Last week, we had dire warnings from doctors that we face a “terrifying fat epidemic.” Obesity in children from two to four almost doubled to nine percent between 1989 and 1998. A third of adults, a third of girls and a fifth of boys will be obese by 2020, putting them at risk of a heart disease, diabetes and possibly cancer. Parents, schools and government were all to blame for, variously, unbalanced meals and not forcing children to participate in more sport on sold-off playing-fields. Meanwhile, an American university professor, Dr. Demko, has devised a lifestyle questionnaire that, it is claimed, can determine how long you live. If you enjoy such acts of private mortification, you will have found you could live to 127, or in my case, cancel out twenty years of too much wine and chocolate by being in love with your husband and having a pet. While this seems harmless fun of the kind many universities now spend scarce research money on, the underlying assumption that we are only to blame if we get sick and die is one of the most obnoxious aspects of modern life.. Anyone who has experienced bereavement will know the question asked is always, “What did he or she die of?” Whatever the answer, there then follows the solemn shaking of heads in which a mortal disease is ascribed to some flaw in lifestyle. Cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer’s, asthma – blame it on dairy foods! On central heating and carpets! On not doing the Times crossword, or Canadian Air-Force exercises!

I find this particularly enraging at present because I have a beloved father-in-law, formerly a most brilliant Oxford philosopher who lived an exemplary life as far as food, exercise, love and kindness was concerned who is dying a slow and horrible death of body and mind. Neither he, nor the children who die every year have done anything to “deserve” this, but people still enquire as if somehow they have. It’s heartbreaking when someone is very young, but almost as heartbreaking when they old, and have touched the lives of many more people. Because the long and short of it is, there is no explanation.

It must have been easier when the majority of us were religious, to put all suffering and death down to the will of God: you might hate God as a result, but you weren’t personally burdened by guilt and poisoned by blame. Now, anyone who eats more than three dried lentils is made to feel they’re digging their own grave with their teeth. If only we could avoid red meat, get on the treadmill and give up sex then, it is implied, we could live forever. Personally, I would rather think of dear PG Wodehouse, who ate, drank and smoked and lived into his 90s, surrounded by love and laughter than listen to these miserable gits, and live in total blandness. We fear death partly because it has become what sex was to the Victorians, something hidden and shameful, something not even to be talked about except as a dire consequence of unhealthy living.

Paradoxically, children themselves are far more realistic about suffering and death. The news that Jacqueline Wilson has now outstripped Catherine Cookson as Britain’s most borrowed author will doubtless be sneered at once again by the TLS as “the Infantilisation of Absolutely Everything” but it reflects something far more interesting. Wilson, like Cookson, is no stylist. Her heroines all sound the same, and they live miserable lives with manic depressive single parents, bullied in horrible housing estates or bog-standard schools. Many middle-class parents don’t count them as “proper” books, feeling that, as one university lecturer mother said to me, “they encourage self-pity, and are really a form of slumming.” Yet children of all classes adore them. When you ask why, the answer is that Wilson is honest about the fact that children can and do suffer. Even if you aren’t yourself a child in obvious need, you want that acknowledged, and you also want to find out about the suffering of others.

The greatest children’s books are far wiser than the current Nobel Prize winner, JM Coetzee, in acknowledging that suffering is a part of life, but describing how existence also contains joy, hope, courage and love. You can’t have one without the other. What parent hasn’t winced when The Story of Babar begins with the little elephant’s mother being killed by a cruel hunter, and wanted to skip that bit? Who hasn’t tried to deny that Snow White’s wicked step-mother exists, or that Hansel and Gretel can be cast out into the dark woods because there isn’t enough food in the house? Without suffering and exile, these books tell us, there can be no joy, no triumphant return to paradise. I know parents who still ban their children from reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and publishers who insist on bowdlerising them, because they are shocked by their violence and cruelty. Yet children want to find out about precisely these things, and to shield them from this knowledge is not just unwise but unkind. By all means, don’t force them to see a dying grandparent or sibling stuck full of tubes in hospital – there are few adults who can stand this sight – but don’t pretend death and bereavement don’t exist, either. We all have a limited time on this earth: how much better to try to live it to the full, and do what makes us happy, whether that means eating platefuls of chips or running marathons. What was so wonderful about Sister Dominica’s attitude was that, though she had no answers to why children die, she was so honest about grief, and the complexity of life, and the possibility of joy and celebration within it.

Children ask why people die, but without the adult need to ask science for an explanation. This may be because they haven’t learnt to make what are often far-fetched patterns of cause and effect, as we have, but it may also be because they see through the great coil of medicalised blame and shame we have somehow allowed ourselves to get caught up in. Some people just are fat. Some are what is what used to be called “delicate.” Some are splendidly healthy. Irrespective of that, we are all going to be culled by the grim reaper. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” kids chant in the street, but they know that’s a game. It’s only adults who take it seriously, and in doing so, deprive themselves of what it is to be alive.

The Sunday Times, February 2004