“Give me a child until he is seven..."

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

This Jesuit motto is the mantra of a television series in thee UK that has filmed a group of individuals every seven years from the age of seven in 1964 till the present day at the age of 56 and it looks likely to continue, which means that we will eventually face the prospect of the participants dying off one by one as they go into old age, including the producer, Michael Apted, and that’s when questions may well be asked as to whether it ought to go on. Whatever happens then, I do hope it will go on a bit further and accompany the chosen subjects well into their sixties. And if any pass away in the process, I suppose we could be there at their funeral, or at least speak with their friends and family about their lives. Having said that, your humble blogger is no spring chicken and may pop his clogs before any of the series participants do and not witness any of the attrition that will occur one day. This is real life, not a scripted tv drama.

For me it has been a fascinating and revealing series so far, witnessing every seven years both the visible physical changes in the subjects and the no-less obvious and natural changes in their mental development, but also, and just as fascinating, the changes taking place in the world around them. We start from a first black-and-white episode showing a truly suffocating dark and dismal environment and progress in subsequent episodes to a world of greater colour and light and growing optimism. The series develops in a very natural way as we follow the participants through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and on to what may now be termed their later years. Admittedly it is all in the form of brief snapshots, but it is nevertheless a potent window into the growing-up process, evolving society and a rapidly changing world.

Although the programme focused on a specific group of children, it is in a way about each and every one of us. Though the course of our own lives may differ somewhat from that of those individuals, the process is the same and the successive stages are the same and we see ourselves in those children as they pass through the various ages and stages of man. We have many common points with them and we recognise many of their experiences in our own. We witness their joys and sorrows, their successes and failures, their triumphs and defeats. The older we are, the more nostalgic we are about the early years, the years of our childhood, our youth, and the younger we are, the more we are intrigued to see how life is faced at an older age. We look back or we look forward and in both cases their life is a reflection of ours and ours of theirs.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” But is this really so? It sounds good, has a good mystical ring to it, but if the series demonstrates one thing it is that this is so often not the case after all. Several of the participants have gone on to lead lives that we could not have imagined from seeing them at age seven. Some have had better and some worse lives as adults than we might have imagined. And some have been a real revelation. But all have been a slice of human lives at various stages and moments, divided into 7-year intervals, and I for one have been spurred to think long and hard about life and our journey from the cradle to the grave. We can do nothing about the one or the other, but we may do a great deal about the in-between. And that is what really matters in the end.

So now the seven-year-old children of 1964 are the fifty-six-year-old adults of 2012 and, if we are fortunate enough, we may hope to revisit them in another seven years’ time when they are sixty-three. By definition it is a process that cannot go on forever and it is already nearer to its end than its beginning, given the average human age-span, but so far it has been an intriguing and moving journey and for the moment it continues. I personally have learnt a lot from it in ways which are more to do with attitude, perception, approach and acceptance than any concrete practical skill or aptitude or technique. Being older than them by a few years, I have seen myself in them and recognised the grey grim world they were born into.

Seven Up has, as I've said, taken us through a large part of the cycle of life in seven-year leaps and by so doing it has set before us the reality or realities of life and an ever-changing world. It has shown us the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a representative group of individuals, and the many things that life throws at us all along the way. There is joy and sorrow there, happiness and sadness, triumph and tragedy, goodness and badness, and we can all identify with that and recognise ourselves in them and the scheme of things. If I am still around to see the next episode in 2019, I will do so… if only to say: "Their journey through life has reflected my own and the challenges they have encountered along the way have also been my own." The differences are only really in the detail.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”  I’m not so sure about this, but whatever the truth of it, the contrast between us as children and us as adults, as poignantly witnessed in the Seven-Up series, is such a huge one that it is difficult to believe that we are the same individuals. And therein lies the fascination in the series. We see the child become the man, mentally and physically, and we are transfixed by the transformation. We note with astonishment the power of the years to transform us into something wholly different from what we were when we came into the world. The inexorable passage from cradle to grave - a journey that we all must make, in a life that may be short or long, happy or sad - is a truly gripping experience and must be the core reason why this documentary series has been so successful. It is I suppose a concrete witnessing of the flame of life that eventually and ineluctably weakens, falters and goes out and we thus pass into history. Sic transit gloria vitae.

My Friend George

Two years ago, this very month, my friend George passed away in hospital in the arms of his grief-stricken mother.

George and I had been friends since secondary school and, though we had had our ups and downs over the years, our friendship had stood the test of time and we had kept in close touch. But life had been less kind to my friend and in his later years he was plagued by constant ill health. He had been asthmatic since his teenage years and then put on a lot of weight which did not of course help his condition. But this was nothing to what awaited him in later life.

One fateful day he injured his foot. At the time, though it was painful, he just patched it up and thought nothing of it. But instead of healing after a few days it became apparent that it was getting worse. In no time the wound had deteriorated to the point where it turned septic and he was forced to seek medical help. Unfortunately, despite lengthy care and nursing of the infection, it stubbornly refused to heal. Quite the contrary, some months later it had started to spread up his leg and now he was having real problems in getting about.

Whilst this was going on, he began experiencing inexplicable bouts of faintness and dizziness, and upon medical examination he was given the terrible news that he had diabetes. This of course came as a great shock to him and his mother, but ever the pragmatist George soon settled into the routine of injecting himself daily with insulin. Years passed and the diabetes inexorably took its toll on his health in general but he soldiered on uncomplaining.

However, worse was to come. To the great dismay of everyone, the infection in his leg, perhaps facilitated by his poor health in general and his diabetes in particular (and, be it said, by some wrong-headed and clumsy handling on the part of visiting nurses), had not abated even after sustained treatment but instead had travelled further up his leg and he was now unable to walk without a crutch. Eventually, gangrene began to set in, and the doctors decided that there was nothing for it but to amputate his leg as far as the knee if his life was not to be endangered! And so it was that George lost part of his right leg.

For awhile after this it seemed that his condition had stabilised and that he was out of the woods. But it was not to be. His asthma was giving him problems again, his diabetes was gradually wearing him down, and his general health had taken a turn for the worse. Psychologically too he was in low spirits, as might be imagined. Within weeks he was back in hospital and on a saline drip to stabilise him and he was receiving other medication. He had been in and out of hospital a number of times, so we all thought that this was just another admission, that he would get the care and treatment he needed and be out again. How wrong we were, for he was not to leave the hospital again alive.

Me and my friend George in happier times

The final blow was to come from an unexpected quarter. Whilst he lay in his hospital bed with his mother at his side, he suffered sudden kidney failure and within minutes he was in a critical condition. By the time the doctors got round to trying to recover the situation, he was beyond all human help. Already weakened by diabetes and in a very poor physical and mental state of health, this was enough to send him over the edge and put an immediate end to his life, and so he slipped away there and then beyond the reach of us all.

And so it was that my lifelong friend George drew his last breath and expired in the arms of his tearful mother who had so loved her only child. Moments before his death, sensing that he was not going to make it, he thanked his mother for devoting her life to him, for loving and caring for him, and asked for her forgiveness for the times he had spoken harshly to her or had hurt her in any way. His last words to her were an entreaty to promise him that she would be strong and not fall apart after his death.

And I for one can confirm that she has kept her promise to this day. Despite her continuing grief, her old age and her loneliness, she has hung on, honouring the promise she gave to her dying son. She has been very brave and kept strong, though it is clear for anyone to see that there is a deep sadness in her soul which will remain till her dying day. She had indeed devoted her life to her son and he had reciprocated and now she was left with the memories of a life they had shared so intimately together and which was gone forever.

None of us had expected that George would go before his mother, especially given her advanced years. She had lost her husband quite early on, then her sister, then her brother. But the cruellest blow of all was to lose her son, for this went against the natural order of things. She had brought him into the world and now had had to see him leave it while she lingered on in her late eighties without the company of the child she had doted on for so many years. As a parent myself, I instinctively know that there is nothing worse in this world than a parent losing a child. And in many cases parents are left with a certain feeling of guilt that perhaps they could have done more to save their child.

The above illustrates, I think, that none of us can know when our time will come. And youth does not necessarily guarantee many years of life to come. Our fortunes can take a sudden downturn and before we know it our life has run its course. People behave today as though they will live forever, especially the young. The celebrity culture and materialistic ethos that govern our society in this day and age give us a false sense of invulnerability and immortality. The desire for fame and fortune is inculcated into each new generation at the expense of the deepeste truths and realities of our finite existence. But no-one is spared that final exit from everything and this is vividly brought home to us by the image of a grieving parent embracing the lifeless body of their beloved child, as in the case of my friend George and his mother.

With the untimely death of my lifelong friend George another chapter in my life came to a close too. Something akin to what happened when I lost my mother to illness many years ago. An era came to an end, fresh painful memories were born, and a painful awareness of the ever-present eventuality of death was accentuated. And so the world goes on.


Postscript: His mother passed away in hospital in November 2011 after a brief illness.