We have an enduring fascination with feral children; those who have been reared by animals or in isolated captivity. Is it because they can teach us about what makes us human? Sadly what they can learn from us - 'civilisation' - often destroys them, discovers Kathryn Holmquist
After those footsteps, silence;
Vigils, solitudes, fasts,
Unchristened tears,
A puzzled love of the light.
But now you speak at last
With a remote mime
Of something beyond
patience,
Your gaping wordless proof
Of lunar distances
Travelled beyond love.
Seamus Heaney, from 'Bye-Child' (Wintering Out)
A child held captive in a hen-house in Northern Ireland in the 1950s inspired the Heaney poem above. A child whose existence was limited to cold and damp, the stench of fowl and the cluttering of caged chickens. A child - now forgotten - whose emergence shocked the country so that nobody talked of anything else. But who remembers now? The poem, in turn, inspired writer Michael Newton to investigate the phenomenon of the wild child - reared by animals or in isolated captivity with no human contact.
Newton, living in Ireland in a "beautiful, ramshackle, irresponsible Georgian house, beneath the mountains and close to the sea", felt his curiosity grow into preoccupation. One of the family attached to that Georgian house, "a wise and humorous former social worker", had been part of the team that discovered the boy who, from birth, had grown up among chickens, never learning language, denied human love - a strange, silent, nightmarish world.
Later, Newton - who teaches at University College London and Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design - wrote the forthcoming book, Savage Girls, Wild boys, A study of feral children.
Like the philosophers, imperialist explorers, religious men, kings, nobility, novelists and film-makers before him in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Newton became obsessed with the wild child. Probably the most famous of the untamed children was Kasper Hauser who, in early 19th-century Germany, on wobbling toddler feet, was escorted to a dungeon and left to survive in darkness. His only toys were a pair of wooden horses and a couple of red ribbons. For a decade, he tied and retied those red ribbons around the horses. His only sustenance was bread and water (never enough) left by his jailer. Discovered wandering the city of Nuremberg in 1828, thought to be aged 16, he had no language, no notion of how to interact with human beings. Some thought him a prince, others an imposter.
Eventually he was murdered, possibly by those who were entrusted with his care.
Werner Herzog, the film-maker, told Hauser's story (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974), just one tale of several that have entranced us. The image of the orphan left to nature and "rescued" by civilisation is part of our romantic view of childhood. Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli was recycled in Disney's Jungle Book. Truffaut's L'enfant Sauvage was a masterpiece of untameable childhood, so eloquent that it was used by real researchers investigating actual cases of wild children in the late 20th century. Only four years ago, the world's press reported the case of Ivan Mishukov, a four-year-old who ran away from an alcoholic stepfather in Moscow and survived as the leader of a pack of wild dogs. Newton writes: "Out on the streets, Ivan began to beg, but gave a portion of the food he cadged each time to one particular pack of dogs. The dogs grew to trust him; befriended him; and finally took him on as their pack leader. The relationship worked perfectly, far better than anything Ivan had known among his fellow humans."
Wanting nothing more than to meet such a child, Newton's curiosity was rewarded. Another child of nature, John, had emerged in Uganda in 1988. John saw his mother murdered by his father, and was then abandoned in the bush to die. He was rescued and reared by monkeys, then "rescued" again by a pastor who saw him as an example of Christ's love - hadn't nature in its most primitive form, after all, nurtured the child when humans had abandoned it?
In London, Newton attended a revivalist-style meeting at which John was singing in a choir. Newton recognised him instantly: "I thought he would look like everyone else. Even though by then I'd read all the books, knew every story off by heart, I hadn't quite believed that there would be this unquantifiable, unmistakable difference. But I was wrong: I knew him instantly, picked him out the moment I walked into the room. He was sitting with the others, on rows of new wooden chairs, just there on the other side.
"In a moment he sensed that I was looking at him and shot me a troubled, suspicious glance - the look of someone all too used to being stared at."
Why are we so fascinated by the wild child? As the success of Disney's Jungle Book has shown, we're all fascinated by the idea of the wild child left to nature. We nurture the idea that children are to be civilised, but that civilisation may actually lessen them. The truth is otherwise - we need civilisation to humanise us, to give us soul.
The story of the feral Indian girls, reared by wolves, also caught Newton's imagination. Eighty miles south-west of Calcutta in 1920, a missionary heard of the existence of "ghosts" living near a huge, burrowed anthill.
The missionary, the Rev J.A.L. Singh, staked out the anthill. "Just as the sun was setting, a wolf stole out from one of the tunnels in the mound. Another followed, and then another, and another, and some wolf-cubs trotting along behind. After the cubs, the ghosts came out.
"There were two of them, both horribly ugly, the heads like large, shapeless globes within which, among the matted hair, a small fragment of face could be seen: a human face with brilliant, bestial eyes."
The girls ran on all fours, bowed head-down in the dust. They had preternatural night-vision, exaggerated canines, a taste for raw flesh and eyes that glittered blue in the dark.
As Singh's party of villagers attempted to capture them, they were defended by the mother wolf, who was immediately shot dead with bows and arrows by the villagers. The hunting party destroyed the mound, leaving a central cave intact. Within it, they found two wolf-cubs and the two ghosts, huddled together in fear.
The ghosts were children, more like beasts than humans, wildly showing their teeth to their captors. Singh believed that the girls had been unwanted babies, abandoned in the wild at birth, who had been brought to the mother wolf as food, only to be nurtured by her.
Singh named the girls Amala and Kamala and left them in the care of the villagers, who tied them up, starved them and left them to rot. Five days later, Singh found them pitted with terrible sores and nurtured them back to health with a handkerchief soaked in tea. He took them to an orphanage, where Amala soon died.
Singh took the surviving girl, Kamala, to his wife, who attempted to teach her to move, eat and play like any other child.
Kamala continued to walk on all fours and ate out of Mrs Singh's hand. Eight years later, Kamala died too, unable to survive the experience of being civilised.
Like so many other wild children in the past 250 years, Kamala was destroyed by the experience of being rescued. Children reared without human contact, without human love, without language, have again and again been reclaimed by the intelligentsia as playthings, as research subjects, as irresistible objects of desire. Again and again they have been let down, disposed of by bored intellectuals.
In the Los Angeles of the 1970s, everyone of politically correct thinking wanted to rescue Susan. Her rescuers - a cabal of psychologists and social workers - would spend years in court fighting over her, ultimately abandoning her. They changed her name from Susan to "Genie". The innocent, wide-eyed girl was like ether from a bottle. She had spent the first 13 years of her life deprived of human contact. Then she had emerged - to be named by psychologists and the media.
The girl had spent 13 years tied to a chair. Her mentally disordered father had been unable to endure his wife's love for babies. He had viewed the babies as rivals. One by one, the couple's babies were abandoned in the garage, where they starved or froze to death. One child, Susan, survived. Her father tied her to a potty with a specially designed straitjacket and left her there for 13 years. Not wanting her to die, he force-fed her with such violence that the poor child never learned to swallow. She was fed quickly with minimal food - cereal, sometimes a soft-boiled egg. What dissolved in her mouth by saliva, she absorbed.
Everything else, she spat out. If she choked, her face was rubbed in it.
When eventually "rescued" and taught language, she said: "Father hit arm. Big wood. Genie cry . . . Not spit. Father. Hit face - spit . . . Father hit big stick. Father is angry. Father hit Genie big stick. Father take piece wood hit. Cry. Father make me cry. Father is dead."
On discovery, Genie's father shot himself in the head, leaving Genie to the care of psychological researchers, who fought over her but eventually abandoned her. She ended up in care units for mentally disturbed adults. To the end, Genie never learned what "dead" meant. She looked at her carers in disbelief when they tried to explain it.
This is a common theme: deprived of language from birth, children do not learn it. The miracle of body language, facial expression and nonsense words that parents use when they engage their newborns, turns out to be the secret of humanness.
In Newton's book, we see Noam Chomsky's theory - that the essential language patterns are encoded in the human brain - disproved by the existence of wild children, who are incapable of learning language once the window of opportunity, which starts at about 18 months, has closed. They may learn words, like monkeys in research laboratories learn sign-language, but they do not know the meaning.
So what makes us human? A "human" child reared by wild animals takes on the characteristics of those animals. A child reared in isolation with no stimulation at all remains a tabula rasa. Children deprived of human language lose their chance of acquiring the one thing that seems to make humans unique. Reared by wolves, antelopes or monkeys, children never learn to interact on any level other than food, safety and warmth. There is no more complexity than "food good; me Tarzan, you Jane". This problem has fascinated us for millennia, ever since Romans created the story of Romulus and Remus reared by wolves.
An Irish physician, Bernard Connor, private doctor to the King of Poland, wrote about wild children in his Medicina Mystica in 1697. Jonathan Swift later became a wild-child fan. He was drawn back to London in 1726, after years of "exile" in supposedly wild Dublin and Kildare, by the promise of meeting "Peter the Wild Boy of Europe", who had become a media sensation in London.
Peter had been found in the woods near Hameln in Hanover. His fascinating lack of civilisation had already made him the court boy and jester of King George I. Dressed in a bright blue suit and attended by ladies-in-waiting who speculated on his sexuality, Peter had been placed in the charge of Swift's close friend, Dr John Arbuthnot. The Scots physician was misleadingly laid-back in demeanour - a politician through and through. In Arbuthnot's care, Peter was a media sensation of the time. Swift reinvented Peter in Gulliver's Travels, in which he explored the nature of untamed animalism through the Yahoos, contrasted with the rationality of the elite Houyhnhnms.
When George I died and fashionable interest waned in Peter, the by-now adolescent creature was left to exist for another 30 years on the farm of a wholesome rural family. His was probably the happiest of endings among the wild children "rescued" by Europe's intelligentsia. The unintentional abuse of wild children by their rescuers is the most horribly fascinating aspect of their story. Hardly any of the children rescued by civilised adults had a happy ending. They were exploited as curiosities, and died young.
In discovering wild children (in the 21st century, read "neglected" for wild), those who seek to inform themselves about questions of human nature have used children as unwilling research projects. This is neither new nor surprising. The Christian Brothers justified the corporal punishment of children on the grounds that they were dealing with original sin. D We have a long history of people with good intentions regarding children as public property - to be analysed in the guise of the public good.
No one has yet answered the question of children's rights - never mind how we rescue neglected children and make them fully human. No one has yet humanised a brutalised child - as our prisons full of recidivists show.
Newton writes: "The savage boys and wild girls are God's lonely children. Loneliness seems the crucial experience of our culture. Our secular faith in 'relationships', marriage, casual sex, drugs, lonely-hearts columns bear witness to the deepest terror of simply being alone. People mock the thing they worst fear, as the reinvention of the word 'sad' as a contemptuous term of abuse shows."
Mass fascination with lonely, wild individuals - Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean - shows that our greatest fear is abandonment. Without loving parents, we are nothing. If Newton's book teaches us anything, it is that children without people who can humanise them are helpless. A child born into the care of loving parents is a fortunate child.
Yet we still do not know what differentiates human children from apes. It's a kind of magic. The story of Mowgli, born to be reared by wild animals, is nothing but a fantasy. The real miracle is the baby - born today - whose parents keenly await its first word, who constantly measure and respond to the child's emotions. That's what makes us human.
•Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children by Michael Newton is published next month by Faber (£12.99 sterling)