Rumer Godden on the invisibility of children in 1956

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Another passage from Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, the novel filmed as Innocent Sinners:

It was a strange thing that up to the age of seven children were noticeable in Catford Street; the babies in their well-kept perambulators and the little boys and girls in coat and legging sets were prominent, but after the age of seven, the children seemed to disappear into anonymity, to be camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in; as if they were really the sparrows the Misses Chesney called them they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them. 

At fourteen or fifteen they appeared again, the boys as big boys that had become ha become somehow dangerous – or was it that there was too much about them in the papers? – the dirty little girls as smart young women, with waved hair, bright coats, the same red nails and lipstick as the dancer in the bus queue; they wore slopping sling-back shoes and had shrill ostentatious voices. The Street prickled with the doings of these boys and girls, as it had admired and petted the babies, but the children were unnoticed … not even experienced mothers like Mrs Malone knew all they did.

An Episode of Sparrows was published in 1956. When I read these observations, I was reminded of two things.

The first was that my mother used to say that when she was a child – this would have been the Thirties and Forties – if you saw an adult you were likely to be told to have a wash or run an errand, so you tended to avoid them.

The second was an episode from the Children's Film Foundation presentation Operation Third Form (1967). In this film, a gang of children (with John Moulder-Brown and Roberta Tovey to the fore) help an old scrap dealer who is their friend when he's accused of stealing their school bell. Exploiting their invisibility, they trail the real thief.

At one point their activities threaten to attract the attention of the police, whereupon they form themselves into a crocodile and march along the with scrap dealer apparently in charge of them. A crocodile of schoolchildren with a teacher? They can't be up to anything, reason the police. As soon as they've gone, the children make themselves invisible again.

That would – the world of An Episode of Sparrows – has gone, but every change brings both gains and losses.