Why childhood deprivation can work wonders
Ah, now I understand. For decades I believed what I’d been told about my unhappy childhood experiences with pubs: that my total exclusion – the long hours spent sitting in the car with my grandmother while the rest of the family imbibed within – was just a question of law.
This, after all, was the 1970s, when pubs were another country. They did things differently there. In the grittier establishments, where working men huddled together for solidarity and mutual affirmation, families were about as welcome as Prohibition. Children were neither seen nor heard; often the only woman in sight was the stripper.
And my grandfather – whose taste in hostelries was at least more elevated than that – suffered nonetheless from a persistent, though non-infectious ailment: a dry cough. The remedy? Daily doses of the hop. No family trip was complete without a visit to the surgery, my grandad bravely quaffing his medicine while I sulked in the car, lemonade and crisps no consolation for my exilic shame.
Now, however, I am convinced that I was being had. The revelation came to me courtesy of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp. In case you missed it, the property show host sparked turbulence this month by revealing that she frequently flew business class with her partner while her kids, aged 10 and 12, were left to slum it in economy with the masses.
Her motives were both financial and moral. Upgrading her sons to the premier seats, she explained, would be “an absurd waste of money” and “very spoiling”. The cash saved enabled the whole family to take “a shed load of holidays”. Most importantly of all, however, this innovative concession to austerity provided her children with a nourishing lesson in the principles of deferred gratification and goal-setting.
“Club class should be a huge treat that you’ve worked for. If kids get used to it, what do they have to work towards?” she mused.
Not everyone agrees. One journo, whose political persuasions were clearly to the left of Ms Allsopp’s, accused her of elitism. No one, she insisted, whose father did not rejoice in the title of Baron Hindlip – ex-chairman of Christie’s International, not a refugee from the panto season – could think that flying without reclining seats and the tinkle of champagne glasses constituted a kind of Duke of Edinburgh challenge in the sky.
Still, I see the point – and I think that my parents saw it too. Those awful banishments to the pub car park had nothing to do with licensing law: they were a means of developing my character.
Had I been exposed,at so tender an age, to the dizzying pleasures of the 1970s boozer – the sawdust, the sexual apartheid, the thrilling cacophony of the fruit machines – to what could my fledgling soul have aspired? The Viceroyalty of India? A timeshare in Shangri-La?
There is much to be said, it seems, for keeping one’s feet on the ground. Even at 32,000 ft.
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