Oh, to be a child again

Last week I came home to find a council of war brewing in my kitchen. My parents were conferring with relatively-unknown-neighbour Chris on the fate of the house next door. Afflicted with middle age regret, the parents moved to Darwin to seek happiness and escape their children. In their absence, an encampment of dubious teenagers has grown and flourished, to the point where we now have (reportedly) the Biggest Speed Dealer in all of Eltham living next door to us. He's a smooth and successful operator; his customers pull up, let someone out of the car to buy the shit and then drive off within two minutes. The council of war produced much wringing of hands and talking of tough alternatives. A phone call to the parents in absentia came up short, with domestic lawmaker #1 absolving himself of all responsibility. It was agreed that Chris would take a tougher line on the kids whenever they started pumping their infernal bass across the quiet paddocks of Eltham. I don't know who I'm siding with. I never thought it would happen, but my fuddy-duddy juices start flowing when I can't concentrate due to the bass levels.

As Chris was leaving the council of war, we had a brief chat. I first met her down at my friends holiday house last year. At the time, she was in the throes of a thoroughly teenage dalliance with a rugged man-child of 50 who liked petrol-powered toys. It later turned out she had another incarnation as professional single mother of four living down the road. Intrigued by the incongruity, I asked her what happened with man-child. "Oh, it was great fun while it lasted," she said. "Doomed - he hates responsibility - but a fun fling." She left and I wondered how it was that I was able to talk on the same level as her; I wondered that there was no distinction between her flings and mine and why it felt so unnaturally normal.

Later, the oddity came to me - it was that I still expected middle aged people to be obeying different rules of relationships, rules dictated by the responsibility of mortgage and career and children and those things that supposedly Come With Age. It was at once reassuring that people can avoid proscribed growing up practices, and somewhat disconcerting. The historic power of the intra-family hierarchy must have been at least partly based on a parental mystique; a firm distinction between children and parents. If parents could impress on their offspring a respect based on the unknown, based on the generation gap, based on different levels of maturity and intellect, then the children would not be able to relate to their parents as people (in the sense that 'people' are only ever people like us). These days, I think the distinction is blurring, as Chris showed me. But also, I think there is an enduring class distinction to tease out. Working class families in Britain during the Industrial Revolution used to sleep together in a single bed; sex and death were not kept from the children, but rather introduced as part of life, without the luxuries of space and squeamishness that money permits.

When I did my newspaper internship last year, I meekly tailed a couple of reporters into Mooroolbark, deep suburbia. There to do a story on the aftermath of a boy pushed in front of a train, one thing that struck me was a girl of 15 or 16 arguing with her mother as an equal. I didn't say that to him, you should know that of all people, what about you mum, you always say that, what did you say. The striking thing about it was how close they were. The ease with which they fought indicated much practice, but they were fighting as equals, without the distance between parents and children found in monied households, in the middle/upper classes. I'd never talk like that with my mother.