What to tell the children

...But when other people bring up this subject when my kids are around, as visitors sometimes do, I grow acutely uneasy...

...I explained that everybody dies, we get to live a long time and have lots of experiences but eventually we get old, dying is something we're strong enough to go through, etc...

...One photo particularly sticks in my mind-of a Japanese skull on a tank in the Pacific...

...He did not get up...

...But of course piercing that carapace is precisely the point of the undertaking...

...How can children live with a knowledge of the world as it really is when adults find it so difficult...

...War is more than kids can handle...

...I knew this was ridiculous, but how else was I to get the game going...

...It was only a matter of time before another big war got going...

...My father can describe it now as if it were before his eyes, with every detail burningly vivid...

...A couple of years earlier she went through a period of wondering about death...

...He was only two or three at the time...

...But she interrupted me...

...Where will we hide...

...But when I finished she moved her legs aside and looked me right in the eye and said, "Do they rose after they die...

...War was in the air, but I had a child's sense of time...

...I must have heard about the "captive nations" but it didn't register...

...I don't want to be pressed about this...

...Perhaps they don't really see things any more clearly than I did back in the early 1950s...

...IN ISRAEL, in 1975, I met a woman with a child who was terrified of war...

...Perhaps the fact I played war made me think of it as only a game...

...People don't mean anything by it...

...But kids get the point anyway...

...My daughter Susan was in the room drawing a picture...

...Wouldn't it be better to brush by the question with some short, neutral answer-"it's about the Air Force," say-and let it go...

...He put off going to bed at night...

...This remark, which has popped spontaneously from more people than you would imagine, used to fill me with despair...

...I said we're members of the church...

...War was very much part of my imaginative life when I was ten or twelve, in the early 1950s...

...Maybe I got the point too, back in the early 1950s...

...Specifically, what do these weapons do...

...When my youngest daughter Cassandra turned four she started wondering about death too...

...Communism was a secret movement of malevolent intent...

...I don't mind if I get sick, if it just happens...

...When the mother and the boy left, his father was still sitting on the chair, waving goodbye...

...In the morning his father was gone and he was gone a long time...

...One night I overdid it...

...Tell me the truth," said Amanda...

...This is a verbatim transcript...

...For the next couple of years I read about Korea in comic books...

...That is, where the subject of nuclear weapons is concerned...

...They pick things up...

...You'd better get it out soon while everybody's still interested...

...A man was walking by on the sidewalk...

...I spent hours poring over the World War II pictures on rainy afternoons...

...All the same, I try not to talk about it...

...She was lying on her back on the couch, waggling her legs in the air, seeming to pay no attention...

...THOMAS POWERS...

...When he was in the car with his mother once he asked, "What will we do if there's a raid...

...My father, who is now eighty-nine, once described to me his earliest memoty...

...Is it going to happen...

...Children get the point...

...Words have an extraordinary power with children, especially vivid, concrete words...

...Is there any defense against them...

...She explained: "Jesus rose so we get to rose, isn't that right, Dad...

...War seemed part of the natural order of things...

...But my real targets were Chinese soldiers wearing padded uniforms and "Chicoms" - the quilted cotton hats with ear flaps which tied up over the top of the head...

...It was like cancer...

...I had toy soldiers, played war with my friends, drew war pictures in school when I should have been studying...

...It's a form of polite inquiry...

...Once their curiosity has been aroused they are relentless in pursuing the full story...

...They" would have found a cure by the time I was old enough to get it...

...I try to change the subject, or skate over the details...

...My two elder daughters once cornered me on the subject of Santa Claus...

...I think it was a boy...

...You ask brokers how the market is going, you ask the old how they're feeling, you ask farmers what they think of the sky, and you ask writers what they're working on...

...One night, when we were alone in the living room, she asked me if everybody dies...

...We had air raid drills in school but it was a kind of a joke...

...The flesh had dried down tight like wrinkled leather and the mouth was open in a scream of anguish...

...Will I rose...

...That picture gave me a sort of shivery feeling, but I can't say that it really scared me...

...THOMAS POWERSabout this...

...He was afraid of the sounds of airplanes...

...Do I want to scare them...

...I had no idea what this was all about...

...They had infiltrated down through Canada to invade the United States...

...I believed it would all be over by the time I grew up...

...I'll believe whatever you tell me...

...One day last summer the oldest, Amanda, asked me what my book was about...

...The mother often wept and said the father would be all right, he would be all right...

...Once, when I was giving her a bath, she suddenly said, "I don't want to have to die...

...I remember the day the war in Korea began...

...Are we in the church...

...Without thinking, I asked her what she thought a war would be like...

...Everybody gets to rose...

...War was exciting and mysterious, like Flying Saucers or the Loch Ness Monster...

...it must have been talk in Sunday school about Easter which brought on the question...

...It just popped out...

...In October, 1973, the child was hustled out of bed to an air raid shelter in the middle of the night...

...When we got to the part about the wolf I lingered on the powerful jaws and the teeth-with the long sharp biters in front, and the big grinders in back...

...How interesting, people say...

...I'm working on a book about strategic weapons...

...That was "in case...

...I can no longer remember if the child was a boy or a girl...

...I told her the same thing I'd told her sister, wondering what it is about the age of four...

...One day last January, when I was trying to write a piece about the world after a nuclear war, I got stumped...

...In the attic were cartons of old Life magazines from the 1940s...

...Don't, Dad," she said...

...Adults are practiced in denial but children are defenseless...

...I thought of those places as being part of Russia...

...I was quite conscious of the Russians as a dangerous horde...

...She likes the scary parts, but not if they're too scary...

...Their very names-Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia-had a sinister sound...

...He was afraid he might not hear the sirens if he was asleep...

...Can fear possibly do them any good...

...I can remember waiting my turn in the barbershop and reading a copy of Police Gazette containing two stories of equal fascination-the positive identification of Hitler in Argentina, where he was living as a retired businessman, and the Red Army's timetable for the invasion of Europe...

...I am asked this all the time...

...The italics were hers...

...She clapped her hand overmy mouth...

...She didn't think I was trying to fudge it...

...He stopped near my father, took out his pocket knife, opened it, bent down over the picket fence, and in a low deliberate voice stressing each word he said, "I'm going to cut your ears off!'' That happened eighty-seven years ago...

...How can a writer pierce a carapace so thick...

...It made the job seem hopeless...

...Around the yard in front was a picket fence...

...That's the way it went in cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or war...

...But I don't want to have to die...

...I don't want them dreaming about it...

...It isn't that, Dad," she said...

...Don't they realize that there are some things you just don't tell kids...

...She answered as if she'd been thinking a long time what to say and I wrote it down...

...It came over the radio...

...I have a dread of being pinned down in a similar manner where my book is concerned...

...Children are quick at getting the point...

...I saw the flower in my mind...

...If there's time, and we're not just glancing off each other on the street or at a party-in short, when I've got someone in a corner for fifteen or twenty minutes-I can usually scare the living daylights out of them...

...It's hard to see how she could have framed the question more narrowly...

...This is what troubles me...

...I didn't quite get her drift...

...I was completely caught off guard...

...My youngest daughter likes the story of Little Red Riding Hood...

...I'd simply missed her point...

...She said, "It would probably be very smoky, and not many people, and lots of things ruined, and dark...

...When the boy finally saw his father again, many months later, the father was sitting in a chair on the lawn in front of a military hospital, and there was a blanket over the father's lap...

...They need to learn to hear without hearing, as adults do...

...I don't want to tell my children what nuclear war would do to them...

...Maybe it's not worth worrying about, one of those things you can't help...

...Don't talk about the teeth...

...In his experience war was something which came in the middle of the night, you never knew when...

...Often the boy woke up at night crying...

...Certain details weren't quite clear to me...

...I think about this a lot and try out my stratagems on the unwary...

...He was living with his grandfather in Owensboro, Kentucky, in a big old Victorian house...

...She was four or five at the time...

...My father was serious, alert, tense, and eager to explain what everything meant...

...War worries me a great deal, I have three daughters of my own, and I wonder what to tell them...

...I grow irritable...

...This was last April...

...They sense where you're vulnerable...

...No one ever sat me down in a class, or at home, and explained things to me...

...But are we in the church...

...He didn't want to go in the car anymore...

...There was a room in the cellar with a moderate stock of canned goods, bottled water, and a sterno stove...

...I didn't think so but people in the church did think so...

...They need to grow up first, and get some practice in ignoring things they can't do anything about...

...You're scaring me...

...Is there a Santa Claus or isn't there...

...This seems to be a common memory among people who were children at that time...

...The other side was waiting its chance...

...In the summer, in Vermont, I used to go hunting woodchucks with the .22 rifle my grandfather had given me...

...I don't want them burdened with terrifying images which never fade...

...I said this was a hard question to answer...

...Adults have learned to live with things they can do nothing about...

...I can't help what I think but I don't talk about this around the house...

...His mother tried to explain everything but explaining was not enough...

...I can still remember a lot of the toy guns I had as a kid-a double-barreled cap-firing pirate pistol, a German Luger cast in silvery pot metal and painted black, a big six-shooter with actual cartridges, a tommygun with a drum clip of the sort Chicago gangsters used in the movies...

...Adults tell themselves people will be sensible...

...Eons passed between one birthday and another...

...But for some reason none of this frightened me...

...Adults bury things and forget they are there, or think about something else, or busy themselves with earning a living, or put their trust in officials who are paid to worry about these matters, or say it will all work out in the end...

...It wasn't the pain of it which troubled her...

...Perhaps it's silly...

...Once something is vivid in their minds it's right there in the room...

...Now things are quite different...

...But what do I tell my daughters, who are four, nine, and eleven...

...They don't really need to be told...

...We lined up and marched out into the corridors, sat down on the floor backs to the wall, and put our heads down between our knees...

...Don't they notice kids are around...

...One day my father was out in the yard with his dog...

...That's very topical just now...