Privileged Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

dear, I’m not so very out of date as all that,’ said Augustus.
    ‘But you’re not a poet,’ finished Clementina.
    There was a pause. Diana poured herself a very stiff whisky and drank it quickly. It was quite dark in the room now, but she did not tell Alice to turn on the lights and they sat in the mauve gloom still.
    ‘As I was saying, Rose,’ said Diana, ‘I wasn’t so much attacking the position of women as attacking the institution of childhood.’
    ‘What do you mean — the institution of childhood?’ said James Bellinger suddenly. He had said nothing all evening.‘Surely childhood is — er — a physical and mental condition, not an institution?’
    ‘It’s not a mental condition,’ said Diana. ‘Or perhaps it is. It’s a state of mind produced by living under arbitrary rule. Parental rule is usually a benevolent despotism, of course, but it’s arbitrary, absolute rule just the same, and it creates a lifelong fear of independence. If you want adults to be free, really free, you must let children think and experiment for themselves. If you do want them to be free,’ she added.
    ‘Yes of course,’ someone murmured.
    ‘My dear Diana,’ said Augustus, ‘I’ve discussed this once before with you, I think, and I agree that physical child-abuse is rife and ought to be stopped and that it’s ridiculous to extend childhood to eighteen or twenty-one as we do, but all the same children do have to be guided and looked after and surely you wouldn’t have some sort of institution doing that rather than parents? Goodness, the things I’ve heard you say about public schools!’
    ‘I don’t have to be looked after,’ said Alice. ‘Not by anyone. I don’t need anyone to take care of me,’ she quavered, ‘I can take care of myself.’
    ‘Because your mother’s taught you how,’ said Clementina. ‘If you hadn’t been taught how to, you wouldn’t know how to. Children do have to be guided, because they haven’t any experience.’
    Alice was silent.
    ‘Alice can look after herself: Alice has experience: Alice is eleven years old: an eleven-year-old is a child: a child cannot look after herself: a child has no experience. Question: is Alice a child or not?’ mocked Diana.
    ‘Answer:’ sniffed Clementina, ‘Alice is old beyond her years because she’s been made to be.’
    ‘I feel like a vivisected rat,’ said Alice and everyone laughed.
    ‘I do apologise, Alice,’ said Diana, stopping the laughter with her apology. ‘I really do. And I admit that if you were a little older I wouldn’t have been so oblivious of your dignity. I’m afraid these habits persist.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ said Alice.
    ‘Yes,’ said Diana, looking down at her daughter, ‘you haven’t been shut up in a nursery, you haven’t been purposely deprived of experience, but all you really have experience of is a little bohemian circle. It’s a sort of grown-up nursery, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.’
    ‘But I’ve been all round London,’ said Alice. ‘Into the slums and everything.’
    ‘You’re as much an outsider there as a slumming duchess, whatever you look like, my darling,’ said Diana, ‘because you can’t imagine life on less than three hundred a year. And neither can I.’
    ‘When you say “can’t imagine”, Diana,’ said Leo, ‘I think you’re wrong. You just mean that you — that none of us, for that matter — have ever lived on much less than that. Very well. But if you just make up an imaginary budget of a pound a week you can imagine what it’s like.’
    ‘I think,’ said Diana, ‘that it’s very arrogant to say that you can imagine the full misery of living six to a room in a leaking slum when you’ve never had any such experience.’
    ‘You may be right,’ said Leo, ‘but then, why are you a Fabian? Why do you believe that such things are evils, curable evils, if you can’t imagine these evils?’
    ‘I’m a Fabian,’ said Diana, ‘because the doctrine