Book review: Wild Child, by Patrick Barkham

When I was five or six I wanted to cook and eat a hedgehog. The man responsible for this ambition was a Methodist minister, G Bramwell Evans (or Evens), who wrote books as “Romany” and broadcast on the BBC, either Children’s Hour or Listen with Mother. The broadcasts, all scripted and made in the studio, recounted his walks with two young girls whom he was teaching about the countryside and the ways of nature. Romany’s mother was a gipsy and cooking the hedgehog gipsy-style seemed wonderfully exciting.

I never achieved that ambition. Children educated at the Forest School central to Patrick Barkham’s delightful and impassioned book might do so – though perhaps not since the hedgehog is now an endangered species. The book is partly narrative, an account of the year which he spent working as an assistant at “Dandelions,” a pre-school or kindergarten forest-school in Norfolk to which he sent his three children, and partly an argument for the benefits – spiritual, intellectual and physical – of such an education.

Children today are deprived by caring and loving parents of the freedom earlier generations enjoyed. They are subject to excessive supervision. Their lives are organized and controlled by their parents – for, of course, the best of reasons, which is to ensure their safety. Even young children in our electronic world know a great deal more than children did even 30 years ago, but they also know much less than many children did 50 or a 100 years back. They know the virtual world better than the natural one. How many children today are told: “out you go and don’t come back till lunch time?” But this was normal even 40 years ago.

“All of us,” Barkham writes, “of all ages are so much happier if we spend a fair chunk of our waking hours outdoors. It is how we used to live; it is how we are meant to be.”

Barkham makes his case: society and schools fail children. It is of course not a new case. Visionary Scottish teachers like AS Neill and RF Mackenzie were making it long before Barkham was born in 1975.Perhaps it is a case that has to be made in every generation and made more urgently in each. Anyone reading about the Dandelion Forest School where very young children are led to think as well as to see, watch, feel, taste and in general experience the natural world is likely to think, at least for the moment, that this is what childhood should be.

“Animal welfare,” Barkham writes, “is high on our political agenda; factory farming is frowned upon. What about child welfare and factory schooling?” What indeed?

There is a danger in idealising the past. We have come a very long way from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It’s easy to suggest that how they used to live is in some sense “how we are meant to be,” and to reject Thomas Hobbes’s judgement that life in a state of nature was “nasty, brutish and short.”

Moreover, even when Barkham has charmed us into agreeing with him, one can hardly avoid the reflection that what is possible and practical for a small number of young children in a Norfolk village is hardly feasible for hundreds of thousands of children reared in cities. The visionary educationalists may have had successes with a small number of children and adolescents, but they rarely, even never, succeeded in translating their ideals into action more widely. This surely is the problem which Barkham recognizes, though he is unable to find an answer, perhaps because there isn’t one. We have travelled so long in time to be where we are, and we can’t, as members of a hi-tech, money-dominated society, arrest time and turn the clock back. Individually we may live differently, but those who do so live, like Romany’s kin, on the fringes.

Nevertheless some of those at least who read this stimulating and enjoyable book may be influenced to consider how they live and what sort of life they are imposing on their children, and conclude that just reading about the natural world is not enough. Better, for the children especially, to live a bit differently.

Wild Child, by Patrick Barkham, Granta, 342pp, £16.99