It's interesting to me those seemingly random moments from your life that your memory decides to take a snap shot of and possibly embellish (placing you in possibly non-existant understairs cupboards while you're practising your 8s). Today another fragment of my childhood made its way to the surface of my mind as I watched a mother and her two sons ahead of me in the queue at the Post Office. They were clearly bright and polite youngsters - one (around about 8 years old) was studiously reading a book and his mother was lightly complaining about how quickly he was getting through his reading, meaning she had to buy new books. Whilst she spoke in English with an accent, he replied in French, so was clearly bilingual. He was not yet self-conscious about his smartness, but nor was he overly proud of himself. They were being a little bit cheeky and fidgety, but they were good boys and the mum knew it, but she joked about the Post Office sign asking people not to abusive and impolite to their customers, saying that she would ask the man at the counter for a copy to put on her fridge. The boys did not get the joke, obviously knowing that sometimes they misbehaved and although the mum admitted it was a joke, she clearly wanted her boys to be as polite and pleasant as possible (and nothing wrong with that) and was trying if only in a little way to make them consider their behaviour and improve upon it. Seeing the studious boys serious face as he considered these issues brought back a two-second memory.
I don't know hold old I was or where I was or what naughty things we were doing, but I have a clear memory of me and my brother and sister (six and five years older than me respectively) getting out of our family car on some family trip to somewhere and my exasperated mum hissing at us, "Do you see any other families behaving like this?" I think I looked around to see if any other children were as badly behaved as we were (whatever it was we were doing) and saw that no one in the vicinity was and I think that I believed we might actually be tha naughtiest kids in the world. That other children didn't squabble or talk back or elbow each other in the back seat. It was just us. And I felt ashamed to be a part of this diabolical brood.
I think that in looking around I had suspected that we weren't the only ones and was desperatly hoping to see proof that we were just normal kids, but there was no evidence on hand and that was enough to make my mum's words ring true. Perhaps my brother and sister, older and wiser were more cynical about the accusation, but I guess it stuck in my mind because I was shamed by my mother's comments. Her clever tactic worked. If only for the next five minutes perhaps. She might as well have tried to turn back the tide than stop children behaving like children.
She must have known that we weren't the only family that acted like this (however we were acting), but I think the moment probably sticks in my mind because her embarrassment and mortification was genuine. My parents' generation were very concerned with social standing and how other people (even strangers) viewed you. She was at the end of her tether no doubt (something that is rare enough in itself which again might be why my memory retains the incident - I also remember another time that she snapped at me for being noisy, which was again so out of character that the emotions I felt were left imprinted on my brain).
Of course in hindsight I can only feel sympathy for my parents, having to deal with a car full of screaming kids of various ages, arguing, farting, crying, demanding attention, complaining of imagined, unfair preferential treatment of their siblings, jockeying for position or whatever other crimes we'd been guilty of on that journey to make her snap and appeal to our sense of shame.
Still, we didn't ask to be born.
