by Owen Booth
Or worse.
And we either want to teach our sons the family business, to pass on to them our smoothly functioning and highly lucrative criminal trades and gangland empires, or we’re determined that they aren’t going to follow in our footsteps. We’re doing all of this (whatever it is that we’re doing, we’re evasive on this point) to ensure that our wonderful sons will never have to.
The criminal dads assemble everyone, fathers and sons, in lock-up garages. They set up interactive whiteboards, walk us all through the job. This is where we enter the building, they explain. This is where we land the boats on the beach. This is where the crooked security guard is paid to look the other way. This is where we cut the wires to the alarm system. This is where we move the decimal point without anyone noticing.
‘What about guard dogs?’ our sons ask. ‘What about the time lock on the vault? What about witnesses? What about the taxman?’
The criminal dads are impressed. They look away, briefly choked up. It’s a proud moment for all of us.
‘And what’s the cardinal rule?’ the criminal dads ask.
‘Snitches get stitches!’ our sons chant in unison.
Later, we’ll promise to visit the criminal dads in prison, re-dedicate ourselves to raising their sons alongside our own as fine and upstanding citizens. We’ll lift a drink to our fallen comrades, pour one out on the ground for them.
We won’t tell our sons about our own brief and not so brief teenage shoplifting careers, our arrests for minor criminal trespass, our minor and not so minor drug offences.
We won’t tell them how you used to be able to rob vending machines with four pieces of sellotape and a five-pound note (it doesn’t work any more, they’ve changed the vending machines now, we’ve tried), we won’t explain how to get into a locked car with a strip of plastic.
And yet.
We still know the blind spots of every security camera in our nearest shopping centre, and how to spot a store detective, and the likelihood of getting away with it at different times of the day on different days of the week. If you were in that sort of business.
Because nobody looks twice at a middle-aged dad.
And we like to keep our hands in.
Glaciers
We’re teaching our sons about glaciers.
We’re explaining how glaciers are formed, how they grow and retreat, how they’ve impacted landscapes and cultures around the world since the end of the last ice age. We’re explaining about U-shaped valleys and truncated spurs and medial and terminal moraines, about Otzi the 5,000-year-old iceman who was discovered frozen in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. We tell our sons what would happen if all the water locked up in glaciers was released by global warming, how sea levels would rise by metres.
We go on a field trip to visit our nearest glacier. We stand on the edge of a crevasse and stare down into the endless blue depths, imagine what it would be like to fall in and be carried along in all that ice, travelling down the valley at a speed of roughly one thousand metres a year.
‘Three hundred years ago,’ we tell our sons, ‘the glacier reached all the way down to the village at the bottom of the valley. And every year it advanced a little bit further. Nothing could stop it. It destroyed crops, fields, even houses. People thought the glacier was possessed by the devil. That it was going to keep growing for ever, that eventually the whole world would be taken over by ice.’
‘So what did they do?’ our sons ask.
‘They had an exorcism. They held a religious ceremony right at the front of the glacier and got the local priest to cast out the demons.’
‘Did they have a human sacrifice?’
‘Where did you learn about human sacrifice?’ we ask.
Our sons shrug.
‘School.’
‘Maybe they sacrificed a goat or something. The Catholic Church wasn’t very big on human sacrifices.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Well, sometime in the eighteenth century the glacier stopped advancing,’ we tell them, ‘and it’s been shrinking ever since.’
It’s true. In pictures from a hundred years ago the glacier is almost a mile further down the valley than it is now. We can even spot the change in the ten years since we were last here.
This is where we came with the mothers of our sons for our last big holiday before we became parents. We rode all the chairlifts and cable cars and went inside the hundred-metre-long cave they dig out of the glacier every summer and took pictures of each other against the walls of ice.
In the pictures the blue light filtering down through the ice makes it look like we’re underwater. And we are so young.
They’ve started covering the surface of the glacier with carpet in the summer now to try to stop it melting away any faster. We wonder if that would work with our relationship with the mothers of our sons. If we’d fallen into a crevasse together on that trip, we realise, we’d still have a good forty or fifty years before we emerged, perfect and hand-in-hand, from the ice at the glacier front.
What Happens When You Get Struck by Lightning
We’re teaching our sons about what happens when you get struck by lightning.
We’re explaining that the earth is hit by a lightning strike approximately fifty times every second, that around a thousand people across the world are struck by lightning every day, that people struck by lightning have, roughly, a one in ten chance of dying.
For comparison, the chance of being killed by bees is roughly one in six million.
‘Do you explode?’ our sons ask. ‘Do your eyes go on fire? Do flames shoot out of the ends of your fingers? Can people see your skeleton, just for a second?’
We’re walking in the forest, spotting trees that have been hit by lightning. There are a surprisingly high number. We’re beginning to wish we’d checked the weather before we came out. There’s a definite ozone tang to the air, and the hairs on our arms are starting to stand up.
‘You’d be likely to get very badly burnt,’ we say, ‘especially at the points where the lightning enters and exits your body. But you don’t normally explode.’
‘What about superpowers?’ our sons ask. ‘Can getting hit by lightning give you superpowers?’
We tell our sons that the after-effects of being hit by lightning can include mood swings, seizures, deafness, memory loss, changes in personality, headaches and chronic pain.
‘Like having children, ha ha!’
We tell them that the best way to avoid being hit by lightning is not to be outside during a thunderstorm, to stay away from bodies of water and objects that conduct electricity – like fences and windmills. And trees. We tell them the story of Roy Sullivan, the American park ranger who held the record for being struck by lightning more times than any other human being. Between 1942 and 1977, we tell them, poor Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning on seven different occasions.
‘Why did he get hit so many times?’ our sons ask.
‘Nobody knows,’ we say, ‘maybe he was just unlucky. He was a park ranger so he did spend a lot of time outdoors.’
‘Maybe he was magnetic,’ our sons say. ‘Maybe he was somehow attracting the lightning. Maybe there was actually metal inside his bones and he didn’t know it. Maybe he was a robot.’
‘It’s possible,’ we say.
We remember reading about Roy Sullivan in the Guinness Book of Records when we were young, remember being touched by the fact that, after surviving seven separate lightning strikes in thirty-five years, he killed himself over an unrequited love affair at the age of seventy-one.
We still don’t know whether to find this wildly romantic, ironic or absurd. We stop walking and turn to our sons, not sure, exactly, what the lesson is here.
And then we all hear the sound of thunder in the distance, and freeze.
The World’s Most Dangerous Spiders
We’re teaching our sons about the world’s most dangerous spiders.
Where they live. The likelihood of being
bitten by one. Their medical significance.
The world’s most dangerous spiders are the Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria nigriventer), the Sydney funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus) and the black widow spider (Latrodectus mactans, and others). These spiders have all been responsible for numerous recorded deaths, although, with the development of antivenins, fatalities are very rare these days.
Other potentially dangerous spiders include the brown recluse spider, the yellow sac spider and the mouse spider. However, as none of these spiders live in northern Europe, we explain to our sons, there’s very little to worry about.
‘Tell us about the time our great-granddad fought a Brazilian wandering spider,’ our sons ask.
So we tell them, again, the story of their great-grandfather’s battle with the Brazilian wandering spider.
We tell them how their great-grandfather used to have a grocer’s shop, where he sold fruit and vegetables and the odd rabbit. We tell them how, one morning, he opened a crate of imported bananas and suddenly found himself confronted by a highly aggressive spider that had accidentally hitched a ride all the way from Brazil. We describe the way the spider reared up in the characteristic warning posture, its front four legs held high to reveal its huge fangs. How it lunged at their great-grandfather. Their great-grandfather, who had survived the First World War despite being blown up and buried in a shell hole for three days and then catching malaria. Their great-grandfather, who was now facing the possibility of meeting his maker in this ludicrous manner, among the smell of overripe South American fruit.
‘And what did he do?’ our sons ask. They’ve never met their great-grandfather. He died thirty years before they were born. We hardly remember him ourselves, although in the pictures taken of him as a young man he looks exactly like us.
‘What do you think he did?’
‘He smashed the spider with the hammer he’d been using to open the banana crates!’ our sons all shout.
‘Exactly!’ we say.
We don’t know how many times we’ve told this story. Our fathers originally told it to us, except in those days nobody had heard of Brazilian wandering spiders, so the spider in the story was a tarantula. These days, tarantulas, as our sons are well aware, aren’t considered to be dangerous at all. They’re also unlikely to be found in crates of bananas.
The story works better, makes more sense with a Brazilian wandering spider. Possibly our sons will replace it with a different species of spider if they ever tell the story to their children. If they ever have children.
If there are still spiders by then.
As well as being one of the most dangerous spiders in the world, the Brazilian wandering spider is also famous for having a bite which causes men to have painful erections that can last for hours.
We don’t tell our sons this.
We don’t think it would add anything to the story.
Friendship
We’re teaching our sons about friendship.
We’re going away for a long weekend in the hills with the same group of male friends we’ve been going away with since we were teenagers. We explain to our sons that it’s important to have relationships with people who’ve known you longer than you’ve known yourself. That it matters to be among people who have no expectations of you.
‘Can we come with you?’ our sons ask.
‘No,’ we tell them.
On the first day of the long weekend we all walk up a hill together, all the middle-aged and nearly middle-aged men. We briefly ask after each other’s families, careers, cars and houses. We look at the sheep, take in the rainy views and the clean air.
Then we spend the evening and the next two days sitting around the rented cottage in our tracksuits, drinking and smoking and taking hallucinogenic drugs and having competitions to see who can do the most chin-ups or eat the most biscuits in one go.
Sometimes we go to the pub across the road.
We don’t discuss our lives, or our worries, or our hopes for the future, or our fears of what happens next. We don’t talk about our money problems or our health. At one point we invent a new version of indoor golf, briefly consider marketing it and becoming rich. We take it in turns to see who can climb to the top of the two-storey stone chimney in the double-height lounge.
Through the windows the endless rain washes the surface of the lake, day and night.
And nobody goes to bed.
Around dawn on the third day somebody notices that Kev has disappeared. We check to see whether he’s fallen asleep in the bath or accidentally locked himself in the cellar. He’s not in the house.
We all put on our boots and stagger outside in the grey half-light. We wander around the fields calling Kev’s name and disturbing the sheep. The wet grass brushes our tracksuit bottoms. The soft rain falls on our faces.
Eventually we find Kev down by the lake, sitting on a rock, looking at pictures of his kids on his phone and crying softly to himself.
Nobody wants to see that.
‘What’s he taken?’ someone asks. ‘What have you taken, Kev?’
‘We all took the same thing,’ says someone else. ‘Didn’t we all take the same thing?’
We all stand around feeling uncomfortable while Kev sobs quietly. A breeze ruffles the surface of the lake. Eventually someone goes to the house and comes back with a cup of tea for Kev.
‘Cup of tea, Kev mate,’ they say.
‘Thanks,’ Kev says, sniffling. He wipes his eyes and gives everyone a weak smile. An embarrassed thumbs-up.
‘I was just, y’know …’ he indicates the hills, the sky, with a sweep of his arm. Holds up the phone with the pictures of his kids.
‘Right,’ we say. ‘Yeah.’
Nobody says anything for a while after that. We smoke our cigarettes, look at the sheep, wonder if the clouds are ever going to clear from the top of the hills.
And then, awkwardly, one by one, we all clap Kev on the shoulder, before trooping back to the house, leaving Kev to pull himself together on his own, in his own time.
Single Mothers
We’re teaching our sons about single mothers.
We’re teaching them to respect, admire and look up to single mothers, particularly the single mothers of their friends and classmates, and to be in awe of their mysterious powers.
We’re warning our sons not to cross the single mothers, not to mess them about, not to wind them up. We’re reminding them to be on their best behaviour when they go round to the houses of their friends who are being raised by single mothers.
‘Whatever you do,’ we say, ‘don’t make them angry.’
The single mothers are all holding down three different jobs and studying for degrees and dealing with their children’s complicated medical conditions and trying to bring up their sons and daughters as well-balanced and polite and confident young men and women.
They haven’t got time for any nonsense from the likes of us.
Standing at the school gates and during school carol concerts and in the park on Sunday mornings we marvel at the single mothers. We’re amazed by their toughness, their bravery, their terrifying improvisational skills.
‘They can do anything,’ say the fathers of the sons of the single mothers, somewhat sheepishly.
They’re hoping this gets them off the hook.
‘Can they do stunts?’ our sons ask.
‘Almost definitely,’ we say.
‘Could they jump off the top of a moving mine cart and grab on to a rope and swing across a river of lava?’
‘If anyone could do that, it would be them.’
‘Could they run down a corridor and keep ducking under a series of spinning blades while diving over sets of spikes that come up from the floor?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise us.’
‘Could they be chased down a hill by a giant boulder and then go over a waterfall in a boat and still survive?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Could they –’
‘Yes,’ we say. ‘Yes, they could.’
At the school gates and during school carol concerts and in the park on Sunday mornings the single mothers get on with things with their usual military precision. They eye us suspiciously, for the fractions of a second that their schedules allow.
We all try to stand or sit a little bit straighter, to look like better fathers.
We loudly remind our sons to have a good day or to just relax and enjoy the show or to not fall off the slide, to remember to drink their water, to always strive to be fine and upstanding citizens.
And we try to overhear what the single mothers are saying to their children.
We wonder what they’re teaching their sons, what terrible secrets we could learn from them about being better men.
The Conquest of the South Pole
We’re teaching our sons about the Conquest of the South Pole.
We’re teaching them about Scott of the Antarctic, and the doomed Terra Nova Expedition, and the heroic Captain Oates walking out of the tent to die in a blizzard in order to give his comrades a better chance of making it home alive, and certain other forms of suicidal English male stoicism that we still find inspiring in spite of our better judgement.
We’re teaching our sons about the considerable superiority of sled dogs over pit ponies as the animal of choice for a journey to the ends of the earth.
‘What about polar bears?’ our sons ask.
‘There are no polar bears in the Antarctic,’ we say. ‘Only penguins and seals.’
‘But could you train a polar bear to pull a sledge?’
‘We don’t –’
‘The polar bears could also protect you from your enemies.’