Stress from city living gets to teenage son.
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge looked back on his 18th-century boyhood as a boarder at the brutal Charterhouse school, he remembered feeling imprisoned and cut o from nature. He used the phrase ‘in populous city pent’, and said the only glimpse he got of the natural world was of the sky and stars. Living in the city, you do sometimes feel trapped and hemmed in. And this feeling of being a prisoner can be acute in children. When my youngest child, fresh from the wilds of Exmoor, started at his inner-city primary school aged eight, he was sent to the headmaster on his rst day. He’d shouted at his teacher, ‘I don’t have to do what you tell me.’ The headmaster asked what he could do to help. ‘I just need a tree to climb,’ said Henry. ‘Well, there aren’t many of those on Uxbridge Road,’ said the headmaster. A few...
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