The World in a Grain of Sand

Anthony Thwaite

issues from the hand of God, the simple soul
To a flat world of changing lights and noise,
To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured”
from Animula, by T. S. Eliot

The process begins in one room, and in one particular part of room, and moves out from there. At first there is restriction and constriction: swaddling clothes, perhaps, and an immobility in the face of noise, light, darkness, faces. There is only a voice “that is all you have, it is your own:

A baby crying in the night
And with no language but a cry.

But what makes the voice, the cry, is hunger, pain, fear. At first happiness makes silence and silence happiness. There is exploration. The cradle, the carry-cot, the apple-box, the bottom-drawer, arms that pick up and hold tight.

Then the baby begins to discover its own body, clasping, unclasping its hands like a sad old woman. A ball of shot silk twirls its colours round above the cot, and gradually the eyes begin to focus and to follow it. The fixed, almost blind, stare turns to recognition, to curiosity. One day someone puts an absurd plastic doll, light as air and with an inane little bell inside it, on to the blankets by the sleeping body “and suddenly there’s a jingling from the cot, and there Alice lies, banging the doll with aimless little paws and looking puzzled at the result.

The baby, immobile in its pram, is exposed to an alarming world of huge, seamy, pocked, smelly, grimacing, well-meaning, unknown faces, peering in and floating like uncertain moons an inch or two away. These first intrusions open up a terrifying area of uncertainty. Leave a baby in its pram outside a shop and then come back a few minutes later: the chances are that someone will be bent double over the tiny supine figure, chattering and gurgling in the friendliest possible way, but quite without any idea how strange, even grotesque, that animated white disc must seem to the trapped creature underneath. At this stage, the child carries his world round with him, shifted in his pram or in someone’s arms, but still a transportable lump at the mercy of anyone who swims into his ken. What must he think, lying there transfixed, without bearings and without any sense of direction?

Now, movement and exploration depend on how much freedom you get. A Japanese child for a long time is swaddled, contained: held to its mother’s back, strapped at seat and back, it lolls asleep, kept asleep by natural movements as the mother goes about her business, or jogged playfully up and down when she’s standing still. The world is a close place, a padded back and the smell of black glossy hair, drenched in camellia oil.

With freedom, limbs and muscles begin to assert themselves. Kicking, flinging out arms; beginning to sit up, at first tremulously uncertain, then with firm, deliberate confidence, then ease; on hands and knees, beginning to crawl, sometimes solidly and four-square, sometimes with a crablike sideways shuffle, or with one leg trailing uselessly. One hand steadies the stance, the other darts out like a lizard's tongue to grasp toy, food, coal, the dog. The room is circumnavigated, harried, conquered.

But this is still one room. Outside there is a garden, a field, a street, sky. There’s the moon, which (according to his father in The Nightingale) pacified little Hartley Coleridge like others before and since. The baby lies on his back in the playpen and watches birds as he watched his silk ball and now he sits and reaches for them, swooping and fluttering. The press of sensations must be so hectic, so various, that it’s a wonder all babies don’t suffer from pronounced hyperaesthesia. Perhaps they do. But they can’t tell us.

They can tell us they don’t like this cereal, that curious sloshy mess of a Junior Dinner. With a smart eyes right the head turns and the parent’s proffered spoon jabs into thin air; or out goes the splayed hand and down on the floor goes the spoon, cereal and all. All this is brute and random action, without words.

Words are the beginning of a new kind of exploration. But before the right definable and defined words arrive, there are torrents of gibberish to wade through, sounds approximating to words, sounds which- through repetition- parents begin to interpret correctly. How colossal that step forward, through millions of years of trial and, preparation, when “Mama” and “Dada” first break through the babble of incoherent noise! Lips that seem to have no purpose but eating and sucking and blowing and gurgling, lips that move like some as yet unperfected plastic, take on a firmness and definition as they shape their first words, exploring the foothills of semantics.

To name is in some measure to understand, to cope with what happens. When my eldest daughter was two she saw the snow for the first time, but she knew about it already: she had already heard the word. Later, I wrote this:

“White snow”, my daughter says, and sees
For the first time the lawn, the trees,
Loaded with this superfluous stuff.
Two words suffice to make facts sure
To her, whose mental furniture
Needs only words to say enough.

Perhaps by next year she’ll forget
What she today saw delicate
On every blade of grass and stone;
Yet will she recognize those two
Syllables, and see them through
Eyes which remain when snow has gone?

Season by season, she will learn
The names when seeds sprout, leaves turn,
And every change is commonplace.
She will bear snowfalls in the mind,
Know wretchedness of rain and wind,
With the same eyes in a different face.

My wish for her, who held by me
Looks out now on this mystery
Which she has solved with words of mine,
Is that she may learn to know
That in her words for the white snow
Change and permanence combine”
The snow melted, the trees green,
Sure words for hurts not suffered yet, nor seen.

The new words, as they come, have mostly to do with will and appetite: “Me want...”, and what is wanted is chocolate biscuit, doll, crayon, drink, pot, that cat, that boy’s biscuit, hat girl’s doll, someone else’s drink, my pot; perhaps a hug. There isn’t much room for abstractions. For a long time the world of things is enough to keep the vocabulary expanding and growing, grasping the seen, the desirable, rejecting the disliked, the feared.

A kind of discrimination begins in the way in which things are explored. At first there’s a cursoriness which shows itself n the restless moving on from object to object: mobility is the important thing, not inspection. But then some particular toy, perhaps, holds the child for an hour, as its parts and recesses and possibilities are fingered and experimented with some adults affect to despise so-called “educational” toys, and indeed it’s an unfortunate term, for any toy worth having teaches a child something about noticing and controlling the world. Those hours spent in screwing and unscrewing wooden nuts and bolts are hours spent in acquiring not just manual dexterity but self-confidence too. And the clockwork animal that runs gibbering up and down the floor half a dozen times and then can’t be made to work any more “that teaches something as well, though it teaches something the manufacturers never intended.

The adult urban world of words, jobs, equipment, is for a long time too difficult for the child to take in. In the country it’s easier. A country child can begin to grasp the idea of his father’s work quite quickly, and all over the world small children feed the pigs, scare off the rooks, glean the cornfields, learn the names of the cows, and take the sheep out on the hills. These seem natural explorations, and the progress from child to man not only natural but accelerated. In Libya I’ve seen boys of six or seven leading a camel as it walks sullenly back and forth at the wells that irrigate the fields, and in Sardinia a boy of the same age out on the hillside with his father’s goats. These are the responsibilities of work in cultures which have no time to let their children explore gradually through play: these boys are miniature adults, and as such they have to learn quickly. But when they play, they play in the same world as the urban child, with the same drives and appetites.

Rehearsing for adulthood is a full-time occupation. “Mothers and fathers” is a figuring-out, a miming, of whatever seems graspable and imitable in the puzzling observed lives of their parents and their friends” parents: the long hours spent arranging bedding for dolls, portioning out mock food, tending sick dolls and younger siblings “these are the gropings towards becoming what they inevitably will become. School, when it comes, is not simply a new way of spending the day, or of adjusting to the social world, or a formal mode in which things are learned, but an extension, again, of the imitable world. No sooner are they back from school in the afternoon than they begin arranging desks, chairs, and blackboard in their own rehearsal, their own re-living, of the experiences they have just gone through. The imposed adult world is not enough–they need to re-create it for themselves, often unconsciously underlining its oddity with their own interpretation: listen, for example, to the way in which a child catches the too sweet modulations in the headmistress’s speech, breathily stressing all those genteel mannerisms, and all completely without any notion of satire or, indeed, of comment. Another mask has been put on, another set of gestures absorbed, to be part of the whole complex equipment of personality.

The body, too, is a strange new piece of equipment to be explored, usually as matter-of-factly as anything else. Whatever Freud and Melanie Klein have unwrapped of a child's sexual drives, plain observation seems to show that a young child's sexuality manifests itself no more and no less than half dozen other characteristics.

It’s a deeply sensuous world, certainly, of touching and tasting and smelling: “the licking and rushing” W. H. Auden writes about. As the world begins to expand, so do the appetites and the capacity, too, for letting the fancy play with them:

“I like paper too. If you gave me a piece of paper and I didn’t want to draw a picture I’d eat it.”

“I’m so hot I’d like to sleep on a frozen pond.”

Some children are demonstrative in their affections, some not: the affectionate child is open about the pleasures of hugging and being hugged, kissing and being kissed. But no child rejects comfort, even if it is only the comfort of some inanimate thing which must be sniffed or plucked or sucked before going to sleep “the adored and fondled talisman, which may be a shred of blanket, a ribbon, a ball of fluff, a glove, an otherwise loathsome woolen animal, or “animate but distinct “his own thumb. Sleep is such a strange thing, not always desirable, sometimes not easy to reach, so that it must be explored stealthily, with the furtive movements of the sniffer, plucker, or sucker.

In sleep, dreams. For years, between the ages of about three and ten, I used to wake up screaming from a dream of a little scotty dog that came running out from under the bed. I never knew why it was so frightening, and I still don’t know. But there are other night fears that are more explicable: think of Robert Louis Stevenson:

The shadows of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed–
And the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.

Emily, who is seven, doesn’t want to see that picture in the book of Bible stories about the wisdom of Solomon, or hear about Herod's slaughter of the Innocents: “No, no, I'll dream about it.” Yet she wants to see the picture and read the story, too. She’s in training for the more sophisticated adult delight in what horrifies and haunts. She has begun to dabble in her emotions, like any connoisseur of Dracula and the Chamber of Horrors. In a more primitive society we too would believe in the existence of her horrors; but we think we know where the difference lies between fact and fantasy, between stories and “the real”.
Stories and people and sensations: they stand round like presences.

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

Joyce with his epiphany of the first gropings, Proust invoking childhood memories from the taste of a petit madeleine cake, the three-year-old who suddenly says excitedly “I can kiss with my mouth!” All of them explore the same sensuous world, from different ends of “the telescope of time”. In autumn, for children out in the garden picking apples, two things are at work: the following of adult directions as apples are graded into undamaged eaters off the tree, cookers, damaged windfalls worth eating, rotten ones for the compost, and so on; and the sense, in grading them, that even these taken-for-granted fruits of the earth have an individuality, a peculiarity, which they’d never noticed before. “Look how this one squashes! And this one has a wasp in it! And this one is split right down the middle! And I’m eating this one and it’s lovely!”

“I can kiss with my mouth and I can eat with it too.”

But the frustrations too. Hours spent trying to make things: a puppet theatre out of bits of coloured paper glued together “it won’t stand up but flops about all over the place, and the parts come unstuck, and the fingers are jammed stickily together, and it all ends in tears. Or learning, simply, that a tricycle two feet wide won’t go between a wall and a table one foot apart. Or trying to paint when the paint is too wet and the paper too absorbent and the brush begins to take lumps out of the paper. Most kinds of adult comfort are no good on these occasions. What’s wrong is nothing that can be put right by saying “I know it’s very difficult” or “Never mind, try again another time” or “most irritating ““I think you've done very well”. What’s wrong is the raw feeling of personal inadequacy, that here’s an intractable world not to be tamed. Certain things are–fair enough–an adult prerogative, and you go to a grown-up to have something done: a needle threaded, a difficult doll’s head put back on, a hem mended. But the acts that come out of a child's own head are for him alone while he wrestles with them, and the tears are the tears of the po–te manqu”: “I made it and it won’t stay together!”

There is always so much to learn, and no one knows what will be held forever in some little fold or cul-de-sac of the brain and what will be lost as if it had never been. Years ago, when Emily was so young that it sometimes seems there was nothing for her to remember but that we have to carry it all round in our heads so that we can supply her with an extreme childhood, some soot fell down the chimney on a particularly windy night: not a lot of it, really, but enough to slop about the carpet a bit beyond the fireplace. That soot is clear and vivid in her mind, and is always being fetched out as an illustration of something or nothing. Why that soot? Why not the aeroplane that took us to Germany, or the woman whom she saw fall down on the pavement with a heart-attack, or, come to that, the first time she saw snow and could use the right words? Some bits of the jigsaw of experience, some fragments of exploration, are absorbed so completely that they simply become part of gesture, thought, being. What will remain distinct, as a specific memory, is unpredictable. Children ought to begin writing their autobiographies in the cradle. In some ways perhaps they do.

A lot of things have to be explored together, with others who have reached the same stage, the same set of skills. In those episodic plays constructed in the shadow of visits to the pantomime or Peter Pan or Let’s Make an Opera action is limited and most of it goes on in the head. Words take on the cadences of refrains. “He’s dead. Ah, he’s dead, he’s de-a-d!” Each actor is involved in a common ritual, yet separate. “Now I'll be the witch and I'll come out of my cave “this is my cave “and you “you’re the little girl now “run away from me, and then I'll come running after you, and you have to drop dead when I say. And then a fairy comes along “you be the fairy, Caroline “and then ... ” “No, I'll be a good wolf and I'll bite the witch and ... ” So they improvise, spontaneously bringing into action all their accumulated half-knowledge, scraps of stories and plays, making together “with give and take “a performance which has never been written and is never to be repeated.

Such exploration needs freedom, an openness of experience which isn’t all the time hedged about with prohibitions and taboos. Children at this stage are quick to sense adult disapproval, scorn, or boredom, and are not eager to have adults “co-operating”, except in the rare situations where adults can take part on completely equal terms. Such a situation comes about “sometimes “when the child becomes a fervent collector.

Most children collect, and most collect without order or strategy; and why not? They aren–t, after all, museums spending public money. They probably aren’t spending at all. Dr J. A. Hadfield quotes the itemized contents of one boy’s pockets, and there is no common factor in those contents: they are simply accumulations. I think of the museum I put together between the ages of seven and ten, and it was like a parody of Elias Ashmole’s “cabinet of curiosities”. There was a stone from Bolton Castle and a stone from Fountains Abbey, a grass-snake’s skin, a German soldier’s cap, fossils, butterflies, Roman coins, a stuffed swordfish, stamps, a Victorian snuff-box with a loose lid, a monocle, some jars of vile mixed liquids which contained my attempts at making poison gas, some ordinary spent cartridges, a rabbit’s paw, birds” eggs, and a bit of barrage balloon. These were the palpable tokens of all my succeeding interest in history and natural history. Through these hoardings of trash and curiosities, we come to the delighted discovery that

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.

Behind every geologist, archaeologist, naturalist, is this caddis-worm of a child; and behind those hard-bitten or prosperous faces in Sotheby’s sale-room too. The urge to discover is also the urge to possess; the exploration of knowledge is a way of coveting and grasping the known thing.

Children learn by imitating and doing, rarely by taking thought and saying, “I shall now learn the six times table” or “I want to know how to make a dog-kennel”. They explore their own potentiality, their own inadequacy, through random questions (and often random answers, too) and through making random shots. Gradually the alarming and unaccountable world reveals itself, sometimes in the way in which things overheard rumble away in the back of the mind and then, suddenly, fall into place and are made plain. I remember puzzling away for years at what people meant by “digs” (“So-and-So’s moving to London, and he’s found digs in Clapham while they house-hunt–), never thinking to ask, and then at last quickly grasping the obvious and mundane meaning. Not only the meanings of words, but the untidy acquisition of new concepts: that milkmen are fathers too, and have holidays; that the hollow-eyed, huge-bellied child on the Oxfam poster is a real child and that children, somewhere, really do starve; that neither teachers nor parents know everything, and that even encyclopedias can be wrong; that even best friends can be hateful, and the spotty, smelly, fat boy can be nice. And reading books begins to be not only a skill but a way of exploring unimaginable as well as imaginable things: fictions often prepare the way for facts. Those cannons solemnly fired off, for example, in one of the Babar the Elephant books took on a firm and “real” meaning when Lucy, aged three, saw the cannon firing their salutes at Churchill’s funeral: the story was a preparation for the otherwise scarcely understandable ritual, and both were given a firmness and concreteness.

Some time around ten or eleven there’s a period, often, of great secretiveness, when a lot of exploration goes on which is more like adult exploration “of strange and new country “than anything that has gone before or will happen afterwards. When I was eleven years old and lived in a part of Virginia that seemed to me like the depths of the country but which in fact was no more than the extreme outer suburbs of Washington, I spent day after summer day tracking down streams where watersnakes hung in the bushes by the bank, watching swallowtail butterflies dart and alight in the undergrowth, finding huge hollow rocks I believed were Indian grindstones, searching the ditches near the old hospital for Civil War musket-balls and cannon-balls. All this I did by myself, not because I was a particularly self-sufficient child but because I needed to find these things for myself, to know them by myself.

Or so I rationalize it now, at a distance fogged with vague memories of Bevis, Richard Jefferies’s paean of boyhood. Fogged with Stalky and Co. too: not a book I ever got on with, because just as Jefferies seems to cover all that intense secret exploration with a light idyllic wash, so Kipling seems to invest all the gang-cohesion and gang-warfare of those boys with an arch and nudging scoutmasterishness. Boys at their pre-initiation practices are not there to be watched in the shrubbery by some elderly note-taker. “Old men ought to be explorers”, and so they may be; but the intense, accelerated, radical exploration was over and done with by the time they were thirteen. After that we learn things, get better at doing them, get wisdom, perhaps, or anyhow make our adjustments. But the explorer has been left behind in the jungle.

This feature: Thwaite, Anthony. (1966). The world in a grain of sand. In The world of Children. The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd.