Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore

Author:Alison Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2016-07-20T10:27:56+00:00

11

My grandmother was born in the same year as the behaviourist B. F. Skinner. My grandmother used to threaten to put me in a box and keep me there until I learned to behave. This, she said, was how Skinner had trained his daughter. Apparently, this is a myth – Skinner’s “baby box” was more like “an upgraded playpen” with a “thermostatically controlled environment” and padded corners (Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century) – but I didn’t know this at the time. My grandmother told me that she would get my grandfather to build the box. He had a workshed and had built a bird table and I knew that he could easily build a box. Whenever I misbehaved, my grandmother would tell my grandfather to go to the workshed and get on with constructing the box, and he would go, and I would try very hard to behave. “If you even think of getting up to anything, Sylvia,” my grandmother would say, “I will be the first to know about it.” Even if I left the room, she would call after me, “I’ve got my eye on you!”

I tried to do helpful things, like dusting the mantelpiece or washing up the teacups, but my grandmother did not like me to do it. “You’ll do it all wrong,” she would say, or, “You’ll break something. I know what you’re like.” If my mother let me carry my own glass to the table, my grandmother would say to me, “You’re going to drop it,” and when I did, and while I stared down at the smashed glass at my feet, my grandmother would say, “I knew you would.”

My mother read child development manuals, turning back the corners of the pages here and there: “Failures of every sort are usually traceable not to a lack of ability, not to bad luck . . . but to a tendency in the subject to maintain the condition in which he has learned to feel at home . . . One of the deepest impulses in the very social human animal is to do what he perceives is expected of him” (Liedloff, The Continuum Concept). My mother asked my grandmother not to talk to me that way. “If you say she’s going to drop it, she will,” said my mother, walking in with the dustpan and brush.

“So she dropped it because I warned her not to?” said my grandmother, raising one thin, scathing eyebrow. “Get away from that glass,” she said to me. “You’re going to cut yourself.”

“You didn’t warn her not to drop the glass,” said my mother. “You told her she would drop it. But Jean Liedloff says it’s the same either way. Whether you tell her, ‘You’ll drop it,’ or whether you tell her, ‘Don’t drop it,’ what she hears is your expectation that she will drop it, and so she does, she complies.”

“I didn’t tell her to drop it,” replied my grandmother. “I didn’t make her drop it.

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