Published in the Baptist Times 26 August 2011
Child labour is ideal for raspberry picking: it helps to be toddler-height to see the fruit hiding under leaves.
A friend's three-year old son was helping, solemnly selecting only the dark red berries, carefully detaching without squashing them, and dropping them into the bowl. Then I noticed something was wrong.
'You're not eating any. Don't you like them?'
'I don't know.' He took the one I held out and chewed it thoughtfully.
'Nice? Like another one?'
'Mm - but not a hairy one this time.'
And it struck me: when did I forget that raspberries are hairy? I remember thinking the same thing as a child. When did I forget that blackcurrants taste nice but smell like sweaty feet, and tomatoes have a prickly bit that can stab a child's tongue?
We showed another friend's two and a half-year old daughter the blackbirds' nest over our porch. Her dad had told her about the newly hatched chicks and she couldn't wait to see them. Held up, she peered down at the cheeping tangle of yellowish featherless creatures with gaping beaks, and exclaimed, 'Oh, yuck!' She was expecting mini-blackbirds. What she was shown was a practical joke in very poor taste, to her.
When I was a child, I thought like a child. Somewhere along the line, I lost the knack. I learned to place events into contexts, rather than experiencing each one as a 'first time.'
What freshness of perception have we lost, on the way from child-thinking to adult assumption?
At my first-ever birthday party, at six or seven, five friends from my class and one from my sister's came home for jelly and cake and musical bumps. The event, as far as we were aware, was a resounding success. But when all the guests had departed, the great-uncle with whom we lived flew into a rage and demanded, 'How dare you invite a black child into my house?'
Confusion ensued as I tried to work out which child he was talking about. I had no clue. My 'pretending not to know' increased our uncle's anger, but I really did not know.
Finally my mother intervened and asked me if I had noticed that Margaret's skin was a darker colour than the other children's; it was this difference that triggered our uncle's fury, because he was colour prejudiced. I was astounded. 'But she's always like that!' How could he see it as inappropriate dress or behaviour for a party, when she was simply being herself?
Racism can only be learned - or rather, the truth that all humans are valid can only be unlearned - through distorting reality through adult lenses. Being judgemental is so embedded in adult perception that what is perceived may seem to be what actually is.
In the eighties, working for a Jewish charity, witnessing long-term family scars left by persecution and pogroms, I could understand the longing for homeland and the ambition for an earthly Israel. When, at that time, I applied to sponsor a third-world child, it was a shock to be sent the photo of a Palestinian girl. It felt somehow disloyal.
But, living in a hovel with an elder brother disabled by painful injuries sustained in the conflict, and siblings for whom going to school was not only unaffordable but physically hazardous, little Nadia el-Atab reminded me of a truth about war.
God is not on the side of those who claim to be right nor of those who disregard others' rights, but on the side of the poor, who in any conflict always lose.
What did you clearly know as a child that has since become obscured? What happens to make an adult stop noticing what is in view or start hiding it under assumptions and arbitrary values? There's a topic to ponder on when you next sit down to a bowl of hairy raspberries.
