Childrens Geographies, Vol. 1, No.

1, 723, 2003

To Go Back up the Side Hill: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

CHRIS PHILO
Chris Philo, Department of Geography and Topographic Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. E-mail: cphilo@geog.gla.ac.uk ABSTRACT This paper offers theoretical reections on how adult researchers access, process and represent the worlds of children and childhood. Recognising previous claims and warnings issued by geographers, it is argued that researchers can and should take advantage of the fact that all adult researchers have once been children, meaning that there are always fragments of connection allowing us at least some intimation of childrens geographies as experiencede and imagined from within. Gaston Bachelards (1969a) poetics of reverie is partially built upon just such a sense of connection, laying out the basis for a phenomenology of childhood wherein adults seek an imaginative revisiting of the reveriesthe absent-minded daydreamingof bored and idle children. This paper provides a critical exegesis of Bachelards work in this respect, emphasising the importance to his thinking of geography, landscape and environment as both elements within and embodied spurs to childhood reverie. Questions about the admixture of adult imagination and memory in the recovery of childhood reverie are considered, and conclusions are reached about what can usefully be taken from Bachelards poetics of childhood, notably in terms of a methodology of not doing too much as an adult researcher in this eld. Claims are also made about needing to take more seriously than hitherto the mundane reveries of childhood, those contained in childrens own undirected jottings, drawings and play, as a possible source for future inquiries into childrens geographies.

Childhood ows from so many springs (sources) that it would be as futile to construct its geography as to write its history. (Bachelard, 1969a, p. 112)

Introduction: Adults, Children and Connections Adult researchers are not children, writes David Sibley (1991, p. 270) in his thoughtful comments on Sarah Jamess 1990 Area paper that restated the case for mounting geographical studies of children.1 Responding to her call for geographers to attempt viewing reality through the eyes of both children and adults (James, 1990, p. 283, my emphasis), Sibleys simple observation that geographers as adult researchers are no
ISSN 1473-3285 print; ISSN 1473-3277 online/03/010007-17 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1473328022000041634

Chris Philo

longer children announces a problematic that has hovered in the margins of this emerging new eld of inquiry ever since. In some respects, it is a difculty standing as one instance of a more general conundrum for geographers studying all manner of human groupings, in that there is often a gulfsometimes massive, sometimes more nuancedin terms of attributes, identities and backgrounds between the person of the researcher and the persons of the researched. Peter Jackson (1993) referred to this as a geography of position, and much ink has been expended, both in the geographical literature and beyond, on the problems entailed when a researcher remains an outsider to the everyday worlds of the people being studied. Up for debate is the credibility of the researchers ndings and conclusions, as linked to the representational problems arising as the academic seeks to portray these other worlds, all as framed by the fraught ethics of the research process from the moment of entering the eld to when research write-ups circulate and become available for external use. For adults researching children, such questions perhaps have a special charge, not least because of the perceived (and often very real) vulnerability of this particular cohort of research subjects, as linked to the great nervousness felt by many other adultsparents, schoolteachers, social workers, politiciansabout allowing strangers access to children and their spaces. In consequence, we are immediately forced to assess exactly why and how we are proposing to conduct research with children, and to wonder whether there are methodological and ethical issues arising in this context that are fundamentally different to those arising in research with (most) adult cohorts. Various such issues integral to researching children have already been inspected in the geographical literature by the likes of Aitken (1994, especially pp. 3138), Matthews et al. (1998) and Valentine (1999), and doubtless this new Childrens Geographies journal will be doing more to satisfy Sibleys (1991, p. 270) injunction that [a]ppropriate research strategies, in both methodological and ethical senses, need to be thought through very carefully.2 While I do not see the present paper as a direct input to this debate, it may still have a relevance through the speculation that we could usefully envisage being less interventionist than is presently the case in most of our qualitative research endeavours as geographers interested in children and childhood. Indeed, I will be arguing for a research practice that allocates a role to the inactive daydreaming of the adult researcher, as well as recommending that greater emphasis be placed upon such simple activities as the researcher responding imaginatively to things producedwritten, drawn, danced, sung, acted, whateverby children outside of the research encounter and independent of the researchers prompting. The nal section of my paper is designed to clarify such claims, strange as they may rst appear, and the hope is that it will be easy to detect how such claims emerge from the main arguments elsewhere about adults (re)kindling their senses of childhood. Some attention has been paid by geographers to the question of whether or not adult researchers can adopt strategies allowing them to stand in the place of the child. A useful early statement from Stuart Aitken (1994, p. 30) runs as follows: It is one of the great ironies of human development that by the time we are old enough to reect on what is it like to be a young child, we are so far removed from the experience that it is difcult to empathise. Schactel (1959, p. 285) articulated this principle as childhood amnesia wherein adults can no longer cognitively process early childhood experiences. Our mental structures have changed to the extent that we have great difculty in imagining the world of the child. Certainly we see ourselves in children, but we no longer appreciate the nuances that comprise the childs world.

Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

The issue may not be so pressing with respect to older children and teenagers, and many of the essays in a collection such as Skelton and Valentine (1997), tackling the geographies of youth cultures, evidently depend in part on authors well-remembered experiences of adolescent years.3 The pertinence of the question with respect to younger children cannot be denied, though, and it is here that the study of children as other echoes most glaringly the current crisis of representation in the social sciences (Aitken, 1994, p. 30).4 A key paper explicitly considering this apparent unbridgeability of the gap between adult and child is that by Owain Jones (2001, p. 177), who offers this observation: We have all been children, or at least biologically young, so perhaps uniquely in this concern for a form of otherness, we have all been that other once, and may still contain some form or traces of it. This raises the question of whether it, or elements of it, are retrievable through memory, or whether the illusion that it is in fact makes the other/other[5] even more inaccessible and invisible. Once childhood is superseded by adult stocks of knowledge,[6] those adult lters can never be removed to get back to earlier states. Adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to be a child are inevitably processed through adultness. Jones is not suggesting that researchers should forsake all efforts to reconstruct childrens geographies as felt from within by children themselves, and he himself (Jones, 1997, 2000) has contributed greatly to a corpus of work now embracing a range of possibilities from the analysing of childrens mental maps (e.g. Matthews, 1992) to the interpretation of childrens most intimate feelings about place and landscape (the classic geographical work in this latter respect being Hart (1979)). What Jones is suggesting, however, is that researchers should beware a too ready insistence that they can (re)visit this particular other. He is warning us to guard against an approach that effectively clos[es] in on the otherness of childhood (Jones, 2001, pp. 177178) to the point where the dimensions of this othernessthose very characteristics which might be at the centre of understanding childrens geographies (Jones, 2001, p. 177)are recongured into shapes, sizes and meanings comprehensible to adults but no longer recognisable to children. I agree entirely with this warning, and in many ways my paper here is moving in the same direction of asking about how to preserve the otherness of childhood in our studies. Where I differ from Jones (2001) is in the extent to which I accept the unbridgeability of adults and childrens worlds. Whereas he rightly worries about the difcult materials with which a bridge might be built between these two worlds, my stance is that we should avoid portraying the situation as one of totally unbridgeable distance. Indeed, while being alert to the problem of childhood amensia, I think it worth repeating the banal but important fact that chronologically all adults have at an earlier time of their lives been children. We have all been there in one way or another, creating the potential for some small measure of empathysome sense of recognition, sharing and mutual understanding, even if slightwith the children whom we encounter in our adult lives. This is not to deny the enormous variability in the childhoods once experienced by adults, as shaped by the contingencies of time, space, gender, class, ethnicity and countless more factors, and in no way is it to reject the crucial gains of scholars who have challenged essentialist understandings of the child by arguing that childhood is constructed in different ways in different times and places (Holloway and Valentine, 2000a, p. 9). Nonetheless, I am speculating that in geographical studies of children, perhaps more so than in many socialcultural projects where we do remain fundamentally other to the peoples being researched, there is still a fragment of

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connection between researcher and researched because we have all at some stage been younger, bodily smaller, experientially decient and largely dependent upon, provided for and regulated by adults. One writer talks about what we once felt all too vividly, the otherness of grownups and the unavailability of true knowledge (Meadowlark, 1979, p. 78), and I reckon that there are occasions when we are recalled to the peculiar psycho-social circumstances of childhoodto that inkling of not being the same as adults, but knowing that one day we would become themand also to the sights, sounds, smells, other sensations and childish knowledges made available through this thoroughly embodied but temporary difference. Moreover, this fragment of connection simultaneously draws us back towards instances in our own childhoods and provides us with resources for an enlarged, open-handed, meeting with children in the here-and-now. There should be no arrogance about positing such a connection, no presumption of transparency before the adult gaze, and maybe something to (re)learn is precisely the humility of children who, as Meadowlark (1979) nicely indicates, know that they do not know. Rather, for me, identifying such a connection is to bring into play a sense of common lives, worlds and spaces that is nonetheless fully aware of its own precariousness. I am therefore proposing, in part contra Jones (2001), that we can and should build a bridge of sorts, and that this bridge need not lead inexorably to the land of children being colonised by invaders from the land of adulthood (even if this remains a danger). In his piece following the present one, Jones (this issue) adds to my argument here, exposing for more critical comment the status of memory in facilitating the adult re-entrance to childhood, and considering further the emotional charge of memory which maybe leads to memories being so shaped by present circumstances that their meaningfulness vis-a ` -vis an individuals past is thrown into doubt. The snares and potentials of misremembering, of then and now becoming so deeply entangled that the relevance of memory in recovering real childhoods becomes unclear, of adults reworking memories to allow them to cope better with the residues of unhappy childhoods, of adults imagining paradisical childhoods informed by popular mythologies rather than by actual experiences: all of these vital matters and more are hinted at by Jones, and in so doing he maps new terrains for exploration by geographers and other scholars of children and childhood. What I wish to contribute is perhaps narrower in scope, launching from the simple fact that in childrens research all of the adult geographers and other researchers involved have once been in the position of the very research subjects who they now study.7 In what follows, I propose to address this fact through a detour into the writings of one particular theorist whose ideas are probably less than fashionable in these post-structuralist and post-humanist days, but whose messageprovided that it is treated with caution, and probably not followed to its own logical conclusioncan, I feel, add a new ingredient to the debates indexed above about the crisis of representation in researching childrens geographies. I will therefore offer a reading of Gaston Bachelards remarks on reveries towards childhood, contained in his 1969 text The Poetics of Reverie, itself a translation of his original 1960 text La Poe tique de la Reverie. Leading from this reading, I will conclude by pondering the implications for research on childrens geographies, including a reference back to the notion of not doing too much as a researcher in this eld. On Reveries towards Childhood and their Geographies Bachelard is not unknown to geographers, given that his most famous work The Poetics of Space (1969b, originally1958) offers a challenging account of the deep psychology

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underlying how the spaces of everyday human habitation, notably the ordinary house, are constituted, apprehended and lived within. As such, his ideas ltered into the thinking of those humanistic geographers who post-1970 countered the empty abstractions of spatial science by turning to the so-called philosophies of meaning, specically phenomenology and existentialism, as a window on the fundamental meaningfulness of human being-in-place (Ley, 1981). The writings of these humanistic geographers (e.g. Tuan, 1974, 1977; Relph, 1976; Seamon, 1979) undoubtedly contain refrains of Bachelards approach, which is unsurprising given the obvious bridge that his texts offer them between difcult psycho-philosophical territory and the substantive concerns of geographers with space and place (with space as place). In a somewhat different vein, his poetics of space inform what Edward Said claims about the imaginative geographies conguring how us, here (in the West) tell our stories about them, there (in the East), in the account of which he explicitly borrows from Bachelard to declare that space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here (Said, 1978, p. 55). The abiding interest of post-colonial and other geographers in Saids work, and specically in imaginative geographies (e.g. Gregory, 2000), has meant that, albeit indirectly, Bachelards ideas have retained a currency, if up for criticism, in this rather different tradition of scholarship to that pursued by the humanistic geographers. Bachelards last major work, The Poetics of Reverie (1969a, henceforth PR), has been almost if not entirely neglected by geographers. This text sees him continuing his phenomenological inquiries into the poetic imagination, confronting poetic images and striving to retrieve from them their original quality the very essence of their originality, and thereby taking advantage of the remarkable psychic productivity of the imagination (PR, pp. 1, 3). More narrowly, he seeks to access the domain of reverie, not the dreams of sleeping for which other analyses are required, but the daydreams of wakefulness when we are in relaxed time and function[ing] with inattention to either the things around us or our more reexive senses of self, biography and intentionality (PR, p. 5). By following the path of reveriea constantly downhill pathconsciousness relaxes and wanders and consequently becomes clouded (PR, p. 5), but in this raw state, paradoxically, reverie becomes of little use because the resulting consciousness which diminishes, which goes to sleep eventually ceases to be consciousit is no longer a consciousness (PR, p. 6)and stops being available for phenomenological reection. Instead of using the formal techniques of empirical psychology to probe such pre-consciousness, Bachelards project is that of bringing poetic reverie, the documents of poets who are themselves drawing inspiration from reverie, into contact with a phenomenological sensibility able to distil from here the shards of an imaginative insight into the deeper verities of the human condition. All of this endeavour is designed, for Bachelard, to restore, even to an average reader, the innovating action of poetic language, and more foundationally to establish a phenomenology of the imaginary where the imagination is restored to its proper, all-important place as the principle of direct stimulation of psychic becoming (PR, p. 8). Numerous reservations can immediately be signalled about such a project, given that its search for essences in a conceptual framework obsessed with depths rather than surfaces sets it squarely against that post-structuralist preference for systems of dispersion, to adopt a motif from Foucault (Philo, 1992), present in much contemporary human geography. Additionally, the deference given to the inspired creations of supposedly superior poets, novelists and other writers, as linked to judgements such as that recorded above about the average reader, cannot but smack of a cultural elitism that has been repeatedly critiqued whenever it has appeared in humanistic and cultural geography (e.g. Daniels, 1985: see below).

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For the purposes of the present paper, though, there may still be merit in following that specic strand of The Poetics of Reverie that leads Bachelard to contemplate, precisely not a child psychology, but the reveries of childhood that arguably remain within adults as the durable character of childhood (PR, p. 20). Harking back to the connectedness of adult and child with which I began, Bachelard (PR, p. 20) hence insists that: [b]y certain of its traits, childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. First, childhood never leaves its nocturnal retreats [night dreams]. Within us, a child sometimes comes to watch over us in our sleep. But in waking life itself, when reverie works on our history, the childhood which is within us brings us its benets. One needs, and sometimes it is very good, to live with the child which he [or she] has been. From such living he [or she] achieves a consciousness of roots Poets will help us nd this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world. Bachelard is not saying that adults can straightforwardly remember their childhoods, but is insisting that intimations of childhood, ickers and hints of what we experienced in childhood, do stay within us and can be accessed,8 infused with wonder and given a quality with the help of inspiration from poetic sources. Indeed, he is less bothered by a doctrine of the utility of memory, and, even if adults were to possess an exact memory (me moire) able to recall with precision having learned a lesson on a garden bench on a particular date, his chief concern is with the imaginative constructions that run in tandem with whatever memory does return to our consciousness (and especially to the scribbling pads of poets) for us to use (PR, p. 115).9 Bachelards focus is hence not the historians memory wherein factual accuracy is usually the goal, but rather the psychological memoryimagination mixture (PR, p. 119) wherein the history of fact, detail and precision is refracted through the lenses of imperfect memory and weakly constrained imagination. Moreover, he argues that it is in the midst of reverie that this mixture swings most creatively into play, writing that in our reverie which imagines while remembering, our past takes on substance again (PR, p. 119),10 thus permitting as in the quote abovereverie to work on our history in the production of a hybrid resource for phenomenological reection with the potential for spying deeper truths.11 Again, I must acknowledge that many readers, myself included, will probably have trouble with the latter goal, but disagreeing with this destination of Bachelards project does not disallow us from accepting that there may still be merit in taking seriously the memories, imaginations and reveries of childhood. According to Bachelard, childhood reveries are the reveries of the child himself or herself, normally occurring in solitudeand solitude is another key concept for Bachelardand entailing moments when, away from the unhappiness often brought to them by adults, childhood can relax its aches and nd the peace for idle daydreaming (PR, p. 99). The geography of this daydreaming is important, and the image that Bachelard conjures up in this respect is of the solitary child sitting on a hill gazing down absent-mindedly on a picturesque landscape, nothing troubling his or her thoughts, and simply drifting off into musings that may have some anchoring in what can be seen but hardly being constrained by its factual presence. Somewhere like the home is not conducive to such reverie, being too dominated by the cares and activities of adult life; and somewhere like school is certainly not conducive to such reverie, being too structured by what adults want children to learn (and schools are places ultimately designed to make children lose their childhood). Bachelard (PR, p. 127) elaborates on why the spaces of childhood reverie have to be in some fashion located away from the world of adults:

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[w]hen we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing. Seeing and showing are phenomenologically in violent antithesis. And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know They demonstrate to the child that the earth is round, that it revolves around the sun. And the poor dreaming child has to listen to all that! What a release for your reverie when you leave the classroom to go back up the side hill, your side hill! [B]ack up the side hill, maybe looking back down on the schoolhouse: that, for Bachelard, is where childhood reveries can begin. In addition, he underlines the point about these needing to be moments of idleness, and he envisages the child by himself or herself, very much alone in the profound boredom of being alone, free to think of the world, free to see the sun setting, the smoke rising from the roof, all these great phenomena (PR, p. 127). For the adult re-entering such reveries, therefore, [t]imes when nothing happened come back, these being [g]reat beautiful times from the former [i.e. childhood] life when the dreaming dominated all boredom (PR, p. 119).12 It is clear that Bachelard regards the spaces bound up in such reveries as more signicant than their timings, given his observation that it is no living memory which runs along the scale of dates without staying long enough at the sites of memory (PR, p. 119). The implication is that the phenomenological treatment of reverie is preoccupied less with when a reverie occurredits exact dating, something only likely if the date was associated with a denite event,13 in which case true reverie was probably absentand more with the details of the spaces where it occurred. Bachelard himself tends to speak of sites rather than spaces, and in one passage he declares that [t]he site overwhelms poor and uid social situations, where the terms situation and event are probably equivalent, before discussing the great value of compiling an album of sites which were the spaces supporting our situated childhood reveries while now also being the ones revealed to us, as adults, in our recovery of childhood reveries (PR, p. 23). We might criticise Bachelards somewhat romanticised sense of the solitary child in reverie; we might criticise his portrayal of such reverie in an idyllic country setting (see also Jones, 1997, 2000), given the crowded, noisy and troubled urban surroundings endured by many children today; we might criticise his too-easy assumption that children can be released from adult charge and concern, particularly in a modern world where strangerdanger and other threats prompt parents to structure the time-spaces of their children in a manner leaving them scant solitary time (e.g. Valentine, 1996; 1997a,b,c; Pugh, 2000), certainly not in outdoor spaces such as back up the side hill. Even so, I would still argue that in this respect Bachelard is introducing valuable notionsto do with the times and spaces of boredom, reverie and childhoodthat, substantively if nothing else, can bring new sustenance to the table of our geographical research. In Bachelards vision, the next stepfollowing the theme of adultchild connectednessis to think about how adults can indeed reacquaint themselves with the reveries of childhood. At this juncture, the issue becomes in effect a communion between reveries, those of adulthood striving to reconnect with the reveries of childhood, and it is intriguing that once again for Bachelard (PR, p. 102) the geography comes to the fore as an element encouraging such a meeting of reveries to take place: We are standing before a great lake whose name is familiar to geographers [i.e. a real location], high in the mountains, and suddenly we are returning to a distant past. We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming. Our memories bring us back to a simple river which reects a sky leaning upon hills. But the hill gets bigger and the loop of the river broadens. The little becomes big. The world

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of childhood reverie is as big, bigger than the world offered to todays reverie. From poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world, to childhood reverie, there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the greatest landscapes. The thoroughly embodied aspects of this passage back to childhood reverie deserve mention, the suggestion of returning to a setting wherein everything seemed much larger because the child was so much smaller, and these remarks hint at another themethe embodiment of children in space, as compared to that of adultsthat has so far been little explored in the geographical literature (but see Winchester et al., 1999; Aitken, 2001, chapters 3 and 4). Bachelard is not saying that adults need to revisit exactly the same spaces as spawned childhood reveries, merely that certain spaces are likely to be triggers because something about them returns to us the sensations and even contents of these childhood moments. It may be the attractiveness of a particular sort of physical landscape, which is why he writes about a commerce of grandeur between adult and childhood reveries, as well as implying that childhood feelings about such scenery perhaps survive into adulthood to determine what we, as adults, herald as the most beautiful landscapes.14 Alternatively, it may be something as humble as smells from the spaces of childhood performing this function.15 As Bachelard puts it, whoever would wish to penetrate into the zone of indeterminate childhood would no doubt be helped by the return of the great vague memories like the memories of odours from the past (PR, p. 136); and again, albeit this time more geographically, he notes that [t]he rooms of the lost house, the corridors, the cellar and the attic are retreats for faithful odours, odours which the dreamer knows belong only to him [or her] (PR, p. 137). Bachelard devotes several pages to smells as entry-points to childhood reverie, using numerous poetic references to the odours of childhood and claiming that a whole childhood [can be] evoked by the memory of an isolated fragrance (PR, p. 141), but this emphasis merely serves to underscore the environmental (or geographical) contingencies of adults reconnecting with their childhoods. Finally in this exegesis of Bachelard on childhood reveries, attention must be paid again to his insistence that such reveries only come to light through the admixture of memory and imagination. There is no possibility of accessing with any exactitude the contents of any one childhood reverie, he would claim, and the phenomenological method that he follows hinges primarily on the imaginative attempts of adulthood to reconnect with the imaginative diversions of childhood: something much more precarious than the double hermeneutic of ordinary interpretative social research (Gregory, 1978).16 This is why he acknowledges that adult [r]everie towards our past lives, reverie looking for childhood, seems to bring back to life lives which have never taken place, lives which have been imagined (PR, p. 112). Or, in other more dramatic words, in reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destiny has not been able to make use of (PR, p. 112). Thus, it is in the horizon of adult imagination that childhood is revisited and childhood reverie recast; and, while the empirical psychologist might be unnerved by the free-wheeling play of imaginations scarcely bound by the facts of memory or history, Bachelards fascination is with the resulting weave of psychic substances from within which the phenomenologist may detect patterns, depths, essences and portals on to the cosmos. Once more, we need not concur with such a phenomenological manoeuvre to accept the invitation to ponder the dynamics integral to adult reimaginings of childhood imaginings; and neither do we have to be fully Bachelardian to realise that in any one of us there are different childhoods, varying senses of both who we were as a child and what we could now have become had we been

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able to pursue different trajectories out of childhood. [P]sychologically we are born many times, comments Bachelard, quoting too a poet who writes: Of childhoods I have so many (PR, pp. 111112). Furthermore, when reimagining our pasts [w]e go into a very nearby elsewhere where reality and reverie are indistinguishable, an imaginative location that Bachelard terms the Other-House or even the House of an Other-Childhood, and wherein we might stumble across the promises of all that should-have-been (PR, p. 121) or at least could-have-been for ourselves. Countless factors press upon both childrens perceptions and adults reimaginings of their own childhoods, inuences spearing from a host of different times and spaces encountered during a lifetime, and this is why Bachelard talks about the futility of trying to capture the sources of these childhoods in their entiretyincluding their multiple geographies or historiesfor any one individual let alone for a collectivity (and hence the epigram opening this paper). Actually, the geographer of children and childhood might reply that, impossible as it will be to map all of these inuences, there is still a vital task to undertakeyet again, one where we are only just starting (e.g. Jones, 1997; Gagen, 2000a,b)in tracing the historical geography of those factors and inuences that have patterned, and continue to pattern, the imaginings of childhood for both children and the adults into which they grow. Conclusions and from Elite Poetry to Childrens Jottings What can this engagement with Bachelard on the poetics of childhood reverie tell us that might be useful for geographical studies of children? I hope that some answers to this question have already been provided above, but let me draw to a close by both summarising my chief claims and adding to them preliminary remarks on more mundane childhood reveries. In the rst instance, and putting aside what might be judged more dubious or extreme features of his phenomenology, I think that Bachelard does provoke us to a more sustained consideration, not just of what separates children from adults, but also of the possible lines of connection residing in the continuity of psychic materials from childhood through into adult life. Psychoanalytic insights, as already deployed by some geographers studying children and childhood (e.g. Sibley, 1995; Aitken and Herman, 1997; Aitken, 1998, 2000), trade on this continuity in various ways, but the implication of Bachelards assessment here is that we could usefully initiate a dialogue between adult imaginings and childhood imaginings (an imaginative resonance between different orders of reverie) very different to that developed in the literature of psychoanalytic geography (see Philo and Parr, 2003). More narrowly, Bachelard does indeed alert us to this realm of bored daydreaming perhaps we can retain the name reveriethat surely is a central component of childrens everyday lives. Such reverie is arguably more signicant to children than it is to adults, who are often too busy at work or with personal affairs to daydream, or whose consumption of imaginative products (books, music, lms, television, even sports) is rarely a potent source of inuences in other spheres of their lives (unlike in the case of children yet to learn the adult boundaries between work, coping and play).17 It is true that quite a few geographers studying children now do seek to reconstruct something of the imaginings, the fantasies and the like that maybe shape childrens worlds (and geographies) from within (e.g. Jones, 1997, 2000), but my own view remains that Bachelard has put his nger on a particular corner of childhoodits itting into reveries full of imaginative content, often with a solitary characteristic as the individual child enjoys uninterrupted time in peaceful spaces to daydreamthat is far more relevant to understanding childrens geographies than has hitherto been recognised. Actually, the

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geographer Dennis Wood long ago urged greater attention to children doing nothing as a time of searching, a time of change, a time of aesthetic (in Aitken, 2001, p. 16), reecting that: the kids with nothing to do were poets waiting for their muse Doing nothing is lling. Doing nothing is an unfolding of things to do, an unfolding of things that have no names, like mooning around a lamppost or kicking stones into the drain across the street Doing nothing is almost everything. As a term, it conceals as it identies. It is both comprehensive and evasive, simultaneously screen and mirror (Wood, 1985, p. 9). Bachelard might respond that there is still too much activity here for the onset of reverie, but I reckon that Woods reference to poets waiting for their muse implies a closeness to the state envisaged by Bachelard. Aitken (2001, p. 16) adds that the worldly context matters, in that [c]hildren must have time to do nothing and the space within which to do it, whereas it may be argued that the freedom to be unsupervised and do nothing is becoming less and less a possibility for children, particularly in the global north (see also Pugh, 2000).18 Maybe this Bachelardian corner of childhood is itself disappearing, rendering much that I have argued in the paper increasingly redundant, which is why I echo Aitkens and Woods insistence on a politics that values non-activities, seemingly inconsequential exchanges and maintaining portions of childrens lives that are not organised and institutionalised by adults (Aitken, 2001, pp. 1617). There is the additional methodological provocation to contemplate precisely how adults might enter this fuzzy landscape of childhood reverie, and there are perhaps two possible ways in which such an entry can be envisaged. The rst involves the adult researchers own daydreaming, entailing in effect a hermeneutic exchange between his or her adult reveries rooted in the here-and-now and recollections of his or her childhood, complete with its own dynamics of reverie, spearing from the there-and-then. Exactly what such an exchange is supposed to entail, release and produce is less than clear-cutas has always been the case for geographers considering the phenomenological methodbut some indication is nonetheless forthcoming from the evidence of Bachelards reections above, presumably bearing the imprint of his own childhood. The second way involves the adult researcher striving to open himself or herself up to the reveries of children around them, including those who might more formally be designated their research subjects, and such an approach veers closer to the double hermeneutic as conventionally understood. In practice, the complex bricolage19 of elements confronting the researcher in both casessome being artefacts of faithful memory, others the artice of imaginative projectionis little different whether sourced, as it were, from the person of the researcher or from the persons of the researched. In neither instance can there be a simple social-scientic formula for how to process the data to hand, and the researcher has no choice but to operate in the realm of subjective appraisal, responding as creatively as possible to the leads, hints and intimations arrived at in the process of working with the materials of the bricolage (whether notes on personal reveries or documents recording those of others). Sticking with the second of these approaches, that where researchers deal with the childhood memories, imaginations and reveries of persons other than themselves, it is telling to hear Bachelards (PR, p. 107) assertion that: a phenomenological project of gathering the poetry of childhood reveries in its personal actuality is naturally much different from the very useful objective examinations of the child by psychologists. Even by letting children speak freely,

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by observing them uncensured while they are enjoying the total liberty of their play, by listening to them with the gentle patience of a child psychoanalyst, one does not necessarily attain the simple purity of phenomenological examination. Geographers studying childrens worlds have made liberal use of the various qualitative techniques gestured to here by Bachelard, of course, and a collection such as Holloway and Valentine (2000b) is full of suggestive quotes from children being interviewed in a variety of formats, commonly unstructured ones permitting them to speak freely, as well as ndings derived from detailed ethnographic observations. There is nonetheless warrant for cautioning that these techniques all carry with them some measure of intrusionsome sense of creating, in Bachelards terms, an eventthat concentrates the minds of the children in a manner quite different to the unstimulating circumstances of bored daydreaming, of reverie. Arguably too, such techniques cannot but be hedged around by the patterns of adult consciousness, even by a willing of the child to respond in ways intelligible to adult strictures of reason and sociability, which thereby risks forcing the child into the die of being a premature adult (PR, p. 107).20 Jones (2001, p. 177) is getting at something similar when complaining that social science research on children too readily prioritises (rational) representations through language, problematically expecting children to provide answers to research questions worded in what are effectively mini-versions of what adults might say and reveal.21 Bachelards preference is hence to avoid standard qualitative methods in turning instead to methods that he regards as phenomenologically purer, as less contaminating of the childhood response. More specically, he turns to the inspiration of poets, since he regards such writers as having peculiar powers of insight allowing them to translate their own childhood reveries into a shape that is both faithful to real reverieto the genuine admixture of memory and imagination stirred thereinand amenable to further (phenomenological) processing. The obvious objection is that this deference to the poets brings in a yet more imposing barrier between us and children, a thick line of poetic sensibility that is arguably less a zone of simple openness to the world and more one of sophisticated adult self-awareness, intelligence and learning about poetry, its history and traditions.22 It hence surprises me that Bachelard does not pay more heed to his own warning that [g]rownups write childrens stories too easily, causing them to make childish fables instead of appreciating that it is necessary to be serious like a dreaming child (PR, p. 118).23 He presumably reckons that poets do not fall into the same traps as the authors of childrens stories, but I would still have my suspicions about adult poets too easily encapsulating childrens worlds, and inserting too much baggage between themselves and the seriousness of the daydreaming child. Let me nally propose that adult geographers might take seriously the more mundane reveries of children, not those that have been converted into the poetic reveries favoured by Bachelard, but the seemingly quite banal hints at the contents of everyday bored daydreaming that can be found in the written or other inscribed documents which many children are making most days of their young lives. The stories, diaries, drawings, paintings and photographs made by children have been used by adult researchers for years,24 of course, but it would appear that these stories, drawings and the like have usually been explicitly asked for by the researchers as part of their projects (thus rendering the acts of production denite events). My impression is that very little has been done with documents that children have made for themselves in a more relaxed, unstructured and perhaps relatively purposeless manner, and yet it is arguable that such documents are more likely to allow the researcher access to bored daydreams, to reverie,

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to these elusive but pivotal fragments of a childs sense of self-in-the-world. An imaginative engagement between the adults sensibilities and the childs reverie, as jotted into a story, scratched into a picture, or whatever, may just furnish a new key to unlock certain internal mysteries of childrens worlds (and geographies). Having dimly recognised this potential myself and capitalising on the connectedness of adulthood and childhood, in this instance the palpable continuity in my own personal biography, I once included in a paper on sports geography (Philo, 1994, pp. 811) reections on my own childhood reveriecaptured in countless drawings and scribblings, but still a shadowy presence in my mind as an adultof a sports landscape full of tiny settlements, each with their own football team, which somehow linked my bedroom to the wider world.25 Rather than rehearse this example again, though, I will conclude by quoting two items written by a friend of mine at school when she was circa 6 or 7 years old: [o]ne day me and Donna saw a witch and the witch saw us and then we ren [ran][26] away and we came to a house But it was a red house and we went in the house and we saw Susan in the house and Susan went with as [us] but the witch was sail [still?] rening [running] after as [us] and then we went to the park and then we went on the string [swing] and then we went to the zoo and we saw a rabbit and then we saw a bird and then we went to a play house and we saw Rhona and Rhona was in the play house and then we went to my house and then we had an ice-cream and mum had an ice-cream and then Dad had a ice-cream and then we went to bed. One day I saw Luice and me and Luice went on the park and we went on the swings and when we came out of the park we saw Rebecca H and Rebecca said lets go on a boat so we did and then we came to a island and on the island we saw a witch But the witch was good and saw [she] said come in my house and we came in the witchs house and we went to sleep on the witchs bed and when we woke up the witch had gone so we went out of the witchs house and we went on the park again and then we we[nt] to a island on the boat and the island was called the island of emeralds and we saw mummy on the island and we saw Daddy on the island and we saw granny and we all had a ice-cream and the[n] we all went to bed. Written nearly every day as news, but also being referred to as stories in one teachers marginal comment, my friend managed to write basically the same piece over and over again, well over 100 times, and as such its production was clearly not an event but rather a highly routinised accomplishment suggesting a denite pattern in the imaginings underlying them. While these mini-narratives are mostly built around real people and practicesfamily members, named friends, lashings of ice-creamthey do nonetheless embrace various imaginings, notably of witches but also of (in other versions) wizards, pirates, robots and dinosaurs. The term reveries would seem quite appropriate for describing such stories, since they surely do reect this individuals abstracted musings every morning at school which, I suspect, were also central to her imagination, talk and play outside of school. Inspecting these reveries as a geographer, they reveal a hybrid geographical imagination full of real placesthe family home, friends houses, the park with swings, the zoosupplemented by numerous more-or-less made-up places such as witches houses, islands and (in other versions) woods with many trees. It might be possible, with my friends help, to identify the inuences feeding the more fantastic elements of her stories, doubtless specic childrens books, television programmes and the like; and yet a full reconstruction of exactly how and why these inuences became mixed up as they did, both with each other and with real people, practices and places, would almost certainly be much more difcult. Even so, I believe

Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

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that we are here travelling very close to the neglected stuff of childhood worlds, ones energised by absent-minded reveries that happily fuse the real and the imagined, often displaying deliciously chaotic geographical imaginations. If we were to work more with documents such as my friends stories, extending the opportunities for imaginative exchange as wethe adult researcherstry to re-envisage ourselves once again as children daydreaming about families and witches, friends and dinosaurs, local streets and distant spacecraft, then, strangely enough, we might actually end up writing more accurately about childrens geographies. Acknowledgements Huge thanks are due to Owain Jones for his extremely perceptive comments on my paper, and would that I had been able to tackle his comments more fully and capably (but see now his own paper following mine (Jones, this issue)). Thanks are also due to Fiona Smith for her encouraging remarks, as well as to Eric Laurier, Hugh Matthews, Hester Parr and Nicola Ross. Notes
1. I say restated because earlier rounds of interest in geographical studies of children, taking seriously their cognitive mapping abilities, their environmental experiences and play, and their spatial oppression can all be traced in the literature prior to 1990. For reviews that emphasise the earlier work, see Aitken (1994, especially pp. 35), Aitken (2001, especially pp. 1218), Holloway and Valentine (2000a), Matthews and Limb (1999) and Philo (1997). Holloway and Valentine (2000a, p. 8) suggest that for the most part this [earlier] work has been ignored within an adultist discipline, and that it is only [t]he last decade of the twentieth century [that] has seen renewed interest in incorporating childrens voices and experiences within the geographical project. 2. Excellent initiatives have recently been taken by various geographical researchers to empower children in the research process, not merely to inform them in detail of what is occurring but to consult them about appropriate methods for the researcher to use and even to enlist them as co-researchers insofar as that is ever possible: see, for instance, Smith and Barker (1999a,b, 2000a,b). In this respect, we might talk about striving to work with children. 3. Memories of childhood remain clear in the minds of most adults, observe Margaret Jones and Chris Cunningham (1999, p. 31) in a chapter on the geographies of middle childhood, and they add that such memories may provide ideas for the examination of childhood today. They draw upon adult reminiscences of growing up in Australia that tell of fondly remembered childhood sounds and scents, and they include a reference to the author Ruth Parks (1992) recollections of being like a forest creature in her own quiet kingdom saturated in physical and spiritual inuences (Jones and Cunningham, 1999, p. 31). 4. See also Aitken (2001, especially pp. 58) for further reections on the crisis of representation lying at the heart of geographical and other research on children. 5. I take it that what Jones is getting at with this construction of other/other is the ambition of writing about otherness that does not simply convert this otherness into the comforting vocabularies of sameness. He is drawing on Baumans (1993) warning about us inadvertently recasting otherness in our standard concepts, models and terms, thereby stealing othernesss authority. 6. Jones takes the notion of stocks of knowledge from the signicant early paper on such matters by Thrift (1985). 7. I should acknowledge that one or two recent PhD students working on childrens geographies have noted how few years, relatively speaking, separate them from the children and young people who they are studying, adding that there are aspects of the lives, experiences and spaces of their research subjects which really do not seem so different, so alien, to them as supposedly adult researchers: neat points in this respect were made in a presentation by Morris-Roberts (2000), and they bubble just under the surface of Tucker (2002). 8. Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined (PR, p. 100), writes Bachelard, adding later the telling phrase that childhood is a state of mind (PR, p. 130). Were we to pursue these claims, particularly the second one, then geographical studies of childhood would potentially acquire a very different character (one in which children and young people per se would not always have to gure).

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9. Here Bachelard counters Bergsons faith in psychic facts that can be retrieved as framed images, repictured moments such as the garden lesson, which a pure memory can locate with certainty in timespace (PR, pp. 115116). This is also another reason why what he is advocating is not an empirical psychology of experiences. 10. Bachelard is not saying that all adult reveries (as in the reveries of an adult) entail a return to childhood, but the impression seems to be that for him most reveries do nonetheless contain the potential for reacquainting us with moments of childhood. 11. At this point, Bachelard talks about recovering a memory of the cosmos (PR, p. 119), a theme of utilising reverie to access deeper truths of human being immersed within the elemental foundations (water, earth, re) of the cosmos, a theme with Jungian undertones. Many will be suspicious, I think rightly, about such an orientation. 12. This is also why he sometimes talks about useless childhood (e.g. PR, p. 116), meaning those moments of childhood when the child is simply left to be a child, free from any demands about learning, contributing to the family wage, looking after siblings, and the like. 13. Events, for Bachelard, are moments when something happened, not nothing, and he supposes that such events are usually ones disturbing the peace required for reverie. It is clear that he does not want his phenomenology to be distracted by events, and that he sees psychoanalysis as the intellectual complement to phenomenology for the very reason that [p]sychoanalysis studies the life of events. We are trying to know life without events, a life which does not mesh with the lives of others. It is the lives of others which bring events into our life. In comparison with this life attached to its peace, this life without events, all events risk being traumas (PR, p. 128). Softening, erasing the traumatic character of certain childhood memories, the salutary task of psychoanalysis, he continues, returns to dissolve those psychic concretions formed around a singular event (PR, p. 128). Elsewhere he proposes to leave to psychoanalysis the task of curing badly spent childhoods, of curing the puerile sufferings of an indurate childhood which oppresses the psyche of so many adults (PR, pp. 99100). Thinking about this distinguishing of the roles of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in the study of childhood, as linked to intimations about the respective roles of timespace in each, raises fascinating questions in the light of, say, Aitkens (Aitken and Herman, 1997; Aitken, 1998, 2000) and Sibleys (1995) turn to psychoanalytic theory to inform their work on childrens geographies. 14. The likes of Cosgrove (1984) and Daniels (1993) would of course qualify the suggestion of such inherent judgements about landscape, preferring to talk about landscape as a way of seeing into which we are all socialised and which is bound up with wider socio-economic imperatives. 15. See also Porteous (1985) on smellscapes. 16. Wherein the issue is mediating between the horizons of meaning possessed by both the researcher and the researched as integral (inescapable) dimensions of their respective everyday worlds of encounter and exchange. I would contend, all the same, that such mediation requires imaginative leaps, hopefully empathetic ones, on the part of the researcher. 17. I hesitate when writing this sentence, given that music, sport and other creative moments can be such an inuential presence in the lives of many adults; but my point is that for the most part adults compartmentalise their lives in such a way that their immersion ineven reveries aboutsuch moments is unlikely to generate inuences with the potential to leak so promiscuously throughout their everyday actions, thoughts and, yes, daydreams. I would be happy for readers to argue with me on this one! 18. It should be noted that Woods research, ethnographically based as it was, took place in Barranquitos, Puerto Rico. 19. The bricoleur, a French term, is a jack of all trades, a builder and handy[person] or a tinkerer who the anthropologist Levi-Strauss opposed to the engineer who begins from plans and models. The bricoleur starts from what is there and tries to make it work by adapting, innovating, reusing and refashioning materials (Crang, 2003, p. 5). 20. The child thus enters into the zone of the family, social and psychological conicts. He [sic] becomes a premature man. This is the same as saying that the premature man is in a state of repressed childhood (PR, p. 107). This line of reasoning may also explain why we are sometimes disappointed by the qualitative evidence that we collect through interviews and ethnography, since what the children say to us and what we write down about their activities can seem so, well, banal. This may therefore be because we are trying to interpret this evidence as we would the words and acts of adultswe crave the levels of self-insight, the wide-ranging reections, and the like; we crave something dramatic and out-of-the-ordinarywhen really we should be seeking to be more open to, and able to work with, what children as children are giving us. 21. Jones hence anticipates a non-representational critique insisting that [n]ew ways of questioning and knowing the world may be particularly pertinent for future research into children. There are theories which emphasise the body (children always have bodies), non-representation and even performance. A

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22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

relevant reference is Thrifts (2000) account of what human geography (or social science more generally) might look like if taking seriously the need to get beyond an obsession with wordsto construct an approach after wordsand thereby to register the extent to which so much of what we are as humans, even as sociable humans, occurs in the bodily realm before words and their post hoc cognitive rationalisations. Such a critique precisely echoes Danielss (1985) brilliant deconstruction of an approach in literary geography that supposes great literature to offer a superior yet somehow unmediated, even more true, access to landscapes and environments beyond in real earth. It should ideally, of course, be eshed out at greater length and with appropriate referencing. This remark might also stand as a plausible critique of using childrens stories by the likes of Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton as a window on childrens geographies: arguably, they are an ingredient in such geographies, possibly as but one inuence on how their young readers end up perceiving landscapes and environments, but in no way are they are an unproblematic window on childrens own imaginings (and imaginative geographies). Compare Jones (1997) with Jones and Cunningham (1999). I have recently seen particularly good examples in McCormack (1998) and Tucker (2002). The mental maps drawn by children have of course been another oft-used kind of document particularly used by geographers: see Matthews (1992). In effect, the research that I have conducted here runs across both of the approaches under discussion in this conclusion: the researcher working on his or her own childhood reveries, but also the researcher working on documentary traces of the reveries of a child (who will usually be someone other than themselves). I am only inserting small clarications in these quotes to aid the reader. Otherwise, I am repeating the extracts as they were written, without punctuation. These are of course wordy documents, but they need not be, and I could have concentrated more on the pictures that accompanied them. I am certainly not trying to convert the words into rational representations.

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