A few weeks ago, when we visited Bury St. Edmund’s, our kids were clambering around on the ruins of the old Abbey there. The ruins are in a lovely public park, open to all. It was early in the morning, and we were some of the first people there. An older British couple wandered by, and the woman looked at our children for a moment. I expected her to make some comment about how cute they were (that’s what usually happens). But instead, she looked at me and said, in her proper middle-class British way: “These are very important ruins; I don’t think children should be climbing on them.”
I was, admittedly, taken aback. There were no signs saying to keep off, the place is a public park, and indeed, within an hour, there were probably 50 kids dashing around and over the ruined walls. So it’s clear we weren’t breaking any rules. The key here is the woman’s phrasing: “I don’t think….” She apparently felt perfectly entitled to give her opinion about the behavior of our children, despite the fact that they were a) not disturbing her; and b) not breaking any rules. She probably also heard our accents and saw our backpacks and pegged us as stupid Americans who wouldn’t know culture if we fell over it.
Of course, I spent the next hour thinking of all the clever and devastating things I could have said. Like, “Oh, these are very important ruins? I thought they were just a bunch of old stones!” Or, “I just
love the warmth of the British people, you know?” Or, “Thanks, but no one asked you.” Or maybe, “Where I come from we still have an empire, not just ruins” (though, on second thought, that one’s not strictly accurate). Anyway, what I
did say was “I don’t think they’re hurting anything,” which I thought was all right given the circumstances and considering that I’m a pretty conflict-averse person. And, amazingly, she came right back at me: “They still shouldn’t be climbing on them,” she announced, before turning on her heel and marching away.
I was reminded of this incident the other day, during Halloween. As Wendy mentioned in her earlier post, trick-or-treating isn’t really that common over here. But it’s not because people think there might be a danger to children, or someone might give them poisoned candy. Just the reverse, actually. Apparently 6-year olds requesting candy once a year is both an invasion of privacy and terrifying for pensioners (aka senior citizens). The other day a local newspaper noted, very seriously, that “Halloween can be harmless fun, but sometimes members
of the community can become distressed by unexpected callers.” (
Unexpected callers? How could they be unexpected, unless you’ve somehow missed that it’s Halloween?) On the BBC web site today there was a story entitled “Should Halloween be banned?” And lots of communities give away signs like the one on the right. And on reflection, though I'm sure some of Olivia's disappointment this year had to do with not scoring much candy, I wonder if there's a deeper level as well, in which she was forced to confront that fact that kids just aren't at the center of the world here, even on a day (like Halloween) that's supposed to be for them.
So part of it is that the British just don't indulge children the way that Americans do. And the over-60 crowd can be particularly chilly. But the other part is this sense of privacy, which is interesting because, of course, in many ways people over here live much
less private lives. Their homes are smaller and closer together, they're outside in public a lot more, they take public transportation more often. All these things help make European quality of life much higher in all kinds of ways. But there may be a kind of compensation in which you've got to protect what few boundaries you have left. In the US we barricade ourselves in huge homes and sentimentalize children. In the UK they do neither.
