A child in a yellow jumper, viewed from behind, casting a shadow on a concrete floor. Photo: By Will Francis via Unsplash.
Childhood development: More from Anne Wade’s memoir of a life lived in learning
‘Protesting against what is wrong is so much easier than the daily living out of what is right.’
I was still working at Leigh House, the Quaker-led adolescent psychotherapy unit, when I was invited to some training for qualified nurses. As part of it, without warning, we had to give short presentations of various aspects of our work. I had always enjoyed telling stories and writing up case studies. After these presentations, I was asked to be an examiner, and invited to apply for posts as a tutor or matron, but I did not want to go back into a hierarchical power system.
Quakers are hierarchical, but we are saved, at least when we hold firm to Quaker process, by being given power only for limited periods, and by holding ourselves in those roles as servants of the Meeting – not as leaders or pseudo-clergy. We should not allow the media to describe any of us as leaders. We have to centre down, hold ideas in the Light, and consult other Friends, before we can be sure something is a true leading. If we exploit power to get our own way, no matter how good we think our reasons are, this is not in right ordering – we are failing in our role and our duty.
While considering all this, I realised I had been working far too hard for too long. I was unwanted in my Quaker Meeting; my group of Young Friends were scattering abroad; and I had been rebuked by a member of the Towards a Quaker View of Sex group when I sought help for the long-term effects of child sexual abuse. What use is a religion that stops its ears both to spiritual experience and to the outrage of such abuse? Much as I loved the work at Leigh House, I needed change in every part of my life.
And then I found that there were degree courses in linguistics: this was the subject I had been looking for in the sixth form, when they told me I had ‘done’ all of English language and put me down for literature instead, as if the difference were trivial. I had refused to go to university then, but I had the grades and it was easy to pick up the option now that the course I wanted was available. I had always wanted to know how language developed in children and how this related to thinking and gave us a degree of access to whatever ‘mind’ is. So I decided on a study break, taking a degree in linguistics, with a particular interest in child language development. I became excited afresh by it, though it broke my heart to leave Leigh House.
Now I had come to the end of the course and I was job-seeking again. As before, I centred down and wrote freely to describe the job I wanted, and it appeared: a combination of psychotherapy and linguistic research in an independent unit for autistic children with language problems, a unit which was exactly what I would have designed if I had had the resources. There was only one problem. At university I had met a man with a similar passion for linguistics (and fifty years later we are still together). After I had accepted a job at the autistic unit, I became pregnant – unintended but also exciting. I badly wanted to do both, to keep the job and to be a mother, but much as I tried to find a way, in those days it was not possible. So I looked after our son along with a friend’s daughter of the same age.
I was fascinated at how tuned-in to us they seemed. I remembered how I had understood what adults were feeling before I could talk, and I now felt I had to be careful with my own thoughts and feelings. This was difficult. When PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange, infiltrated the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, and as a consequence the NCCL (now Liberty) naïvely accepted PIE into membership, I was breastfeeding a new-born. I remember raging at the NCCL’s stupidity. I could not credit how they were taken in by arguments over the rights of paedophiles, while being so unaware that children have the primary right to be protected from manipulation and exploitation while they explore and develop their sexuality.
‘A small life, yet infinite.’
Then Ealing Common was designated a mass grave in case of nuclear war, and we took the babies to a day of protest, entering imaginatively into what it would be like. Again, I realised how unhealthy our distress was for the children, and I gave up protesting or thinking about peace activism until Greenham Common made it unavoidable again. We did help the boycott on artificial baby feeding, campaigning against the horrors of what it does in poor areas of the world, and I trained as a breastfeeding counsellor. And we played with the babies.
A small life, playing with small children, yet infinite. I was amazed at how long they could sit still, to watch a favourite spider spin a web, or cut an unwanted bee out of the web, wrap it up, and mend the web. They monitored the lifecycle of a group of ladybirds, as they mated, and laid eggs, which hatched out into unfamiliar blue-grey larvae. Were they really baby ladybirds? We went to the library, where our favourite librarian, who happened to be a member of the nearby Quaker Meeting, found a book for us. We caught the moment when the new ladybirds emerged from pupae, and we spent hours watching them dry out and change from white to red.
I centred down as usual as I sat with the children, but I also blended Nicolas Herman’s ‘practising the presence of God’ and the idea of living in the present moment into a clumsy ‘practising the present/ce’, trying to make each day with them as loving and happy as possible. With a family came housework, which I had always hated, and for that I tried to use George Herbert’s notion of sweeping a room ‘as for thy sake’, to see the work as sacred. I did learn to enjoy putting a room to rights when I could maintain that mindfulness, but it was erratic.
And of course, with my upbringing, I often failed in all this. Protesting against what is wrong is so much easier than the daily living out of what is right. I tried not to indoctrinate the children with my beliefs, and yet much of what our son said seemed to come straight from the Quaker testimonies. When a box of Action Men was passed on to him, he weeded out the military equipment and asked me to help him make accessories for hiking and camping and other peaceable activities that we all enjoyed.
One day, after starting school, he said, ‘Karina’s my friend – she doesn’t like me but she’s my friend.’ I asked how that worked. ‘She’s too unhappy at the moment to like anyone, but I’ll go on being her friend and it’ll be all right.’ At other times: ‘Jon is the best at maths and the worst at kindness.’ ‘I don’t like Max but there’s some good in everyone so I’ll keep trying.’ ‘Jenny was daydreaming and Miss Jones shouted at her and made her stand up so everyone looked at her. Jenny hates people looking at her, and she was so scared she wet herself. Miss Jones is a bully.’
He loved being with the other children, but, as he said, some of the teachers were bullies, and he experienced the classroom as boring, frustrating imprisonment. So after a year we took him out of school and educated him at home, going to the national gatherings of Education Otherwise three times a year, and meeting up locally.
I soon found I was working again, as way opened, while home educating our son, and a whole new life emerged.
