Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 55: Children: Blind, Bitter Happiness
Autumn 1996
What was it like to be that lost personality in a vanished time, a child? This issue describes the rearing, loving, loathing, and fearing of children, and includes some remarkable evocations of being a child. Jayne Anne Phillips, Blake Morrison, Adam Mars-Jones, David Mamet, Todd McEwen, Allan Gurganus, Leila Berg, and more.
From this Issue
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Mother Care
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘After the birth and the overnight in the hospital she didn’t go downstairs for a week.’
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Soul Murder
David Mamet
‘The child sat with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth.’
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Doctors and Nurses
Blake Morrison
‘Skirtless, jumperless, she lies on the floor, her hair settling about her like a silky parachute.’
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I Am Here
Brian Hall
‘We knew almost nothing about her before she was born, not even her sex, so we must have referred to her as “it”’
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Salford, 1924
Leila Berg
‘Yesterday two boys got hold of me in the playground and banged my head against the wall over and over and said “Why did you kill Jesus?”’
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Arithmetic Town
Todd McEwen
‘Free play is when you have fun instead of playing kickball.’
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Hazleton Public Schools, Pennsylvania
Judith Joy Ross & Liz Jobey
‘Growing up is learning how to take a stance, before the camera and before the world.’
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Sluts
Susan Swan
‘It was Tom’s contention that you could spot a slut by the colour of her complexion.’
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He’s One, Too
Allan Gurganus
‘In Falls, North Carolina, in 1957, we had just one way of “coming out”. It was called getting caught.’
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The Case Against Babies
Joy Williams
‘Babies, babies, babies. There’s a plague of babies.’
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Eternal Love
Karen E. Bender
‘After Lena and Bob were married in the Chapel of Eternal Love, Ella told them that new husbands and wives were not allowed to share a hotel bedroom.’
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The Last Jews in Warsaw
Abraham Brumberg
‘I paid only one visit to the Jewish cemetery before the war, sometime in the spring of 1939. I was twelve years old.’
