Excerpt from: Such and Such were the Joys | By George Orwell
A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering
horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien
under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination.
Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves, and
many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood
almost entirely. Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that
people will inflict by sending a child back to school with clothes of
the wrong pattern, and refusing to see that this matters! Over things
of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal
of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment. Not to expose
your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of
seven or eight onwards. Even the affection that one feels for a child,
the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misunderstanding.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another
adult, but is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
Looking back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I
do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my
mother, and even her I did not trust, in the sense that shyness made me
conceal most of my real feelings from her. Love, the spontaneous,
unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people
who were young. Towards people who were old—and remember that ‘old’ to
a child means over thirty, or even over twenty-five—I could feel
reverence, respect, admiration or compunction, but I seemed cut off
from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up with physical
distaste. People are too ready to forget the child’s physical shrinking
from the adult. The enormous size of grownups, their ungainly, rigid
bodies, their coarse wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids, their
yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and sweat and
tobacco that disengage from them at every movement! Part of the reason
for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is
usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from
below. Besides, being fresh and unmarked itself, the child has
impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and
complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is the child’s
misconception about age. A child can hardly envisage life beyond
thirty, and in judging people’s ages it will make fantastic mistakes.
It will think that a person of twenty-five is forty, that a person of
forty is sixty-five, and so on. Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I
took her to be grown up. I met her again, when I was thirteen and she,
I think, must have been twenty-three; she now seemed to me a
middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And the child thinks of
growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious
reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of
thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no
importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see,
having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The
schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is in
fact mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not
seem dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous.
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