Leith on Life: nothing to fear but fear itself

First boredom, then fear. That’s Philip Larkin’s formula. I think he oversimplified things—or, at least, writing from adulthood, he forgot what came first. Certainly, looking at my five-year-old daughter, the trajectory seems to be different. She’s seldom ever bored, as far as I can tell, but she is a complete scaredy-cat.

When one of her friends was planning a birthday treat—a pizza and a trip to the cinema—the friend’s mother said, with concern in her voice, that perhaps it would be safest not to take Marlene along for the cinema part of the expedition. Were they thinking of going to see The Shining? Nope. The Moomins. The fricking Moomins. Moomintroll, I would remind non-aficionados, is not an actual troll of the bridge-dwelling, goat-dismembering kind. He’s a giant marshmallow with a face of melancholy kindness. Should he pass a goose, he would cross the road to avoid it thinking he had said “boo.”

And yet, my friend had spoken truly. This is a girl who has run screaming from the room during an episode of Pingu. When Dora the Explorer encountered a small, bubble-blowing pink dragon she completely lost her shizzle. I have had to pull off a dual carriageway when a spider no bigger than a thumbnail was sighted in the vicinity of her car-seat. If a goose said “boo” to her, I shudder to think what would happen.

And I look at her, full of paternal tenderness, and I wonder whether these fears are the product of an inherited disposition, or whether somehow my wife and I have failed to make her feel secure enough, or whether being afraid is a universal condition of early childhood: a natural evolved response to a universe in which, not yet knowing whether a pocket-sized, pink, bubble-blowing dragon is likely to be a harmless source of amusement and delight or a dangerous predator, it’s best to err on the safe side.

As a child I was full of fear. The top five, in no particular order, were: intimacy, wasps, death, embarrassment and—at least while asleep but vestigially during daylight hours—men in bowler hats with shiny pink eggs instead of faces. Things have reshuffled a bit. Wasps are now out of the top five, death is what in Top of the Pops terms would be called a “climber,” intimacy and embarrassment are holding steady and the bowler-hat men, having had their vogue, reappear only when red wine has caused me to eat three cheese toasties before bed. A raft of what TOTP called “new entries” include harm to my children, financial disaster, and being asked to chair Peter Ackroyd on stage again.

Larkin’s proposition, thought on hard enough, seems to yield a whole spectrum of fine variations: first fear, then fear of boredom, then boredom, then fear of fear, then boredom of fear, then fear of people writing in to tell you that it’s “bored with” rather than “bored of,” then boredom with people writing in tell you that it’s “bored with” rather than “bored of,” then just boredom, and finally once again fear. That, at least, is how I think it’s going to go for me.

And for my daughter? I cannot say. But I can note that the fear is not universal. William Gibson’s smart remark about modernity—“The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”—also applies to Marlene’s bravery. Pink dragons have her climbing the walls. But put her two feet away from an enraged father threatening ever greater sanctions for some act of obnoxious defiance or other... and she more often than not simply gets the giggles.

That’s a compliment of sorts, I suppose: she lives in the absolute certainty that I won’t do her any harm. And it’s an indictment, too, in the sense that had I been better and more systematic at managing my programme of sanctions and rewards a slight raising of the voice would suffice to indicate to her that a line had been crossed rather than, say, wild promises of the cancellation of all Christmases forever and the immediate and irrevocable placing of favoured toys in the bin.

I’m scared, in other words: scared that her fear may be my fault; and her indiscipline likewise. There’s only one thing for it. Next time she refuses to brush her teeth, I’m going to vanish into the closet and come out dressed as a pink dragon.