ABSTRACT
In considering the question of the consciousness of children my thoughts immediately return to 1978, to a conversation I had with a twelve-year-oldboy. Still vivid, it encapsulates the essence of my enquiry. I had got to know the boy whilst doing fieldwork in the north of England. That day, as ever, he was bragging before his friends of recent escapades, bemoaning, in passing, the restrictions which age placed upon his everyday activities: not being allowed to smoke or drink, being too young to do this, too old for that. Perplexed and seemingly exasperated, the boy suddenly demanded of me: when are you an adult? As an adult, I could give no sensible reply. Age alone would have been of little help: sure, he could vote at eighteen but with local unemployment figures high and on the increase would he, in the eyes of those who mattered, yet be a man? At sixteen he could buy cigarettes; that he already did. At eighteen he might drink in the village pubs and clubs, but in the years till he reached that age he would certainly be practising. He would leave school at sixteen and, inevitably, swop one training ground for another in the guise of the then much despised YTS (Youth Training Scheme). Chickening out I dodged the question. Some fifteen years later the epistemological frame of his enquiry remains central for me, if not for him. He has no doubt found out, by now, what it means to be an adult. I, on the other hand, am still asking what it might mean to be a child. Through the course of this chapter I shall be attempting, at last, some kind of reply.
