[Redbook1:114-116][19700120:1605]{The
Cluster}[20th January 1970]
Tuesday 20th January
1970 4.05 p.m.
Today, in
Pimlico, I saw a [...] woman beat her little child for falling down. She had lost her temper. I do not doubt that the provocation was
great, and that the child’s running ahead and falling down was the last straw;
but when the child stood up it turned round to look at its approaching mother
and wailed. At first I thought it cried
for the pain and indignity of falling over -- a minor thing -- but now I wonder
if it did not realise what was coming to it.
For fully three minutes she chastised it and scolded it, while it
wailed, and we watched.
I wonder
how often that happens to that child; and I wonder too what will happen to
it. Will it grow up delinquent, and fall
to violence, killing and hurting to revenge itself on society for the ills its
parents did it? Or in imitation of their
ways? For children imitate their parents
and resent them at one and the same moment.
I should
like to see flats and maisonettes built to look inwards in groups of, say,
between six and twelve families -- probably eight to ten is the best size. Houses should also be built round a central
courtyard with a covered cloister joining them.
The
advantages of this are that statistically, there would be more chance of
finding two good parents among eighteen or twenty than among two -- as it
were. Parents would not have to suffer
their own offspring continually, babysitters would always be available, and,
since other people's children are just as interesting to parents as other
people's parents are to children, many of the strains of family life from the
children's point of view would be relieved.
If the
community was bigger, it would take teenage gangs into its fold -- there won't
be enough teenagers in one community to allow that with ten-family units, probably
-- but it would lose something of its essential closed nature. If it was smaller it would be too intimate
and people would get on each other's nerves.
That is the
chief danger, of course -- that the lack of privacy will be resented. I think that, for the sake of the children,
we shall have to redefine our standards of privacy and allow a certain amount
of meddling by the community -- as opposed to the State -- in the affairs of
individuals. I should like to see
the communities populated on a cross-class, cross-wealth basis, but I am afraid
that like tends to gather towards like too much to allow that to happen
naturally. I don't think one should
force these things. To provide for
common facilities for e.g. sports and leisure, the small, ten-to-twenty-family
groups could be part of a large collection of such groups.
Private
schemes could have common ownership of houses (?) by a community trust which
leases the freehold to an individual with first option to the trust if he
leaves. So he has all the rights of an
owner-dweller but the community of ten/twenty families retains ultimate
control.
In this way
also the day-to-day interests of old people would be cared for to a certain
extent.
I think now
that fifteen would be closer to the optimum number of families, with twenty as
a maximum. This will have to be worked
out by trial and error to a certain extent.
For a
start, houses in London which have back gardens could have their gardens turned
into a central garden and playground.
There would be no way in, other than through the houses, so
responsibility for the gardens would remain with the householders i.e. if
someone broke into a house from the back he would have to got in through someone
else's house.
Incidentally,
the local authority could help solve the parking problem by building car parks
underneath.
[PostedBlogger14122012]
