posted on Friday, April 13, 2007 8:12 AM
by
Endie
Silly Child, Vile Mother
This story is that of a silly, unlucky child and a vile-sounding mother.
The kid decides to have a party while her parents are away. That is an absolutely standard rite-of-passage thing to do. The internet is a novel element, and mentioning it on mySpace meant that strangers turned up, it got badly out of hand, and twenty-thousand pounds' worth of damage was done.
Well, the mother says it was twenty grand. From the description, I am sure that she is vastly exaggerating. But the number is beside the point.
The fact is that the kid made a mistake. A big mistake. But children make errors. As a parent, her job is to help her kid learn from it, and to display unconditional love and forgiveness at the same time as exerting discipline. She needs to show that actions have consequences, but that at least parents stick by their kids.
Not Mrs Bell of Chipchase Court. She compares having damage done to her house to rape, no less. She complains that she left the house immaculate. I'l bet se did: everything about her comments screams possessions-centred, obsessive-compulsive middle-classed woman. She has sent her child away to stay with friends, presumably unable to stand having a house-rapist under ths same roof. She has refused to forgive her, justifying this on the grounds of the amount of damage done. Perhaps forgiving her kid is worth eight thousand, but not twenty-thousand pounds. The character painted of Mrs Bell in the BBC article is the most generous and human of those I have so far read.
Mrs Bell says that she may never be able to bring herself to return to the house. She is just the sort of drearily unpleasant member of the "respectable" middle classes that Saki or Wilde would have had a field day with.
Poor kid. She was stupid, but I can certainly construct a scenario in which almost two decades of taking her shoes off when in the house, washing her hands before using light-switches, not scuffing her feet on the hall carpet, and always putting the green mugs on the middle shelf made her, on some semi-conscious level, say "sod this, the world can come, and bring their mates..."