Songs of Innocence by Fran Abrams Page B

Spurley Hey, revealed that half the city’s pupils were attending at least once a week.
Indeed, Mr Hey told a commission of inquiry, many of them were prepared to beg or steal to do so. One enterprising group had formed a begging circle for the purpose, which had met its demise when
one member had stolen the group’s hidden boots and stockings – removed to increase the impression of poverty – and had pawned them for cinema tickets. But
The Times
weighed
in on the child’s part. Criticism of the cinema as immoral was ‘an expression of the type of mind which regards all pleasure as evil’, the paper said in a leader column in January
1914. But the biggest question was: What would children do instead if the picture-houses were closed to them? ‘Are their homes better ventilated than the palaces, or the street corners less
draughty? Will they go to bed any earlier, or sleep any sounder for being left at home?’
    Sonia Keppel, growing up in a wealthy household in London, would have had no such japes. However, her mother would occasionally take her to a matinée at the theatre, which in itself was a
far from sedate experience. 17 ‘Clearly I remember that it was a matinée about Nero, fiddling madly before the burning of Rome. A
deafening thunderstorm went on in the background, through which Agrippinashrieked valedictions to her insensitive son. Alternately, the stage glowed red from the flames
consuming Rome, or was blacked out altogether while the thunder lasted, or flared white with the lightning. Through all these extremes of heat and shade and light I clung to Mamma, protesting
loudly that I was not frightened.’
    Nor was the experience entirely free from violence: the Keppels had taken along a friend, Sir Hedworth Williamson, ‘who appeared to treat the appalling scene in front of him with
comforting levity’. Halfway through the performance, a lady arrived late and groped her way to a seat in the row behind. ‘Then she took the long pins out of her hat and pinned it to the
back of the seat in front of her. On the stage the lightning flared, and by its light I beheld the terrifying spectacle of Sir Hedworth Williamson impaled, like a gigantic butterfly, on the back of
his seat. And a doctor had to be sent for to dress the wound and to treat him for shock.’
    The Keppels evidently gained endless amusement from retelling the story later. Yet these excursions with her mother were rare, Sonia said, and mostly she ‘accepted the current theory that
a child must not be too much with its parents’. Yet, despite her admission that she longed to spend more time with her parents, she described the times she did spend with them –
shopping trips, even a holiday in St Moritz – as times filled with fun and affection. The Edwardian age, Sonia said, was a time when the heavy mantle of Victoria’s solemnity was lifted,
and when both children and adults indulged – at least sometimes – in childish behaviour.
    The world intrudes
    Yet this was a turbulent age, with Britain preparing for war and with tension mounting over women’s suffrage, Irish home rule and the reform of the House of Lords. And
children were not immune totheir odd outbreak of social unrest. In 1911, a wave of school strikes swept the country, during which pupils refused to work in protest at
perceived injustices in their schools. It all began in Llanelli, in south Wales, when pupils had marched out of their classrooms in protest at the hitting of a child by an assistant
teacher. 18 Similar strikes followed across the country, highlighting grievances over hours, leaving ages, holidays and discipline. By the end of
a week, pupils had walked out of lessons in Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, London and Glasgow, as well as in other cities. In the East End, school strikers armed themselves with iron bars,
sticks and belts, though eventually their protest ended peacefully.
The Times
, while condemning the action, took a notably