The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (20 page)

Two years in a row our brood produced a few chicks, a miracle which happened by us simply following, again, John Seymour’s advice and leaving them alone. No incubators or anything. The first year the chicks died, and we blamed the children. We did warn them that the chicks would not appreciate being given a bath. Both died and the children got a stern ticking-off. The following year, though, we watched three grow to near-maturity. One was a cockerel. Then the fox came visiting and every day took one or two chickens, until
after a couple of weeks there was only the young cockerel left. He made it through a few days on his own, hanging out with the pigs for company, and then we returned home after a weekend away to find that he too had vanished. It was very, very sad to lose them all like that. I can still picture every one of them. You get to know them quite well.

But I suppose with all that drama happening around the animals, we have absolutely no need to get our drama second-hand from soap operas. The animals supply endless material for discussion.

As I have said, it is good for the kids to be picking up a few of the rudiments of husbandry, so they can better look after themselves in the future. Victoria has recently acquired a beehive, and she has taken Arthur to some of her bee-keeping lessons. What a wonderful thing, to learn about bees, such an important element of civilization. Clearly also, following the collapse of our banking systems and the end of cheap oil, husbandry will be back in vogue so it makes sense to accustom children to it now. Husbandry also demonstrates how work and play can be harmonized. For this the chickens are very useful. It is enormously enjoyable to go and collect the eggs, and it is a job that can be easily delegated to a child. The feeding, also, can be done by a two-year-old. Lately Arthur has taken charge of the egg production system, and he markets the surplus by leaving a cash box at the end of the lane, some eggs in boxes and a sign that reads: ‘Free Range Egss [
sic
]. £1 for six.’ He also went door-to-door selling to the neighbours. Thus he educated himself in the principles of trade and made some of his own money, which was enormously satisfying to him. And when a child is in charge of some part of the household economy, such as the egg production, it means that they are actively and helpfully contributing
to the household economy, which they love to do. A burden and a hindrance no more. They become a useful addition to the domestic labour force. And, what is also important to the idle parent, they are learning that ‘getting a job’ is not the only way to make money. As I have said elsewhere in this book, I will consider my education of the children to have been a success if they end up being self-employed in some way or other.

To learn about the source of our food is a useful part of every child’s education, especially today when supermarkets and government rules have separated us so far from nature. Even if they dive into a world of convenience foods and supermarkets later in life, at least they will have grown up with a more complete picture of the relationships between animals and man and food. Having grown up with these sorts of ideas and skills will also make it that much easier for them to return to them later in life should they choose to.

We’ve not yet killed a chicken for eating, although we may do soon. Right now we have none at all, as a result of last year’s fox attacks. But if it’s anything like as good as the other food we’ve produced at home, then we’re in for a treat.

Hunting for food seems to me to be a terrific idea: rather than paying to shoot things in an amusement arcade, you go out and shoot them for free, and you come home with some food.

Then there is the pony. I have not always been in sympathy with it. It is expensive to keep. And it causes much extra toil and can damage things: last week it ate my vegetable patch. All the cabbages and broccoli plants that I had been lovingly tending for months vanished. That resulted in a lot of swearing. Amidst the expletives I tried to argue to the pony’s guardian, V., that this pony was entirely without practical use,
that it was expensive and no one ever rode it anyway. ‘The kids like it,’ she said. ‘Not really! They only ride it about once a year!’ I shouted back. The animal needs a lot of clearing up after as well. The yard is always full of horseshit, of which it produces a really unbelievable amount. Having said that, we have a limitless supply of good manure for the garden.

But as oil prices rise, ponies and horses begin to look like a good alternative to the motor car. You can buy small carts for £200, little three-seaters called ‘exercise carts’. It strikes me that would be the perfect use for our old pony. We could take it for pub trips or shopping or picnics. And we could start a little business with it, giving pony rides to tourists. We could ferry holidaymakers from nearby Woody Bay Station to the beach and back. Perhaps Arthur could operate this venture and thereby contribute even more to the household income. We could paint a nice sign to go on the cart: ‘Arthur and Tom’s Pony Rides’ or somesuch. The business has a pleasing Famous Five quality to it, a sensual real-life smell that is all too rare in these days of air-conditioning, Facebook, Bebo, and all the other anti-nature virtual worlds.

Cats, rabbits, chickens: I recommend all highly. We now also have a dog, and although I used to dislike dogs, this one is a jolly companion. My friend John recommends keeping a ferret in a hutch in the garden. Ferrets are supposed to be very useful for poaching. And one day I will take up Cobbett’s advice and keep some pigeons in a dovecote: ‘They are very pretty creatures; very interesting in their manners; they are an object to delight children.’ I also hanker for a hawk. Again, hawks can hunt for you, thus providing for their keep. And we may at least enquire about barn owls, for they are beautiful and mysterious creatures.

If an animal is both useful and beautiful, then it is a
welcome addition to the idle parent’s household, because it saves money and gives the children a diversion, and also a feel for the care of animals. The noble pig fulfils all these criteria. We bought two young pigs in early June last year and fed them twice a day on scraps, nettles, apples and bought-in food. It was very enjoyable to scratch them and watch their doings. Then we had them killed at home (although we have since found out that this is – absurdly – illegal, thanks to new legislation brought in to encourage all animals to be killed in slaughterhouses) and spent two weeks processing them. The children now know exactly where their pork and bacon comes from. Although I have to admit that this morning, over his bacon, Henry started asking me some awkward questions:

‘Is this our pig?’

‘Yes, Henry.’

‘Why did we kill them?’

‘To eat them.’

‘I didn’t want to kill them.’

Oh dear. But our pigs did have the best life a pig could hope for, and the best death: a bullet to the head while eating. They didn’t even have to suffer the stress of the journey to the slaughterhouse. A very great shame, then, that this ancient custom and right has now been outlawed by the state. I wrote about our pig-killing in a newspaper, and soon after received both a visit from the council and a rather ungrammatical letter from the Food Standards Agency’s spookily titled ‘Director of Enforcement’, saying: ‘Some of the practices you describe in your article are unlawful… I am particularly concerned that people do not think they can kill animals in the way described in your piece.’

Animals harmonize work and play, which is the ultimate aim of the idle family. Is it work or play to go and collect the
eggs with Henry? To scratch the pigs’ backs as they sit down and lean against the gate? To scatter chicken feed across the yard on a warm spring morning and watch as the hens scamper towards it with their strange sprinting waddle?

It is essential that children are able to indulge their wild natures. We should refute the urban ideal of an animal-free existence, a white plastic world of air-conditioned comfort, with no hens wandering past and shitting on the floor. That sort of vision is warned against in Huxley’s
Brave New World
. It’s a world where animals are safely locked up in warehouses out of sight and processed quietly for food, having seen no soil or real light or animals of other species, and having had no space to move around, whose only companions are white-coated health and safety inspectors with clipboards in their hands and hearts empty of love; where animals are sliced by machine, packed into clingfilm and taken by giant lorries to the country’s megamarkets, where we drive to collect them.

With animals in the house we keep the brave new world at bay. Adults and children see the reality of nature in all its mess, they see all the reality of life and death. Animals bring joy and amusement into family life, they develop compassion in kids, they connect us all with nature.

Not long after we left the city I found myself making things out of wood. I would go into the barn with a saw, a vice and a chisel and emerge with some objects that, in my view at least, closely resembled toys. There was the toy elephant which I somehow managed to carve. There was the rocket made from a log. With help from Arthur, I used the chisel to carve one end of the log into a point, and at the other end I nailed half a dozen pieces of red gas tubing for fire power. In the middle I carved an ‘A’ for Arthur, and incredibly this piece is still in use today, three years after it was constructed. So too is the wooden aeroplane we made. Such toys are unique, cost nothing and we greatly enjoyed making them together. More recently we took apart an old Apple Mac computer, and having unscrewed the whole thing were pleased to find that
the plastic casing resembled a Darth Vadar mask. Then we nailed bits of the computer to planks of wood to make a robot. Arthur nailed in two bits of red wire for its eyes. The end result was impressive: it looked like we’d crucified the computer. Arthur’s wire eyes gave the effect of weeping blood: very effective. Our previous collaboration was called Wild Wood and consisted of three or four bits of wood nailed together and then covered with pieces of torn newspaper giving fragments of the news of the day. We are planning to make more such artworks and maybe even market them under the name Arthur and Tom, a sort of father and son version of Gilbert and George.

The children love pootling around in the workshop. And it’s enjoyable and instructive for Dad too. Banging nails and sawing wood is deeply enjoyable, and being an idle parent is all about enjoyment and pleasure rather than self-sacrifice. We are always being told by state-run TV shows on childcare to set aside half an hour a day to ‘play’ with them, but far better if our work and our play and our childcare are all mixed up together into one happy and harmonious whole.

It’s fascinating to read in Jean Liedloff’s
The Continuum Concept
(the only book on children and babies worth reading; burn the rest because they simply serve the status quo) that for her beloved Yequana Indians, work does not exist. They do not even have a word for it. Liedloff spent two and a half years with this South American tribe, observing their habits.

The boys, she writes, imitate their fathers. ‘Before they can talk, boys are provided with little bows and arrows that give valuable practice, as the arrows are straight and accurately reflect their skill.’ All parents notice this: children play at doing the things that their parents do. That is how they learn. Delilah and Arthur love helping me do the
Idler
subscription
mail-out: bagging up and addressing 500 copies of the mag. So if you don’t want your children to spend all their time at the computer, then don’t spend all your time at the computer. Teach by example, not authority. If you don’t have a workshop for making things, then convert the kitchen table into one. Be careful, too, of excessive praise and blame. Act like what they do is normal and expected when it’s good. Too often we eject a torrent of praise so hyperbolic it sounds like surprise. As Liedloff remarks of Western families:

The idle parent, in contrast to the shrieking praising-and-blaming parent, should play it cool and expect the child to be cool as well. I’m not saying that I always manage this: instead of demonstrating the wisdom of cooperation, I shout ‘BE COOPERATIVE!’ But I’m getting better, I hope. I also bear in mind the wisdom that one should keep one’s trap shut a little more often. Some commentators are even of the opinion that you should not encourage your child in anything, and that this way the child will learn determination. Philip Pullman says that he was never encouraged to write by his parents. It was never made easy for him. But that itself gave him a forward thrust. Sometimes a mild discouragement from authority can be a real spur to creation.