SUCH, SUCH WERE THE
JOYS
543
feels and thinks. A child which appears reasonably happy may
actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It
lives in a sort of alien underwater world which we can only pene–
trate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we
were once children ourselves, and many people appear to forget the
atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for
instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by send–
ing a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and
refusing to see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child
will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its at–
titude is one of simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings
to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight
onwards. Even the affection that one feels for
.a
child, the desire
to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misunderstanding. One can
love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult,
but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return. Looking
back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not
believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my mother,
and even her I did not trust, in the sense that shyness made me
conceal most of my real feelings from her. Love, the spontaneous,
unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for
people who were young. Toward people who were old-and remem–
ber that "old" to a child means over thirty, or even over twenty-five
-I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction, but
I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed
to–
with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child's
physical
shrinking from the adult. The enormous size of grown-ups,
their ungainly, rigid bodies, their coarse wrinkled skins, their great
relaxed eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes
and beer and sweat and tobacco that disengage from them at every
movement! P.art of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's
eyes,
is
that the child
is
usually looking upwards, and few faces are
at their best when seen from below. Besides, being fresh and un–
marked itself, the child has impossibly high standards in the matter
of skin and teeth and complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is
the child's misconception about age. A child can hardly envisage
life beyond thirty, and in judging people's ages it will make fantastic
mistakes.
It
will think that a person of twenty-five is forty, that a
