Babies smoking durries
And other drugs for children (1750-1980).
Do you ever read a bunch of seemingly disparate books then notice they’re all eerily converged on the same theme? Like your subconscious is sniffing out a message? At the moment, mine seems to be a heat-seeker for historical accounts of extremely lax parenting.
I’ve recently finished three books that are not alike on the surface. The first was a beaten 1893 edition of Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times by a Pakeha Maori, loaned to me by my dad and authored by Frederick Edward Maning, a burly, fractious Irishman who arrived onshore in Hokianga in the Far North of New Zealand in 1833. It contains Maning’s detailed impressions of Māori life, into which he assimilated deeply but ambivalently.
The second was the bone people by Keri Hulme (1985), a novel I first read (and loved) in my early 20s, when I picked it up in a hostel bookshelf in Pai, Thailand. It’s the first New Zealand novel (and debut) to win the Booker, and concerns a star-crossed triad: Kerewin, a reclusive seaside artist, Joe, a widowed and careworn foster father, and Simon, a strange waifish child who washed up on shore one day, mute, maybe six or seven years old, no one knows, towards whom Joe is brutally violent.
The third was Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock by Christina Hardyment (1983), a fascinating account of childrearing advice from the mid 18th century through to the 1980s.
All three books contain accounts of childrearing unthinkable by modern standards, especially when it comes to the drugs parents were willing to ply them with. Apropos of nothing, except that they’re under my nose and serve as a citric palate cleanser to my usual richly online beat, here are some of those accounts.
