My Risk-Filled Childhood

It now seems that risks – even dangers – in childhood are good for children. There is a growing body of expertise claiming that a worrying aspect of modern childhood is parental – and social – over-protection.

Contemporary childhood is often a wrapped-in-cotton-wool experience which robs kids of their natural inclination to fall out of trees, come home covered in grazed knees and survive encounters with eccentric strangers.

In the light of such thinking, it would seem that I had a model childhood, as it was fraught with risks. First, I was the child of a much older father – Pa was 67 when I was conceived – and that, today, is thought a great danger. Older fathers are, say French experts, liable  to infertility, and to beget babies inclined to miscarry. As their sperm is exhausted, the sprogs they produce are vulnerable to a range of disabilities. So far, I’ve come through.

At the age of three, I climbed an old dresser in the kitchen, grasped a china cup, and promptly fell on the stone flags with the cup in my hand, very nearly taking my eye out – I still bear the facial scar.

At four, experimenting with the wrong kind of gobstopper sweet, I nearly choked to death: fortunately there was a medical student conveniently nearby who turned me upside down and thumped my gullet until the object was disgorged.

At five, I cycled across Dublin, from Sandymount to Ballymun, following the Number 3 bus through the O’Connell Street traffic, because I took a fancy to visiting an American cousin. What larks!

At six, I ran across a dangerous parapet in pursuit of a kitten, which my brother Carlos happened to witness, and which memory, to this day, gives him heart palpitations.

I had a mania for climbing into cars with strange men: the unknown motorists often brought me for a “spin” which I thought it was great sport. They were delightful and I was delighted.

I made friends with a young boy who lived down the road, and who, for irregular family reasons, spent days and nights in a hut in the back of his garden, cooking all his own meals on a camp fire. I spent hours and hours there, experimenting with fire.

By seven, I was a street-wise city child, accustomed to going about on my own, on foot and by bicycle. I took apples out of our garden, and sold them to passers-by, perhaps showing an early inclination to entrepreneurship which alas, did not develop further. 

I frequented some neighbours’ children not through the proper approach of walking to the front door, but by clambering over a set of rusty garden roofs and through various hen-runs (yes, people kept hens in Dublin 4 within living memory). People also kept cattle, though, being the jackeen, I was not keen on cattle, and unable to tell the difference between a cow, a bullock and a bull.

By ten, I was being despatched to the Gaeltacht to (allegedly) learn more Irish and took it into my head to swim across a cool-looking pool in a glade. There were ructions afterwards when it was disclosed that the pond covered a dangerous whirlpool which was known to suck swimmers to the depths.

As a teenager, I hitchhiked across France on my own, thumbing lifts all the way.

All this, according to education experts such as Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood – which argues that children today are being turned from “free-range” to “battery” raised – makes for a bracingly healthy childhood experience. Having come through the myriad risks undertaken, I should be a confident and robust adult.

Except that I’m not. I am full of anxieties, both real and imagined. I did not repeat the exercise of a healthy, risk-taking childhood with my own offspring: quite the opposite. I wrapped them in cotton wool. I filled their little heads with fears and anxieties. I was terrified they’d take up bicycles, or horses, or cars, or sailing, or anything.

The person who takes the risks knows the risks taken – and the dangers courted. That’s why the worst rakes, when they become fathers, lock up their daughters against men like themselves.