LOVE TO THE LITTLE ONES

Louisa Lane-Fox (Frances Lincoln, £14.99)

For all those struggling with recalcitrant teenagers, crying babies, tantrumy toddlers, and even those whose children are grown up, be assured that it was ever thus. In Love to the Little Ones, Lane-Fox has collected a selection of extracts from letters, diaries and essays through the ages that prove this very point: once a parent, always a parent, with all the trials and triumphs that parenthood entails It’s a perfect book for dipping into — indeed, is best read in snippets, with sections from pregnancy through childhood and adolescence to ‘the end’.

Within these pages, there’s admonition and advice; sorrow and pride. We hear about the doctor’s remedy for crying babies: 20 drops of chloroform on a pocket handkerchief. And a mother, whose 14-year-old son had just gone up to Oxford in the 1630s, wrote him many cheerful letters of advice, such as to ‘drinke in the morning beer boyled with licorisch’.

Gwen Raverat’s own theory in the matter of child-rearing was to ‘take things easily; and, above all, eschew good intentions’. She was brought up with a twice-weekly bath into which salt pebbles were put — the theory being that sea-bathing was wholesome, and salt water in the bath would do just as well. In an extract from Oscar Wilde, writing from Reading Gaol, we hear his sorrow at being thought ‘unfit’ to see his son Cyril. And there’s an encouraging extract by Rudyard Kipling, aware of his own desperately unhappy experiences at school, writing to his son, newly deposited at boarding school.

Death in childbirth and childhood were common features of the past, but there are many moving entries from more modern times as well: Captain Scott’s loving last letter to his wife and only son, aged three (‘Dearest Darling — we are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through’); the novelist Susan Hill’s account of the death of her premature baby.

This book is a celebration of parenthood. A delightful snapshot of parents through the ages; a glimpse through history of parental love and care.