The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”

Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…

Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...