HAVE YOU EVER wanted to storm into a playground, grab a couple of five-year-old kids by the hair and knock their heads together, then find a couple more and start kicking at their shins, lashing out wildly? I want to - right now, writes John Butler.
Calm down people, I'm not talking about a random, senseless act of violence - Lord, no. The truth is, I have a couple of specific five-year-old kids in mind. I've done my research. Names, addresses, that sort of thing. Go ahead - call social services; call the cops, attack me on the street, for I no longer care.
The reason for these irrational, violent urges is simple. A lovely tow-headed little fella of my acquaintance, who is not yet six, is being bullied in his school; with some of the more . . . how shall I put this . . . survivalist of his peers, forming cliques in the yard to exclude him from their stupid little games. If you're reading this and you're thinking "that can't be my Myles / Algernon / Shelby", well think again. Just because Algernon doesn't look like Satan when he's asleep, doesn't mean he's not capable of cruelty when he's awake and you're not around. The greatest trick the Devil ever performed was making people think he didn't exist.
These times are quite distressing for my best little friend, but they are a rite of passage, too. Kids are cruel, and other kids need to learn all about that, because when they grow up they will be dealing with adults, and adults are cruel too - cruel, but with free will. Yesterday at Tesco, a hulking, bearded man, with both trouser-legs tucked into his socks, flung some coins down on the counter to pay for an egg and cress sandwich. The man behind the counter politely asked him not to throw the money, to which he responded, "Why not? You're my servant". After a pause, the customer to his right told him there was a big difference between having a job and being a servant.
A scuffle ensued, with the man whose trousers were tucked into his socks leaning across the counter and grabbing the man at the checkout by the lapels and screaming racial abuse into his face before being escorted from the shop. The man behind the counter was left weeping. I stood with my shopping basket sitting at my feet and watched one human being consoling an exhausted other and tried to remember what had changed since we were all five years old.
Random horribleness abounds in life, all the way from inception to endgame, and once my little friend gets through this particular spell, he'll be a stronger, more compassionate person, better prepared to deal with trips to the supermarket in adulthood. It's the parents I feel sorry for, because they've already learned the lesson. I'm not a parent myself, but I'm fairly sure that the only people who will bear the scars are his mum and dad. The tragedy of every household is that those at the top know exactly what it's like to be down below, in the steerage cabin of childhood. They know just how it can hurt, and they know that, to a greater or lesser extent, the best thing they can do is stand on deck and allow it to happen so that their child can learn to deal with the world.
This bind calls to mind the famous Philip Larkin poem, This Be The Verse, and in particular its tragic closing lines: "Man hands on misery to man, / It deepens like a coastal shelf, / Get out as early as you can, / And don't have any kids yourself." It's a solution of sorts, but only because the miserable Hull librarian was impervious to the joy of little people. Maybe he never stood beside one who was waiting to be put on top of a giant horse at his first riding lesson, and felt the trust and friendship of a tiny hand grabbing his own for comfort. Maybe he never heard the uniquely comic sound of a little voice computerised down about five octaves and issuing from deep with a Power Rangers mask - "I am Optimus Prime!" He probably never read a bedtime story to a scampering figure in Spiderman jim-jams with a gurgling laugh, who refused to call it a night.
Maybe he just wasn't lucky. Not everyone wins the twin lotteries of biology and timing and gets to become a parent, but Larkin appears not to have bought a ticket. To each their own, but in all of this, where is the comfort for parents? Well, with all miserablists, you don't have to look far to find regret and self-doubt. In my favourite of his poems, Dockery and Son, the new dean girds himself to teach lessons to the son of a former classmate, and acknowledges a sense that choosing not to have children might be the most painful course of all: "For Dockery a son, for me nothing, / Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage. / Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes, / And leaves what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age."
Despite the dominant narrative conceit of beginning, middle and end, having a child seems to make it plausible that the story of life is a circle and not a straight line. We're born and then we live and then we die and that's a line, no doubt, but depending on what you believe happens, once we shuffle off this mortal coil, even that line could wrap itself into a circle after we lose track of it; just a much larger circle that those who don't believe in anything after life can begin to imagine. Grandfather, father, son, grandson - round and round we go.