"Photos, Children's Books & the Passing of Childhood"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Photos, Children’s Book & the Passing of Childhood”

April 24, 2021

 

‘Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

                                                                                                                C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

                                                                                                                The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950

 

A framed photo sits on my desk. Taken two years ago at the Seabright Beach Club in New Jersey, it shows our ten grandchildren, cousin alongside cousin. They range in age from ten to eighteen. Recently, looking for a missing picture, I opened the back and out fell half a dozen photos of earlier Christmas cards. The earliest was for Christmas 2003 when there were five grandchildren. The most recent, 2013 with all ten. Looking at the photos, I choked up, filled with a sense of loss – the passing of their childhood. 

 

As a grandfather, I am having my third go at childhood. But now, as my youngest approaches her thirteenth birthday, that most wonderful of all human experiences is about to fade away. My wife and I were fortunate that our three children produced ten grandchildren within eight years, which meant that their childhoods – from the birth of the first on July 10, 2000 to the youngest turning thirteen, which she will do on June 24^th of this year – lasted twenty-one years, or 20% of my life, too short a time for the joy they bring. Being a grandparent means you get the pleasure without the responsibility. Grandparents bring treats, read stories and take them on Thomas the Train. Parents must make them brush their teeth, put them to bed and tell them to turn off their i-Phones. Now, looking at the photo taken in 2003 with my daughter and two daughters-in-law holding their babies, and knowing that today all five are in college, I ask, where has the time gone?

 

One’s own children provide a second shot at childhood. Our first arrived in 1966, and the last (the third) turned thirteen in 1984. Those eighteen years represented 40% of my then life. While my wife and I were the “heavies,” in that we were the ones to discipline our children, we were rewarded with the joys that can only accrue to a parent, in seeing awe in young eyes when first seeing Santa. On Christmas morning 1972, our oldest was six, his sister four, and the youngest not yet two. Around five o’clock that morning the two oldest snuck downstairs, having first made sure that pillows were tucked under the covers of their beds, so that a night-wandering, parent might think they were still asleep. Their mission: to see if Santa had come. Wrapped presents under the tree and filled stockings hung from the mantle gave assurance they had not been forgotten. But the temptation was too great and the time before breakfast too long; so down came the stockings with a crash, which awakened their mother and father. Expressions of wonder and delight on the children’s faces turned rudely-awakened Mother and Father into forgiving Mom and Dad.

 

It is our own childhood to which we return as we grow older. During those dozen years before the teens arrive, time, like desert sands, stretched toward infinity. It was the only life we knew. Grown-ups are, of course, necessary. They provide food and shelter, offer shoulders to cry on and have arms to hug with. But they don’t, as we constantly told them, understand us. My mother would admonish me: “Grow up!” How was I to know what she meant? I was a child and spoke and acted as a child. Now, from a vantage point of almost seventy years, I look back, aided by childhood books and faded black-and-white photographs of people and animals long dead, and I mourn the loss of the innocence of childhood. But I am thankful for memories. I have dozens of pictures with my older sister, younger brother and sometimes baby sister Betsy. Many were taken during the war, most with our mother – on the beach in Madison, Connecticut or playing with goats in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Time has erased hurt feelings, the scare from once being locked in a bath house, recurring nightmares, and the pain of getting my finger caught in a car door. It is the happy times I remember. Riding horseback with my mother, skiing with my father, and doing both with my siblings. 

 

We lived four miles from the village and a mile from the nearest neighbor, so we entertained ourselves. Our house was filled with books, some of which I still own: Miltiades Peterkin Paul by Charles Remington Talbot, writing as John Brownjohn, and An Island Story by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall. In the introduction she wrote that the book is “not a history lesson but a story-book.” Daddy Jake by Joel Chandler Harris (1889) and Two Little Confederates by Thomas Nelson Page (1889) belonged to my Tennessee-born maternal grandmother. Proud Pumpkin was written and illustrated by Nora Unwin in 1953. She moved to Peterborough from England in 1946, to be close to her friend and collaborator Elizabeth Yates, author of Amos Fortune, Free Man and several other children’s books. When we moved, these books came along. They include The Allies Fairy Book, published after World War I and illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Clement Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, also illustrated by Rackham, was read by my mother and has been read by us to our three children and ten grandchildren. As children, we laughed when my mother read: “He had a broad face and a little round belly, that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.” Today, upon hearing those words, I smile. 

 

Over the years I purchased others that I knew as a child: Mother Goose, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix Potter, Barnaby by Crockett Johnson, who appeared in comic trips, Crock of Gold by James Stephens and illustrated by Thomas McKenzie. I have original editions of Uncle Remus by Joel Candler Harris, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and the four Pooh books by A.A. Milne. My copy of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were published in 1946 and include the John Tenniel illustrations. I can still recite the poem “Jabberwocky”: “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” Who does not get nostalgic for their childhood when re-reading the opening sentence in Winnie-The-Pooh: “Here is Edward Bear, coming down stairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.” And who does not weep when Charlotte dies: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” I could go on. There are over three dozen such books on my shelves. I pull one out, glance through it, and the images that appear are of my own childhood, when there was no past, and the future was indistinguishable from the present. 

 

One’s childhood lasts about a dozen years – not long in the average person’s lifetime. But memories emerge as we age. And we realize how quickly those years passed by. Childhood cannot be restored but it can be reclaimed through quiet moments spent alone, sifting through old photographs, and turning the pages of a favorite, childhood story. C.S. Lewis, as quoted in the rubric that heads this essay, was right. I am now old enough to read his magical Narnia tales, which I did three years ago.