Sometimes people argue about you can have parts in your Little Space that are not of the era you were brought up in as if they are not emotionally an authentic part of you so that if say you were brought up in say the nineteen fifties, you cannot have plushies or have say books from other eras.
In my regressed world you can add some things into it so say action figures can be complemented by say a Teddies or Dinosaur plushie because it's function and utility to is the same, you play with it, it comforts you as hold and hug it as the inner child you are.
We didn't have computers then just typewriter's and diaries but they are in our new childhood not just for publishing and printing but for playing games and reading about things and our hallway telephone is often now a mobile phone that fits in our shorts pocket.
In much the same way to read say the books of Jacqueline Wilson is a part of understanding a part of contemporary childhood with the objects and experiences our age in it, that can aid me understand more of this age I'm travelling through as the hybrid adult-child I am.
The core though is very much routed in era I was brought up in not least the extent to which the stories I read or were read to me reflected the social norms around us even though things were and did change over time and in that context re-writing them so much of the social structure is missing but the dialogue sounds dated even for those of us who lived through the nineteen seventies and eighties just muddles it all up.
One might as well say for arguments sake have " Noddy goes to school" re-written by (insert editors) based on a story by Enid Blyton as miss out the whole section when in the class room a slipper is hanging by the chalkboard and when a child is naughty, is instructed to fetch it but hesitates, Noddy (trying to be obliging and not realizing what it symbolizes) says "I'll fetch it for you Miss!" because that was just how it was like in the first year of Infant school where we got a few spanks in front of the class as we all learned school discipline as a class.
Such things were and are part of the authentic emotional sense of the inner-child me tapping into my experiences and to part of how we were brought up and part of Caregiver to little re-parenting.
Consider this quote:
"Big-Ears the goblin was always on the look-out for anything he could take. Sometimes it was an apple off a barrow, or off somebody's tree. Sometimes it was a biscuit from the counter of Mr. Butter the grocer's and sometimes a few flowers from a garden.
He was too clever to be found out, which was a pity, because a good spanking would have done him a lot of good, and might have stopped his bad ways. But nobody ever spanked him or locked him up for a night, so Big-Ears grew worse and worse. "
It's from the "Hi Feather-tail!" Noddy story in Enid Blyton's Sunshine collection where clearly we are talking about teaching Big-Ears right from wrong from an early age in they way that was the norm then. No 'but they have (insert) syndrome so they can't help it and there is an implicit idea that it's the adults who are to work on managing your behaviour so you learn to however difficult it may be. You learn social limits, not be exempted from them.
It is very relevant because truthfully I had the same traits as Big-Ears, was pretty good at not being found out so my behaviour had gotten worse and worse in my hybrid adult-child life and why it is spanking has been put back into it, to re-parent me in the way we were expected to so so adult-child me learns to conform.
Or take the following exchange from Claudine at St Clare's one of six novels in the St. Clares girls boarding school series Enid wrote:
"If I wasn't in the fourth form I'd give you the hardest spanking you've ever had in your life, Angela. A good spanking would be the best thing you could have."
"Nobody has ever laid a finger on me in my life."
The first person speaking is Carlotta, the wild ex circus girl who is a Prefect and that is Angela's retort.
This like the other quote has now been removed from current editions on sale but it rings very true in that Prefects and Head Girls and Boys did have that delegated authority with one threatening me with quite a spanking if I was caught smoking in school.
It also had to be said, it wasn't just them that did, so did teachers.
That was the kind of thing that was not so much the core plot but very much in the background of those stories I loved by Enid Blyton such as the girls boarding school Malory Towers, St. Claire's series and referenced in the Famous Five.
For being there you got more of a feeling of how each character felt, empathizing with them in their situations that you also knew of that either wholesale deletion of a paragraph or replacing the word with a say scolding doesn't work because expecting a scolding feels different than say expecting a spanking.
What happens is therefore more believable for being set with the social expectations and sanctions of that very era where pretty much everything else is at odds with Twenty-first century Britain anyway.
It is in the form of novels, a depiction of the world that in the past I was brought up in so in their attempt to render a depiction of the past in terms that are seen as 'right on' so-called 'politically correct' is in so may ways a tampering with our recollection not just of these texts and how they they were a part of our lives but also of our recollection of the world as it was as that child around seven to thirteen as we lived it.
Grown ups are more than entitled to debate the rights and wrongs of our era (although a return to that era's values and sanctions is helping me no end) but in airbrushing the world we knew, they are not simply disrespecting us who loved reading these books at the time, enjoying re-reading them later in life, they fail to give a basis to explain to newer young readers the difference between now and then, muddling up the past.
