"Has anyone seen Callum?" A cloud passes over a sunny summer party. There is strain in Callum's mum's voice, and it is infectious. I can hear voices calling in the forest. Soon there's a proper search party out. Suddenly everyone's looking for a lost child. He hasn't come back from the river. Who saw him last? Who was responsible?
We're in Suffolk, celebrating a birthday, and a gaggle of friends and family had headed off in the morning to the Alde at the sandy curve in the river by Iken Cliffs. A couple of cars drove down, back seats and boots piled with kids and towels. The rest walked or jogged through the pink-infused scots pines, and we all swam, just as I used to when I was a child, sometimes at the very same spot. Perhaps the angle of the bend has softened here slightly. Some of the trees are horizontal now, bleached and bare, but it is all essentially the same. You bob along with feet squelching into soft, warm mud, cutting across the flow until you get to the channel where the current's almost too strong to swim against. And across on the other side, seals sleep on reedy clumps of loamy mud and creeks fill and drain with the rise and fall of tides.
After our swim, we dried ourselves with borrowed towels, muddy and sandy, and trailed back to the cars. Others set off for the long walk home, backs sticky with salt, feet gritty in sockless trainers. We glowed. Just like the old days.
But two small boys – they're 10 or so – have been left behind. At least, they haven't come back with the others. And Callum's mum's not interested in the bread and cheese and pickles spread out on trestle tables for lunch. She just wants to know who saw her son last and where he was and what was he doing and where is he now. It doesn't help when someone says they saw him on the other side of the channel and another's sure he was chatting with the other boy, Joseph, on the near shore.
I'm glad to say it wasn't a day that ended in tragedy. The kids had just lost their bearings. They were bemused by all the fuss, and particularly by the telling-off they got. Part of me was bemused too, just a little. I grew up in Suffolk during the late 60s and 70s, long before the word parent became a verb.
Benign neglect might best describe my upbringing, and being the second youngest of five probably made it better or worse, depending on your perspective. During the last few blissful years of primary school, our not-so-small world was our oyster. Looking at a map now, I reckon our stomping ground had about a 10-mile radius.
At first we went as far as our bikes could take us in any direction. Eastwards was Arthur Ransome territory – Pin Mill and Chelmo. Heading west, we'd get to Wherstead where the river meets the county-town of Ipswich, south to Holbrook ponds and the river Stour, while the river Orwell formed a temporary boundary to the north. Before long, though, we were sorted with canoes and dinghies and able to explore the opposite shore too. The river was a good mile or so wide so it took about half an hour to cross – longer if you swam it. It was always a slightly precarious crossing, with strong tides and busy commercial shipping taking cargo up to Ipswich docks. But landing on the sandy beaches called Canada and California, we felt like explorers discovering new lands.
We made good use of our freedom. My brothers and I built camps, traps, rafts, harpoons and go-carts, and we fished, hunted and shot pretty much anything that moved. We took it all for granted until we grew up. Bit by bit though, odd conversations with friends made me question the wild freedom I remembered. Chatting away, I'd say something like: "It's like when you're arrested and they take your shoelaces out." Then I'd notice a blank look in my friends' eyes. Had I misremembered? Surely I hadn't imagined it all?
When I started to pin down these years in writing, to organise my memories while I worked out exactly how my childhood obsession with making and breaking things had turned into my work as a jeweller today, I began to mistrust them. With three children of my own, I found it even harder to believe the versions of events I'd stashed away for so many years. For several months I quizzed my mother and my brothers and sisters mercilessly.
Had my parents really left the 10-year-old me with my only slightly older brother in a leaky canvas canoe at Snape bridge to find our own way almost to Aldeburgh on a wet and stormy night? The river's twisting channels and treacherous tides make it a challenge for the most experienced riverman, and the journey was a good six or seven miles. We didn't even have life jackets.
When I ask my mother about this particular night, she is dismissive. She doesn't understand why I'm harping on about it. She thought it would be fun for us, she says. And besides we were fine weren't we? Of course much of the time, these adventures were indeed fun, great fun: long cycle rides, swimming and diving, sailing and fishing, bows and arrows and home-made guns and exploring in every direction. But they could be scary too.
I visited the river again recently. I arrived alone at the same time in the evening under the same menacing grey Suffolk sky. My youngest was getting on for 10, and I pictured watching her set off into the gathering dusk. Then I leaned over the parapet of Snape bridge staring down at the inky black water and tried to put myself in my parents' shoes. Walking along the river bank to Iken, to the same spot where we would later lose poor Callum, the light faded and the vast expanse of water began to bleed into the darkening sky. With only the haunting cries of the river birds for company, and the wind in the rushes, I thought what on earth were they thinking?
I call my brother for corroboration. He remembers it exactly as I do. Terrifying. Although we both agree it must have been character-building, we shudder at the thought of any of our kids doing the same. No way. And I think of myself as a fairly hands-off, no-nonsense, liberal kind of parent – even pride myself on it, perhaps. Yet when one of my own daughters is freewheeling down a Suffolk lane on a bike, her hair streaming behind her, I'm not far behind her. And actually her hair's rarely streaming behind her because I like her to wear a helmet.
My mother isn't defensive about the way we were brought up. Just matter-of-fact. I'm not sure I completely understand when she tells me that "in those days we allowed you children to grow rather than us parents growing you". Did she guess exactly what we were up to, out of sight? At the time she seemed to take everything in her stride – explosions, car crashes, unconscious children, booby traps …
Back to those missing children. While Callum's mum was rounding up the troops, Joseph's was tucking into her lunch, seemingly oblivious to the unfolding drama. (I think, like me, she'd been starving.) Joseph's mother is Japanese. I point this out because one of the first things that always strikes me when I'm travelling in Japan is the sight of very young children calmly getting themselves around, completely parent-free. By the time they start school at the age of six they're expected to walk to the bus or train and get there on their own. Hence, perhaps, Joseph's mum's laissez-faire approach. I couldn't help wondering if the rest of us weren't overreacting.
Callum is a creative and resourceful boy. The last time I saw him he showed me a home-made stun gun that he had just built. It was impressive, and it really hurt when we tested it out too. Callum's going to be all right, I thought. We are the ones who need watching, or we'll never learn to let go.
