1980 ‘When I was 5, the rudest word you might say was willy or bum’
EVAN JONES, born 1980
Evan Jones is sitting in a meeting room at the firm where he works as an IT
systems manager in Central London, explaining his parents’ decision to let
him walk to school alone when he was 10.
“It was two minutes’ walk. It wasn’t far,” he says, almost as if he feels he
needs to defend the decision. “Me and the girl next door, who was the same
age, walked together. We lived on a main road, but there was a lollipop lady
and we knew the rules.”
Evan, who grew up in Petts Wood in Kent, the son of an estate agent and a
mother who stayed at home and did childminding as her children grew older,
says his childhood was constrained by carefully drawn boundaries: “You were
told the consequences of overstepping the mark, and if you did you knew what
would happen. If I got in trouble at school for something like fighting, I
got in trouble at home, too. There would be no Mum and Dad going up to the
school to complain. I would say when I was growing up people were more
respectful of adults.”
Evan joined the Boys’ Brigade when he was 5, and he is now a youth leader with
the organisation, working with seven to ten-year-olds.
He thinks children are fundamentally the same as ever – but the world around
them has altered.
“Kids are kids. Human nature doesn’t really change. If you’re 5 now, you’re
still going to have the same needs and wants and desires. But when I was
that age the rudest word you might say was ‘willy’ or ‘bum’. That was really
rude.
“I remember going into the school library and getting a history book to look
at naked Neanderthal people. That was the rudest thing in there. Now there
seems to be a lot of sexual awareness. There are kids of 7 or 8 coming out
with graphic terms and descriptions. One of them said he’d been on the
internet and found this stuff.”
His own experiences help him to identify with today’s children, he feels. He
can still remember his own decision to break the rules: “I was well behaved
until I was 13, then I misbehaved. I think I just rebelled. I’d had enough
of being a good kid all the time. Things like being disruptive in class, or
after break times we would go to lessons late and carry on playing football.
But by the age of 15 I realised I had GCSEs coming up and if I screwed them
up I wouldn’t have good prospects.”
Before he was 14, he was drinking regularly with his friend in a local pub:
“The first time, we went to a quiet pub round the back of nowhere and we got
served. After that we went maybe once a week. Later we would go up to London
and go to a club, and would come out of there at two or three and catch a
night bus home. That was our weekend, at the age of 14, 15, 16.”
Yet somehow he kept a foot firmly in his parents’ traditional, ordered world.
It never seemed to him that there was any major conflict between their
expectations and the less reputable activities indulged in by modern
teenagers: “Typically I would go to Boys’ Brigade on Friday night and leave
to go to a party with my mates. If we went clubbing we’d come back and sleep
for a couple of hours before we walked to the shop to do our paper rounds.
“After I’d done my round I’d work in the shop for a couple of hours and then
I’d go to church. I didn’t have to choose; I could do both.”
1990 ‘Pressure comes from parents, but also because you have goals’
STANLEY KASUMBA, born 1990
For half an hour or so, Stanley Kasumba has been sipping Fanta and chatting
about his childhood in a pizza house near his home in Enfield, North London.
He seems at ease with himself – confident, articulate, charming in an
unostentatious way.
Then suddenly, musing on how his life used to revolve around football in the
park, the pressure of being 17 overwhelms him and a torrent of words pours
out: “As I grow older I look back and I think: ‘Oh, man! Look how old I am!’
“When I was younger, everything was so happy. I remember when I was 11 and we
used to play in the park, and when I was 12, the first day I walked to
school. I don’t feel as joyful now. There’s always that thought: what am I
going to do, why am I feeling this way? Then, I didn’t have to think about
anything. I could just be free and happy.”
It would be unfair to call it angst – too strong a word perhaps, for Stanley
speaks of himself as essentially a happy, optimistic person. And 17 is an
age of transition for everyone. Yet time and again he comes back to this
feeling that he must strive ever harder to achieve, that the stress seems
greater all the time, that he must be constantly vigilant if he is to
continue swimming against the tide of underachievement and temptation that
has swept off some of his acquaintances.
Adolescence in London, he says, is full of choice. And while it may be easy to
know which are the right choices, it’s frighteningly easy to make the wrong
ones. He talks a lot about how many of his friends have “fallen off”,
succumbing to drugs or alcohol, or simply giving up and drifting instead of
staying in school, as he has done, and keeping their heads down. Stanley has
just started his A-level courses and wants to do engineering at university.
His mum, an operations manager for an Arts Council schools project, went to
university; he wants to do the same.
“I think the pressure comes from your parents. But there’s also pressure on
you because you have goals. There’s pressure to make it: am I going to do
what I really want to do? It gets harder each year. It’s really hard. This
is the make-or-break season.
“OK, university is important, but once you’re in uni, you can relax. You’re
secure.” And there’s peer pressure, too, pulling the other way. “It’s very
hard to make your own decisions sometimes. You think you make a decision,
but really it’s been made by what your friends say and you kind of tag
along. When you are young, maybe you start throwing stones and get into
vandalism. When you reach 13 or 14 there are other things, mainly drug use;
a lot of my friends have been swayed into doing that kind of stuff. You have
to be strong and fight it. All the fingers are pointing at you. At 16 some
people start getting into relationships. A lot of households have trouble
with kids not coming home. Stuff like that. There are so many factors in
these two years. It’s kind of crazy.”
London is a dangerous place in which to grow up, Stanley admits: “But you
become streetwise. You know where not to go, and what not to do at a certain
time. But yes, people will try and rob you for your phone and your money.
Everybody I know has been through it at least once. I’m not a fearful person
– when I’m walking the streets I’m actually quite content with myself. But
once I was threatened with a knife. I said: ‘No, I’m not giving you my
stuff.’ I don’t give up my things easily. I tried to walk away but they
acted more aggressive, and threatened to stab me. Eventually you have to
say: ‘Fine. It’s only a phone.’ I didn’t contact the police. My friends
wouldn’t do that either. If those people live in the same area they might
know you. Something else might happen.”
When he was younger, Stanley thinks, life was more simple, focused on home,
parents, family: “You would play football and after that there would
probably be a reading workshop at the library. Everything was really set.
Your mother would be telling you there’s this thing you should do. At the
age of maybe 8 or 9, that’s when my parents started giving me a tiny bit of
freedom. Before that I wouldn’t have been out of their sight.”
He’s an only child, so he is the focus of his parents’ dreams and ambitions.
But that’s only part of the picture. He thinks that these days parenting is
a more intense business than maybe it used to be. “I have a close
relationship with my parents, and they are very ambitious for me. I think
that’s what parenting is about now. Maybe in the past parents would be
preoccupied with so many things that they wouldn’t channel everything into
their children. Now they put everything they have into their children, and
they want them to do the best.”
Now Stanley’s social life revolves around friends, parties and clubbing, but
he still feels there isn’t much he wouldn’t tell his parents:“I’ve had a
happy childhood. I would say the love of my family and friends makes me
happy. That’s the real relationship that makes your life. If it wasn’t for
my friends and family, my childhood wouldn’t have been the same,” he says.
“Life’s good.”
2000 ‘Maybe I’d like to be a Munchkin’
FLORENCE BISHOP, born 2000
Florence Bishop staggers into her family living room, almost invisible under a
mass of furry animals. “This is Spike,” she says, holding up a hedgehog.
Then she produces a pink pig from somewhere under her arm: “This is Messy.
He likes splashing mud everywhere . . . Smile the monkey . . . and Trot the
horse. Trot is really clever and he drives a bus. But my giraffe Bibble was
the first. He’s very friendly.” She smiles, her initial shyness beginning to
wear off.
She’s busy, now, clipping her animals – which have magnets in their paws – on
to a Lego car she’s made. Will Trot be driving, then? She looks up,
scornful: “No, because this is a car, not a bus.” What does she like to eat?
Salami and sausages, she says. Does she eat fish and chips? Bibble, sitting
on her knee now, shakes his head sadly.
“No, not all the time.” Her mum, Sarah, chips in: “What do you have to have
all the time, Florence?” Florence pulls a face. “Vegetables. Bibble doesn’t
like vegetables. But I have to eat them.”
In many ways Florence lives a very orderly life. On school days she leaves the
house at 7.40am with her father, Gordon, and nine-year-old sister Edwina.
Gordon sees them safely on to the school bus, with a mobile phone for
emergencies, and by 8.30 they are deposited at the Portsmouth Grammar junior
school. At the age of 7, Florence must remember which books or sports kit
she needs for each lesson and must find her way to her classes, each in a
different room with a different teacher. If she has a violin lesson, she
must remember her instrument.
Usually she arrives home at 4.10pm – although if she has an after-school club
it may be as late as 7pm – and at 6pm she sits down to tea at the kitchen
table with both her parents and Edwina. She has regular homework: English
and maths. On a Saturday morning she goes to school for netball practice. On
a Sunday she often goes for a walk, a bike ride or a swim – always
accompanied by one or both of her parents.
Life has changed for children, Sarah says, since she was born in 1966. For one
thing, Sarah’s mother stayed at home to look after her, while she and Gordon
both work as solicitors and run their own businesses: “Because my mother
wasn’t working, she was the primary care-giver. But we have our lives set up
as a shared caring arrangement. I’d say it’s 60-40 in our house. Gordon can
do everything I do; I think that’s a huge shift in many families nowadays. I
think kids have a much closer relationship with their parents than they had
30 or 40 years ago.”
Florence never goes out on her own. Edwina is allowed to cycle to the end of
the road, and sometimes to walk back from her friend’s house about 100 yards
away – although not in the dark. “I think that’s the biggest difference
between her childhood and mine,” Sarah says. “I was walking to school from
the age of 5 on my own. There’s more traffic on the road, and that’s a
genuinely increased danger.”
Florence’s parents have made a conscious decision to ensure she has “chill
time” – bouncing on her trampoline, crashed out in front of the TV or
playing cards. Often she will simply potter in the garden with Gordon. She’s
full of surprises, he says: “One day she got all the buckets out of the shed
and hung them on the apple tree, so we had a bucket tree. There must have
been almost 20 buckets in the tree.” Florence’s response is quizzical,
mock-puzzled: “How else do you dry buckets?”
Suddenly she remembers Munchkin the hamster, who has been snoozing in his
cage. Now the cage has to be dismantled so that Munchkin can be dislodged
and brought out to sit on her knee and nibble on a monkey nut.
Father Christmas brought Munchkin the year before last, she explains: “I
think Father Christmas comes down the chimney. But I don’t think he brought
Munchkin down the chimney. I think he came down the chimney and opened the
front door to let Munchkin in so he didn’t get hurt.” Last year’s list for
Father Christmas included Littlest Pet Shop toys, Nintendo DS games and yet
more friends for Bibble.
Does she know what she wants to be when she grows up? She thinks for a minute,
uncertain. Then a thought strikes her and she laughs out loud: “Once me and
Edwina were asking lots of questions and Dad was getting tired of it, so he
said: ‘Mummy, when I grow up can I be a tree?’” She thinks some more. “Maybe
I’d like to be a Munchkin.”
