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Little figures, big shadows: country childhood stories Owain Jones: Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and environment; Countryside & Community Research Institute 1

Country Childhood Stories - Owain Jones

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Owain Jones' seminar given at Museum of English Rural Life on 12/03/13 concerning childhood stories and experiences of rurla life

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Page 1: Country Childhood Stories - Owain Jones

Little figures, big shadows: country childhood stories

Owain Jones: Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and environment; Countryside & Community Research Institute

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I am a cultural geographer with interests in how landscapes and places are imagined, and how they are practiced in everyday life. This includes thinking about rural childhood in the UK. A very potent cultural idea - or discourse – or set of intersecting discourses.

I will go through ideas of

‘rural idyll’

‘rural childhood idyll’

Ideas about – ‘what children are’

Literary portrayals of rural childhood

How the countryside and the city are contrasted

How the idea of ‘rural childhood idyll’ is commodified

Is it just a cultural myth?

Gender and ethnic differences

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The Rural Idyll

One of the most powerful cultural discourses

in UK society – the idea of ‘the countryside’.

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Nature and (traditional) agriculture conflated in the UK (no wilderness). Art intersects with the ‘countryside’ – nature, agriculture, community. A pastoral tradition – still very active and powerful - still being reinvented.

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WHY rural idyll?

Deep roots in ancient texts (Raymond Williams)

Countryside and forest seen as areas free from state control (Shakespeare, Robin Hood)

Reaction against urbanisation and industrialisation

Class - Powerful families were firstly landowning families.

War - countryside used as emblem of nation at times of national crisis

Memory : nation’s deep collective pre-urbanidentity

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Debates still abound in media andLiterature about the ‘idyll’.

Villages, communities

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Idyll in Literature: e.g. Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, The Brontes

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Idyll in Poetry: e.g. Keats, Wordsworth, R S Thomas, Housman, Claire, Ivor Gurney (many others)

Often about idyll lost

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Idyll in Art: John Constable, Graham Southerland

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Idyll in Music: classical, e.g. Vaughan Williams; William Walton; folk (a folk revival going on at moment)

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Welly Telly

Escape to the Country (BBC)

“A series which helps prospective buyers find their dream home in the country”

Build A New Life In The Country (Channel 5)

“The show follows British adventurers who dream of creating homes in perfect rural locations” (often moving from urban areas

“Perfect rural location”

An idea that is recognisable

The perfect urban location but more uncertain

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The Country Childhood Idyll

A key part of the

wider idea of idyll.

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An ongoing discussion about this notably Colin Ward

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The Country Childhood Idyll

A potent cocktail of:

Freedom

Adventure (Famous Five)

Fresh air

Physical activities (tree climbing)

Contact with nature: animals, plants, landscapes.

Stuff to play with (think of city spaces in comparison)

Places to hide and play (the Just William stories)

Other children (gangs) (Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee)

Places to make their own (dens)

Community

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A literary creation?

Many examples

(novels) Cider with Rosie

(on curriculum - film, tv, plays)

(night games)

Larkrise to Candleford

Children’s literature

Memoirs and biographies

(My Country Childhood)

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It is very arguable that modern childhood was invented about 2 – 2.5 centuries ago by the Romantics - innocence, purity, spontaneous, creative, the best of humanity

Charted in paintings and literature

The Apollonian view of children as opposed to the Dionysian. (Jenks 1996)

The invention of childhood

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Romantic genealogy

Romantic movement: art, literature and philosophy in late18th century Western Europe.

In reaction to urbanisation and Industrialisation.

Invented the ‘nature’ , ‘countryside’ and ‘childhood’.

Childhood close to nature. Athome in the countryside.

Distrust of the urban, dismay at the urban

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So just as children were beginning to be constructed as natural, wild, free, they were being moved into, or born into, the growing urban dystopias of the industrial revolution. (Dickens). This tension still remains (Jones 2000)

Blake Songs of Innocence

Rural

Blake Songs of Experience

Urban

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Rural –urban comparisons live on

Most children now live in

urban or suburban areas.

(but)

‘the city under modern conditions,

can no longer be dealt with

practically by children’

(Ward 1978: vii).

A nostalgia for other times

and other places.

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Urban childhood lives in a sort of shadow of the other as an ideal.

A wider discourse too - Raymond Williams -

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Result??? The impossibility of urban childhood

‘The city is everywhere and in everything’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 1).

‘in Britain, the late modern private child [is] predominantly the city child’. (James et al: 1998: 51)

‘to be a child outside adult supervision, visible on city centre streets, is to be out of place’ (Connolly and Ennew 1996: 133)

‘it is hard to escape the conclusion that the turn of the century urban child is an indoor child’ (Ward, 2000: viii)

‘environmental planners have become increasingly aware of the ‘impossibility’ of urban space for children’ (ESRC, 1999)

‘ I can think of no city that admits the claim of children’ (Ward, 1978: 204).

‘the death of children is a constant thread in the history of London. In more than one sense, youth is a stuff which will not endure in the confines of the city’ (Peter Ackroyd 2000: 639).

Where does this leave children?

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A recently changed history??

Half a century ago youths, in rural areas at least, were freer than those in urban areas. They were not watched over, they were not always under the eyes of adults. This is no longer the case. Now when they leave school they have to return home right away -there are no more haystacks, quiet hideaways, places where one can go in secret. They moved from the gaze of adults-teachers to that of adult-parents, to the gaze of the TV. And they are always closed off in that way. Where as in the city, it was the opposite is not too long ago. Freedom could be found in basements, in parking lots, in everything that was underground; that is, in the unconscious of the city, where a certain sexuality in relation to the forbidden, including its unfortunate sexist and violent aspects would take place. There was something really wild about it. Now it is disappearing because of the control of children’s free time. (Poslianec 1996: 68-69)

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Putting the ‘myth’ into practice?

Counterurbanisation

Moving to the countryside. Some couples move from urban areas when they have, or plan to have, children.

Bringing up kids (quote from my research):

, “well, you see, he (Jack) couldn’t be a wild thing in St Andrews Road [their old address] without people telling him off and whatever, whereas out here he can, can’t he?”

“they can’t do wild things in the city can they without, without sort of damaging things... Jack running around with a huge stick (here) sort of, it looks funny rather than menacing doesn’t it”.

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Putting the ‘myth’ into practice?

Taking city children into

the countryside. Various

Organisations do this.

City farms (bringing the

country to the city).

School – farm link

programmes.

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CHILDREN’S FARMS (very quick google search)

LANGLEYBURY CHILDREN’S FARM

Langleybury Lane

Kings Langley

01923 270603

www.langleyburyfarm.org.uk

Open: Easter – End of October

School holidays (weekdays) –

12pm – 4pm

MEAD OPEN FARM

Standbridge Road

Billington

Nr. Leighton Buzzard, Beds

01525 852954

www.meadopenfarm.co.uk

Adult £5.50, Child £4.50, SC £5

Annual tickets available

THURLEIGH FARM CENTRE

Cross End

Thurleigh, Beds

01234 771597

www.thurleighfarmcentre.co.uk

Adult from £2.95

Child from £3.50

See the lambs being hand-reared. Plus lots of young rabbits to cuddle.

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Comodification

Children’s Books and Toys

1000s of farm/rural based booksFor children of all ages

Mostly read to /played withby urban children

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A myth? A mask?As the idea of rural idyll is argued to hide all sorts of problems; the rural childhood idyll might mask all kinds of problems which children face such as social isolation, lack of access to transport and facilities, poverty, drugs etc.

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place  Harry Crews's memoir of his childhood in rural Georgia, published in

1978, was lauded by critics as an honest depiction of the violence, desperation, and courage evoked by situations of extreme poverty.

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IsolationRemote from servicesPublic transportAging populationsModern agri-businessRural poverty

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So is it just a myth?

No. That is too simplistic a conclusion.

“There is a big gap in equality of access to high quality natural environments between children from rural backgrounds and children from urban backgrounds” (Demos and Green Alliance, 2003).

“There is also a suggestion that across England, children in rural areas may be more active than other children (Pretty and others 2009).” Play England (2012)

The myth, when acted out, can become a sort of reality.

(Counter-urbanisation) those moving to the country today might well be wealthy middle class families with significant resources.

Children in some instances do have degrees of freedom.

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A complex picture

Cider With Rosie is definitely an account of Idyll but there is detailed description of extreme poverty and violence in it. There are glimpses of one disabled child who just disappears

Idyll is in part about community and belonging

As depicted in film….

Whistle Down the Wind. Brian Forbes

Will it Snow at Christmas?Sandrine Veysset

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Glimpses of ‘Allswell’ (case study in South West England)

Lots of children, some quite free to ‘play out’ at quite early age

The “micro geographies” very important – roads, paths, arrangements of houses

STUFF TO PLAY WITH. SPACE TO PLAY IN

Parental/adult attitudes variable but key

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It did look like ‘The Famous Five’ sometimes

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Theoretically: this is very much a cultural geography approach where discourse and social construction is to the fore. But as the pictures show, it can also beabout embodied practice. The two are always entangled in social formations of what ever kind.

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Control and a kind of freedom

By choosing to live in such a place, where what children can encounter is controlled by the environment, parents exert a form of control which in turn lets some children have a degree of freedom.

The case study, very much a middle class idyll. There might well be other, wilder, idylls.

In either case, these allow children to make their own local geographies which suffuse through adult spatial patterns.

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Differentiated country childhoods

Ethnicity (n.b. Ingrid Pollard).

Ability

Individual and family

Gender

Where?

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Boys and girls and come out to play?

The girls played their part of invitation and show, and were rather more assured than we were. They sensed they had come into their own at last. For suddenly they were not creatures to order about any more, nor the make shift boys they had been; they possessed, and they knew it, the clues to secrets more momentous than we could guess. (Laurie Lee).

I became aware when writing about city children that boys experience, explore and exploit their environment much more than girls do. This is even more true in the country. The range of activities thought appropriate for boys is far wider than for girls, who are also subject to a wider range of parental prohibitions (Ward p. 13)

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Need to radically rethink what children are, and what cities are, and how they (can) come together

Children not “Apollonian” (innocent) or “Dionysian” (corrupt) (Chris Jenks 2005)

but ‘other’ (Jones, 2008). Strange, partly unknowable, weird creatures who need to be left to their own devices, spaces and becomings as much as practicable

Higonnet (1998)

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Conclusions?

Ideas and practices of country childhood are a highly complex and potent mix of powerful ideas of nature, nationhood, romantic childhood, concern over the cities and so on.

These flows of meaning get tangled up in the everyday lives of children and families, and shape everyday life.

But they do not shape everyday life completely or in simple, direct, ways. Many other factors are important too, such as the specifics of personal and family geographical life.

There are differences in ethnic and gender experiences and the shifting contexts of globalised culture, economy and technology (which I have not mentioned) are also important.

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Key references

Bunce, M. (1994) The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American images of landscape, London: Routledge.

Bunce, M. (2003), Reproducing the Idyll, in P. Cloke (ed.) Country Visions, London: Pearson Education, 14-30.

Davis, J. and Ridge, T. (1997) Same Scenery, Different Lifestyle: Rural Children on a Low income, London: The Children’s Society.

Demos and Green Alliance (2003) a child’s place: why environment matters to children, Demos: London

Horton, J. (2003) Different Genres, Different Visions? The changing countryside in postwar British children’s literature , in P. Cloke (ed.) Country Visions, London: Pearson Education. 73-92.

Jones, O. (1997) ‘Little Figures, Big Shadows, Country Childhood Stories’, in P. Cloke and J. Little (eds.) Contested Countryside Cultures, London: Routledge, 158-179.

Jones, O. (1999) ‘Tomboy Tales: the rural, nature and the gender of childhood’, Gender, Place and Culture, 6, 2, 117-136.

Jones, O. (2000) ‘Melting Geography: Purity, disorder Childhood and Space’, in S. Holloway and G. Valentine (eds.) Children’s Geography: Living, Playing Learning, London: Routledge.

Jones, O. (2002) ‘Naturally Not! Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism’, Human Ecology Review, 9. 2. 17-30.

Philo, C. (1992) ‘Neglected rural geographies: a review’, Journal of Rural Studies 8, 2, 193-207.Ward, C. (1990) The Child in the Country, London: Bedford Square Press.Williams, R. (1985) The Country and the City, London: The Hogarth Press.

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