They muck you up...

Yes, I do realise that Philip Larkin's original quote is several letters of the alphabet removed from my title line; but I've never used that word and I don't plan to start now.

Anyway, I think I was about eleven when my parents decided that I wanted to try basket weaving. They were always telling me what I wanted (or didn't want), so by sheer statistics they were going to be right now and again, and as it happened they were on this particular occasion. Apparently it ran in the family; some long-deceased relatives on my father's side had been professional basketmakers.

Of course, that didn't mean I was going to get natural materials. They were expensive, they usually had to be soaked, and there was always the possibility that I might make a mess, which was very much forbidden. I'm actually astonished, looking back, that we were even allowed paints; but I think my parents felt obliged to provide those for some reason. Of course, we couldn't paint just anywhere. There was an old occasional table with a wonky leg that lived in the hall because it was of no further use to the adults, and if you wanted to paint, you had to go and ask for a piece of paper (no free access to paper! It might get wasted! And heaven help you if you wanted a piece of sticky tape; you had to go through a full interrogation to ensure it was for a very good reason). If you were allowed your piece of paper, which wasn't a given, you then had to go and do your painting at this occasional table. It had a formica top, so it was very easy to clean, but nonetheless you weren't allowed to do your own cleaning up (because you would be bad at it) and there was no reason why adults should have to clean up after you any more than was strictly necessary; so you had to put down newspaper first. The table was also too low, so your knees stuck out, but that didn't matter for children. And so on, and so on. And, of course, woe to you if you got so much as a trace of it on your clothes. They could always just have given us overalls, but I suppose that would have been an unnecessary expense because we'd have grown out of them.

So I was given a pile of plastic cane and a set of instructions, and I was left to teach myself, which was standard practice. This I did, with a great deal of gusto; and I made a waste paper basket. It was, for want of a word, vase-shaped; it curved slightly inwards from the bottom and then tapered out. And it must actually have been pretty good, at least for a child, because my parents never said a word about it. I did have to keep it in my bedroom, though, and I could never work out whether this was because a) it was good but it still looked as if it had been made by a child, or b) it was only plastic. They didn't like any embarrassing evidence that they had children hanging around in the main parts of the house, but also they liked stuff that looked expensive, even if it wasn't; and my little waste paper basket certainly didn't look expensive. Still, it did me good service for years until I was finally able to leave home.

Well, by this time I'd got the bug, so I asked if I could have some actual rattan now so that I could make more and better baskets. It turned out that this had not been the idea. I was not supposed to get the bug, just to make a basket which would keep me quiet for a bit. I can't remember if I was told I didn't want that (I wouldn't be surprised if I was, but I can't specifically remember it), but in any case the answer was a definite no. Silly of me to ask, really.

Anyway, if you want to know how it's done with proper wicker, there is an extremely good tutorial here, and there is also some background material here which is very interesting. If you're using plastic cane, you have to adapt slightly, because you can't split the cane; I seem to remember I started my basket with four (or possibly eight) thick strands overlapped in a square, and then added in more strands as the base circle got larger. But it was a very long time ago, and the basket has not survived, so I can't give you a great deal of detail.

I've never tried doing it since; I would quite like to, but it is a somewhat unwieldy craft, and I'm now at the stage where if I can't easily do it in my lap I need to find workarounds. I will admit, though, I was a bit put off at the time. I always had difficulty with being told what I wanted in any case, and I found it hard to adjust to being told I wanted something and then didn't want to carry on with it; and I didn't like to make trouble, so I suppose I just convinced myself I didn't want to do any more of it. That, after all, was my usual strategy; it was generally the best bet.

It could have been a lot worse. At least they didn't manage to put me off knitting. As I've previously mentioned, my mother refused to teach me (I think she felt that was what teachers were for; although she did at least teach one of my sisters to play the piano, after I'd been asking her unsuccessfully for years if she'd teach me, so the rule about not teaching anything to one's own children wasn't quite absolute). But when I managed to learn from someone else, she bought me a knitting bag as a Christmas present one year, with some needles, some rather nice random yarn, and a pattern for a tank top. It had two versions, one with a round neck and one with a square neck. I was initially delighted, and I said, "Thank you so much! I'm going to knit this one" (pointing to the one with the round neck).

"Oh, no, you're not," Mum replied. "You're going to knit the other one."

"But I like this one!" I protested.

"If you knit that one, you will be punished. You will knit the other one."

I never finished it. I thought at the time it was just normal parental arbitrariness; but actually, looking back, I realise she did have a reason for her behaviour. She was afraid that if I tried to knit the one with the round neck, I might need help. And you didn't help children with things. It was a waste of precious adult time and generally Not Done.

But - to continue to misquote Philip Larkin slightly - they were mucked up in their turn. My father had such a bad childhood that he could not be persuaded ever to talk about it, and my mother was sent to a ghastly tenth-rate boarding school which considered deportment to be far more important than, say, science (it taught the first but not the second). I'm not going to disguise the fact that I had a horrible time as a child (and for years I didn't believe there was even such a thing as a happy childhood), but I'm also not going to blame my parents for it, as they were both products of their own even more horrible upbringing. In fact, I'm more than happy to go on record as saying they did surprisingly well, all things considered. They were at least very conscientious about ensuring that our basic physical needs were met, even if not always on time; if you were thirsty, for instance, you had to wait till it was "time for a drink", and for years I thought that was a real thing. But you would certainly get a drink when the adults were thirsty (well, unless it was mid-morning, in which case you had to wait till lunchtime, because mid-morning drinks were on the list of arbitrary adult privileges). Also, the unremitting negativity was intended entirely for our benefit. My parents were both terrified that we might turn out spoilt or big-headed; I think they saw those as the greatest risks facing children. So they were very careful not to say anything positive to us, and in fact they had entire systems in place whose sole purpose was to ensure that we were continually reminded of our inferior status. Otherwise, we might start to think we were important, and then the world would end.

Thankfully, things have greatly changed. I've mentioned before that there are a lot of children in our church. In all the time that I've been there, I have never once heard any parent insult their children, talk down to them, make disparaging remarks about them to other people in their hearing, fail to say things like "please" and "thank you" and even "sorry" to them when appropriate, automatically disbelieve them on the grounds that "children imagine things" (the unspoken assumption being "and they can't tell the difference between imagination and reality"), fail to give praise where it's due, make them feel guilty about being expensive nuisances, or in any way treat them as less than people. In fact, they even encourage and support their children and teach them to do things! The other day I saw a friend from church coming out of a karate class with her two sons. Not only was she prepared to take them all the way down here (they live in a village some distance away) for a karate class, but she was even happy to join in with them. It blew my mind. It wasn't even that she was prepared to take the trouble; it was that she didn't even think of it as trouble. She genuinely enjoys sharing her children's interests. And I have another friend whose son is keen on football and apparently a very good goalkeeper. She isn't interested herself, but nonetheless she happily drives him all over the place to play in school matches.

You know... treating children like people ought to be basic. Children are people, and these days I can say that with conviction. But all these parents don't realise just how healing it is.