Kids are Weird, Part II

In an earlier post, I remark that children don't see the world in the same way as adults. Although an event may seem traumatic to adults, it may seem ordinary and everyday to children--until someone or something comes along and forces the event to take on special meaning.

My Friends the Miss Boyds by Jane Duncan is an excellent example of the child's perspective. Part-fiction/part-memoir, the story chronicles the slice-of-life experiences of Jane, an eight-to-nine-year-old, the months before and after the Armistice.

The true genius of the story is how Duncan portrays the Armistice. Although the adults are happy and relieved--and believe that all wars are ended--Jane sees the Armistice almost entirely in negative terms. After the Armistice, life changes. Routines change. Expectations change. Stability ends. The patterns of life that had, for her, been normal and everyday, shift. 

"It seemed to me," she states near the end of the book, "that after the Miss Boyds came and the Armistice, and I had my ninth birthday in March, my Family was Different...It did not occur to me that I was growing older and was observing more and differently" (184). 

The quote is one of the few times, the narrator, Jane, breaks into her older self. Most of the time, she allows the child-self, like the child-self of To Kill a Mockingbird, to observe and report without comment. On Prize-giving day at the end of school, she is awarded for being the brightest young woman (as she was). She takes the prizes as her due--and doesn't entirely understand her family's wistful reactions. To them, she is nearing adulthood. Within a few years, she will likely be sent to school. Childhood is ending. 

Her family's awareness begins to creep into her own viewpoint:

"[E]ven now I cannot see those mournful-coloured sweets or smell their sugar-peppermint scent without feeling again that searching, wandering sadness, which was my first knowledge that the world I knew was subject to change and was not, as I had thought, a steady, constant thing created to wait, ready and beautiful, for me to explore it as if it were some treasure-box of bright jewels."

Jane paints childhood with brilliant emotions and unending freedom. She falls into the school of Stevenson though Stevenson--also Scottish--did not enjoy so much freedom to the same extent (Stevenson relied somewhat more on his imagination as a child). And yet both evoke that "normality" of childhood ("this is the way things are"), including its wonder, with little effort: