“This instant,” said Bevis, stamping his foot

I’ve just started Bevis, by Richard Jefferies.  Published in 1882, it apparently a classic – both according to the Wordsworth Classic paperback version I’ve got, and the websites I found when looking it up.  I’d gone this long without having heard of it, and didn’t realize it was a sequel, or that W.H Auden had called it “the only tolerable book about boyhood”.  That’s quite a recommendation, and convinced me to spend 10p on it very happily.

It begins thus:

“One morning a large wooden case was brought to the farmhouse, and Bevis, impatient to see what was in it, ran for the hard chisel and the hammer, and would not consent to be put off the work of undoing it for a moment.  It must be done directly.  The case was very broad and nearly square, but only a few inches deep, and was formed of thin boards.  They placed it for him upon the floor, and, kneeling down, he tapped the chisel, driving the edge of it under the lid, and so starting the nails.  Twice he hit his fingers in his haste, once so hard that he dropped the hammer, but he picked it up again and went on as before, till he had loosened the lid all round.

After labouring like this, and bruising his fingers, Bevis was disappointed to find that the case only contained a picture which might look very well, but was of no use to him.  It was a fine engraving of “An English Merry-making in the Olden Time,” and was soon slung to the wall.  Bevis claimed the case as his perquisite, and began to meditate what he could do with it.  It was dragged from the house into one of the sheds for him, and he fetched the hammer and his own special little hatchet, for his first idea was to split up the boards.  Deal splits so easily, it is a pleasure to feel the fibres part, but upon consideration he thought it might do for the roof of a hut, if he could fix it to four stakes, one at each corner.”

In the opening two paragraphs we have a sympathetic narration of a child’s sense of urgency, the same child using real tools with skills and mild injury, his plan to build a fort – and the earliest example I’ve seen of the old adage of the box being “better than what’s in it”.

Over the next few pages Bevis roams the estate he lives on freely, cutting down reeds and a tree for his hut, then abandoning the idea in favor of building a boat.  After much thought, the boat becomes a raft which necessitates the scavenging of all sorts of materials – including some rope stolen from the end of a cart line.  He seeks something else from “his mamma’s room, the drawer in which she kept odds and ends, and having upset everything, and mixed her treasures” he finds the bit of rag he was looking for and pinches some.  

Bevis really labours for this raft, and at the same time is distracted by all manner of other joys.  Having hit a technical snag, he decides to “go indoors and sit down and play at something else”.  He watches a fire, and considers mending his fishing rod, making bullets or pulling apart an old gun “to see how it worked”.  He reads for awhile, becoming deeply absorbed into the narrative, but “his mind, as soon as he had put down the grey book, ran still on his raft, and our he raced to see it again, fresh and bright from the rest of leaving it alone for a while.”

There is so much here that is familiar to those interested in children at play, so much that seems simultaneously universal and tragically lost.  The urgency of his needs and the vital importance of what he is doing in the moment would been observable to anyone watching children today.  What has been lost is the freedom to do it, the availability of tools and time and chances to get it wrong and try again, unobserved and untutored by adults.  Bevis demonstrates a level of skill that very few children in the West would have, and in his play he draws on a degree of mastery of his surroundings, and of basic carpentry.  

These are not the only forms of “mastery” that now seem out-of-date, as shortly after leaving his book Bevis commandeers “the carter’s lad” to help him drag his raft to the river, with the following exchange:

“Stop, said Bevis, “stop directly, and hitch the chain on my raft.”

The boy hesitated; he dared not disobey the carter, and he had been in trouble for pleasing Bevis before.

“This instant,” said Bevis, stamping his food; “I’m your master.”

“No; that you beant,” said the boy slowly, very particular as to facts; “your father be my master.”

“You do it this minute,” said Bevis, hot in the face, “or I’ll kill you; but if you’ll do it I’ll give you – sixpence.”

 And Matias?  The title of this opening chapter – Bevis at Work.

The Furred and the Restless

Yesterday I was sitting in my house, typing away at emails and waiting to meet with Hannah from Chwarae Plant.  She’d parked the car on my street and I was expecting a call to say that she’d found a coffee shop nearby.  Instead, she said the following.

“I’ve found a chinchilla!”

Assuming I’d heard wrong, I said, “you’re at Cafe Chinchilla?”

“No,” she said.  ”A real chinchilla, hiding under a car.  Come down here and take a look.”

So I went to where she was huddled with the little animal, and we called the RSPCA hotline, the local vets, everyone we could think of.  No one had reported one missing, and no one was quite sure what to do with the one that we’d found.

“You don’t want to bring him here,” one of the rescue groups said.  ”We’ve got hundreds of dogs, the little guy would have a heart attack.”

After asking around the street, it seemed likeliest that he’d been abandoned.  He doesn’t seem the adventurous type, and was huddled outside the front door of a student house that had been vacated that day.  Without any better ideas, I took him into my house while we figured out next steps.

I try and make these posts related to play or playwork somehow, and it’s true that so far the process of gaining his trust is not entirely unfamiliar.  Take it slow, follow his cues.  Set out den-making equipment and cardboard toilet rolls.  After getting things wrong early on and frightening him, I was reminded of Marc Bekoff‘s Rules of Fair Play* and quickly changed tactics accordingly.  Now he scurries behind my furniture, occasionally taking experimental nibbles of my slipper.  (The chinchilla, that is.  Not Marc Bekoff.  Though, if you’re reading this Marc, hi!  I loved your presentation at IPA.)

However, when we went to the pet store to pick up some supplies to tide the little guy over, I found the perfect thing to make this post hang together neatly.  We’ve discussed parenting methods that treat children like animals – now we have equipment for animals that treats them like children.

I bring you, the Adventure Playground for Gerbils.

 

* Bekoff’s Rules are based on years of observation of animal behaviour, and are as follows:

• Ask first (such as by a dog’s bowing posture, etc)
• Be honest
• Mind your manners
• Admit when you’re wrong

 

“Play and work were intertwined…” Quote from Cindi Katz on children’s lives in Howa

A lovely quote from Cindi Katz, in  Growing up Global : Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. p 60-61.

The quote – and the scrupulous referencing – are thanks to Matias, who provided additional context that “Katz is referring to the children of a village in rural Sudan, and how ‘development’ has impacted on their play-work continuum”.

Thanks, as always!

M.

—

“Work and play were key and critical means through which children reproduced themselves and the social and economic life of their village. Play and work were intertwined in the time-space of children’s everyday lives in Howa with deep resonances between the two. An element of play was almost fused with the work of children— they worked at play and played at work— temporally, metaphorically, and imaginatively. They worked while they played and played while they worked, they worked around their play and they played in the interstices of their work, they participated in tasks that were playful and play that was “workful,” and they engaged in play activities whose focus was work.

The unities that bound work and play in the children’s everyday lives frayed under the impress of the changes brought about by the agricultural project and its attendant social relations. One of the obvious reasons for this unraveling was the increase in children’s work time resulting from the intensified cultivation requirements of the project, the decreased availability of wood and the deterioration of nearby pasture areas, and the heightened monetization of the local economy. Still, the ties that joined work and play in Howa were numerous and durable, in part because even as children worked more, it was hard to drain the play out of them. Nevertheless, some of the fine weave between certain work and play practices was worn thin by the uncertainties for the future posed by the project. Yet this is precisely why the children’s work and play activities and their intertwinings were of so much interest to me. If in their work and play children encountered, made sense of, and tried to prepare themselves for the [p. 61] world, they also encountered and engaged the inchoateness of the ways that new and old social relations and cultural forms and practices clashed in that world. Their playful work and workful play were not only ways of making sense of and negotiating these shifting conditions, but they offered glimpses of creative possibilities that were new and different.”