How to live with whizz kids

After a decade of fatherhood, this year I learned something new about the fault line between adults and the other lot. I needed to go skiing to do it, which I hadn't done since the age of 15. In skiing years, that made me 16 - theoretically.

In 20 years away from the slopes you learn a lot of things, but most of all you learn about fear. I never realised before how children have no idea about this.

Our family contained three beginners as we stepped out into the plush spring snow of La Plagne: Pascale, nine, and Florence, seven, were sealed inside crash helmets, denied ski poles and, by the end of the week, faithfully snowploughing behind me like manic goslings. Their mother, Jenny, thirtysomething, was mortified by the speeds they were reaching. Like all adult beginners, she was much more concerned with correctness than velocity. During our one stop-start attempt to ski together as a family, the air turned a delicate shade of blue.

Alex, 17, with two weeks' skiing behind him, enrolled in a class called Mach 2. It is run by Oxygene, an independent ski teaching and equipment-hire company with schools in La Plagne and Val d'Isere, and open to any youngster with the appropriate ability. (As a theoretical 16-year-old, for a couple of sessions I went along too.) It's billed by Mark Warner as a teenagers' week, but depending on who turns up, the average age actually varies between 14 and 10.

A lot have been coming to La Plagne all their skiing lives, so Oxygene, with its English-speaking instructors, has taught them all they know. This particular week there was Alex at one end of the scale, and, at the other, Harry, a small seven-year-old from Devon who wore his white lip salve like a clown's war paint. Harry, even more drastically than the rest of the class, looked as if he had had some sort of lobotomy which allowed him to slice down a vertical ice-face heaving with moguls. The instinct to feel fear had been removed - or had not yet formed.

None of these kids would win prizes for style - only adults care about looking good. But they were all, in every sense, dashing skiers. The first two days were spent familiarising the class with technique, although some were back for the second time that season. Then the fun started. One morning the class skied to the top of a steep, bumpy red run. Sylvain, a Pied Piper of an instructor, pulled a comically large drill out of his rucksack and started firing holes into the piste to stick in slalom gates. The first time down there was a motorway pile-up, but they got better. Personally, I avoided falling, but that's because 36-year-olds will do anything to avoid falling. Go slowly, for example. One afternoon Alex and I went snowblading. Snowblades didn't exist in 1981, so I thought I'd give them a try. They are short and rounded, like platypus bills, and wobble under your feet. As I snapped them onto my boots, I felt the years falling away: it was as if, by taking the weight of the heavier skis off your feet, somehow a burden was removed from your shoulders too. You could sense the fear was leaving your body.

We did jumps in La Plagne's Snow Park; we sped through huge parabolic carving turns on the blades' edges; we picked up snowballs on the move and threw them in a sort of winter-sport version of Rollerball. Down Death Valley we went, a narrow gully shaped like a skateboarder's tube. On skis, I struggled along here, but on blades it was a different story. It was like going through a portal into your own childhood, only you could take your children with you. Pascale and Florence hared down Death Valley, and I suddenly realised why: to them it didn't look narrow. That's the thing I learned about the fault line separating adults from youth: in certain circumstances, you can get over to the other side.

Way to go

Jasper Rees and family travelled to La Plagne with Mark Warner (0870 8480482); seven nights this March from £664 per person (ages two to 15 from £464 sharing with parents), including breakfast, afternoon tea, lunch and dinner with wine, flights and transfers. Six-day lift pass £105; six days' Mach 2 tuition with Oxygene (00 33 4 79 09 03 99) £90; six half days £78.