‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells, before the dark of reason grows’: children’s geographies at 12

Abstract

This Keynote essay argues for a supplement to existing studies in children’s geographies, one that explores the potential of a non-child-centric children’s geography alert to the work done by the figure of ‘the child’ in all manner of worldly situations. Taking a cue from the poetry of John Betjeman, notably his 1960 Summoned by Bells, the essay considers both the intimate spaces of childhood – ones gauged by the immediacies of ‘sounds and sights and smells’ – and the challenges posed by a wider world raddled by adult preoccupations and abuses, those characterised by Betjeman as stemming from ‘the dark of reason’. The essay builds from this foundation to address the ‘darkness’ in two sets of Nazi children’s wartime geographies, as well as engaging with the complexities of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s claims, in the horizon of WWII, about the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. Within the latter – and also, notably, in Adorno’s later writing – the figure of ‘the child’ surfaces as one miniscule crumb of hope, of experiencing and knowing the world otherwise, set against the face of adult Enlightenment’s seemingly inevitable decay. At the close, Adorno’s own brief dalliance with imagining a small slice of children’s geographies allows the essay to arc back towards its original claims, and to a renewed sense of why childhood ‘sounds and sights and smells’ continue to matter far beyond just the domain of geographers researching children.

Keywords:

• children
• childhood
• Sir John Betjeman
• dialectic of enlightenment
• Nazis

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks are due to Elsbeth Robson, John Horton and Peter Kraftl for inviting me to deliver the Second Annual Children’s Geographies Keynote Lecture at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, University of Exeter, September 2015. Their warmth, encouragement and scholarly responses have been invaluable in the creation and delivery of this lecture, an experience that I enjoyed and learned from immensely. Thanks too to all participants, including those whose excellent questions are still being ‘dodged’ in the version written through here. Further thanks are also extended to John Horton and two generous referees for assisting in the process of converting a lecture into a publishable paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rather nicely, a very recent document prepared by the publishers, Routledge, refers to Children’s Geographies as now ‘an adolescent journal’ (Routledge 2015, 1). When delivering the Keynote, the journal was 12 years old; now, in 2016, it is of course a year older again.

2 There are a few pointers in papers by geographers on how the figure of ‘the child’ has been deployed in discourses of ‘development’ (‘progress’ and ‘empire’), in the ‘infantilising’ of non-Europeans in colonial discourse/practice, and in the regulation of alternative sexualities (Finn and McEwan 2015; Gagen 2007; West 2015).

3 Jones has partially used this same title before: see Jones (2001; also Jones 2008), a careful reflection on what it means to research ‘the otherness of children’, as effectively lying outwith the ‘dark reason’ of the adult academic. He does not reference or discuss the source of the phrase in Betjeman’s work.

4 There are two major biographies of Betjeman, both appearing in 2006 to mark the Centenary of the poet’s birth (see Hillier 2006 [itself a single-volume abridgement of a three-volume biography]; Wilson 2006). There are two substantial volumes of surviving letters from Betjeman, edited by his daughter, Candida Lycett Green (see Lycett Green 1994, 1995). The extracts from letters below are taken from these volumes. Betjeman was evidently closer to, and more fondly remembered by, his daughter, Candida, in comparison to his son, Paul (Barber 2006; Leith 2006). Curiously, Paul was always referenced by his parents as ‘It’.

5 The only substantial reference – and maybe indeed the only reference per se – by an academic geographer to Betjeman’s poetics of place is in a book by the sports geographer, Bale, which, somewhat curiously, deals with anti-sports sentiments expressed in literary works (Bale 2008). Chapter 5 of this book deals with Betjeman, and includes a careful excavation of Betjeman’s treatment of place and also a debate about Betjeman explicitly anticipating Tuan’s (1974) construct of ‘topophilia’.

6 Lycett Green refers to him as ‘Edward Gilbert’, but the reference is surely Edmund W. Gilbert, a doyen and chronicler of Oxford Geography (note his Oxford-centric account of British Pioneers in Geography [Gilbert 1972]). Gilbert had an interest in literary geographies, and wrote a significant piece about novelists as able to ‘paint a picture of real earth’ (Gilbert 1960, 164). Intriguingly, ‘[t]he geographer, Edward [sic.] Gilbert, wrote about the new Western Bypass skirting Wytham Woods and Godstow. JB replied (16 October 1957), “My heaven! I was driving to Northampton from Wantage the other day and went around by Wytham and Godstow in the lovely autumn sunshine. It seemed to me amazing at the time that so unspoilt a stretch of country should be allowed to remain … ”’ (Lycett Green 1995, 100). The Betjemans’ son, Paul, studied Geography at Oxford, 1956–1959, ‘much to the delight of JB’s friend the geographer Edward [sic.] Gilbert’ (Lycett Green 1995, 102). Graduating with a ‘Fourth’ (basically a fail) – I am sure that Wilson (2006, 246) is mistaken in saying that he took postgraduate Geography – Paul turned to music, emigrated to the USA and converted to Mormonism. A painful sense of how the Betjemans sometimes discussed Paul is found in a letter from Penelope in 1959: ‘I think it [i.e. Paul] needs a sharp pulling up … It cannot and DOES NOT EVER work all day at its geography … ’ (in Wilson 2006, 246: emphases in original).

7 Some examples from the current journal, Children’s Geographies, would include, in chronological order except where authors have contributed more than one relevant paper: Philo (2003), Jones (2003, 2008), Kjørholt (2003), Tranter and Malone (2004), Harker (2005), Catling (2005), Horton and Kratfl (2006a, 2006b), Hancock and Gillen (2007), Ross (2007), Forsberg and Strandell (2007), Svensson, Ekblad, and Ascher (2009), Tipper (2011), Rautio (2013), Pyyry (2015) and Änggård (2016).

8 Bruno and Gretel have private tuition from a Herr Lister, and most of their lessons are about ‘history and geography’, it evidently being the case that were indoctrinated in an understanding of how Germany – its identity, territory and pride – had historically been undermined, not least by the Jews, and how it should rise again by defeating its enemies both internal and external. Gretel is more persuaded than Bruno, and in her bedroom at ‘Out-With’ the dolls are removed to be replaced by maps with little flags on which she traced German fortunes in the theatre of war.

9 Or, at least, the words imagined by/projected on to Bruno and Gretel by Boyne, the adult author.

10 There had long been only a limited Jewish presence in Strehlen, but there were removals during the so-called Kristallnach of 9 November, 1938, and Mahlendorf honestly admits that ‘Jews disappeared from my experience as living people and became an abstraction’ (Mahlendorf 2009, 68).

11 I am using a 1979 edition.

12 Note the distinction here between Enlightenment (with upper-case first letter) and enlightenment (with lower-case first letter): the switching between the two in what follows is deliberate.

13 Such ‘modern mythologies’ of course also included Nazi ideology, which, on some readings, ‘rejected rationalism, intellectualism and the European Enlightenment’ (Mahlendorf 2009, 96). For Adorno and Horkheimer, however, Enlightenment was almost pre-destined to descend into such barbarisms; and such an argument runs throughout the writings of not just the Frankfurt School, but also the likes of Michel Foucault in his critiques of Enlightenment/Reason in its treatment of Madness/Unreason (see Philo 2013).

14 There is no evidence that Betjeman knew anything of the Frankfurt School.

15 Elsewhere in Adorno’s oeuvre, when discussing ‘authoritarian personalities’ and the ‘infantile’ responses of mass populations, notions of ‘childishness’ and being ‘childlike’ acquire a more negative and troubling dimension; a contradiction noted by Bard-Rosenberg (2013) among others.

16 There are the outlines here of a broader thesis about where ‘happiness’ peeps through Adorno’s otherwise ‘melancholy science’ (Rose 2014), possibly influenced by how his one-time mentor, Walter Benjamin, delighted in fairy tales and the ‘promises’ of children’s stories (Duffy and Boscagli 2011, 8; also Feuer 2015). These glimpses at other, unfettered ways of encountering and knowing the world, ones that willingly invent and suspend disbelief, are also related to strands of utopian thinking in Adorno’s oeuvre, notably by Floyd (2010, 8–9) when quoting passages from Adorno’s aphoristic Minima Moralia (Adorno 2005a) about children, ‘nooks and crannies’ and ‘little trucks’ to disclose ‘[t]he sensory quality’ of objects – meaning the ‘use values’ in what inventively can be done with them – as ‘precisely what children, unlike adults, can see’. In line with an overall arc in this essay, the small intimacies of children’s geographies, including playing with toys, here take on a profound meaning.

17 A not dissimilar line of reasoning is to be found in Philo and Swanson (2008), where we seek to explain why the apparently/utterly ‘trivial’ aspects of childhood – those aspects called to the fore for the study of children’s geographies by Horton and Kraftl (2005) – should not be dismissed as indeed too trivial in comparison with the wider political-economic and socio-cultural structuring of ‘young lives’. Such aspects matter precisely because they are the texture of (hopefully) happy ‘young lives’: thus, why they matter only really becomes obvious when they are lost, when the children, like Shmuel’s young friends in ‘Out-With’, stop playing (‘And the children weren’t playing games in groups’: Boyne 2006, 206). The adult political charge to ensure that such smallnesses are not lost from children’s lifeworlds is emphasised in Philo and Smith (2013).

18 This was Adorno’s ‘new categorical imperative’, that Auschwitz should never happen again. As Short (2007, 195) writes, ‘[t]here is an element of childhood mimesis located in the midst of Adorno’s most negative of pronouncements [in Negative Dialectics], his formulation of the new categorical imperative’.

19 A specific claim that might also be advanced would be about how this essay can perhaps speak to debates about the historical geography of Enlightenment as itself a variegated resource for thinking through diverse matters at the heart of re-envisaging – possibly ‘re-enlightening’ – critical scholarship in and beyond contemporary human geography (e.g. Livingstone and Withers 1999).