Torturing flies, cruelty and making sense of it all

When my eldest son was around seven we had a visitor who dropped off her son to play with him.  As we had a large garden and an old caravan in its middle, with a forest to one side it seemed an idyllic place for children.  I could look out the kitchen window and watch my sons playing in the fields opposite.  It felt as if we were providing our three sons with freedom childhood used to allow decades ago.  It didn’t turn out exactly like that.

This boy was two years older than my eldest and had an odd world weary look about him.  As if he had already seen too much in his nine years.  But for my eldest son, who had been hounded by two inquisitive younger brothers, it must have seemed something of relief to have an older playmate at last.   They both disappeared into the caravan and seemed totally immersed in playing together.  After a couple of hours, my visitor returned and picked up our young guest.  My eldest son seemed quieter than normal and after some questioning he revealed that they had spent most of the time pulling the wings off flies!  When bored with this, flies had been pierced with drawing pins, gassed under glasses with air freshener and others drowned slowly.  I was horrified and asked him how he could do such things?  He claimed he had been a passive observer watching as his older playmate invented more gruesome methods of killing his prey.  I found myself livid beyond reason, after all they were only flies but it felt as if into an idyllic setting corruption and cruelty had crept unseen.  My son was upset at my reaction and his claim to be a passive participant was greeted with me likening him to SS guards who stood by watching others gassed the Jews.  Now, I have to confess that comparing his fly killing activities to genocide was hardly fair.  But I was disappointed in him and was overreacting as is my want at times.  Poor little chap stood listening gravely, eyes huge, as he took my comments on board.  How children suffer from parents’ stupidity!  He swore he would never be involved in such activities again and his shock at my reaction was obvious.  I do fear at times that my children may need, in the future, to invest in expensive counselling and therapy as a result of my poor parenting skills.

It was all rather unfair as after all, he was a rather kind hearted little chap who took great care of his younger brothers.  He’d appointed himself their guard and protector, probably realizing I was rather flawed in that area.  On an earlier trip to London by train he had acted as a railway platform edge monitor.  I found him, aged six, with both arms outstretched, his back to the railway lines, desperate to ensure his active younger brothers would not throw themselves off the platform into the path of an oncoming train.  On another occasion when he was four I managed to lose him and his brothers in a huge shopping mall.  After a frantic search, the crowd cleared from an area before me and I spotted him standing bravely alone, with both arms wrapped around his crying younger brothers.  Combined with this rather stoic dependable nature was an insatiable hunger for input.  He read anything and everything he could get his hands on and asked ceaseless questions of everyone.  A dear friend, Pari, re-christened  him “Whyman” after she took care of him for an afternoon and returned later exhausted by the never ending  interrogation he put her under.  He seemed to observe the world avidly around him trying to work things out and make sense of it all.  Sometimes it just didn’t make sense.

The only other children in our neighbourhood were the bin man’s two boys.  These lads were rather wild with a tendency to steal toys, slit our garden hammocks from end to end, throw stones, push small children out of trees and a perverse liking for putting dead animals on our kitchen windowsill!  As the years went by, they progressed to scratching the cars with stones, braking neighbour’s windows, intimidating the elderly in the street and then ultimately to drugs and real crime.  My eldest son observed their growing cruelty with alarm, after all, he had two vulnerable younger brothers to look out for.  But, I like to think that on some level, he managed to make some sense of it all, my poor parenting skills, unexpected cruelty in others and our own vulnerability to it all.  That, what we do, on a small tiny moral level, has consequences for who we become.  Like tiny unsure steps taken in a chosen direction, our kindness or our cruelty will shape not just our destination but our very communities.