Diary

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 7 · 8 April 1993

From Elisa Segrave

Andrew O’Hagan’s Diary (LRB, 11 March) brought some note of honesty and reality to the sad death of the little boy in Liverpool. I myself remember torturing one of my brothers, four years younger than me, whom I adored, by putting him in a cage of chicken wire and feeding him rotten walnuts. (I was seven.) Seeing on television the adults going berserk and trying to storm the van containing the ten-year-olds on their way to be charged was horrific. Once I was in New York at night when a man snatched a woman’s handbag. He was then pursued by two young men who chased him up Lexington Avenue, knocked him down, and kicked him savagely in the stomach encouraged to do so by the people watching. Their ‘justified’ brutality seemed worse, because of the hypocrisy involved, than the original crime.

Elisa Segrave
London W8

From David Townsend

I was not clear, having waded through Mr O’Hagan’s catalogue of beastly and criminal behaviour, what point he wanted to make. It could have been that deep inside any ‘nasty persistent juvenile little offender’ is an assistant literary editor trying to escape. It could have been that most families in Scotland on dog-infested Badlands council estates, with parents in dead-end jobs and violence the norm in family life, behave in an anti-social way. O’Hagan offers no explanation. ‘Why’ is never asked. There is no insight given: there is nothing constructive offered. My own childhood and those of my friends was probably no better or worse off than his but bore no relation whatever to what he described. At a time of public hysteria over juvenile and adult crime, this article merely seems to say that cruelty and crime is a perfectly normal way of passing your childhood. Or am I missing something?

David Townsend
Director of Social Services, London Borough of Croydon

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Vol. 15 No. 9 · 13 May 1993

From Angus Calder

The response in your 8 April issue from David Townsend to Andrew O’Hagan’s now rather famous Diary rang bells, as they say, when I noticed that he is Director of Social Services for Croydon. Back in 1960 when, unbelievably, it was possible to move directly from sixth-form studies into supply teaching en route to one’s university course, I was taken on by Croydon Education Authority as a callow 18-year-old and sent to teach the bottom two streams in the first year of Davidson Secondary Modern. D.H. Lawrence had worked at this school: the grim buildings were probably much as he knew them. The experience gave me a very deep conviction that the 11-plus, and streaming in general, were very evil things, since I found bright, interesting children condemned at 11 to the social scrap-heap, often as a result of untimely illnesses or sad home backgrounds. But it also cured me of any disposition to believe that children are essentially innocent creatures whose badnesses can easily be cured by what David Townsend would call ‘constructive’ approaches.

As a child in genteel, prosperous London suburbia I had myself been bullied, and had bullied. Books I read with the full approval of parents and teachers – Richmal Crompton and R.L. Stevenson, for instance – made transgressive behaviour and violent persons seem attractive. ‘O’Hagan’, Mr Townsend complains, ‘offers no explanation’ of similar antisocial behaviour in Scotland. For many thinkers in past times the Christian conception of Original Sin was sufficient explanation for the badness of children in virtually all known social environments. Can we not still agree that children are ‘naturally bad’?

My own Modest Proposal would not, I fear, seem ‘constructive’ to Mr Townsend. I suggest that the foolish legislation of the 1870s which made education compulsory and created Bastilles like Davidson Secondary should now be expunged. The community should provide free schools, as it provides libraries, for citizens who want them, and they should be very generously funded. But it should relieve the unfortunate caste of school-teachers of responsibility for the behaviour of children and their moral and intellectual progress, and face up squarely to the inherent badness of its own young.

Angus Calder
Reader in Cultural Studies, Open University, Edinburgh

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Vol. 15 No. 10 · 27 May 1993

From Hamish Dickie-Clark

Is it possible that the two young boys who admitted to the murder of James Bulger were driven to this confession by others? Andrew O’Hagan’s Diary (11 March) and Elisa Segrave’s letter (8 April) say nothing of this possibility and seem rather to confirm the ‘normality’ of children murdering one another. I can only hope that there are more David Townsends (8 April) than O’Hagans and Segraves in present-day Britain.

Hamish Dickie-Clark
Vancouver, Canada

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Vol. 15 No. 11 · 10 June 1993

From David Townsend

I was delighted to read the funny and touching letter from Angus Calder (13 May), who occupies an influential post in the nation’s educational affairs as ‘Reader in Cultural Studies’ at the Open University. I am sure that John Selwyn Gummer and other fruitcakes on the right will have been gratified to see the quaint old argument about original sin paraded, and on this occasion coupled with Mr Calder’s ideas of abolishing compulsory education.

When Mr Calder got onto more serious ground, he was a bit lost. It is true that D.H. Lawrence taught, unhappily, in Croydon for a little while. I doubt, however, he ever advocated the abolition of compulsory education, since he had been a beneficiary of it.

As to the other literary references, does anyone take R.L. Stevenson to be more than a superior historical novelist? Would any child think that an 18th-century pirate accommodating a parrot on the left shoulder, and having only one leg and one eye, is a real role model? Richmal Crompton (certainly in this context an eclectic choice) wrote second-rate books about a suburban childhood. William lived a cossetted, middle-class life next door to the gravelled driveway and tree-filled garden of the Boot family and his parents ‘took tea’ and owned a car. His gang’s ‘violence’ was wholly unlike what Andrew O’Hagan described. If anyone can show me in any of the books a case of William killing pet animals, setting fire to buildings, stealing money, sexually assaulting girls and committing serious criminal damage, I should feel obliged to eat the entire canon.

David Townsend
Director of Social Services, London Borough of Croydon

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Vol. 15 No. 13 · 8 July 1993

From Adrian Bowyer

After his offer to eat all the William books if any contained a case of William killing pet animals (Letters, 10 June), I hope David Townsend is feeling peckish. Despite his lack of a character-forming broken home, and despite his being connately middle-class (clearly the closest one can get to possessing a genetic determinant for unacceptable behaviour in David Townsend’s eyes), William owned an air-gun. He discovered that this consistently shot six inches to the left of the point at which he aimed it. One day he wanted to shoot a pole stuck in the ground. Six inches to the right of the pole sat a cat. William did the empirically correct thing, with the structurally necessary fatal consequences. There must be about forty William books. That’s over twenty pounds of unglazed foxed paper between those old red Newnes hardback covers. Is David Townsend going to munch his way through them over the space of a few weeks, or will he go for the heroic Guinness-record live-goldfish approach? Can you spare us a few column-inches for the Polaroids?

By the way, who are the mysterious Boot family next door to William to whom David Townsend alludes? I accept that confusing the similar names Crompton and Waugh is the venial sort of mistake that any Director of Social Services (Croydon) could make; but does he perhaps mean the sauce-producing non-next-door – and rather sub-middle-class Bott family?

Adrian Bowyer
Senior Lecturer in Manufacturing,

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Vol. 15 No. 14 · 22 July 1993

From Angus Calder

David Townsend (Letters, 10 June) may well be on firm ground when he challenges my suggestion that approved children’s fiction incites to violence. It could be that Stevenson, Richmal Crompton and Ransome were so successful as children’s writers because they saw very clearly that children had wicked propensities and addressed them on this basis, diverting them from real violence into morally tolerable fantasy. It is silly of Mr Townsend, however, to smear me with Gummerism for taking the notion of ‘original sin’ seriously. I am an atheist. Rousseauesque notions of ‘original virtue’ swiftly sent lots of people to the guillotine, which undermined the credibility of these notions more than somewhat. Though some Christians at every stage in history have been very stupid, hideously intolerant and/or extremely vicious, we should not, as historians of ideas and culture, dismiss the insights of their theologians out of hand. The onus of proof rests on those who dispute that children are naughty, amoral and often cruel.

As for the idea of improving them by compulsory education, it will hardly do to cite D.H. Lawrence against my contention that we should drop that. His account in The Rainbow of the foul working conditions for early state schoolteachers is outstanding in his generally mediocre prose oeuvre for a documentary power to rival Zola’s Germinal. It was not just because of faddism or snobbery that ‘progressives’ in his day who could afford it sent their children to the experimental schools founded by A.S. Neill and others.

Angus Calder
Open University, Edinburgh

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Vol. 15 No. 16 · 19 August 1993

From Adrian Bowyer

I was delighted to read the funny and touching Diary column in the Independent on 23 July. Apparently David Townsend (Letters, 10 June) has been obtaining quotations from Croydon bakers for the supply of dough and marzipan simulacra of the 38 William books against the possibility that I was right. Now, to slink around town searching out counterfeiters who may be able to facilitate the dishonest discharge of a debt of honour is bad enough. But to admit you’re doing so in the press, thus labelling your creditors as dupes before you’ve even duped them, is worse yet. Of course, David Townsend could have been forgiven all had he not been so smug as to call the late Richmal Crompton second-rate before he proceeded to make two fundamental errors about her work. (William shot the cat in the book William the Bold, incidentally).

I think that payment must now be made in the true coin of mashed paper and ink. Eating cake would be more of a treat than a forfeit.

Adrian Bowyer
University of Bath

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Vol. 15 No. 17 · 9 September 1993

From David Townsend

Adrian Bowyer (Letters, 19 August) can hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of obliging me to eat the 38 William books. Although my knife and fork were polished and at the ready and stomach pumps were on standby at a local hospital, the huge quantity of unsolicited mail and telephoned messages of support which followed the Independent’s coverage of the ‘was William a cat killer?’ controversy meant the challenge to my literary appetite was lifted. Besides, William did not deliberately or maliciously kill Hector. He was ‘aghast’ at what had happened. What is more, he found a replacement cat for his neighbour.

The cake enquiries, which were reported in the Independent, were the result of a disreputable journalist taking advantage of my trusting nature over some celebratory refreshment in Croydon’s premier French restaurant, the Petit Jacques.

David Townsend
Social Services Department, London Borough of Croydon

From John Roe

All power to Adrian Bowyer for defending the reputation of Richmal Crompton. I think she’s wonderful too, and so I suspect does Mr Townsend, only he wasn’t man enough to declare his addiction straight off. But Townsend is right in essence about the cat: it was killed accidentally and not in malice, though several grown-ups cheerfully wished it dead (Mr Townsend’s point, originally).

All this surely heralds the formation of a Crompton Club – with annual gatherings for ale and marzipan.

John Roe
University of York