by Libby Brooks
It is so hot indoors, and Allana wants to play outside. So Gloria opens up the pram shed for her, and she fetches her bike – pink to match her scooter and with stabilisers – then rides up and down the thin concrete yard. It is bright and breezeless outside. Gloria has taken a chair out on to the landing and watches her from there.
Allana has a green notepad which she leaves by the staircase, and sometimes she stops off to make jaggy scribbles in it. She doesn’t try to make letters. Three early-teenage boys wander in from the street. They huddle by the stairs and bang open beer bottles on the metal railings. Allana cycles over to watch them through the bars. They ignore her, and after some minutes slouch off down the alleyway, beyond the sun’s glare.
Gloria and some of the other parents had a meeting with the council about building a play area. There are twenty-five kids on the top floor of these maisonettes, and the overgrown concrete square at the back of flats that is designated theirs just isn’t big enough, certainly not for a slide or swings.
Malcolm, the new councillor, is helping their campaign. He’s a good man. Gloria has always had terrible trouble with damp and silverfish. The council told her that she’d have to pay to get them removed, but Malcolm got on the phone and now the men are coming on Monday to do it free of charge. It’s a relief, she says, because she couldn’t afford to pay for it herself. Allana doesn’t mind them, but Sienna gets really freaked out. When the council refused to remove the abandoned fridge outside the gate, Malcolm came with a friend and took it away himself.
Back upstairs, the party bag is the magic porridge pot, never emptying. Now there’s a bottle of bubbles. Allana tries to blow some herself but she can’t direct her breath gently or evenly enough and keeps breaking the meniscus across the wand. Gloria takes over and makes an expert string. ‘I pop them!’ shrieks Allana, jumping up on the spot and clapping her hands together to catch the falling globes.
Gloria holds the wand against the fan, and a bubble stretches and strains huge in the air-flow. ‘Do that again!’ commands Allana. ‘Here it comes …’ Sienna gets a turn, and proves almost as expert as her mother. It becomes a competition: ‘I can do it! I can do it, Mama!’
Back to the sweeties. Two lollypops down, Allana opens a small packet of Gummi Bears. Gloria tells her to eat them slowly, so she repairs to the balcony, where she crams as many as she can into her mouth at once. Earlier in the week, they all went on a Family Centre trip to Bournemouth. It only cost £8.50. Tomorrow they’re going to Weston-super-Mare. Gloria isn’t even sure where that is, but it’s worth it for the outing. The coach leaves at 7.30 a.m., and she’s not sure how she’ll get these two ready in time.
Allana is becoming increasingly frantic, as she devours a pastel-coloured sweetie necklace out of view on the balcony. Sienna’s dad is coming to pick her up. Allana wants to go with him too, but she’s staying at her nanna’s instead. Gloria is sitting in tonight, getting ready for the early start. As the hour approaches, Allana whispers something horrible to Sienna about the evening’s arrangements. Sienna’s face crumples and she runs to Gloria for comfort.
Sienna is getting her clothes changed before her father arrives. ‘You’re a poo-y,’ announces her sister. Gloria starts to brush Sienna’s hair, and opens a box of hairbands, asking them to name the colours and choose their favourite. But Allana won’t be distracted. There is more pushing, then kicking, and Gloria takes Allana to sit on the naughty step until she’s calmed down. She always has her naughty five minutes. Last week, she was down the club with Sienna’s dad and tipped a full ashtray into his pint. It was hard not to laugh.
Gloria got the naughty-step idea from a Supernanny episode. The hairbands game is the sort of thing that PEEP taught her – how they can learn from something that’s just happening along the way. Like every parent, she’s discovered a lot since her first-born arrived. The most important thing she’s realised is that you should give everything a try, even if it doesn’t work the first time.
It is all too easy to interpret theories about the importance of early-years care oppressively. Just as genetics-based concepts can be seen as letting bad parenting off the hook, so parent-oriented developmentalism may exonerate society.
It cannot be incumbent on Gloria alone to parent her children out of poverty. Without structural equality, no amount of parenting skills – whether instinctive or taught – can break the cycle of deprivation. To suggest that when poorer parents fail it is purely a question of individual responsibility is to ignore how social disadvantage works.
But it remains the case that genetic theory is more open to manipulation in pursuit of ugly agendas. Take that New Zealand study, which uncovered the interaction between a particular gene and maltreatment in childhood. On one level this is heartening: neither a rotten genotype nor a rotten upbringing need ruin a life. But what about the child who has both? If science can identify individuals as irrevocably lost causes, then is the socially responsible option to lock them up and throw away the key? Society has never been much inclined to help children like this, and if genetics offers an empirical basis for writing them off completely, then the community needn’t exercise its collective conscience at all.
The nature/nurture debate may be gaining welcome nuance, with a degree of consensus now that genes do not act independently of environments but respond flexibly to them. But the potential for studies like the one in New Zealand to be employed in the pursuit of regressive and authoritarian policies remains troubling.
Of course, any study can be manipulated in pursuit of a political goal. Moral conclusions do not follow directly from scientific evidence. But traditionally genetics have been used to bolster more conservative agendas, perhaps because nature has been seen as more restraining than nurture. As genetic engineering advances, however, there is always the possibility that biology will end up being more flexible than culture.
Similar vigilance must be exercised when considering the flipside of the law of lost causes: the excuse of exceptionalism. This is the idea that through talent and determination children can transcend their circumstances, trouncing inequality by sheer dint of will, and so obviating the need to tackle social exclusion. Here Stephen Pinker may have a foothold, when he contends that blank-slate theory is just as likely as a theory of evolution based on Darwinism to entrench inequality and determinism.
Exceptionalism is a fantasy that is only ever applied – again – to the children that society is least willing to take responsibility for. There are one in a million Billy Elliots or Samantha Mortons or Tracey Emins. On very few occasions do ability and application alone provide a route out of poverty, and on fewer occasions do children possess such copious gifts in the first place. Inequality is inherent in the capitalist system, and meritocracy is its partner in crime.
The children that this country has most difficulty accepting are those that the sociologist Charles Jenks called the ‘unexceptional disadvantaged’ – the ones who can’t dance or act or paint their way out of the cycle of deprivation. But they are no less deserving of care because they will never go on to thrill the audience at Covent Garden.
A few weeks later, Allana is climbing up on to the bench in a bus shelter in the city centre, kicking against the reinforced glass: ‘I break it!’ Again and again, she likes to test the boundaries of the physical world – and adult tolerance. Gloria ignores her and goes to check the timetable, leaving Allana in charge of Sienna, who is asleep and gaping in her pushchair. Tenderly, she arranges her sister’s blanket and strokes her hair. She does not stir. Allana was in trouble again last night: ‘Fuck’s sake, I can’t do it!’ she said as she was struggling to put some clothes on a Sindy.
The journey to the Snakes and Ladders play warehouse is an adventure in itself. The interior of the bus offers a new domain of physical challenge and entertainment. There are also strict rules that must be adhered to.
Gloria finds a nook for the pushchair behind the driver’s cabin, while Allana heads up to the back of the vehicle
. She’s looking for a front-facing seat next to a hanging strap. (The back-facing seats next to straps are positioned too low for her to reach up.) Both seats are taken. She regards the occupants jealously, and makes a few pointed remarks about not being able to reach from her height-retarded, back-facing perch. But the two men are talking into their mobile phones and don’t seem to realise that they’re sitting where she should be.
She moves off into one of the two-seater rows and buries her face in the seat. Sometimes she looks out of the window. Sometimes she sings: ‘Wah, wah, wah.’ One of the men alights and Allana dives to claim her position. ‘I reach up.’ She grasps the strap with firm satisfaction. ‘I gon’ go on the one next to it.’ She tells herself to hold on when the bus starts moving again. ‘Bus goin’ now.’ She refuses to move when the bus is in motion, and won’t even slide along from one seat to the next on her bottom.
On the walk from the bus-stop to the Snakes and Ladders building, Gloria keeps calling to her to keep up, but Allana hangs behind the pushchair, grabbing ever more preposterous handfuls of flowers and leaves, only to throw them up into the wind. The boundaries set by walls and other people’s gardens don’t matter. Anything that can be reached can be ripped at.
It’s not Allana’s first time here, so she propels herself through the entrance gate while Gloria is still paying. The Snakes and Ladders warehouse comprises a vast, primary-coloured and multi-storied play area, with a scaled-back version for threes and under, and a café space where adults can sit and chat, or even read a book, and wave occasionally to a child up on high. The air is prickly with body heat and plastic. Everything inside is soft and wipe-clean.
Shoes come off. Gloria goes in with Sienna and Allana climbs by herself. She’s curious, but cautious. There are bigger, quicker kids, who push past. The top floor is not explored immediately – she climbs one level, returns to the ground floor, then up to the second floor and down again. Even with this studied gradualism, the top level when first reached feels overwhelming, and she starts crying for her mummy. Gloria lifts her up tenderly, and carries her across the intimidating wobbly floor.
Eventually, both girls settle on a route: up the spongy ramp; across the net; along the rope bridge; through the hanging mats with cartoon faces; and down the wide, blue, wavy slide which takes four children at a time. Sometimes they race on the way down: ‘Ready, steady, go!’ Allana always says it, and she always pushes herself off slightly ahead of ‘go’. When the sisters get to the bottom of the slide they’re not dizzied for a second; they spring upright and run for the ramp again.
The café sells Slush Puppies. Allana’s mouth is turning purple. Sienna has dropped a piece of ice on her trousers. A little girl walks past, crying torrentially, and they both turn from their drinks to observe her with interest. Their mini chocolate biscuits are melted and stuck together. Allana pushes the packet at Gloria. ‘You have them, Mum.’
The man came to attend to the silverfish this morning. They went up to Botley last night and spent a lot of pennies on presents for Sienna’s third birthday. Gloria has to borrow for things like that – sometimes from her mum and sometimes from the Provident, who come round to the door; you pay them back weekly.
The girls are both tired now and it’s not a struggle to persuade them that it’s time to go. Sienna says she wants to walk. Allana gets in the pushchair, but the moment her sister sees her there she changes her mind and demands her rightful place. Now Allana wants to be carried.
As she grudgingly walks back up to the bus-stop, Allana is again seeking foliage. She picks up a huge, brown, leathery horse-chestnut leaf. It’s as big as her face. She finds a lavender bush and picks some scented stems. She gives one to Sienna and one to Gloria.
Summer ends. On the first day of school after the holidays, the class is truncated. The majority of the children have moved up a year and are starting Reception today, while the new nursery intake has yet to arrive. Allana walks with her nanna along the road towards the sprawl of low school buildings, fiddling with a heavy ring on the hand she is holding. She finds her name peg for her pink hat, and strolls out into the playground once nanna makes it clear she isn’t staying.
So Allana begins a new term – without Kayleigh. It’s hard to know if she’s missing her, or whether her absence will make a difference to her talking. Everyone is feeling funny today, missing home, remembering playmates and where the toys are kept. The nursery assistants are unobtrusively alert to the tension under the sunny sky.
Allana is playing with Mr Toad, a wrinkled, unpretty creature who will be her constant companion this afternoon. She discusses his movements on the climbing-frame. ‘He climb up. He slide down. He go under.’ Sometimes she looks around to check whether anyone else is listening to her, but mostly she aspires to conduct herself unwitnessed. She shows no interest in the other children, who are mainly competing with each other for grown-ups’ attention, sometimes with tears and sometimes with tantrums. Allana prefers to be away from adult eyes.
She commandeers a bike with a long wooden trailer and trundles over to her favourite part of the playground, an avenue of thick bushes that connects with an unlandscaped area beyond. ‘Go in the bushes!’ she calls excitedly. ‘There aren’t monsters. My mum gone in there.’ She pauses to savour the isolation before peddling round to the other side of the tarmacked cycling area. ‘Monsters in there,’ she reveals, pointing to the primary-school building. ‘He say “I’m gon’ eat you”.’
Indoors, the classroom is quiet, and empty but for one boy who would like somebody to read him a story. Allana walks round to the seating area, which contains a small sofa and a big bucket of toys. She removes the toys one by one, naming them as they come: the dinosaur is a monster, the bear a teddy, the dolly a little baby. ‘Sienna, Sienna,’ she croons as she pauses to cradle it for a moment.
By the door, the assistants have set up a table with pink play dough. It’s home-made and sticky, leaving a wormy residue on people’s palms. Allana takes a lump. ‘I break it!’ she challenges. ‘I roll it.’ She presses Mr Toad’s limbs into it. ‘Him very naughty.’ Allana has taken her neatly rolled sausage and torn it to bits. ‘Him very, very naughty. Him allowed to do it again?’ The other children round the table don’t care if she’s ruining her dough. Lack of censure can frustrate her as much as its imposition. She seems to have difficulty distinguishing between the intrinsically bad and what is merely self-defeating. ‘See him do it again! Him sad, him sad.’
Now it’s fruit time. Everyone goes outside and sits on squares of carpet on the almost-too-damp grass. There are plates of chopped apple and banana and cups for milk. The assistant suggests they count the number of adults and the number of children. A little boy is squirming, worried about his plastic comb, which doesn’t fit in his pocket when he is sitting down. The plate is passed from hand to hand nearly flat, and only a few slices of fruit fall on to the grass, when one girl is distracted by a fly.
Allana has chosen an orange cup for her milk. Would she like a little bit more? She nods and nods, but Miss puts her hand to her ear with an encouraging face until a small ‘please’ emerges. By the third refill, she says ‘yes, please’ without prompting. The other children are talking about what they’ll be when they grow up, but Allana isn’t paying attention. Sometimes it seems that it is the communal expectation of speech rather than the act itself that bothers her most. In the next playground, the Reception class comes out. Some of them approach the fence and call over to their friends in nursery. Someone calls for Allana but she doesn’t go to them. It’s not Kayleigh.
At the end of the day, one of the nursery assistants bets that they’ve all forgotten how to tidy up. There are new green drawers to put the toys away in. Allana goes to the table of bricks and sweeps some off into the box on the floor. They make a mighty clatter and she turns around to check, unsure that something so noisy can be approved of. It is. She repeats the motion carefully, over and over, until all the bricks are cleared away. Her sticker says
: ‘I tidied up.’
Mrs Harrison just about has time to read a story. It’s called ‘My First Day at Nursery’, because it’s their first day back after the holidays. Allana sits cross-legged with the other children. She looks carefully at the book being held up, though she doesn’t call out the answers to the teacher’s questions with the rest of the class. When asked directly, she says her favourite colour is purple.
They sing ‘Old MacDonald Had A Farm’, and for each verse a different child is invited to choose an animal. Allana picks a cow and, even though someone picked that only two verses ago, Mrs Harrison says it’s OK. She asks Allana if she knows what noise cows make, but she doesn’t want to say. The first day without Kayleigh, her personal spokesperson, is nearly over. Halfway through the verse, Allana begins to sing along. They finish with ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’.
Although they’re separated at school, Kayleigh still comes round to play. Next weekend, the atmosphere is hot and high in Allana’s room. Her visitor is cooking in the plastic microwave. She’s making cake and hot chocolate, actually. You’ve got to be very careful with it, actually. Kayleigh bosses Allana briskly, while bringing out foodstuffs for an imaginary guest: ‘Don’t draw on the walls, actually, your mum’s already told you.’
Gloria and Kayleigh’s mum have been friends for years. Hardly any of the mothers they know with young children are out at work. Gloria would like to get another job eventually, but she knows that for now Sienna won’t be left. Gloria hasn’t had any trouble herself, but a friend of hers with young children was told that if she didn’t get back to work they’d stop her payments. She lasted two days in her new job.
It has been suggested that the government only started to take an interest in child care when it surmised that one way to tackle this country’s appalling levels of child poverty was to get poor mothers into the workplace. But ‘welfare to work’ has its limits: more than half of children living in poverty already have a parent in employment. This is also a question of culture. The upper and middle classes have historically paid other people to look after their children to an extent that is anathema to a working-class – and particularly ethnic minority – mother. (More often because of structural imperatives rather than personal choice, child care in the UK remains a woman’s province, though this is slowly changing.)