What We're Teaching Our Sons

by Owen Booth

  ‘What enemies would anyone have at the South Pole?’ we ask.

  ‘Other explorers. People trying to steal your supplies. Your food.’

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘You couldn’t eat the polar bears when they died though,’ our sons remind us. ‘Because polar bear liver contains lethal levels of vitamin A.’

  ‘So it does.’

  We don’t tell our sons about The Worst Journey in the World, when three members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition, including the writer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, spent a month travelling on foot across the continent through the endless polar night in order to collect unhatched emperor penguin eggs for scientific study. After barely surviving horrific blizzards, temperatures of minus 40 degrees, the loss of their tent and most of their teeth, the team eventually returned with just three intact eggs.

  The eggs are still in the Natural History Museum in London.

  We don’t tell our sons that Cherry-Garrard never really recovered from the journey, or from what he saw as his personal failure to save Scott’s team from starving to death on their return from the pole. We don’t tell them about the book that he wrote recounting the journey and its aftermath, which contains the most devastating last line we’ve ever read.

  Inevitably, we wonder how we would have survived in those conditions, how long it would have taken us to give up and surrender. We hope that we would have been inspired to keep going by thinking about our sons, by our determination to see them again.

  But then, loving our sons, we don’t know how we would have found ourselves that far away from them in the first place.

  Of Scott’s team, Edgar Evans, who died on the return from the pole, had three children. Scott had a son, who was only two when his father died.

  Cherry-Garrard, who survived to return to England, get invalided out of the First World War and write his book, never had children. He spent most of his life suffering from chronic depression.

  In the event, the eggs that he and his comrades collected added little to the sum of scientific knowledge.

  Monsters

  We’re teaching our sons about monsters.

  We’re teaching them how to correctly identify zombies, vampires and werewolves, how to avoid or defend themselves against them. How to most effectively kill them, if it comes to that.

  We’re hanging around in graveyards and crypts, on lonely moonlit moors, outside the gates of apparently abandoned castles.

  Naturally, our sons are arguing amongst themselves about the finer details.

  ‘Werewolves don’t just kill you – they turn you into werewolves as well. If you get killed by a werewolf, you come back as a werewolf too.’

  ‘No, that’s vampires. You only turn into a werewolf if you survive a werewolf attack.’

  ‘Vampires don’t turn you into a vampire. They just drink your blood.’

  ‘If a vampire drinks nearly all your blood but you don’t die and then they give you some of their own blood then you become one of the living dead like them.’

  ‘Zombies are the living dead, not vampires. Vampires are the undead.’

  ‘If a zombie bites you, you die and then you turn into a zombie and come back to life. But as a zombie.’

  ‘What would happen if a vampire got bitten by a zombie?’

  ‘A zombie wouldn’t bite a vampire – they only bite people who are alive.’

  ‘Could you have a zombie werewolf? Or a werewolf vampire?’

  ‘What’s the difference between a skeleton and a zombie?’

  Etc.

  We wonder if this is an altogether healthy conversation. It is exactly the kind of thing that we used to discuss with our friends and brothers when we were young, but then, look at us. We’re the sort of men who take their sons wandering through graveyards and across lonely moors and up to the gates of abandoned castles in the middle of the night.

  We’re nowhere near being the sort of fine people that we hope our sons will become.

  And yet we also know that this is the kind of knowledge that most of the mothers of our sons can’t pass on. Given the situation, would they even know how best to employ a hawthorn stake or silver bullets or a sharpened spade, and which monsters to use them against?

  We would. And, surely, that has to count for something.

  The media is reporting that a child has disappeared on the way home from school on the edge of a town a hundred miles away. It’s so rare an occurrence, thank God, that the disappearance is the lead story. An entire village has been mobilised to look for the boy. Everyone is holding their breath. Nobody wants to think about how these things end.

  At some point, we know, we’ll need to talk to our sons about those kinds of monsters, too.

  But not yet. Please, not yet.

  Romance

  We’re teaching our sons about romance.

  We’re explaining about romantic songs and books and poetry, about romantic poets with romantic diseases, about how romance has very little to do with the real, tough, day-to-day business of love.

  ‘For the most part,’ we tell our sons, ‘romance makes people do stupid and desperate things. It makes them lie and cheat and steal and invade other countries and blow things up. For the most part,’ we say, ‘romance is not to be trusted.’

  Our sons nod. They like the bit about stuff getting blown up. They’ve got no interest, not yet, in romance.

  ‘But still …’ we say.

  But still, we’re trying desperately to keep the romance alive between ourselves and the mothers of our sons. In between all the arguments about money and the future and our differing parenting styles and worldviews.

  When we can afford it we take the mothers of our sons away for romantic weekend city breaks to try to recapture the magic, and we spend the whole time talking about our sons.

  We talk about our sons in boutique hotels and restaurants and on the steps of famous tourist attractions. We talk about them while taking in the beautiful views and standing in front of priceless works of art. We reconstruct our entire relationship, again and again, in relation to our sons.

  On the steps of the famous tourist attractions we try to remember what it was that first attracted us to each other. In front of the priceless works of art we worry about how much of our relationship is based on what we’ve already been through, rather than on a mutual vision of the rest of our lives. In the boutique hotels and restaurants we realise we feel like the survivors of a disaster that we can’t move on from, and which nobody who wasn’t there could possibly understand.

  Which is not to say we’re comparing the experience of parenthood to a being in a disaster. Not all of it, certainly.

  We rope our sons into helping us stage a series of grand romantic gestures, to try to win back the distant, tired hearts of their mothers.

  ‘But you said –’

  ‘Never mind what we said.’

  We put together surprise balloon trips, surprise parties and musical performances, organise surprise art installations and events. We book skywriters and ice sculptors and troupes of acrobats. Our sons dress as waiters and ushers and hand out cocktails and canapés while their mothers watch the fabulous sunsets that we’ve arranged and enjoy the feeling of the volcanic sand between their toes.

  Their mothers who we’ve seen suffer and glow and hope and lose and grieve, over and over again, in order just to get this far. Their mothers who will never know how much it cost us to import that volcanic sand.

  And we try to work out how much longer and how well we can rely on all the things we’ve been through together to stop us falling apart.

  Nostalgia

  We’re teaching our sons about nostalgia.

  What it is. Where it comes from. How it was originally diagnosed as a potentially fatal medical condition among seventeenth-century Swiss mercenaries who were suffering from homesickness while fighting in other countries.

  Our sons, we’ve noticed, are incredibly nostalgic. Although not, as yet, in an apparently u
nhealthy way. They’re nostalgic for things that happened a couple of weeks ago, for stuff we did the other day.

  ‘Remember that time the trolls were going to cook the dwarves in that book we read,’ they say. ‘Remember when we made up that joke. Remember how our younger brothers once did that funny thing.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ we say. ‘It was literally yesterday/last night/this morning.’

  ‘Those were the days,’ our sons say.

  And we can’t argue with that.

  As younger men we were almost crushed by nostalgia. From the age of fourteen to at least our early thirties we were constantly trying to recapture whatever feeling it was that we’d previously had at that particular time of year, the last time we’d smelled that perfume, the day we first heard that piece of music. We were obsessed with the changing of the seasons, with fleeting autumn days and mid-summer evenings that went on for ever, with the love affairs we could have had rather than the ones we did. Our idea of perfect happiness was feeling nostalgic for an experience while it was actually still going on.

  We weren’t so good at processing things in the immediate present. We always had too many questions. Consequently, we missed out on half the significant events of our lives even while they were happening to us.

  But, oh, afterwards …

  Naturally, we don’t want this to happen to our sons. We want them to live, as much as possible, in the here and now.

  ‘Look at this beautiful sunset!’ we tell them. ‘Listen to this wonderful song! Enjoy this perfect moment! But, you know, don’t look for too long …’

  We take them with us to meet one of our oldest friends, who is now The Most Nostalgic Man in the World. The Most Nostalgic Man in the World can remember every moment we ever spent together, remember everything we did and said. He lives surrounded by fading diaries and scrap books and ledgers, in a house where it’s always a late October afternoon and the lengthening shadows never seem to move across the walls.

  He drinks too much.

  The Most Nostalgic Man in the World fixes us all a drink and together we reminisce about the old days for a while. We realise that since we’ve become fathers we’ve been mostly too busy to feel nostalgic about anything. We realise that we don’t miss the old days at all.

  Nowadays we fail to live in the moment by worrying about the future instead of the past. We worry constantly about everything that could go wrong, about all the awful things that might happen to our sons or to the mothers of our sons or to us or to the rest of the world, about the possibility that there might be things to worry about that we haven’t even thought of yet.

  We hope we might briefly manage to get the balance right one day, before our sons escape from us for ever.

  Practical Life Skills

  We’re teaching our sons about practical life skills.

  We’re teaching them how to shave, how to iron a shirt, how to deal with swarms of wasps and bees. We’re teaching them how to wire plugs and change tyres and put up shelves, how to bleed radiators and install washing machines. We’re bringing in experts to teach them how to buy suits, how to wear a bow tie, what the seven successful habits of the world’s most highly effective people are.

  The younger sons complain that they’re too young for most of this.

  ‘You’re never too young!’ we shout enthusiastically, trying to ignore the stings of the bees and wasps.

  We line our sons up in the empty car park, our massed ranks of sons, and we time them with stopwatches as they assemble kitchen cabinets and repair leaking taps and strip lawnmower engines. Then we get them to do it faster, to do it blindfold, to do it with one hand tied behind their backs, to do it in rain and snowstorms and high winds.

  Our sons don’t see the point of any of this, don’t see why they need these skills. They already have their own YouTube channels and long-term consumer engagement strategies. They upload films of themselves reviewing Lego sets and action figures and playing computer games and doing stunts in the back garden, and then sell their huge audiences to eager advertisers. They’re already planning cross-platform multi-media projects involving books, film series, toy tie-ins and video game franchises.

  Dealing with failed do-it-yourself projects and swarms of angry insects plays no part in their glorious future.

  Our sons hand us our scripts, ask us to go away and learn our lines, give us a couple of days to practise our routines. Then they film us tripping over chairs and falling off collapsing ladders and walking into closed doors and stumbling through plate-glass windows and being knocked down by cars and accidentally getting set on fire, again and again and again, until they’re happy they’ve got what they need.

  And we’re proud, as we head off to be treated for our concussions and burns and lacerations, our broken arms and legs, just to have played some small part in their success.

  Just to have been of use.

  Teenage Girls

  We’re teaching our sons about teenage girls.

  How to understand them. How to be friends with them. How to predict their varied moods and movements.

  Our sons are confused by the teenage girls, just like everyone else. Nobody knows what to do with them.

  We take our sons to places where we can observe teenage girls in their natural habitat – shopping centres and pop concerts, bus stops and libraries, Olympic and Paralympic events, the high desert and the endless steppes. We attempt to blend in with the crowds or the surroundings, pull our hats down over our eyes or camouflage ourselves as rocks, while our sons take hasty notes.

  The teenage girls pay no attention to us or our sons. They’re too busy shopping and enjoying each other’s company, or having mass brawls over stolen boyfriends, or singing along to/performing number one records, or setting fire to suburban bus shelters, or having their first kiss, or writing award-winning poems, or learning to break horses and hunt with eagles, or winning Olympic and Paralympic medals.

  Our sons stare, open-mouthed, at the teenage girls.

  ‘What even are they?’ they ask.

  ‘They’re the future,’ we tell them, ‘just like you.’

  We ask the teenage girls if they can answer some questions. Our older sons stand in the background looking horrified and frantically pantomiming ‘NO!’ We don’t blame them. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen we were so nervous around girls our age – even the ones we’d known since primary school – that we couldn’t even speak in their presence. And look at us now.

  It turns out that the teenage girls are too busy to talk to us at the moment, what with all the shopping and gang fights and hunting with eagles.

  We take our sons to meet friends of ours who are the fathers of teenage girls. The fathers of the teenage girls sit on their porches, cradling their shotguns as we come down the street. They’re twitchy and tired. Their daughters are out late again.

  ‘That’s far enough,’ the fathers of teenage girls tell us, as we reach their front yards. They ask us what we want with the teenage girls.

  ‘Our sons would like to ask them some questions,’ we say. ‘To try to understand their perspective on life, what makes them tick, that sort of thing.’

  The fathers of the teenage girls look our sons up and down. Squint their eyes at them. Frown.

  ‘Better they don’t,’ they say.

  ‘But if we could just –’

  The fathers of the teenage girls shake their heads, gesture with their shotguns.

  ‘Move along now.’

  We turn to apologise to our sons, to come up with another plan, to suggest we all head home, but most of them have already disappeared into the sprawling darkness.

  Into the giant and wonderful possibilities of the teenage summer night.

  The Abominable Snowman

  We’re teaching our sons about the Abominable Snowman.

  We’re telling them about the giant ape-men that feature in the legends of many cultures across the world. We’re explaining to them about the Yeti, the Mi-Goh, the Orang
Pendek, the Sasquatch, the wild-man of the forest. We’re taking them with us on scientific expeditions to the Himalayas that end in disaster as an unidentified creature picks off the members of our party, one by one.

  Something that comes out of the blizzard. Something taller than a man …

  Our younger sons love the idea of the Abominable Snowman, of Bigfoot, of the Incredible Hulk. They love the idea of pretty much anyone or anything that smashes stuff up and gets away with it. They have adopted these creatures as avatars of their own rage – at their too-early bedtimes, at the food they don’t want to eat, at the gigantic unfairness of the world.

  Our sons are magnificent in their rage. Their fury is awe-inspiring. We glory in their wrath in a way we were never allowed to glory in our own.

  But, all the same, nobody wants them still to be carrying this amount of anger around by the time they become grown men. And, in the meantime, we can’t allow them to keep smashing the house up and blaming it all on mythical beasts.

  ‘Why do you think the Abominable Snowman is still so angry at the world?’ we ask our sons, as we hold them in our arms in the middle of the trashed bedroom, again, and try to calm them down.

  ‘Nobody understands him,’ our sons say, between anguished sobs. ‘Nobody listens. And he’s probably cold.’

  ‘What do you think would cheer him up?’

  ‘Maybe being allowed to do whatever he wanted,’ our sons say, sniffling. They look up at us. ‘Maybe not having to clean his teeth so often?’

  We sit on the edge of the bed with our young sons in our laps, tuck their heads under our chins, and together we listen to the howling of the wind – and whatever else is out there, in the night and the snow – until they go to sleep.

  We stare down at our sons’ troubled brows and consider our options, wonder what other parenting techniques we might be able to adopt, think about how we can set a better example to them.