BEASTLY AUNT GEORGINA

Won't someone think of the children, for fucks sake

It’s been a long time since I last read Lord of the Flies, but even so, I’m sorry to report that it did very little to prepare me for being in a school playground, surrounded by a bunch of nine-year-old boys.

The only nine-year-old boy I quite like is my nephew, but obviously I’m biased. He was my reason for being in a playground in the first place, since it’s become my regular task to walk him to and from school. If I’m being honest, these walks are some of my favourite parts of the day. They take about 15 minutes, and Nephew can easily fill this time with disquisitions about pokemon and weird things he’s seen on youtube which he definitely should not have been watching. I often zone out somewhere in the middle of these impromptu TED talks, but I don’t feel bad about it, because I’m pretty sure this is all part of a Derren Brown-style hypnotic technique he’s using to get me to buy him things. I believe this because he once spent an entire fifteen minutes telling me about his favourite crisps, and later that day, I did in fact find myself in the snack aisle in Morrisons, seeking out a mega pack of pickled onion space invaders.

It’s good to spend time with young children, if only to remind yourself of how intensely creative humans can be. During our fifteen minute walks we have, among other things, invented a squircle (cross between a square and a circle), practiced the sport of Hedge Jumping (literally running head first into a hedge), and invented an activity designed to replicate the experience of a non-fatal car accident (don’t ask).

Not having kids of my own, I’ve always felt a bit like I could take them or leave them. Preferably leave them. But when it comes to Nephew, I’ve surprised myself on occasion with the strength of my protective instincts.

Which takes us back to the playground. School was yet to start, and Nephew was playing football with a bunch of other juvenile horrors when I noticed a great lumbering hulk of a child shoving him repeatedly against a wall. Nephew is a diminutive child, small for his age, and his assailant was, to put it bluntly, not. He was a substantial boy. He had, shall we say, heft. He had none of the elegance or softness of a Sumo wrestler, but rather, he looked firm and unyielding, like a couple of armchairs stuffed into a carrier bag. His legs were two pink columns wrapped in a pair of shorts, and his fists were meaty trotters. A bowling ball with a slice of boiled ham slapped on the front of it passed for his head; the ham was studded with a pair of eyes the size and luminosity of a couple of raisins. In short, he was a beast.

I was about to intervene when the beastly boy ceased to shove my nephew, and instead walked away rubbing his own arm with one of his mottled trotters. It was at this point that I locked eyes with the boy, and in a low, menacing voice which I was convinced he alone could hear, said, “Oh no, did you hurt yourself while you were trying to hurt my nephew?” My eyes beamed into his with a medium level of malevolence. (I wasn’t aiming for an immediate panicked breakdown, but hoping to give him subtle nightmare fuel until he’s in his thirties at least.)

The child looked at me with an unmistakeable expression of utter incomprehension and apathy, and I realised that he hadn’t heard anything I’d said and probably thought I was admiring his coat or something.

I can admit that this was for the best. Look, I’m not proud of my behaviour. I’m a nice, kind, middle-aged woman, not a character out of a Roald Dahl novel. I am, however, apparently channelling the spirit of Roald Dahl while writing this account. Certainly I’m being a little unkind in my description of this child, who is no doubt a lovely little boy, or was once a lovely little boy. Or once ate a lovely little boy. Whatever. All I can say is that it was pure instinctive protectiveness that compelled me to issue a mild threat to a minor.

I suppose Lord of the Flies actually did prepare me for this, in a way. I knew I had an inner monster that in the right conditions was capable of anything – torture, murder, dirty looks. I just hadn’t realised that the ‘right conditions’ would be as humdrum and innocuous as seeing my nephew being over-enthusiastically but ultimately harmlessly tackled by a slightly older and bigger (but, if I’m honest, still reasonably-sized) child.

Dealing with nine-year-old boys is bad enough, but what I really can’t cope with is thirteen-year-old girls. You’d think I’d find them easier, given the fact that I was once a thirteen-year-old girl myself. But then again, I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Having weighed up the evidence, I actually think that I was never a thirteen-year-old girl, although I was quite possibly a nine-year-old boy. Indeed, I am quite possibly still a nine-year-old boy on the inside (which may explain my general beastliness). I grew up with four brothers (my two sisters didn’t come along until I was already practically grown up) so I understood and enjoyed surreal stupidity, reckless behaviour, and punching people who were mean to me. What I was completely unable to get my head around were the subtle and complex politics of girls’ social lives, which seemed to me to be akin to the intricacies of some eighteenth century French court, in which your position in the hierarchy was determined by exquisite delicacies of eye contact, tone, dress, hairstyle, and vocabulary; and one wrong glance from beneath your fan would end in a beheading.

I didn’t understand this. I didn’t understand it so much that I didn’t realise it was even happening. It was only later, looking back on my adolescence, that I saw how utterly oblivious I had been. I’d never even stood a chance of being a cool girl.

All of this is to try to explain my mindset when, upon being left alone in a room with a friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter, I panicked, and tried to fill the awkward silence by asking her first about school, then following up that completely uncool question by inquiring whether she went in much for glue sniffing.

(I’m not joking. I wish to God I was.)

No, she said, in response to the glue sniffing thing. Which was of course the only thing she possibly could say, and was more than I deserved. This utterance was followed by a long and deeply humiliating pause in which I mentally reviewed my entire existence up until that point and decided it probably would have been better had I been culled at birth. Obviously, this would have created other problems for me, such as not existing. But I think it’s clear by now that this may have been for the best. For the children’s sake, if nothing else.

I’d happily have my head skewered on a piggy stick if it stopped me from humiliating myself in front of juveniles.

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