We can’t eliminate all risk for children

The classic book The Railway Children contains several episodes that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern children. None perhaps are more shocking to the modern mind than the incident where some public schoolboys on a cross country run are directed through a tunnel on a working public railway. Unsurprisingly, this does not end well, with one of the boys – Jim – breaking his leg and almost being hit by a train.

If I remember correctly, there is little hint in the novel of anybody regarding the decision to let the boys run through the tunnel as a bad thing in and of itself, which is even more remarkable given that the author Edith Nesbit was a prominent and vocal social reformer. Jim’s accident is clearly regarded by the characters in the novel as just that, an accident, the kind of mishap that is regrettable but unavoidable in the wider context of training British boys to be fit, sturdy, persistent and self-reliant.