I was told by someone who’d been on an intensive course of self-improvement that we need to identify three important moments in our childhoods: when we first experience fear; when we first feel we don’t fit in; and when it dawns on us that we are alone in the world. Or something like that. I’ve no idea if these things are particularly important, but I can’t stop thinking about them.
I bawled my eyes out when I was first taken to nursery school. I don’t think that was fear as such, more that I was just a bit of a wuss. Anyway, I bawled at such length and volume that my mummy was asked to come and take me away and never bring me back. This suited me.
Apparently, first fears are commonly felt in the moments you are conscious of being separated from your parents, or lost. I was briefly lost once when I was little, in a crowded airport somewhere. A stranger lifted me on to his shoulders so someone could claim me. I was terrified, but that was because I knew what kind of hiding awaited me from my mum when she got hold of me, furious at my wandering off.
No, I first knew proper terror when I was about eight and realised that my grandad would die one day before long. This was awful to know, quite impossible to get my head around. I cried and shook in bed. The horror soon deepened when it dawned on me that the same fate awaited my dad. Appalled, I wailed in even deeper terror at this new knowledge, but not half as loudly as I did when the penny dropped that this unpleasant mortality business applied to me too. I would die one day. I was gripped by this fear night after night. I became frightened of going to bed.
As for when I first felt I didn’t fit in, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that. And when did I first realise that I was alone in the world? It’s probably somewhat to my discredit that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that either. There’s a saying that you only feel properly grown up once both of your parents have died. Deluded I may well be, but I can never feel alone in the world as long as my parents are yet to join the great majority. Childish, really. It’s not that I consider them infallible – I don’t think either of them is right about much any more – but knowing they care about me is enough.
All this has got me wondering how the children of the pandemic, those of early or preschool age, might answer the above questions in years to come. In the darkest days of the last two years, millions of them were cooped up at home with concerned parents who couldn’t shield the kids from what was happening. All these nippers must have caught sight of some news bulletins, on which they’ll have seen something no other cohort of kids in history ever had to see: evidence that for a good while there wasn’t a single grownup in the world who had a clue what was going on. This is quite something for young minds to compute. It is probably the first real fear millions of today’s kids have experienced and, with the adults at sixes and sevens, a strong indication that they’ll have to start figuring things out for themselves.
I suppose that sooner or later everyone needs to realise that no one knows anything but, as with stuff about sex, mortgages, mortality and Santa Claus, that truth can wait.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
