20 January 2006
Originally posted on greenfairydotcom
From the Sunday Times last weekend: an article from a woman outraged to find herself 'fighting off the child haters'(*) on a train journey with her children.
I do not believe that this woman's children of six, four and 18 months sat peacefully throughout the whole journey from Paddington to Cornwall and suspect that the interspersed bouts of pinching, squawking and ' throwing Frubes(**) around' mentioned were more akin to fingernails being scraped down a blackboard after the second or third consecutive hour of listening to it. However, that isn't the point. I am not really interested in how much noise this woman's children were making, whether the complaining woman was right to accuse her (with her nanny, car seat and violin) of being excessively Home Counties (I didn't snigger at that once, honest) or the seemingly completely innocent question of why no-one complained to the drunken stag party also in the carriage about their noise (I can't imagine). The following author opinions are what I'm interested in.
I know: I should have hung my head and scuttled along to the hideously entitled “family carriage” where anyone in a nappy is conventionally banished.
Well, yes dear, that is where you should have been. I am sure your mind is simply coursing with righteous notions of being labelled a second class citizen as soon as you breed and being forced into a special compartment for you and your kind, but I don't hear too many mobile phone users complaining about being turned into pariahs for not being welcome in the quiet carriage.
There is nothing so basic as the instinct of a (presumably) single woman against that of another with children.
She goes on to accuse the woman of 'pregnancy envy', because obviously that's it. Bitter, single, 'professional looking' woman jealous of pregnant mother and scenes of domestic happiness enraged to be witness to all that she is missing out on cannot contain her 'anti-maternal rage'. I know that's how I feel when I've been trapped in a train carriage for hours on end with children 'squealing with delight'. Positively green with suppressed envy and sick with the spectacle of all I could have had.
The truth is that the British are allergic to the sight or sound of anyone under 10.
Because this, of course, is an anti-children thing. Not merely an anti having to listen to screeching and screaming for hours on end thing, or an anti oblivious parents either so attuned to the noise or simply unwilling to stop it thing, it's the innocent small people that are the focus of all that frustrated, Miss Haversham-esque hatred. In minds turned sour by denied motherhood we are incapable of seperating cause from effect and your children are directly in our embittered line of sight.
Be afraid, be justified. We come wielding poisoned candy.
(*) A woman complained to her about the noise.
(**) What the arse is a Frube?