Boys will be boys

Boys will be boys

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...230571,00.html
http://tinyurl.com/n3g5a

DJ Taylor
June 18, 2006

Why are fathers snapping up an old-fashioned book of boyhood lore? DJ
Taylor looks at the gap in almost every father's life

--

Like practically every human relationship these days, fatherhood has
become horribly institutionalised. A condition that was once thoroughly
ad hoc and made up as one went along is now caught up in
bureaucracy's stifling grasp.

Father's Day (an American import that didn't exist in my youth),
fathers' support agencies, parenting classes: on all sides comes
evidence of a natural state hedged about with all kind of wholly
artificial supports.

What my own father would have made of this during my late 1960s and
early 1970s childhood I can't begin to imagine. As far as I can
deduce he simply got on with the task in hand, inspected the school
reports and was at all times available for advice and consolation.
Asked to theorise about it, he would probably have laughed in your
face. A Father's Day card would have been hooted out of the house.

Judging by the hot story from the UK book trade a good many fathers
still share that view.

Every so often the lofty minarets of publishing find themselves shaken
by a seismic crack from down below. The sound - deeply liberating in
the age of the pre-digested blockbuster - is that of the book-buying
public spontaneously making its presence felt: one of those infrequent
but hugely intriguing instances of word-of-mouth buzz picking up on
some hitherto under-publicised item and sending it storming up the
bestseller list without the people who administer the book trade really
noticing.

The latest example of this encouraging trend is a work entitled The
Dangerous Book For Boys by the brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden - Conn
is a well-known historical novelist - which was overlooked by the
literary editors and the three-for-two promotions but is currently
number one on the Amazon chart.

Undoubtedly it is being bought not only by boys but by their fathers as
a splendidly politically incorrect guide to both boyhood and
fatherhood.

Got up in gilt and scarlet covers, stoutly hardbacked and looking for
all the world like a juvenile Christmas present from around the time of
King Edward VII's coronation, The Dangerous Book For Boys declares
its intent from the opening page.

"In this age of video games and mobile phones there must still be a
place for knots, tree houses and stories of incredible courage," the
authors maintain. "Men and boys today are the same as they always
were, and interested in the same things . . . We hope in years to come
that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple
of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it."

There follow nearly 300 neatly written pages on such enticing topics as
Hunting and Cooking a Rabbit, Understanding Grammar (in three parts,
this one), A Brief History of Artillery and even a section on an entity
that would have been zealously excluded from the Edwardian original -
Girls.

Halfway between an act of homage to a bygone era and a thoroughly
practical "how to" guide - having promised the children a
treehouse years ago I read that particular tranche with the sinking
realisation that something would probably have to be done - the
Igguldens' book is, however unobtrusively, making a fairly dramatic
claim: "Men and boys today are the same as they always were."

Are they? My six-year-old, however cosseted and protected from the
wicked world outside, looks to me like a miniature adult, absurdly well
informed about the latest computer gizmos and able to discuss football
with the statistical nous of a man of 30. ("Why doesn't Scholes
still play for England," he demanded during the Trinidad & Tobago
game on Thursday night. "He's only 31.")

So what, I wondered, would children, as opposed to the moist-eyed
paternal elegist, make of these expositions of the Battle of Waterloo
or the thumbnail guides to coleoptera?

And here things turned very interesting. Felix, aged 13, sensibilities
already hardened by the obligations of the schoolroom, approached it in
a more or less utilitarian spirit. "Very useful if you were bored,"
he reported back.

Predictably the treehouse groundplan went down well, as did the lessons
on juggling. The air of sexual apartheid, too, seemed a clear
advantage. ("Definitely not for girls.") All the same, I detected a
mild suspicion at the thought of education being ushered in by the back
door. ("Kings, queens and astronomy.")

Six-year-old Leo, on the other hand, was completely absorbed. He went
through the checklist of creepy-crawlies an insect at a time, pored
rapturously over the instructions for skimming stones (the world record
is 38 hops, apparently) and wanted to spell his name in naval flag
code.

Clearly, over the next few months The Dangerous Book For Boys, however
misleading the promise of its title, is set to play a bumper role in
Taylor family life.

Behind its success lurk some shrewd cultural deductions that, here in
the bright dawn of the technology-driven 21st century, hardly ever
occur to people down at the sharp end of the child-rearing process.

The most obvious is the absolute feebleness of what gets taught in
schools these days. Among other choice offerings the Igguldens supply a
complete list of British monarchs going back to Egbert of Wessex
(802-839), instructions on when to use whom rather than who, and
warnings on the inadvisability of ending a sentence with a preposition.


Even my own privately educated brood seemed faintly aghast at this, but
is there a state school 12-year-old in the country, you wonder, who
knows who Harold Harefoot was or what FD means on a penny - knowledge
that this particular parent regards as far more important in the long
term than knowing how to log on.

At the same time the Igguldens' co-production is much more than an
implied criticism of lapsed or simply "different" educational
standards. It is also a lament for what might be called the lost
cultural world of the boy.

In strict historical terms, the idea of the child, and the whole modern
cult of "childhood", is a very recent invention. Until at least the
start of the Victorian era "children", as we conceive of them
today, barely existed.

Boys, in particular, were treated as under-sized adults to be sent out
to work as soon as family circumstances demanded it. The notion of a
distinctive boys' culture, with its own dress styles, pursuits and
reading material, lay far away in the mid-Victorian future.

If a boy in the age of King William IV was given anything to read by
his parents it would have been some vengeful work of moral uplift such
as The Fairchild Family, a 19th-century bestseller in which papa
improves his children's minds by taking them to the gibbet, where
they can watch recently executed murderers hanging in their chains.

The "boy" was effectively created by Victorian factory acts and
education bills, legislation that kept him out of the mill and in the
schoolroom for a much longer period, and at the same time, in however
marginal a way, turned him into a consumer.

Simultaneously this consumption had an ethical dimension. Manufacturers
and industrialists wanted to sell things to him, but - this being the
Victorian age - philanthropists and moralists wanted to fill his mind
with information that would be useful to him in later life and teach
him how to behave. Hence the proliferation, come the later 19th
century, of boys' school stories, boys' magazines, attempts to
organise boys for the common good by way of clubs and institutions.

More important even than this - as it was unofficial - was the
development of a whole series of codes and behaviours by which the
average boy lived his life.

The early parts of George Orwell's novel Coming Up For Air, set in
the Thames valley of the early 1900s and reflecting many of the
circumstances of Orwell's own childhood, are a kind of checklist of
what being an off-duty boy meant a century ago: long aimless walks,
fishing, plundering snacks from the hedgerow ("Even plantain seeds
are better than nothing when you're a long way from home and very
hungry"), above all reading.

At one point Orwell's hero, George Bowling, remembers his 12-year-old
self reading an encyclopaedia that came in penny numbers ("If I now
know the length of the Mississippi or the difference between an octopus
and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal, that's
where I learnt it from"). It bears more than a passing resemblance to
The Dangerous Book For Boys.

As a mid-fortysomething whose first coherent public memory is of
watching England win the 1966 World Cup final, I must have been one of
the last beneficiaries of old-style boys' culture.

Apart from your schoolwork, life until you reached the age of about 14
consisted of a series of enthusiasms or "crazes". I began with
stamps, moved rapidly on to coins - a tricky hobby, this, as they
were more expensive - and then progressed in easy stages to Airfix
kits by way of the Tempo Toys range of cowboys, indians and US Seventh
Cavalry.

For communal activity there were the Cubs, followed by the Scouts, with
all manner of other associations such as the League of Pity (a junior
version of the NSPCC) lurking in the background.

There was, too, a whole mass of reading matter deliberately aimed at
pre and early teens, notably a magazine called Look and Learn, which
contained potted biographies of writers like Balzac and Dickens. I
still credit this with putting me on the scent of literature.

Thirty years later that world - a completely enclosed shell into
which adults scarcely penetrated - has all but disappeared. How many
pre-teenage children of your acquaintance collect stamps, or own a
stack of "young head" Victorian pennies? Apart from the odd private
subscription effort aimed at young eggheads, is there a single weekly
publication directed at nine-to-13-year-olds above the level of a
comic?

No, the old constituencies have moved on, transformed themselves,
disappeared. I discovered first-hand evidence of this sea change in the
early 1980s when for a brief period I worked for a public relations
agency that had the Airfix account and became the notional editor of
Airfix Magazine. The punters, sad to relate, were now middle-aged men,
their attics stuffed with boxes full of unmade Avro Lancasters and
Fieseler Storches. The children, mysteriously, had gone elsewhere.

The great thing about old-style boyhood, evidence insists, was its
continuity. As far as I can make out, although the economic
circumstances had improved, my own childhood was not substantially
different from my father's (born 1921). Certainly we read many of the
same books and pursued several of the same hobbies.

What killed boys' culture - that curious, chaotic world of bike
rides and loafing and swapping the football club crests that they gave
out in packets at petrol stations?

At one level the explanation is physical - boys reach puberty
earlier, yearn to grow up in a way that didn't perhaps commend itself
to the space hopper and clacker aficionados of the early 1970s. On
another, parents have grown - in some cases necessarily - much more
protective of their offspring, less keen on letting them out of the
house to climb trees and stalk unsuspecting wildlife with their
home-made bow.

Much more decisive, though, is the onrushing development of electronic
media, that whole bedroom-tethered sub-world of PlayStations, GameCubes
and deeply repetitive eye candy. The modern boy, surveys regularly
announce, spends most of his time in his room, on the phone, at large
in cyberspace or prone in front of the television rather than up a
tree, in a den or out on the prowl.

And if boyhood is in crisis, to the point where it may be supposed
hardly to exist, then so is the agency that sustains it and whose
collective memory lies at the heart of the Iggulden enterprise.

Fatherhood, as you may have gathered, is having a pretty bad time of it
at the moment. Fathers are thought to need all the support that a
concerned bureaucracy can throw at them. Only last week Fathers Direct
(more formally the National Information Centre on Fatherhood) could be
found distributing a government-funded Dad Pack, replete with
Gorillaz-style graphics, 10,000 of which were ordered by children's
centres in advance of Father's Day.

"The pack meets government guidance requiring thousands of
children's centres, maternity units and nurseries to provide
effective support to dads. Until now, these services have mainly
offered support to mums," says Fathers Direct.

Much mocked in the media, this "special Dad guide" occupies ground
as far from the Dangerous Book For Boys as you can get. Instead of the
kings of England or how to make a bow and arrow, it covers such topics
as pregnancy, birth, work, relationships, money, health, benefits,
legal rights and responsibilities, giving a baby a bath and preparing a
picnic. It also features the usual band of celebrity dads commending
the paternal state. (Thierry Henry on being present at his daughter's
birth: "I've won stuff in my life. Nothing can beat that.")

Duncan Fisher, Fathers Direct's chief executive, enthuses over
"proper information for modern dads, written in men's language,
using contemporary images of men and covering the issues men are
concerned with".

Fathers Direct says its mission is "to promote close and positive
relationships between men and their children". It was set up seven
years ago with a grant from the Department of Health, and the Dad Pack
was subsidised with £25,000 from the Department for Education and
Skills.

My first reaction to the Dad Pack is to question the wisdom of public
money being spent on this kind of thing. I am brought sharply back to
earth, however, when I read a newspaper interview with an unmarried,
unemployed teenage father who is proud of providing help for his infant
son from his benefit giro.

"The other day the sole came off my trainers but now I put my son
before myself - I've got to dress him smart," he says. "See
that dummy - £3.75 a time and he kept losing it. So I bought a solid
gold £75 chain to put it on and they don't get lost any more."

Make no mistake, it's tough, this fathering business, tough in a way
that doesn't seem to have occurred to bygone generations.
Expectations are high on both sides. Failure means ignominy.

I don't recall my own father constructing a philosophy of parenthood.
He just turned up: standing on one side of the goal as I veered round
the full back in Cub football matches; applauding at school
prizegivings; taking me out for cycle rides in the Norfolk countryside.


Looking back on it at the age of 85, he recalls: "It was all a bit of
a game, but we did our best." All the anxiety examined by Nick Hornby
and Tony Parsons in their stories simply eluded him.

Modern dads, alternatively, merely agonise. Marcus Berkmann, author of
Fatherhood:

The Truth, and at 45 the parent of two small children, sees himself as
"Mr Bad Example . . . incorrigibly lazy, self-indulgent and quietly
manipulative", his instincts forever pulling him in opposite
directions.

"I love my children to distraction - I genuinely believe that they
are the greatest thing that has happened to me - while constantly
thinking of new ways to get out of the house," he says.

Berkmann's son, one of the objects of this affection, has barely
started at nursery school. But should his nervy father be planning
ahead, reading the Igguldens and sharpening up the knives, say, for
that excursion in search of rabbits, or measuring up lengths of timber
for that treehouse?

The message of The Dangerous Book For Boys is that fathers ought to do
"stuff" with their sons, that even now, with every sort of media
enticement dangled before them, boys are still fascinated by practical
activities and miscellaneous information: juggling tips, conjuring
hints and tree recognition. Framed in the right way, the message runs,
these things have an eternal appeal that the latest electronic gadgetry
can never replace.

The drawback to the Iggulden project, of course, is that it is
completely opposed to practically every development (and developer)
currently at work in the British educational process. Not many modern
curriculums, after all, feature lists of British kings and queens,
troop deployments at Balaclava and the nature of the pluperfect tense.

On the practical side, it goes without saying that the average
headmaster would probably have a fit if anyone suggested that his male
pupils ought, for the purpose of drawing them closer to their fathers,
be taught how to gut a rabbit.

He (or she) would probably be deeply disturbed, too, by the sight of
the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson - quoted by the Igguldens -
summarising the achievements of the British Empire (downsides are
mentioned too) or a list of recommended reading that includes the
original James Bond books and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald
Fraser.

Happily, what might now be considered political incorrectness can never
be excluded from this kind of book. In his famous essay, Boys'
Weeklies, examining the world of the Gem and Magnet, George Orwell
wondered what a progressive boys' magazine aimed at readers of 12 to
14 might look like.

"At first glance," he reckoned, "such an idea makes one slightly
sick." No normal boy would have the slightest interest in the
"dreary uplift" it would contain.

He was right - and still is. For some reason the average 13-year-old
will always prefer an account of the battle of Agincourt to an essay on
the development of the United Nations; similarly, toy pacifists will
never have the appeal of a file of toy infantry.

What The Dangerous Book For Boys ultimately implies is that children
- and their fathers - should be provided with a space that is their
own, far away from schools, government and received opinion, a place
where, in defiance of nearly every progressive educative and social
tendency, they can pull off the ever more difficult trick of being
themselves.

--

The Dangerous Book For Boys is published by HarperCollins at £18.99.
The National Information Centre on Fatherhood is at
http://www.fathersdirect.com/ or 0845 634 1328

yep.. boys dont usually grow up


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Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:
Boys will be boys

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...230571,00.html
http://tinyurl.com/n3g5a

DJ Taylor
June 18, 2006

Why are fathers snapping up an old-fashioned book of boyhood lore? DJ
Taylor looks at the gap in almost every father's life

--

Like practically every human relationship these days, fatherhood has
become horribly institutionalised. A condition that was once thoroughly
ad hoc and made up as one went along is now caught up in
bureaucracy's stifling grasp.

Father's Day (an American import that didn't exist in my youth),
fathers' support agencies, parenting classes: on all sides comes
evidence of a natural state hedged about with all kind of wholly
artificial supports.

What my own father would have made of this during my late 1960s and
early 1970s childhood I can't begin to imagine. As far as I can
deduce he simply got on with the task in hand, inspected the school
reports and was at all times available for advice and consolation.
Asked to theorise about it, he would probably have laughed in your
face. A Father's Day card would have been hooted out of the house.

Judging by the hot story from the UK book trade a good many fathers
still share that view.

Every so often the lofty minarets of publishing find themselves shaken
by a seismic crack from down below. The sound - deeply liberating in
the age of the pre-digested blockbuster - is that of the book-buying
public spontaneously making its presence felt: one of those infrequent
but hugely intriguing instances of word-of-mouth buzz picking up on
some hitherto under-publicised item and sending it storming up the
bestseller list without the people who administer the book trade really
noticing.

The latest example of this encouraging trend is a work entitled The
Dangerous Book For Boys by the brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden - Conn
is a well-known historical novelist - which was overlooked by the
literary editors and the three-for-two promotions but is currently
number one on the Amazon chart.

Undoubtedly it is being bought not only by boys but by their fathers as
a splendidly politically incorrect guide to both boyhood and
fatherhood.

Got up in gilt and scarlet covers, stoutly hardbacked and looking for
all the world like a juvenile Christmas present from around the time of
King Edward VII's coronation, The Dangerous Book For Boys declares
its intent from the opening page.

"In this age of video games and mobile phones there must still be a
place for knots, tree houses and stories of incredible courage," the
authors maintain. "Men and boys today are the same as they always
were, and interested in the same things . . . We hope in years to come
that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple
of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it."

There follow nearly 300 neatly written pages on such enticing topics as
Hunting and Cooking a Rabbit, Understanding Grammar (in three parts,
this one), A Brief History of Artillery and even a section on an entity
that would have been zealously excluded from the Edwardian original -
Girls.

Halfway between an act of homage to a bygone era and a thoroughly
practical "how to" guide - having promised the children a
treehouse years ago I read that particular tranche with the sinking
realisation that something would probably have to be done - the
Igguldens' book is, however unobtrusively, making a fairly dramatic
claim: "Men and boys today are the same as they always were."

Are they? My six-year-old, however cosseted and protected from the
wicked world outside, looks to me like a miniature adult, absurdly well
informed about the latest computer gizmos and able to discuss football
with the statistical nous of a man of 30. ("Why doesn't Scholes
still play for England," he demanded during the Trinidad & Tobago
game on Thursday night. "He's only 31.")

So what, I wondered, would children, as opposed to the moist-eyed
paternal elegist, make of these expositions of the Battle of Waterloo
or the thumbnail guides to coleoptera?

And here things turned very interesting. Felix, aged 13, sensibilities
already hardened by the obligations of the schoolroom, approached it in
a more or less utilitarian spirit. "Very useful if you were bored,"
he reported back.

Predictably the treehouse groundplan went down well, as did the lessons
on juggling. The air of sexual apartheid, too, seemed a clear
advantage. ("Definitely not for girls.") All the same, I detected a
mild suspicion at the thought of education being ushered in by the back
door. ("Kings, queens and astronomy.")

Six-year-old Leo, on the other hand, was completely absorbed. He went
through the checklist of creepy-crawlies an insect at a time, pored
rapturously over the instructions for skimming stones (the world record
is 38 hops, apparently) and wanted to spell his name in naval flag
code.

Clearly, over the next few months The Dangerous Book For Boys, however
misleading the promise of its title, is set to play a bumper role in
Taylor family life.

Behind its success lurk some shrewd cultural deductions that, here in
the bright dawn of the technology-driven 21st century, hardly ever
occur to people down at the sharp end of the child-rearing process.

The most obvious is the absolute feebleness of what gets taught in
schools these days. Among other choice offerings the Igguldens supply a
complete list of British monarchs going back to Egbert of Wessex
(802-839), instructions on when to use whom rather than who, and
warnings on the inadvisability of ending a sentence with a preposition.


Even my own privately educated brood seemed faintly aghast at this, but
is there a state school 12-year-old in the country, you wonder, who
knows who Harold Harefoot was or what FD means on a penny - knowledge
that this particular parent regards as far more important in the long
term than knowing how to log on.

At the same time the Igguldens' co-production is much more than an
implied criticism of lapsed or simply "different" educational
standards. It is also a lament for what might be called the lost
cultural world of the boy.

In strict historical terms, the idea of the child, and the whole modern
cult of "childhood", is a very recent invention. Until at least the
start of the Victorian era "children", as we conceive of them
today, barely existed.

Boys, in particular, were treated as under-sized adults to be sent out
to work as soon as family circumstances demanded it. The notion of a
distinctive boys' culture, with its own dress styles, pursuits and
reading material, lay far away in the mid-Victorian future.

If a boy in the age of King William IV was given anything to read by
his parents it would have been some vengeful work of moral uplift such
as The Fairchild Family, a 19th-century bestseller in which papa
improves his children's minds by taking them to the gibbet, where
they can watch recently executed murderers hanging in their chains.

The "boy" was effectively created by Victorian factory acts and
education bills, legislation that kept him out of the mill and in the
schoolroom for a much longer period, and at the same time, in however
marginal a way, turned him into a consumer.

Simultaneously this consumption had an ethical dimension. Manufacturers
and industrialists wanted to sell things to him, but - this being the
Victorian age - philanthropists and moralists wanted to fill his mind
with information that would be useful to him in later life and teach
him how to behave. Hence the proliferation, come the later 19th
century, of boys' school stories, boys' magazines, attempts to
organise boys for the common good by way of clubs and institutions.

More important even than this - as it was unofficial - was the
development of a whole series of codes and behaviours by which the
average boy lived his life.

The early parts of George Orwell's novel Coming Up For Air, set in
the Thames valley of the early 1900s and reflecting many of the
circumstances of Orwell's own childhood, are a kind of checklist of
what being an off-duty boy meant a century ago: long aimless walks,
fishing, plundering snacks from the hedgerow ("Even plantain seeds
are better than nothing when you're a long way from home and very
hungry"), above all reading.

At one point Orwell's hero, George Bowling, remembers his 12-year-old
self reading an encyclopaedia that came in penny numbers ("If I now
know the length of the Mississippi or the difference between an octopus
and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal, that's
where I learnt it from"). It bears more than a passing resemblance to
The Dangerous Book For Boys.

As a mid-fortysomething whose first coherent public memory is of
watching England win the 1966 World Cup final, I must have been one of
the last beneficiaries of old-style boys' culture.

Apart from your schoolwork, life until you reached the age of about 14
consisted of a series of enthusiasms or "crazes". I began with
stamps, moved rapidly on to coins - a tricky hobby, this, as they
were more expensive - and then progressed in easy stages to Airfix
kits by way of the Tempo Toys range of cowboys, indians and US Seventh
Cavalry.

For communal activity there were the Cubs, followed by the Scouts, with
all manner of other associations such as the League of Pity (a junior
version of the NSPCC) lurking in the background.

There was, too, a whole mass of reading matter deliberately aimed at
pre and early teens, notably a magazine called Look and Learn, which
contained potted biographies of writers like Balzac and Dickens. I
still credit this with putting me on the scent of literature.

Thirty years later that world - a completely enclosed shell into
which adults scarcely penetrated - has all but disappeared. How many
pre-teenage children of your acquaintance collect stamps, or own a
stack of "young head" Victorian pennies? Apart from the odd private
subscription effort aimed at young eggheads, is there a single weekly
publication directed at nine-to-13-year-olds above the level of a
comic?

No, the old constituencies have moved on, transformed themselves,
disappeared. I discovered first-hand evidence of this sea change in the
early 1980s when for a brief period I worked for a public relations
agency that had the Airfix account and became the notional editor of
Airfix Magazine. The punters, sad to relate, were now middle-aged men,
their attics stuffed with boxes full of unmade Avro Lancasters and
Fieseler Storches. The children, mysteriously, had gone elsewhere.

The great thing about old-style boyhood, evidence insists, was its
continuity. As far as I can make out, although the economic
circumstances had improved, my own childhood was not substantially
different from my father's (born 1921). Certainly we read many of the
same books and pursued several of the same hobbies.

What killed boys' culture - that curious, chaotic world of bike
rides and loafing and swapping the football club crests that they gave
out in packets at petrol stations?

At one level the explanation is physical - boys reach puberty
earlier, yearn to grow up in a way that didn't perhaps commend itself
to the space hopper and clacker aficionados of the early 1970s. On
another, parents have grown - in some cases necessarily - much more
protective of their offspring, less keen on letting them out of the
house to climb trees and stalk unsuspecting wildlife with their
home-made bow.

Much more decisive, though, is the onrushing development of electronic
media, that whole bedroom-tethered sub-world of PlayStations, GameCubes
and deeply repetitive eye candy. The modern boy, surveys regularly
announce, spends most of his time in his room, on the phone, at large
in cyberspace or prone in front of the television rather than up a
tree, in a den or out on the prowl.

And if boyhood is in crisis, to the point where it may be supposed
hardly to exist, then so is the agency that sustains it and whose
collective memory lies at the heart of the Iggulden enterprise.

Fatherhood, as you may have gathered, is having a pretty bad time of it
at the moment. Fathers are thought to need all the support that a
concerned bureaucracy can throw at them. Only last week Fathers Direct
(more formally the National Information Centre on Fatherhood) could be
found distributing a government-funded Dad Pack, replete with
Gorillaz-style graphics, 10,000 of which were ordered by children's
centres in advance of Father's Day.

"The pack meets government guidance requiring thousands of
children's centres, maternity units and nurseries to provide
effective support to dads. Until now, these services have mainly
offered support to mums," says Fathers Direct.

Much mocked in the media, this "special Dad guide" occupies ground
as far from the Dangerous Book For Boys as you can get. Instead of the
kings of England or how to make a bow and arrow, it covers such topics
as pregnancy, birth, work, relationships, money, health, benefits,
legal rights and responsibilities, giving a baby a bath and preparing a
picnic. It also features the usual band of celebrity dads commending
the paternal state. (Thierry Henry on being present at his daughter's
birth: "I've won stuff in my life. Nothing can beat that.")

Duncan Fisher, Fathers Direct's chief executive, enthuses over
"proper information for modern dads, written in men's language,
using contemporary images of men and covering the issues men are
concerned with".

Fathers Direct says its mission is "to promote close and positive
relationships between men and their children". It was set up seven
years ago with a grant from the Department of Health, and the Dad Pack
was subsidised with £25,000 from the Department for Education and
Skills.

My first reaction to the Dad Pack is to question the wisdom of public
money being spent on this kind of thing. I am brought sharply back to
earth, however, when I read a newspaper interview with an unmarried,
unemployed teenage father who is proud of providing help for his infant
son from his benefit giro.

"The other day the sole came off my trainers but now I put my son
before myself - I've got to dress him smart," he says. "See
that dummy - £3.75 a time and he kept losing it. So I bought a solid
gold £75 chain to put it on and they don't get lost any more."

Make no mistake, it's tough, this fathering business, tough in a way
that doesn't seem to have occurred to bygone generations.
Expectations are high on both sides. Failure means ignominy.

I don't recall my own father constructing a philosophy of parenthood.
He just turned up: standing on one side of the goal as I veered round
the full back in Cub football matches; applauding at school
prizegivings; taking me out for cycle rides in the Norfolk countryside.


Looking back on it at the age of 85, he recalls: "It was all a bit of
a game, but we did our best." All the anxiety examined by Nick Hornby
and Tony Parsons in their stories simply eluded him.

Modern dads, alternatively, merely agonise. Marcus Berkmann, author of
Fatherhood:

The Truth, and at 45 the parent of two small children, sees himself as
"Mr Bad Example . . . incorrigibly lazy, self-indulgent and quietly
manipulative", his instincts forever pulling him in opposite
directions.

"I love my children to distraction - I genuinely believe that they
are the greatest thing that has happened to me - while constantly
thinking of new ways to get out of the house," he says.

Berkmann's son, one of the objects of this affection, has barely
started at nursery school. But should his nervy father be planning
ahead, reading the Igguldens and sharpening up the knives, say, for
that excursion in search of rabbits, or measuring up lengths of timber
for that treehouse?

The message of The Dangerous Book For Boys is that fathers ought to do
"stuff" with their sons, that even now, with every sort of media
enticement dangled before them, boys are still fascinated by practical
activities and miscellaneous information: juggling tips, conjuring
hints and tree recognition. Framed in the right way, the message runs,
these things have an eternal appeal that the latest electronic gadgetry
can never replace.

The drawback to the Iggulden project, of course, is that it is
completely opposed to practically every development (and developer)
currently at work in the British educational process. Not many modern
curriculums, after all, feature lists of British kings and queens,
troop deployments at Balaclava and the nature of the pluperfect tense.

On the practical side, it goes without saying that the average
headmaster would probably have a fit if anyone suggested that his male
pupils ought, for the purpose of drawing them closer to their fathers,
be taught how to gut a rabbit.

He (or she) would probably be deeply disturbed, too, by the sight of
the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson - quoted by the Igguldens -
summarising the achievements of the British Empire (downsides are
mentioned too) or a list of recommended reading that includes the
original James Bond books and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald
Fraser.

Happily, what might now be considered political incorrectness can never
be excluded from this kind of book. In his famous essay, Boys'
Weeklies, examining the world of the Gem and Magnet, George Orwell
wondered what a progressive boys' magazine aimed at readers of 12 to
14 might look like.

"At first glance," he reckoned, "such an idea makes one slightly
sick." No normal boy would have the slightest interest in the
"dreary uplift" it would contain.

He was right - and still is. For some reason the average 13-year-old
will always prefer an account of the battle of Agincourt to an essay on
the development of the United Nations; similarly, toy pacifists will
never have the appeal of a file of toy infantry.

What The Dangerous Book For Boys ultimately implies is that children
- and their fathers - should be provided with a space that is their
own, far away from schools, government and received opinion, a place
where, in defiance of nearly every progressive educative and social
tendency, they can pull off the ever more difficult trick of being
themselves.

--

The Dangerous Book For Boys is published by HarperCollins at £18.99.
The National Information Centre on Fatherhood is at
http://www.fathersdirect.com/ or 0845 634 1328