Penguins are super-parents. When the female provides dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick, His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in a creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Yet, even for penguins, rejection comes: after the winter huddling and the pre-fledge commutes, the deep dives and the exhausting feeds, the mother will waddle off across the tundra, never to be seen by her children again. Abandonment, we understand, is not the deranging catastrophe that wrecks the child’s system of trust, but the crowning achievement of good parenting.
Humans tend to take the whole waddling away thing quite badly. ‘When a child feels abandoned,’ D.W. Winnicott writes in The Child, the Family and the Outside World, he
“becomes unable to play, and unable to be affectionate or to accept affection. Along with this, as is well known, there can be compulsive erotic activities. The stealing of deprived children who are recovering can be said to be part of the search for the transitional object, which had been lost through the death or fading of the internalised version of the mother.”
* Prince Harry’s mother died when he was twelve years old, and his search for the transitional object has been messed up ever since. In Tom Bradby’s interview with him for ITV, after Harry describes the crash in Paris he immediately speaks of not wanting the same thing to happen to his wife. ‘Shooting, shooting, shooting,’ is the way this ex-soldier describes the actions of the paparazzi that night. He has always believed that Diana was murdered by careless journalists pursuing her for personal profit, and he wants to get rid of these death-eaters before they get anywhere near his wife and children. Journalism for him is a profession opposed to truth. This seems so obvious to him that it acts as a gateway drug to everything else he believes. The art of biography appears to the prince to be a pane of clear glass through which the truth will finally be revealed to the reader. So here it comes: The Corrections by Harry Windsor, a postmodern social novel in which the author will confront the twisted evils that harass civilisation and be a living antidote to the poison spread by the Daily Mail. It’s an impressive scheme of outrage. Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting. His truth – ‘my truth’ – is much better written than the Mail, though guddling in the same sad bogs on the same dark heaths of human experience. Really funny, though.
