It was a fairly ordinary car journey a couple of years go when my then-7-year-old son piped up from his usual seat in the boot of the car. He announced that he’d memorised something, and asked if we wanted to hear it.
My wife and I gave each other a slightly bemused smirk and asked him to fire away. He then proceeded to recite word-for-word the entire opening sequence of a Christian Heroes biography on the famous 19th-century missionary, David Livingstone:
Something moved in the undergrowth. David Livingstone stopped in his tracks. Suddenly he saw the flick of a tail, a tan-coloured tail with a tuft at the end. As he looked closer he could make out the shape of a lion hidden among the bushes. Not a small lion, but one that must have weighed at least four hundred pounds, and now it was no more than ten feet away. Without taking his eyes off the huge animal for one second, David reached over his shoulder for his rifle. He put the stock of the gun to his shoulder and lined up the sights with the lion’s eyes. Smoothly he squeezed the trigger. Boom! The mouth of the rifle exploded in a flash of burning gunpowder. The lead bullet found its mark, slamming into the lion’s neck.
But instead of falling over dead, the lion stood roaring in agony. David watched in amazement as it crouched back on its haunches and then leapt forward. The rifle flew from David Livingstone’s hand. Pain raced through David’s body as the lion’s claws clamped down hard on his left arm, each of the lion’s razor-sharp teeth cutting into his flesh. Before David knew what was happening, the beast had lifted him into the air and was shaking him like a cat shaking a mouse. Then it dropped him and pounced again, tightening its vicelike grip on his arm.
David felt the lion’s hot breath against his body and its saliva seeping through his torn jacket. The animal rested its paw on David’s head, and David could feel the point of each claw poised to rip his skull open. Through the searing pain in his body, David could feel his heart thumping wildly in his chest.
He didn’t have the book with him. This 7-year old boy had learned all of that by heart, of his own accord, and without even telling us he was doing it. I don’t know how long it took him. It just came out, as though he only chose to share it with us because he happened to think about it whilst he was sitting there.
The Thing About Boys
Why did he feel the need to memorise that? Why did this scene motivate him to an almost absurd commitment to learning something which no schoolteacher could ever have incited him to do as “homework”?
Young boys seem to know - with an unerring consistency - that the heart of the best stories is the adventure, the challenge, the fight. Much of contemporary society does its utmost to teach this instinct out of them, believing it will lead to inevitably “toxic” behaviour.
This is why, in many school classrooms, boys are often treated like defective girls, and why for many years now, people have been noticing the way boys struggle at school in general. Nowadays boys get the fight kicked out of them less by bullies in the playground than by bullies in the administrator’s office, perturbed that boys do not comply with what the latest gender studies textbook theories told them.
Put simply: boys tend to respond to danger, risk, and boundaries rather differently to girls. This tendency to glorious thrill-seeking certainly causes an awful lot of the wrong kinds of trouble, for sure. (Prisons are overwhelmingly full of men, not women). But that desire for thrill and adventure is not a defect in their manufacturing. It’s built-in. It’s what they were made for.
And safe to say, in the imaginations of virtually all boys who’ve ever walked the earth, there’s always been something unusually thrilling about lions.
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