘kind and helpful’, which is the worst
score of all the developed countries.
� More than thirty per cent of fifteen to nineteen year olds are
not in education or training and are not looking beyond low-
skilled work.
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� According to the children’s charity NCH in 2007, one in ten
young people suffers from significant mental health prob-
lems, and the prevalence of emotional problems and conduct
disorders has doubled since the 1990s.
� According to a Children’s Society survey in 2008, a quarter of
children say they often feel depressed, and seventy per cent of
fourteen to seventeen year olds say they feel under pressure to
look good and are on a diet some or all of the time.
“British children . . . are more tested, more punished, more
imprisoned, more unhappy and more generally disliked, distrust-
ed, feared and demonised than they are pretty much anywhere else
in the developed world.”Deborah Orr, writing in The Independent, June 2008
Yikes! The grim, bleak picture painted above is one that many
of us already suspected was there, and fret about daily. It starkly
illustrates that our twenty-first-century children are losing out
on one of the most important phases of their lives; a time that
sets them up for life; a time that is irreplaceable and invaluable.
In short, children are missing out on a proper childhood.
Now then, before we get too depressed, it’s important in any
discussion about childhood in times past to be very careful not to
mythologise it – to see it through the rose-tinted glow of Time; to
imagine it was perfect and lovely and happy and jolly for all chil-
dren. It wasn’t. Times really were tough for many kids, even fifty
years ago. There was real hardship. We may remember our own
childhoods as a time of sweet innocence, uninterrupted hours of
playing with hand-made toys, cooking with mother, climbing
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trees and watching Fingermouse, but it wasn’t all wonderful!
Things our kids take for granted like hot water on demand,
central heating making every room in the house toasty and cup-
boards full of fresh food whenever they’re hungry were not the
norm for many of us growing up.
But children were at least given the chance to be children and
to enjoy this childhood beyond their fourth birthday – and that’s
what’s missing now. Getting that experience back for our kids is
the crux of what we’re going to be seeking to do in this book.
Asking where it has all gone wrong is all very well, but whatwe really need to ask is, how can we put things right? How do youensure children have a happy childhood these days? Why has itbecome so difficult and so complicated? And is there anythingsimpler from previous generations that we could try to implementin ours?
In a bid to answer these and many other pressing questions of
the day I decided to ask Granny, while I still could. I talked to her
at length about all of this over a period of a year, while her toe-
related illness went through it ups and downs, and it’s these con-
versations that are recounted in this book. I wasn’t sure what I
would get: maybe a few snippets of useful information here and
there, a funny story or two about tin baths or halfpenny sweets,
or a memory dug up from the depths.
What I actually got outstripped all expectations – Granny’s
stories and details taught me so much about the essential ele-
ments of child-rearing that all of us could put into practice today,
and in doing so, remove much of the stress, worry and hair-
tearing that seems increasingly to accompany modern parenting.
Of course the world is very different now and I’ve allowed for
twenty-four-hour TV, internet chat rooms and fast-food chains
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in my own tips and advice. But I’m now completely convinced
that there is much about raising kids and about family life in
general we can and should learn, simply by talking to the oldest
generation alive today. They generally offer biscuits and limitless
tea while they’re at it, so it’s not such a bad deal really.
I hope some of it proves useful and effective to you and makes
your experience of raising your own troublesome brood a good
deal simpler and more enjoyable than it was proving before. Who
knows – we might even manage to raise a generation of kids who
can spell ‘No ASBO for me today, thanks’ properly.
I also hope it makes you think about where you come from,
how you, and your parents before you, were raised and how you
might try to use some of their wisdom and experience in your
own children’s upbringing. It’s best to discard the ‘kids up chim-
neys, regular beatings with sticks and general misery’ and try to
stick to the good, sensible bits instead.
But they’re your kids. You decide.
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Liz and her Granny in Scotland, November 2008.
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