A Thanatology of the Child: Children and Young People's Perceptions, Experiences and Understanding of Life, Death and Bereavement

A Thanatology of the Child: Children and Young People's Perceptions, Experiences and Understanding of Life, Death and Bereavement. By Christine Kenny. Dinton, Wiltshire: Quay Books, 1998. Pbk 10.99 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1 85642 097 3

Christine Kenny is Bolton born and bred; she brought up her four children there and worked as a nurse there until in mid-life, gaining a degree through a local college. Along with Bill Flynn, she strongly supports the use of researching local history as a way into adult education. The three books form a trilogy about death in Bolton.

Many of the burgeoning studies of death are disturbingly vague as to whether they are about England, Britain, the USA, Anglophone society, modern society or western society. To root a study of death in one community is a blessed relief. Kenny thinks the specifics of the social, economic and cultural history of the town as important as a wider knowledge of British/western society if we are to understand how Boltonians respond to death and loss. Kenny does, however, sometimes conflate Bolton, Lancashire, and (as in the title of Book 1) "the North." Whether one-time mining communities in County Durham would recognise her depictions of gender relations that derive from the cotton industry, I very much doubt. Nevertheless, the books will have a wide appeal across the country.

Kenny now lectures in social psychology at South Bank University, London. Given the methodological straightjackets within which most academic psychologists operate, it is refreshing to find a psychologist valuing the data to be derived from oral history, and she is skilled at gathering and using this data. Unlike many oral historians, however, she is keen to create a dialogue between oral history and psychology.

The term thanatology--the multi-disciplinary study of death, dying and bereavement--has been common in North America for some decades, and I have been dreading the introduction of the word into the British Isles. Though thanatologists are committed to promoting death education and open discussion of mortality (and certainly Kenny, like many American thanatologists, writes very clearly and without jargon), "thanatology" is an invented word from the Greek, the latest in a genre that includes gynaecology, psychiatry and a whole host of "ologies" that mystify and disempower. What is wrong with good old Anglo-Saxon "death studies" or "the study of death"? In death, more than in any area, we need to call a spade a spade, not its ancient Greek equivalent. The books would more helpfully be titled Death in Bolton, Bolton at War, and Children and Death.

So to the books themselves. One is brilliant, one okay, and one poor. Volume 2, on war, is by far the best, especially Chapter 3 where we find stories of veterans from the two world wars as told to Kenny, along with the discussion of these in Chapter 10 in terms of post-Vietnam research on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Interviewees' comments such as "it must seem shocking to you, love, but that is how it was" provide a real flavour of the struggle of this pacifist feminist to understand how men behaved in war and how this affected them and their families subsequently. Kenny, who previously had associated the military with a macho version of masculinity, was astonished at the vulnerability, fear and frankness that permeate these men's accounts, their fear more of killing than of being killed, their concern to assure both her and themselves that they were no longer killers. The personal and intellectual transformation these interviews wrought in Kenny, and her courage in facing and documenting this, are what make this a fine book. Reminiscence work with those who have been through war should not be undertaken lightly: the effect on both teller and listener can be profound.

The interviews are supplemented with extensive use of the local paper to reveal the complex and conflicting meanings of war in Bolton. The celebrations at the end of the Great War were soured for many by bereavement and later for others by disillusion at government policies. The family life of disabled ex-servicemen must be examined in terms of women's hopes and aspirations for marriage in Bolton at that time, not in terms of today's orgasm-obsessed theories about disability and sex. As Kenny observes in her final chapter on war memorials, oral history and books can themselves become war memorials. Her book is one such.

Volume 1, the most general book, is good on folk religious approaches to death, but weak and occasionally downright misleading about formal religion. This book will be useful to health care students, displaying as it does the roots of nursing, not only in middle class Nightingaleism but also in the witches, healers, midwives and layers-out that have attended birth, sickness and death for centuries. Important questions about professionalisation and consequent disempowering of untrained women are raised. I, not a folklorist, learned quite a bit about women and healing; I am not competent, though, to vouch for the accuracy of her broad-brush history.