So far as I can remember when I was a child I didn’t feel little. I believe children don’t feel so until the retrospective realisation, when they revisit scenes of the past and find distances shortened. If it was a hundred paces for a child to the shop and only fifty for a grown up, then it must have seemed twice as far. But it was as far as it was to the shop or anywhere else, that was all that registers as a child.
Adults to me didn’t come in many different shapes and sizes, just young or old and men or women. Young stopped at about seventeen, after that age I classified everyone as old. Then there were women or men, the former mysterious, sad and insular. The latter powerful, alien, further removed from my small species than even the women were. Men were not to be disturbed because they were ‘working’ Women were not to be disturbed because they were also ‘working’ or too sad. I didn’t want to disturb any of them anyway.
Some people remember from a very early age, the womb even. I can’t. I can’t remember not being able to ride a bike, or look over the kitchen table, though I do remember things on my level, low down. The blue bricks in the yard, Granny’s black fire grate, and I could sit on a kerb without my knees in my eyes.
What communion did we have with playmates then? Not much. We played with them but did not have any niceties of conversation. We never said hello, or goodbye, it was just there they were, and there we were. The big topic was what were we going to mutually agree to do. This took ages, there wasn’t much to do anyway. It really meant in what direction were we going to wander and in what vicinity would we mooch. There was absolutely no way of keeping time, we were just as likely to come home for tea, ten minutes after dinner, or when it got dark and they were out searching.
The main feeling of childhood was not warmth and security but fear. Not any sort of deep dread but just a misgiving that I was probably, late, early, wet, dirty, or in some other way unsatisfactory, same as now really.
Peter
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_e_sad.gif)