Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  They said there was stealing and stealing. A child swiping a chocolate bar from a supermarket shelf wasn’t the real thing. Now, if he had taken one from another child, it really would have been stealing. Then she would have something to worry about. It showed a totally different sort of nature if a kid stole from another kid’s schoolbag or coat pocket. But from a shelf of them? No.

  And then there were those who said that maybe it was a sign that something was wrong. She shouldn’t look on it as a simple act of shoplifting, but as an indication that the boy wasn’t getting enough love or attention at home. She thought about that seriously and decided that, as a theory, it didn’t hold any water.

  Theirs was a happy home. There had been no new arrival to wipe his eye, no latchkey child syndrome, no absent father, no rows, no fear that the marriage wasn’t stable. In all honesty she couldn’t see that it was a cry for help. Just a cry for a Kit Kat. And a refusal to spend his pocket money on it.

  And other reassuring friends said: “It wasn’t as if it was money. Don’t worry if they only take small things, that’s natural. Now money from someone’s handbag, that would be different”.

  But she asks herself, suppose it is a handbag next time?

  If he thinks she’ll keep an eye on him in supermarkets from now on, might he not help himself to the coins from her bag? Or, a thousand times worse, from someone else’s handbag? And why would it be worse from someone else’s bag? The amount would be the same, the action would be the same.

  She realised that it’s the shame element that would make one theft greater than the other. What kind of morality was that?

  I’d advise that she should have gone back with the Kit Kat. Not with a heavy moral tone and drumbeats of doom, but quite casually, saying: “Look, we forgot to pay for this, sorry . . . Can we pay for it now?” Then the point would have been made.

  There couldn’t be à la carte nicking, some of which was tolerated and some of which wasn’t.

  Children are very logical. Why, if the odd bar of chocolate is okay, wouldn’t the odd bottle of sherry be fine for the adult to take? If parents gloat over not paying VAT on something, shouldn’t a child try to escape the fare on the DART?

  People will say that times have changed since my youth, when a girl of 12 was reported to the school for having stolen a packet of clear gums from a station stall. And we thought she was terrible. Nowadays, kids go into shops and hoover up what’s available, they tell you.

  But that’s not what anyone would call the march of progress or the dawn of a new enlightenment. And it is not the way parents should view it. Of course it’s easier when you have no children, things are more absolute, the areas less grey. But even those with no children love them and want the best for them. If I were with a nine-year-old, I’d go back to the till with a cheery face and no post-mortems over a nicked bar of chocolate.

  You can’t expect children to look into your face and wonder is this kind of theft acceptable – or not – unless there are some guidelines, however old-fashioned, laid down, for them.

  Caste Struggle

  “A sense of tribal mistrust will never be solved by a new batch of statistics, however accurate and however damning

  to the racist war of words”

  It was a long way to the reading at the Writers and Readers Festival in Birmingham. We passed two mosques, endless rows of shops selling saris, very sweet sugary confectionery, stores with bags of flour to make chapati-type bread. The children playing in the school-yards were of all colours. The signs over shops and business premises were in foreign lettering. It would not take a fleet of detectives to work out that Birmingham is a multinational city.

  The remarks of Tory MP Winston Churchill – who, because of his name, would get media attention if he only read the telephone book – hit Birmingham hard. He spoke of a “relentless flow” of immigrants into the country and of “our northern cities being over 50 per cent immigrant”. He called for a halt to immigration, and said that the face of Britain was changing in ways that did not have the consent of its people.

  Like Enoch Powell’s famous “rivers of blood” speech all those years ago, his words provoked both alarm and fear. They had to be taken back, of course, explained, and elaborated. He wrote to The Times: “When I spoke about our northern cities being 50 per cent immigrant, I only meant the inner cities”. This, when his figures were immediately challenged.

  The British Home Office had to come out and pat people down by assuring them that only the families and dependants of British subjects were being allowed to immigrate, and denied that it was a “relentless flow”. So it meant that everyone was apologising for the existence of Asians in the country and trying to say there weren’t nearly as many there, nor on the way, as Winston Churchill had said.

  And then began the pub talk. A latter-day Alf Garnett said that maybe the man had a point. Why shouldn’t such things be discussed? This wasn’t what they had fought two World Wars for.

  It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Mary. It coincided with the week she had decided to tell her parents that she would marry Jalid. They know about him, of course, they’ve met him and have been polite – on the whole. When her father has had a few pints on a Sunday, he sometimes asks how it is that Mary couldn’t find one of her own kind to take up with. But Mary says that this kind of thing goes with the territory of Sunday lunch at your parents’ house. Something is always a mystery to parents – the length of skirts, of hair, of time on the phone, in the bathroom, or not in the bathroom. It was only to be expected that finding love in another community would be a mystery as well.

  Mary is a teacher and lives in her own flat. When it became serious with Jalid, she did her best to prepare for arguments by involving her mother in the school so that she could meet little Pakistani children at first hand and not fear the possibility of being a grandmother to an alien kind.

  Jalid’s mother doesn’t speak English and Mary has enough problems trying to work out what the small, anxious foreign woman thinks of her to even contemplate bringing the two families together in any farcical pretence of bonhomie. She and Jalid have decided that the wedding will involve a lot of hand-shaking introductions, and then two distinct groups at either end of a function room. They could survive it, they told each other, up to the new war of words. Now everything has changed.

  The older generation in Jalid’s family has bought very strong shutters for the windows of the small shops that they run. His father has urged him seriously not to be seen holding Mary’s hand in public, in case it might inflame a gang of skinheads.

  Mary’s father said that, if she could get a career break, he would be happy to give her a few quid to get out of Birmingham and see a bit more of the world. All right, so he did say there was no place like home, once. But that was a while ago and a person could be wrong, couldn’t they? Mary’s mother has spoken not once, but twice, about the marriage bureau at Knock.

  Mary is so stung by the injustice of it all that she is not thinking practically any more; she is thinking in statistics which will not change any mind or heart that she wants to change. She will point to surveys, independent surveys, not ones undertaken with a bias. Immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, she will prove to you, are far higher in what are defined as the acceptable values that British society desires.

  Even the census shows that, in 80 per cent of Asian families, there are two parents and children, so how could anyone say that they are battening off the State? Milking the welfare services? You only had to look at their record in looking after the elderly in their extended families: they didn’t need paid welfare visitors or places in old people’s homes.

  Mary says she can’t understand why people turn away from these statistics; if you read them, it’s as plain as the nose on your face, that the Asian community is no threat, no drain on the country’s resources. Why can’t there be a proper campaign to counteract this whisper war from the Winston Churchill faction which claims that the number
of immigrants each year is in excess of the whole population of Grantham? Things will not change, Mary cries, until everyone is told the facts.

  I don’t agree. I think Mary should forget the facts and concentrate on people and life-stories. She should bring Jalid around to her parents for his breakfast, dinner and tea, if she wants them to understand him. She should encourage him to tell her father all about the place where he works (making the new Pullman cars for the Channel Tunnel trains), and all the luxuries they will have – videos, maplewood desks, telephones in each room. She should forget charts about the stability of Asian family life and quibbles over numbers let in at Heathrow. She should include his nephews and nieces with their Brummie accents. She should talk about the members of his family whom she loves, and whisper about the ones she dislikes, just as she would do if they were not from Pakistan.

  She should bring up, good-naturedly, all the fuss there was in the 1950s when her own parents married across the cultural divide, at a time when “No Irish” was written in landladies’ windows, and when her mother’s people thought that marrying an Englishman was the greatest sell-out since the marriage of Aoife to Strongbow.

  A sense of tribal mistrust will never be solved by a new batch of statistics, however accurate and however damning to the racist war of words. The weapons that the thousands of Jalids and Marys must use have got everything to do with wearing down prejudice by sheer familiarity, and nothing at all to do with an intellectual appeal. The host community will not read the evidence and accept that it is not being swamped by newcomers.

  What Mary should bring to Sunday lunch tomorrow is Jalid – and not the study from Warwick University proving what a splendid and non-intrusive role Jalid’s tribe is playing in the area.

  Her Irish mother and English father will never learn to love statistics. But they might well accept as normal and, eventually even as good, a marriage where a man and woman refuse even to dignify the problems by defining and denying them.

  First Compromise

  “It’s not blackmail, it’s not super indulgence, it’s knowing that you can’t change the world between now and Corpus Christi”

  All right, the young mother says, all right, she knows the arguments, you can’t disappoint a child. It is not the little girl’s fault that the country has become obsessed with show and competition and vulgar display. But someone has to make a stand. Either it’s a religious milestone, and an important part of a person’s spiritual life – if so then of course it should be marked and honoured – or it’s not. And, for the great majority of those entering into the Communion and Confirmation circuses this month, there is little spirituality. When she hears of seven-year-old girls applying fake tan to their little legs to look well in the photographs, that annoys her marginally less than their mothers going to the Canaries to get real tans to look dazzling in the church in pale pink jackets and low-cut blouses.

  This woman is 33 and she has a daughter and a son. She has a husband who was recently made redundant. She has a job where she works long hours. They have a house which could be a lot more comfortable if there were two salaries coming in. They have friends, neighbours and family around. She is not a loner. She is head of no cause. She never stood on a principle against the crowd, before this. She is not doing it for God. She thinks that God is indulgent and forgiving about the way humans make such a mess out of everything including what is meant to be a sacrament.

  No, she wants to stand alone against the charade because she thinks it’s dangerous for little girls to be made into princesses for a day with everyone admiring their dress, their ringlets, their flowers, the professional taker of photographs, the video of a big lunch party with a host of relatives and friends fielded.

  Because it’s the first step on a ladder. Then there will be the Confirmation, and the Debs and the Engagement and the Wedding and the Christening. She says she can’t listen any more to those who say that life is grey enough, and that it’s colourful and good to mark out the happenings along the way with pageantry.

  In her job she has come across the seriously poor. Her everyday work involves trying to put together the pieces for people deep in a well of poverty in a world of moneylenders. It is only too obvious to see that the spiral begins with the loans for the First Communion outfit.

  She can date almost every loan pattern to the time when the eldest child was seven. She says that, up to now, she went along with the indulgent view that life had to have its compensations, that it was not fair to deny those who had so little, their days of dressing up and being able to stand heads high watching a little princess come out of the church rather than a kid in the clothes, the unsatisfactory clothes, of every day.

  Now she thinks this view is patronising. It smacks of allowing the poor to have processions and pageants and to pretend to be the rich for one day a year. She sees what the expectations of a middle-class child are going to cost, and she feels it personally. They will not put themselves into debt over this. She will not approach her credit union for a loan even though she is luckier than those who have to go out and borrow from moneylenders.

  Scales have fallen from her eyes, she says. She sees the other mothers, not as wonderful, kind, maternal creatures doing their best for a child’s big day, but as ludicrous, competitive entrants in a surreal Miss World contest. They are living out their own fantasies in the dresses, the curls, the flowers and the photographs. They are grumbling because camcorders are not allowed into the church; they are saying that kill-joys are trying to spoil it for the youngsters. Trying to be all sour and take away their big day.

  And she believes with all her heart that a seven-year-old child will be happy with any kind of fuss . . . not just this out-of-control commercial fuss. All it needs is for someone to have the courage to opt out, to give the child a great day without the razzmatazz.

  She was disappointed that I didn’t agree. She would have thought I wouldn’t want to go for all this show, that I’d like it to be like the old days. It’s no use thinking about the past, what it was like in the old days.

  I have my First Communion picture like everyone has. I look like a happy lampshade, there was something odd about the wreath. We went to see my aunt in the convent; it was just after the war and the trams and buses were so slow it took all day, but I didn’t mind. I had people admiring me for hours.

  I don’t remember my Confirmation day, although I have a picture of myself in school uniform but wearing a plain net veil. The nuns, very admirably, urged families not to spend a great deal of money on outfits, which was sensible, but they didn’t give us a big party in the school, which was foolish. We felt like anyone else. My face has all the lines of being short-changed.

  I think this mother should borrow the money and give her daughter the day. Her husband is very supportive; he says he would love his little girl to look and feel the equal of everyone else at her school. He doesn’t see it as a principle. And that is what their real difference is all about.

  I do see it as a principle. But, because she’s much, much too late, she has missed the principle bus. And she has to give in, this time anyway. It really is not fair that a seven-year-old should be made the victim of her stance. It’s all very well to say that a seven-year-old heart doesn’t break seriously and the child will cheer up again, but it’s not honest. It’s not only the day itself. It is the weeks afterwards when they are all still talking about it and showing the pictures. How can a girl that age explain what her mother finds difficult to put into words, even if she were to understand it?

  There are many more years of misconstruing for her mother ahead, many rows to be fought, chasms to be opened between them, words to be said and taken back, plea bargains to be arranged. Let her not have the additional weapon and aching hurt that at seven, when every single other child had a day like a princess, Mother took a silly stand and wouldn’t let the child do it.

  It’s not blackmail, it’s not super indulgence, it’s knowing that you can’t change the world between
now and Corpus Christi.

  The little lad is only four. She has three years to work on his school, to try to get it turned into a school day where all the parents can come and contribute food and give money to a good cause. There can be group pictures and family snaps. The notion of collecting money can be frowned upon.

  Most mothers are misunderstood much of the time. Let her not go for it like a lemming by depriving her daughter of a day that was hers by right of having expected it.

  Treading on Dreams

  “Of course it’s a dream. We can’t buy certain happiness”

  This summer over 30,000 people will leave Ireland for Florida alone, many of them on family holidays. For two grown-ups and two children it can cost £1,300 for two weeks. That will include the fares, an apartment and a hired car. They pay for petrol and food and drink the same as they would at home.

  This family has been saving since Christmas and they’ll be heading off in about three weeks’ time. Their neighbours shake their heads and say they are quite mad.

  First, they say these are not wealthy people. They have very ordinary jobs, the mother and father. The house could do with a coat of paint, the children don’t have clothes or shoes that are up to standard. They don’t have a lawnmower and, in the summer, their garden has a straggly look about it.

  This couple have a cheap and smelly oil heater in their hall, the kind of thing that you wouldn’t feel safe with at all. They might be better getting some kind of heating, cleaning up their act a bit, instead of filling two children’s heads with nonsense out in Florida, no less.

  These are not just jealous, selfish neighbours, nor killjoys who are against the lower orders having a holiday as if they were people of property. They are not the house-proud, neighbourhood-conscious folk who would want to confiscate the air tickets and replace them with two cans of paint and a strimmer to keep up standards.