Boys will be boys

[fgoodwin]

Boys will be boys

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2230571,00.html

http://tinyurl.com/n3g5a

 

DJ Taylor

June 18, 2006

 

Why are fathers snapping up an old-fashioned book of boyhood lore? DJ Taylor looks at the gap in almost every fathers life

 

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Like practically every human relationship these days, fatherhood has become horribly institutionalised. A condition that was once thoroughly ad hoc and made up as one went along is now caught up in bureaucracys stifling grasp.

 

Fathers Day (an American import that didnt exist in my youth), fathers support agencies, parenting classes: on all sides comes evidence of a natural state hedged about with all kind of wholly artificial supports.

 

What my own father would have made of this during my late 1960s and early 1970s childhood I cant begin to imagine. As far as I can deduce he simply got on with the task in hand, inspected the school reports and was at all times available for advice and consolation. Asked to theorise about it, he would probably have laughed in your face. A Fathers Day card would have been hooted out of the house.

 

Judging by the hot story from the UK book trade a good many fathers still share that view.

 

Every so often the lofty minarets of publishing find themselves shaken by a seismic crack from down below. The sound deeply liberating in the age of the pre-digested blockbuster is that of the book-buying public spontaneously making its presence felt: one of those infrequent but hugely intriguing instances of word-of-mouth buzz picking up on some hitherto under-publicised item and sending it storming up the bestseller list without the people who administer the book trade really noticing.

 

The latest example of this encouraging trend is a work entitled The Dangerous Book For Boys by the brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden Conn is a well-known historical novelist which was overlooked by the literary editors and the three-for-two promotions but is currently number one on the Amazon chart.

 

Undoubtedly it is being bought not only by boys but by their fathers as a splendidly politically incorrect guide to both boyhood and fatherhood.

 

Got up in gilt and scarlet covers, stoutly hardbacked and looking for all the world like a juvenile Christmas present from around the time of King Edward VIIs coronation, The Dangerous Book For Boys declares its intent from the opening page.

 

In this age of video games and mobile phones there must still be a place for knots, tree houses and stories of incredible courage, the authors maintain. Men and boys today are the same as they always were, and interested in the same things . . . We hope in years to come that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it.

 

There follow nearly 300 neatly written pages on such enticing topics as Hunting and Cooking a Rabbit, Understanding Grammar (in three parts, this one), A Brief History of Artillery and even a section on an entity that would have been zealously excluded from the Edwardian original Girls.

 

Halfway between an act of homage to a bygone era and a thoroughly practical how to guide having promised the children a treehouse years ago I read that particular tranche with the sinking realisation that something would probably have to be done the Igguldens book is, however unobtrusively, making a fairly dramatic claim: Men and boys today are the same as they always were.

 

Are they? My six-year-old, however cosseted and protected from the wicked world outside, looks to me like a miniature adult, absurdly well informed about the latest computer gizmos and able to discuss football with the statistical nous of a man of 30. (Why doesnt Scholes still play for England, he demanded during the Trinidad & Tobago game on Thursday night. Hes only 31.)

 

So what, I wondered, would children, as opposed to the moist-eyed paternal elegist, make of these expositions of the Battle of Waterloo or the thumbnail guides to coleoptera?

 

And here things turned very interesting. Felix, aged 13, sensibilities already hardened by the obligations of the schoolroom, approached it in a more or less utilitarian spirit. Very useful if you were bored, he reported back.

 

Predictably the treehouse groundplan went down well, as did the lessons on juggling. The air of sexual apartheid, too, seemed a clear advantage. (Definitely not for girls.) All the same, I detected a mild suspicion at the thought of education being ushered in by the back door. (Kings, queens and astronomy.)

 

Six-year-old Leo, on the other hand, was completely absorbed. He went through the checklist of creepy-crawlies an insect at a time, pored rapturously over the instructions for skimming stones (the world record is 38 hops, apparently) and wanted to spell his name in naval flag code.

 

Clearly, over the next few months The Dangerous Book For Boys, however misleading the promise of its title, is set to play a bumper role in Taylor family life.

 

Behind its success lurk some shrewd cultural deductions that, here in the bright dawn of the technology-driven 21st century, hardly ever occur to people down at the sharp end of the child-rearing process.

 

The most obvious is the absolute feebleness of what gets taught in schools these days. Among other choice offerings the Igguldens supply a complete list of British monarchs going back to Egbert of Wessex (802-839), instructions on when to use whom rather than who, and warnings on the inadvisability of ending a sentence with a preposition.

 

Even my own privately educated brood seemed faintly aghast at this, but is there a state school 12-year-old in the country, you wonder, who knows who Harold Harefoot was or what FD means on a penny knowledge that this particular parent regards as far more important in the long term than knowing how to log on.

 

At the same time the Igguldens co-production is much more than an implied criticism of lapsed or simply different educational standards. It is also a lament for what might be called the lost cultural world of the boy.

 

In strict historical terms, the idea of the child, and the whole modern cult of childhood, is a very recent invention. Until at least the start of the Victorian era children, as we conceive of them today, barely existed.

 

Boys, in particular, were treated as under-sized adults to be sent out to work as soon as family circumstances demanded it. The notion of a distinctive boys culture, with its own dress styles, pursuits and reading material, lay far away in the mid-Victorian future.

 

If a boy in the age of King William IV was given anything to read by his parents it would have been some vengeful work of moral uplift such as The Fairchild Family, a 19th-century bestseller in which papa improves his childrens minds by taking them to the gibbet, where they can watch recently executed murderers hanging in their chains.

 

The boy was effectively created by Victorian factory acts and education bills, legislation that kept him out of the mill and in the schoolroom for a much longer period, and at the same time, in however marginal a way, turned him into a consumer.

 

Simultaneously this consumption had an ethical dimension. Manufacturers and industrialists wanted to sell things to him, but this being the Victorian age philanthropists and moralists wanted to fill his mind with information that would be useful to him in later life and teach him how to behave. Hence the proliferation, come the later 19th century, of boys school stories, boys magazines, attempts to organise boys for the common good by way of clubs and institutions.

 

More important even than this as it was unofficial was the development of a whole series of codes and behaviours by which the average boy lived his life.

 

The early parts of George Orwells novel Coming Up For Air, set in the Thames valley of the early 1900s and reflecting many of the circumstances of Orwells own childhood, are a kind of checklist of what being an off-duty boy meant a century ago: long aimless walks, fishing, plundering snacks from the hedgerow (Even plantain seeds are better than nothing when youre a long way from home and very hungry), above all reading.

 

At one point Orwells hero, George Bowling, remembers his 12-year-old self reading an encyclopaedia that came in penny numbers (If I now know the length of the Mississippi or the difference between an octopus and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal, thats where I learnt it from). It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Dangerous Book For Boys.

 

As a mid-fortysomething whose first coherent public memory is of watching England win the 1966 World Cup final, I must have been one of the last beneficiaries of old-style boys culture.

 

Apart from your schoolwork, life until you reached the age of about 14 consisted of a series of enthusiasms or crazes. I began with stamps, moved rapidly on to coins a tricky hobby, this, as they were more expensive and then progressed in easy stages to Airfix kits by way of the Tempo Toys range of cowboys, indians and US Seventh Cavalry.

 

For communal activity there were the Cubs, followed by the Scouts, with all manner of other associations such as the League of Pity (a junior version of the NSPCC) lurking in the background.

 

There was, too, a whole mass of reading matter deliberately aimed at pre and early teens, notably a magazine called Look and Learn, which contained potted biographies of writers like Balzac and Dickens. I still credit this with putting me on the scent of literature.

 

Thirty years later that world a completely enclosed shell into which adults scarcely penetrated has all but disappeared. How many pre-teenage children of your acquaintance collect stamps, or own a stack of young head Victorian pennies? Apart from the odd private subscription effort aimed at young eggheads, is there a single weekly publication directed at nine-to-13-year-olds above the level of a comic?

 

No, the old constituencies have moved on, transformed themselves, disappeared. I discovered first-hand evidence of this sea change in the early 1980s when for a brief period I worked for a public relations agency that had the Airfix account and became the notional editor of Airfix Magazine. The punters, sad to relate, were now middle-aged men, their attics stuffed with boxes full of unmade Avro Lancasters and Fieseler Storches. The children, mysteriously, had gone elsewhere.

 

The great thing about old-style boyhood, evidence insists, was its continuity. As far as I can make out, although the economic circumstances had improved, my own childhood was not substantially different from my fathers (born 1921). Certainly we read many of the same books and pursued several of the same hobbies.

 

What killed boys culture that curious, chaotic world of bike rides and loafing and swapping the football club crests that they gave out in packets at petrol stations?

 

At one level the explanation is physical boys reach puberty earlier, yearn to grow up in a way that didnt perhaps commend itself to the space hopper and clacker aficionados of the early 1970s. On another, parents have grown in some cases necessarily much more protective of their offspring, less keen on letting them out of the house to climb trees and stalk unsuspecting wildlife with their home-made bow.

 

Much more decisive, though, is the onrushing development of electronic media, that whole bedroom-tethered sub-world of PlayStations, GameCubes and deeply repetitive eye candy. The modern boy, surveys regularly announce, spends most of his time in his room, on the phone, at large in cyberspace or prone in front of the television rather than up a tree, in a den or out on the prowl.

 

And if boyhood is in crisis, to the point where it may be supposed hardly to exist, then so is the agency that sustains it and whose collective memory lies at the heart of the Iggulden enterprise.

 

Fatherhood, as you may have gathered, is having a pretty bad time of it at the moment. Fathers are thought to need all the support that a concerned bureaucracy can throw at them. Only last week Fathers Direct (more formally the National Information Centre on Fatherhood) could be found distributing a government-funded Dad Pack, replete with Gorillaz-style graphics, 10,000 of which were ordered by childrens centres in advance of Fathers Day.

 

The pack meets government guidance requiring thousands of childrens centres, maternity units and nurseries to provide effective support to dads. Until now, these services have mainly offered support to mums, says Fathers Direct.

 

Much mocked in the media, this special Dad guide occupies ground as far from the Dangerous Book For Boys as you can get. Instead of the kings of England or how to make a bow and arrow, it covers such topics as pregnancy, birth, work, relationships, money, health, benefits, legal rights and responsibilities, giving a baby a bath and preparing a picnic. It also features the usual band of celebrity dads commending the paternal state. (Thierry Henry on being present at his daughters birth: Ive won stuff in my life. Nothing can beat that.)

 

Duncan Fisher, Fathers Directs chief executive, enthuses over proper information for modern dads, written in mens language, using contemporary images of men and covering the issues men are concerned with.

 

Fathers Direct says its mission is to promote close and positive relationships between men and their children. It was set up seven years ago with a grant from the Department of Health, and the Dad Pack was subsidised with 25,000 from the Department for Education and Skills.

 

My first reaction to the Dad Pack is to question the wisdom of public money being spent on this kind of thing. I am brought sharply back to earth, however, when I read a newspaper interview with an unmarried, unemployed teenage father who is proud of providing help for his infant son from his benefit giro.

 

The other day the sole came off my trainers but now I put my son before myself Ive got to dress him smart, he says. See that dummy 3.75 a time and he kept losing it. So I bought a solid gold 75 chain to put it on and they dont get lost any more.

 

Make no mistake, its tough, this fathering business, tough in a way that doesnt seem to have occurred to bygone generations. Expectations are high on both sides. Failure means ignominy.

 

I dont recall my own father constructing a philosophy of parenthood. He just turned up: standing on one side of the goal as I veered round the full back in Cub football matches; applauding at school prizegivings; taking me out for cycle rides in the Norfolk countryside.

 

Looking back on it at the age of 85, he recalls: It was all a bit of a game, but we did our best. All the anxiety examined by Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons in their stories simply eluded him.

 

Modern dads, alternatively, merely agonise. Marcus Berkmann, author of Fatherhood:

 

The Truth, and at 45 the parent of two small children, sees himself as Mr Bad Example . . . incorrigibly lazy, self-indulgent and quietly manipulative, his instincts forever pulling him in opposite directions.

 

I love my children to distraction I genuinely believe that they are the greatest thing that has happened to me while constantly thinking of new ways to get out of the house, he says.

 

Berkmanns son, one of the objects of this affection, has barely started at nursery school. But should his nervy father be planning ahead, reading the Igguldens and sharpening up the knives, say, for that excursion in search of rabbits, or measuring up lengths of timber for that treehouse?

 

The message of The Dangerous Book For Boys is that fathers ought to do stuff with their sons, that even now, with every sort of media enticement dangled before them, boys are still fascinated by practical activities and miscellaneous information: juggling tips, conjuring hints and tree recognition. Framed in the right way, the message runs, these things have an eternal appeal that the latest electronic gadgetry can never replace.

 

The drawback to the Iggulden project, of course, is that it is completely opposed to practically every development (and developer) currently at work in the British educational process. Not many modern curriculums, after all, feature lists of British kings and queens, troop deployments at Balaclava and the nature of the pluperfect tense.

 

On the practical side, it goes without saying that the average headmaster would probably have a fit if anyone suggested that his male pupils ought, for the purpose of drawing them closer to their fathers, be taught how to gut a rabbit.

 

He (or she) would probably be deeply disturbed, too, by the sight of the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson quoted by the Igguldens summarising the achievements of the British Empire (downsides are mentioned too) or a list of recommended reading that includes the original James Bond books and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser.

 

Happily, what might now be considered political incorrectness can never be excluded from this kind of book. In his famous essay, Boys Weeklies, examining the world of the Gem and Magnet, George Orwell wondered what a progressive boys magazine aimed at readers of 12 to 14 might look like.

 

At first glance, he reckoned, such an idea makes one slightly sick. No normal boy would have the slightest interest in the dreary uplift it would contain.

 

He was right and still is. For some reason the average 13-year-old will always prefer an account of the battle of Agincourt to an essay on the development of the United Nations; similarly, toy pacifists will never have the appeal of a file of toy infantry.

 

What The Dangerous Book For Boys ultimately implies is that children and their fathers should be provided with a space that is their own, far away from schools, government and received opinion, a place where, in defiance of nearly every progressive educative and social tendency, they can pull off the ever more difficult trick of being themselves.

 

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The Dangerous Book For Boys is published by HarperCollins at 18.99. The National Information Centre on Fatherhood is at http://www.fathersdirect.com/ or 0845 634 1328

[Vicki]

Freeze frame on my husband as he negotiates the difficult terrain of a video game to emerge triumphant over our 14 and 11 year olds, inspiring awe and incredulity. He likes it, he's good at it and they love him for it (amongst other things).

 

Do I understand it? No. I'm the one upstairs reading a book. Last week I was canoeing and backpacking with a bunch of scouts. Two weeks before that I was at summer camp with the 11 year old. The 14 year old is there this week. Our 11 year old is much more enthusiastic about scout "stuff" than the 14 year old was at his age.

 

It's all about proportion.

 

Vicki

[Fuzzy Bear]

As I floated through this article, all that came to my mind was, "edit". I suppose that for many of us, we would not get the news if it were not for fgoodwin. My sentiments go right along side of young Felix, age 13. FB

[fgoodwin]

FB: there's always the "Ignore" / "Squelch" option for those who don't care to read what I post.

[Fuzzy Bear]

fgoodwin,

 

You underestimate my response. I like what you bring to the Forum. You are thoughtful and you stir things up. The ignore button does little to change one's perception.

 

FB