Confessions of a Bad Mother

by Stephanie Calman

  Chief offenders at this stage are the Mr Men books, with their so-called ‘plots’ in which the main character always goes for a walk and meets the other characters. The aim seems to be to stamp out individuality. Everyone ignores Mr Noisy until he learns to be quiet. Mr Messy gets ‘re-educated’ into being tidy by communist, Cultural Revolution-style thugs.

  ‘Neat and Tidy,’ they say, ‘Tidy and Neat.’

  Doesn’t it just make your blood run cold?

  Or Lydia wants The Lion King, which I’ll use any excuse to get out of. Peter, being nicer, tends to give in, but speeds up more ruthlessly than I do. He can do Lion King II in 108 seconds. I don’t know which is worse, that, or Disney’s cutesy ‘retellings’ of the classics. I can’t wait to see how they’ll do Madame Bovary: ‘In ancient France, a humble country doctor’s wife longed to seek beyond the simple pleasures of village life …’ Or have they got onto Shakespeare yet? ‘In ancient Denmark, a noble young prince sought to avenge his father’s death while asking himself some pretty tough questions along the way …’

  This is why we’ve sent the children to schools where they’ll be hot-housed, so they can hurry up and learn to read to themselves. And it’s starting to work already, up to a point. Lawrence will read Lydia a few pages – of something pretty infantile – just to show that he can do something she can’t. But it only lasts for a few minutes. So, until they’re completely self-sufficient, one way to keep control over bedtime reading is to make up our own stories, as both my parents – effortlessly, it seemed – used to do. As well as spinning fictions out of thin air, my mother told tales from Greek myths, opera and folklore, although looking back on it she did rather tend towards the macabre. She was very keen on Tosca, and I can remember the sinking feeling after the firing squad scene, when the lover didn’t get up. She was also quite fond of Cupid and Psyche, in which Psyche is tricked into losing Cupid for ever by his jealous mother Venus, and then there were her versions of reports by Mayhew, the pioneering Victorian journalist also not known for his happy endings. I’ve never forgotten the interview with the infant watercress seller, who could not play in the park because she had to work from dawn till dusk for a few farthings, or starve. The fact that the park outside in which she stood was our own playground, made it all the more heart-rending.

  My father, being less intellectual, created cheerier narratives such as the story of Mr Today and his friends – Mr Today’s body was a calendar which he flipped over every morning – who went on a journey through the Forest of Feelings to the Palace of Pleasure, which was guarded by fierce birds named after an – at the time – well-known brand of shampoo. The saga continued over many nights, taking whichever direction he fancied at the time. At our urgings he wrote some of it down, but we couldn’t understand why it was never finished.

  Because it’s bloody exhausting, that’s why, improvising a story on the spot, then trying to recall the exact details on subsequent nights. On holiday at the seaside I have a go, but the best I can manage is a kind of imperious, superannuated mermaid, a bit like Margaret Thatcher with a tail. The Sea-Fairy Queen has sea horses for servants and I invent her as a way to stop the children running along the sea wall and falling onto the rocks on the other side. I tell them she’ll push them off the wall if they disobey, because she owns the beach.

  Bizarrely, they like the idea of this scaly despot, and I am forced to think up more adventures for her, such as setting impossible tasks for her daughter’s suitors and so on. But the effort wears me out. Peter does a little better, with improvised meanderings that involve Lawrence and Lydia and whatever objects – a flying boat, a diamond potty, a chocolate tree – that they want him to include. But this too cannot be kept up for long. So, guiltily, we resort to tapes. But these do not produce the hoped-for results; Lydia likes Puffin Poems, while Lawrence will only be quiet for The Greek Myths. Fights break out over whose turn it is to choose, so that when we come up for final kisses, Theseus and the Minotaur pales by comparison. I yell: ‘GO TO SLEEEEP!!!’

  And, eventually, they do.

  ‘Why read the Twelve Labours of bloody Hercules when you can live it,’ says Peter, reeling out of their room.

  Around this time, I see a copy of My Family and Other Animals in a charity shop which – due to my previous indifference to the charms of the furry and feathered fraternity – I’ve never read. It suits us perfectly. Most of the characters are totally self-absorbed, especially the sneering Larry, who complains constantly and sets the house on fire, and Leslie, who wants to shoot dear little Gerry’s pets. Gerry reminds me of Lawrence; he’s lately begun stopping to examine spiders and shield bugs on the way to school, and we have a stag beetle in our salt dish, though it hasn’t moved for a while.

  ‘Do stag beetles like salt, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, but not that much.’

  The whole Durrell household has so captivated me that I desperately want to be Mrs D, who drifts through the chaos without ever losing her temper, and have started to fantasize about moving to Corfu in the 1950s. Eventually, though, even this literary treat starts to pall. They lose interest in Gerry’s last tutor, a hunchbacked, pathological liar and like Sheherezade, we have to come up with a new plot, or die.

  Thank God we’ve still got so many of our own childhood favourites. Catherine Storr’s Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf I have kept for over thirty years. Polly and the Wolf have a relationship characterized by humour and ambivalence. The Wolf tries to be brilliant and predatory, but is stupid and lazy. He comes round on various pretexts to try and eat her, but she always outwits him. She feels slightly sorry for him, though, a bit like Lisa Simpson with Homer. Indeed, the sitcommy quality of their escapades goes down well, and, emboldened by my success with Polly, I decide to try and train them to like everything else by the same writer.

  Here’s my old copy of Lucy, a girl who wants to be a boy, and to prove herself catches a gang of burglars. The only problem comes when she stows away in their van and ends up having to escape from their hideout.

  ‘But of course you wouldn’t do this, would you?’ I point out.

  ‘We would if the burglars were bad.’

  ‘Well, no, you see, because it might be dangerous. It would be dangerous.’

  ‘But Lucy can do it.’

  It was written, of course, in 1962.

  In Lucy Runs Away, she gets so sick of not being a boy that she gets a train all the way to Cornwall – again by herself – and outwits the guard who thinks she’s escaping her cruel parents and offers to call the welfare. On the beach she saves an old man from drowning by calling the lifeguard, but I rather overshadow this triumph by emphasizing the risks inherent in getting trains to distant places without adults. At least nowadays they’re so often delayed the parents would easily catch up. But I feel denigrating Lucy’s autonomy is a pity, because I do want them to be independent – not least so I can have some of my life to myself while I’m young enough to enjoy it. Anyhow, it’s with my next choice that I get out of my depth.

  Polly, the Giant’s Bride is about a young girl on holiday with her family in Birling Gap who meets a giant. He starts off politely enough, by giving her a stone bracelet and ring. But the ring and bracelet won’t come off, and then he starts sending her horrible, creepy notes. In other words, he’s an enormous stalker. ‘Eights and Over’ says the blurb on the back, not, as in Lydia’s case, ‘Five And Under’ – i.e. four. I have a sinking feeling as I read it, for Polly, the Giant’s Bride is, I remember now, absolutely terrifying.

  Lydia’s sitting bolt upright in her bed. Her face is becoming more and more anxious; she’s nearly crying. No, she’s not, she’s – gripped, and wants to hear it again. And – again. Thank God it does actually have a happy ending, and the heroine is not assaulted by a man who jumps out from behind the cliffs with an unfeasibly large cock.

  Shaken by my lack of judgement, I over-correct, and try to repair the damage with Robin, which though by the same author
is the polar opposite of Polly, written in a completely different style, with long passages of description and very little action except towards the end, when Robin rescues a storm-tossed ship by dialling the coastguard, all thanks to his magic shell. You see what I mean? He is ever so slightly soppy. And inevitably by chapter three I am skipping more and more, and flipping the pages furtively to see if there might be a helicopter chase or machine-gun attack I’d forgotten. But no, Robin continues to go for walks and examine his magic shell, to not entirely surprising taunts from his older brother and sister. So I resort to trying to make the thing more exciting by varying the modulation of my voice. However this doesn’t help much, as I find that yelling the line, ‘“ARE YOU MAGIC?!!” he asked the shell!’ only irritates my audience more.

  Then I find our copy of Roald Dahl’s Boy. The dead mouse in the sweetie jar is possibly the most famous bit, but they like even better the section in which Roald’s nose is torn off while being driven by his sister, in the days when you bought a car and then taught yourself to drive. Being squeamish, I have to delegate this bit to Peter, or read while looking away. The same goes for the removal of Roald’s adenoids – with no anaesthetic – and the chapter where poor Ellis is stabbed by the doctor lancing his boil. In fact, the whole book is full of people being hurt in various appalling ways. It is ideal for children.

  Peter and I discuss this factor over a bottle one night, and feel that they’re bound to enjoy the sequel, Going Solo, which takes the writer from England to East Africa. But what we’ve forgotten, having last read it pre-parenthood, is that halfway through, there’s a murder. We’re all right with the servant’s wife being grabbed by a lion, because she jumps out of its mouth, dusts down her dress and walks away. But as I read on, I get a bit of a feeling that something fairly unpleasant is about to happen with a sword. It’s funny; you’d think you’d remember someone being decapitated. Hearing that war has been declared, Dahl’s brave and loyal servant Mdisho is desperate to help. When Dahl returns to the house and finds his sword missing, he rightly suspects the worst. Mdisho has gone to the house of a much-hated local German and ‘cut through his neck so deeply that his whole head fell forward and dangled onto his chest.’ I skim ahead, and doing some pretty swift editorial swerving, manage to cut straight to the jaunty dialogue:

  ‘“To me you are a great hero,” I said.’

  ‘Why? Why is he, Mummy?’

  ‘Er, he’s killed a German. A German baddie.’

  ‘Is he a Nazi?’

  They’ve seen Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, another dubious choice on my part, as the phone rang when the baddies’ faces melted and I failed to fast-forward in time.

  ‘He’s a German Nazi,’ explains Lawrence wearily to his sister.

  ‘I know how to kill Nazis!’ says Lydia helpfully. ‘You buy a bagel, and cut it in half and put foxglove seeds all round the circle, then they die.’

  And they go to sleep, comforted by thoughts of Nazis eating Jewish snacks laced with digitalis.

  When I put the book back, I notice Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams, the dark, post-Freudian novella about a girl stuck in bed with flu on her tenth birthday who draws a house which in her sleep becomes real. There are stones all around it which in the dreams grow tall and menacing. She meets a boy in the house and when they both become trapped by the stones –which now have eyes – they have to try and escape. ‘Phallic symbols, of course,’ said my mother, which luckily didn’t spoil it for me. When I first read it over thirty years ago, it scared the living shit out of me. Suitable for ages four and five? Well, they can always sleep with the light on. Someone else will have to read it to them, though.

  In the middle of the night, Peter says: ‘Keep still! What are you doing?’

  In vain I am changing position, thinking of the head dangling on the chest.

  20 Don’t Say Butt, Say Bum

  At Lawrence’s school, the standard of reading is scarily high. But as he’s got nothing to compare it with, he seems not to notice. He has to do ten minutes at home every night, which makes a welcome alternative to fighting with Lydia. He’s moved up to Year 1, where instead of the cuddly-cosy Nursery, he’s in a labyrinthine jumble of buildings, and a regime of lining up in the playground behind his teacher at the start of the day. Parents may not come into the classrooms. If I wait to watch him line up, I get a lump in my throat so I leave before. But if he’s not actually playing with anyone I get a lump in my throat as well, so I have to wait until he is – or try and put him together with another boy so I can leave without breaking into tears.

  At home time we queue outside. One day I get there to be greeted by his new teacher, with a face like doom, saying that Lawrence has left his toy in the Wrong Place. They are allowed to bring a small toy – not a Game Boy, not a guided missile – and named. They recommend a tennis ball, the one thing we mothers don’t give them because of its tendency to bounce over the wall onto the railway line, causing Eurostar drivers to think they’re being attacked by miniature versions of Barnes Wallis. Lawrence has brought a Bionicle, the wrong size and unnamed, with a removable – losable – brain. We’ve played brain transplants with it going up the road.

  ‘I’ve lost the brain!’ he wails. I know how he feels.

  ‘Could Lawrence just look for his brain?’ I can’t resist asking. She is not amused. Of course, she could be asking herself why she chose a job dealing with six year olds. Personally, I’d rather dig coal.

  ‘It was not in the Toy Tray,’ she says, sounding like a Colditz guard who’s just found your tunnel. I half expect the next line to be, ‘So he’s been shot. You may collect the body from the Main Hall. Please ensure it is named.’ We retrieve the brain from its refuge under the radiator, and flee.

  Then someone, a parent, complains about Lawrence to the school. He has slapped their child, and they haven’t had a quiet word – they’ve written a letter. That’s one stop short of legal. The teacher tells me quite kindly. She probably feels a bit sorry for me, lumbered with a psychopath. I am mortified. I tell him off all the way down the road, round the corner and up to the news-agent’s. Then it occurs to me to ask him for his version.

  ‘Lawrence, did you slap someone?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pxxx. But he kicked me first!’ One down, two to go.

  ‘OK, and did you slap or hit anyone else?’

  ‘Txxx. But he punched me! Just leave me alone, will you?!’ But he didn’t do it first. OK, well … um. I suddenly realize I don’t know what my strategy is. Has he been wrongly accused? Should he stand there and take it?

  ‘If anyone’s playing too rough, don’t hit them back, just – move away from them, OK?’

  ‘OK, Mummy.’

  ‘And if it goes on, tell a teacher.’

  ‘O-kaaay!’

  ‘I’ve got to the bottom of it,’ I tell the teacher confidently. ‘It was Pxxx and Txxx, and clearly there was silliness on both sides.’

  ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid the letter wasn’t about either of them.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ She isn’t.

  ‘Look, it was a new boy, one not used to going to school. He probably isn’t used to the rough and tumble of the playground.’

  ‘So you’re saying the mother over-reacted?’

  ‘A bit, possibly, yes.’

  ‘And you won’t tell me who?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  How dare some over-protective –twat – write letters about my child! Right! I bet it’s the one who’s just moved back here from America – infected, no doubt, by their ludicrous culture of blaming. These are the sort of people who sue God because they think they should be entitled to avoid death. Yes, yes, it must be her! Recently I’ve noticed that the mother’s been a bit stand-offish. She always used to come up and talk to me; now she seems not to see me. Adopting my softly-softly, FBI-on-Valium approach, I ask Lawrence if he’s had a fight with her son. />
  ‘Oh, yes – we’ve had about twenty fights.’

  ‘But are you still friends?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Right, that’s it. He’s quite breezy about the whole thing. But I – I, on the other hand – am affronted. How dare this woman attack my child – and in print?! In my head I go up to her in the playground, poke her in the chest and ask her just what the bloody hell she thinks she’s playing at. We’ve never had complaints from anyone. My son’s never been in trouble in his life. If her son can’t cope with school, maybe he should stay at home. And she can piss off as well. In a gathering of middle-class mummies in hairbands, I have turned into a hard-faced cow with no tights and a tattoo, smoking and shoving sweets at the baby while threatening an innocent person with actual bodily harm. Well, in my head.

  Peter thinks I’m over-reacting.

  ‘Of course I don’t like it when someone – I don’t even know who it is – complains about me and … well, how would you like it?’

  ‘Lawrence.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘They complained about Lawrence, not you.’

  ‘Yeah?! So?’

  ‘It’s not happening to you. And anyway, he’s fine. Look at him.’

  True, he is contentedly running a toy car down a cardboard poster tube. But I am not satisfied. When we next visit Peter’s sister, I demand an explanation. She runs a centre for ‘impossible’ children, for God’s sake; she must have the answer!

  ‘I mean, three different boys. What’s going on?’

  ‘Boys fight,’ she says.

  ‘That’s it? That’s the entire sum of your thirty years’ experience?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I thought you knew stuff.’

  ‘Not really. I have made sticky chicken, though.’

  ‘And you think that solves everything, do you?’

  Peter has his Objective voice on.

  ‘It’s good you’ve married into a family which doesn’t panic.’