Born in Belfast and educated at Queen's University of Belfast, Robert Lynd spent most of his adult life in London, writing for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New Statesman. Leonard Woolf characterized Lynd as "one of those impeccable journalists who every week for 30 or 40 years turn out an impeccable essay . . . like an impeccable sausage, about anything or everything or nothing." "Child's Talk," originally published in 1922, is one of those impeccable essays.
Child's Talk
by Robert Lynd
I was sitting in a railway carriage opposite a child who was holding a large elephant on wheels under its right arm. I cannot remember what the child looked like, but I remember that the elephant had a skin of grey cloth and a red saddle, and that the child had squeezed its handkerchief under the saddle, and, pointing to this, said, as if telling me a secret: "My pocket."
It always comes as a relief to me when a child ventures some remark of this kind, because when I meet a strange child for the first time in the presence of grown-up people I do not, as a rule, find conversation easy.
One's ordinary conversation seems so far beneath the level of a small child. To say to it, "What wonderful weather we've been having!" would seem an outrage. The child would merely stare.
Thirty or forty years hence it will have adapted itself to grown-up conversation, and will have learned to return babble for babble like an ordinary inmate of a railway carriage. At present it believes that conversation should be as interesting as the things one thinks about, and that it should either be amusing or informing and serious.
On the other hand, it does not regard as serious many of the things that you and I regard as serious. There is no use looking over your paper at it and saying: "Lloyd George seems to be getting into hot water with the French about the Poles." It has never heard of Mr. Lloyd George, or of the French, or of the Poles.
The only words in the sentence that will convey anything to its mind are "hot water," and these will call up a picture of somebody putting his toe into a steaming bath and having to withdraw it hurriedly.
This may lead to some reminiscences of baths of its own and to a conversation on baths in general--especially on the horror of sitting on in the bath when the plug has been taken out, and there begins the gurgling of the animal that lives just under the plug-hole and is always trying to swallow you.
One ought not to say "the animal," perhaps; it is really called "the demon," or rather "the demond." Anyhow, it is worse than Mr. Lloyd George, worse than the French, worse than the Poles. Mr. Lloyd George does not at least hide down the waste-pipe and make gurgling noises.
That is why the problem of making the bath safe for children seems, at the age of six, a matter of far more urgent public importance than the problem of making the world safe for democracy.
The truth is, perhaps, that either the child or the grown-up person is a little insane. We should certainly think a child of six mad if it said the things that men of sixty say in railway trains. If, for instance, a child of six broke in on a discussion on the coal dispute with: "Settle the matter once for all. Humph, humph! Like having a tooth out. Humph! Painful just for the moment. Humph! Feel all the better for it afterwards. Humph, humph, humph!"--one would carry it off to a mental specialist to have its bumps examined.
On the other hand, if an elderly gentleman went about carrying a grey elephant with a red saddle under his arm, and wearing his handkerchief under the elephant's saddle instead of in an ordinary pocket, we should regard this as even more convincing proof of his insanity than his remarks on the coal strike. If he pointed to the saddle and said with a beaming eye, as if communicating a secret, "My pocket," one would undoubtedly change one's compartment at the next station.
And yet, when the child behaved in this fashion, I experienced not only no alarm, but positive pleasure. The child and I had now something to talk about.
I discovered that it was devoted not only to elephants, but to all animals--that it liked animals for toys and animals in stories.
"You like animals better than people?" I asked it after a time.
It paused for a moment to consider whether I was the sort of person to whom one could tell an important secret. Then it nodded and confessed, ever so shyly, ever so sweetly: "I like animals and railway junctions."
After that we had a perfectly engrossing conversation.
"Child's Talk," by Robert Lynd originally appeared in the collection The Sporting Life and Other Trifles, published in 1922 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
