There is little to do for children growing up there. They become accustomed to a southern life of playing and hunting in the woods. Basketball and football are the main pursuits for boys and the girls’ focus is basketball and also cheerleading before settling into early domestic bliss.
The roads are so remote that fathers will ride with their children sat between their legs in the car, in front of the steering wheel; they ride with children on their laps in the same way as many dog owners do with their pets. When Britney became a mother and attempted to transfer this practice to the roads of Malibu in 2007, she soon realised a Louisiana way of life won’t wash elsewhere. But that incident served to highlight the conditioning influences spilling over from her childhood.
Kentwood is a hunt-shoot-fish town but it’s not ‘country life’ in the same fashion as England’s tweed jackets and picnic hampers, or Balmoral shoots. Men throw a rifle and ice-packed beer in the back of their trucks and hunt for deer and rabbit, sitting in ‘deer-hides’—wooden shacks where they sit to hide from the deer. They’ll then return home and throw a ‘crawfish boil party’, thanking God for the catches they’ve snared.
For God is one of the chief grandfathers of this ‘Bible Belt’ town. His presence is observed in the community and in locals’ vernacular. The Spears family merely had to walk across the road from their home to Sunday service. Christian values formed the backbone of Britney’s upbringing and education. The way that Mum Lynne explains it is that they are not a religious, but deeply spiritual family and yet they are strongly tied to the Christian faith.
As a child, Britney kept a prayer journal and was encouraged to have discussions with God and confide in her local pastor. Of course, as a child, it is easy to nod one’s head in blithe acceptance of a faith that perhaps holds more of a worship indoctrination than actual meaning. Britney almost certainly found pleasure in the ‘performance’ and rituals—the ceremonies that would ultimately allow her to showcase her talents. Yet, regardless of meaning, she was obviously influenced by the beliefs instilled in her by her elders.
What she was told, she believed. So, when Britney went to bed each night, she believed God was watching over her and that everything happened because of His higher reasoning. He was her mainstay. Indeed, this is illustrated as she grew up and found her dreams coming true, blessing Him for the opportunities she had, acknowledging His guidance in the albums she made and believing He places obstacles in our way to make us stronger. Britney’s early-stated philosophy on life was that: ‘He has a hand in everything, good or bad. It’s all part of God’s plan.’
In a book penned by Britney and Lynne together, called Heart to Heart, Britney wrote: ‘I pray all the time. I find a lot of comfort and strength in knowing I can talk to God and He’s listening. That’s the way we were raised.’ On the wall above her bed, she hung a cross-stitch of the 18th-century prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each night before bed, Britney wrote down her thoughts for ‘God to read’. Her jottings complete, she kneeled at her bed and prayed, hands steep led in prayer. Then she reached under the blue, glass-plated bedside lamp and turned out the light to disappear into dreamland.
‘Dancing and singing all the time…
Like a little girl should.’
–Britney, 2007
Kentwood may well have counted as home, but Britney was a girl who yearned for faraway places. She was, say friends, ‘always different’ and came across as a day-dreaming introvert, absorbed in her own thoughts.
Often she found places to go that were a million miles from her woodland playground, running toward secret locations where she felt happy and in control. This is something Britney learned to do from a tender age: to step into self-created bubbles that distracted her and denied access to insecurities she didn’t yet understand; allowing her to avoid a confrontation with a childhood far more distressing than has previously been acknowledged.
In getting to know Britney, one soon learns that it was in such day-dreamy places that the escapist performer was born and as will become clear, her hunger to perform was as much a coping mechanism as a desire to entertain. It was in a corner of her vivid imagination that she first located Klickitat Street, a place where ‘…growing up was the slowest thing there was’. All she wanted was to sing and skip, and say: ‘This is a great day…This is a great day!’, wanting to be universally popular. It was a make-believe world that she dived into, as created by children’s author Beverly Cleary Britney immersed herself in the adventures of her protagonist Ramona Quimby a brown-haired girl with brown eyes and no cavities, perfect in every sense. Britney was, in her own words, ‘obsessed’ and cites her favourite book among the titles as Ramona the Pest, who ‘…struggles to make a place for herself in an uncomprehending world’. Just like Ramona, Britney Spears always wanted to fit in and be accepted.
Ensconced in her bedroom, lying prone on her bed, with her legs in the air, she jumped into the pages and then rushed into the bathroom—directly opposite her door, on the other side of the hallway—armed with her doll collection and teddy bears. There, behind the locked door of this mock VIP room, she lined up twelve dolls and six bears in the sitting position as her pretend audience; she perched and stood with the bath’s edge as her stage and then performed before a giant mirror on the wall (her television camera), using a shampoo bottle as a microphone. In a town where everyone listened to Dolly Parton, Randy Travis and Reba McEntire, she belted out hits from Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Madonna. In that box of a bathroom, she was, she said, ‘the biggest star in the world—bigger than Madonna.’
At the age of five, Britney set her sights high and ‘rehearsed’ in that little room for hours on end, cut off from—and unconcerned about—the rest of the household.
‘Brit-Brit, please keep it down, baby,’ Mum Lynne pleaded from the wood-panelled kitchen.
‘BRITNEY! You’d better shut up this minute!’ yelled her brother Bryan from the couch in the wood-panelled living room.
Whether Dad Jamie heard her at all was debatable, but the bathroom door remained locked and Britney kept entertaining her dolls, focussed on the world where her singing blocked out everything and everyone else. In that zone, she found her entrance to a Narnia-like world of music, applause and uninterrupted bliss. That perhaps explains why, even to this day, she’ll sing in the bathroom, usually while soaking in the tub surrounded by candles, because, she says, you can’t beat the acoustics. It is the same in elevators, minus the candles. A lot of what Britney experienced and was influenced by as a child would continue to make its impression known in adulthood, from the trivial to the emotional, to the deep psychological imprinting which effectively began from the moment she was born.
Britney’s official birthplace is actually 15 miles away, across the state border in McComb, Mississippi. She was born Britney Jean Spears on 2 December 1981, a daughter to boiler-maker Jamie Spears and wife Lynne, who worked as a day-care supervisor; sneaking into the world six months after a certain Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles in another fairytale that was just beginning