Meanwhile Judy and David were now separated. In return for the deeds to their home, a pretty detached house opposite Manchester Grammar School in Old Hall Lane, David was freed of any future financial responsibilities for the boys. I had promised to share these, and the mortgage, with Judy. A lot of trust was involved on all sides and later I had to repeat my pledges to a judge in the family courts.
Meanwhile there was the pressing question of how to introduce myself to Tom and Dan, now seven, as a permanent fixture in their lives. Judy and I decided that after a series of days out together–at the end of which I modestly returned to my nearby flat–we should advance matters by renting a holiday cottage in Cornwall, where the boys could get used to me being around at bedtime and for breakfast. If all went well, I would move in to Old Hall Lane when we got back.
I finally got the roof rack bolted on at about one in the morning and crept into the spare room with my flat G&T. This was it, then. Moment of truth, and all that. Tomorrow–no, today–I would assume a hands-on paternal role for the first time. David, of course, was the boys’ father–and a constant and crucial force in their lives to this day–but I was on the final descent to touchdown on what a friend in similar circumstances called ‘Planet Steppy’.
I knew from those dumped reference books that there were no reliable guides or maps; I would have to find my own way, and I fought back a sudden frisson of panic.
This was no time to go flaky on a mother and her two boys.
We broke the journey from Manchester to Cornwall at a small family hotel in Somerset, close to the village where I’d received the news of my father’s death. I wondered what he would have made of his son’s great big adventure; a holiday to the West Country and the start of a whole new chapter in my life. I think he would have been intrigued. He certainly would have been relieved to see that I was at last driving a Ford.
‘We mustn’t sleep in the same room tonight,’ Judy told me firmly as we checked in. ‘I think it’d be a really good idea if you share with the boys. They’ll think it’s fun, all guys together. I’ll take a single.’
Most of the conversation at dinner that evening was taken up with comparing the relative merits of superheroes. Judy and David must have heard it all a hundred times before but at least I was fresh to the debate and engaged with mostly unfeigned enthusiasm. Judy stifled a yawn.
‘OK, boys, that’s it. Cornwall tomorrow, bed now. You know where your room is–I’ll be up to tuck you in in a minute. So will Richard.’
I looked at her as they disappeared up the stairs. ‘So…how d’you think it’s going so far?’
‘If I’d realised you knew so much about Batman, Spiderman and the Green Goblin I’d never have agreed to marry you. Seriously, darling, it’s going better than I could have hoped. Don’t feel you have to try too hard with them, though. When you’re fed up talking about bloody superheroes, just tell them.’
‘Er…right, I will.’
I didn’t tell her I’d kept my best stuff about Spiderman back for the next round.
I look back now on those ten days in Cornwall with a kind of reverence. They were among the most perfect days of my life. The August sunshine was absurdly extravagant; we lived under a bowl of brilliant blue from dawn to dusk. At night we and the boys would lie out on the little lawn in front of our cottage and watch satellites coursing silently between the stars. Meteorites flared brightly as they rushed to their doom, and once, a tumbling green shooting star eerily lit our upturned faces.
During the days, cornfields that crowded to the sea cliffs shone bright yellow in the sun, and great clouds of dust rose like smoke as the giant combines brought in the harvest. Despite the warm nights we lit log fires and candles and read the boys Cornish ghost stories and legends.
One sultry afternoon Judy took a siesta and I took her sons to Lantic Bay, one of the most stunning cliff-beaches in Britain. There is no access by car and we hiked the mile or so to the steep, rocky path that plunges down from the dizzy cliffs that half-circle the sandy cove. When we got to the bottom it was low tide and we plucked baby mussels from the exposed rocks, planning to simmer them with onions and wine and cream in a home-made moules marinière. Dan, at seven, was already something of a gastronome. He’d try anything on a restaurant menu and never forgot what it was called.
Then I had second thoughts–specifically, thoughts about shellfish poisoning–and we dropped the little creatures back in their rock pool. Years later I harvested Lantic’s mussels again, and this time defiantly took them home and cooked them. They were delicious.
It was the first time I had spent more than a few minutes alone with the twins. Until now, our relationship had been conditioned, to a certain extent, by their mother’s presence. This didn’t occur to me until we were clambering back up the cliffs to get to our car, and I reviewed the past few hours. We’d had a good time…hadn’t we?
‘Had a good time, boys?’ I shouted after them as they raced each other to the stile at the top of the path.
‘Yes!’ they yelled over their shoulders.
Mind you, I thought, you can’t go wrong if you put a boy on a beach.
That night we had a barbecue and after the boys had gone to bed, stuffed with my best burned sausages, Judy and I took our drinks out into the cottage’s little garden.
‘How did it go today with the boys?’
I shrugged. ‘Unselfconsciously, I guess. We had fun.’
‘Did they talk about their dad?’
‘Yes, a bit. Not to make a point or anything, I don’t think–they were just telling me about stuff they do with him. It was fine, honestly.’
The rental on our cottage ran out, but none of us wanted to go home so we squeezed an extra couple of days out of our holiday and checked into a hotel at nearby Talland Bay. They only had their two most expensive rooms left, but we took them anyway, mouthing not entirely unfeigned horror at each other about the cost when the receptionist’s back was turned. Next day, in the hotel pool, Tom and Dan shouted across to two new friends they had made.
‘How much did your room cost? Ours cost a hundred pounds!’
Mortifying.
Our almost dreamlike interlude over, we rolled back into Manchester on a Sunday evening and I carried everyone’s bags back into the house in Old Hall Lane.
‘Right…well…that’s everything, I think…I’ll just, er…’
The twins looked up at me in surprise.
‘Aren’t you staying?’
I looked at their mother. ‘What do you think?’
Judy smiled. ‘I think that would be fine.’
One morning at breakfast, after a couple of weeks at Old Hall Lane, Dan asked through a mouthful of Ready Brek: ‘Is it all right that Tom and me call you Richard?’
‘Yes, of course. You can call me whatever you want. Why?’
‘Cos some of our friends at St James’s’–a primary school at the end of the road where the boys went–‘have stepdads too and they call them Daddy, but that’s what we call our Daddy.’
‘I know. Maybe your friends’ real fathers don’t see them any more, not like your daddy does. I think you should just carry on calling me Richard.’
‘I know,’ said Tom. ‘We can call you Steppy.’
The boys thought this was highly amusing, so Steppy I was for a month or two before the joke waned, and then we went back to Richard.
We were a daily presence in each other’s lives now, so it was a huge stroke of fortune that we just happened to get along right from the start. I thought the boys were funny, good company, and interesting. Our holiday in Cornwall had been an inspired idea (Judy’s) and a useful dress rehearsal for this new play in which we were all cast, a production that now seemed set to run daily until further notice.
There was almost a first-night disaster. We’d unpacked and Judy sent the boys to run their evening bath, a job they insisted on doing for themselves. After a couple of minutes there was a yelp from upstairs and Dan ran to the banisters.<
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‘Richard, there’s a massive spider in the bath. Come and get it, please.’
I grabbed a thick magazine and went upstairs to do my duty.
But there was to be no execution that night. The boys were horrified when I prepared to crush the impressively large creature crouching near the plughole.
‘No! You mustn’t kill it! Daddy never kills them! You have to pick it up and throw it out of the window.’
I loathed spiders. Not quite phobic about them, I nevertheless couldn’t go to sleep in a bedroom with one on the wall. It had to be despatched before lights out.
The prospect of reaching down and picking this monster up with my bare hands was stomach-churning. But it was clearly a test sent by God. ‘So you want to be a stepfather, do you, matey? Let’s see how you handle this, then…their real father could…’
Fuck, I had no choice. ‘Right, well, if that’s what Daddy does, I’d better do the same.’ I opened the window, and considered the spider. It considered me. It looked rather smug now, I thought, still hesitating.
‘Go on! We want our bath!’
Bugger it. I reached down, grabbed the creature by the legs and hurled it out of the window in one sweeping motion.
‘There. All done.’ I swaggered out of the bathroom.
Downstairs, I boasted to Judy. ‘You know I hate spiders? Well I just picked up an enormous one with my bare hands. I didn’t think I had it in me. I think I might have actually cured my fear of them. I–’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. David did it all the time and never made a fuss. Honestly…’
Trickier to handle than spiders in the bath was the potentially fraught area of discipline. I dreaded hearing the words: ‘You can’t tell us what to do, you’re not our dad,’ and in those early weeks and months I trod very carefully, leaving most laying down of the law to their mother, although this was pretty much the normal state of affairs anyway. The boys were used to fairly long periods without their father at home–he was a successful documentary programme maker and was often abroad filming–and Judy was very much the one in charge.
In any case, I had to accept that I was new at the parenting game and had a lot to learn. I took my cues from her.
One of the first things I noticed was how adroit she was at avoiding confrontation. Tom was going through a phase of developing mild addictions to foods and his current obsession was with the fruit drink Five Alive. He could get through cartons of the stuff in one sitting, if allowed. I suggested not buying any more for a while, but Judy disagreed.
‘He’d just move on to something else. It’s only a phase; he has to learn self-control, that’s all.’
But the lure of Five Alive was too much for seven-year-old Tom. Like the Secret Lemonade Drinker in the TV ads, he was drawn to the fridge like a moth to the flame. One night, soon after the boys had been put to bed, stealthy noises could be heard coming from the kitchen. Judy went in and there was the criminal, dressed in Superman pyjamas, guzzling his fix straight from the carton.
‘Tom!’
He leaped in the air like a startled cat and raced up the stairs to bed. Judy called after him: ‘And no more tonight, Tom, that’s an order. And stay in bed.’
A few minutes later there was a creak from the stairs. We crept to the door and peered out. It was Superman again, tiptoeing with pantomime steps across the hall to the kitchen. Judy swept out like an inshore patrol boat intercepting contraband.
This time the raiding party was escorted to the room he shared with his brother and given a firm telling-off. But a few minutes after Judy had come down again, there was a knock on the living-room door. It was Dan.
‘Tom won’t let me go to sleep. He keeps crying and shouting, “I want Five Alive.” It’s giving me a headache.’
We went upstairs. The noises coming from the boys’ bedroom made it sound as if Tom had been left lashed to the rack; sobs and bellows interspersed with the mangled mantra: ‘Wa–nt–Fi–ve–Al-Al-Alive!’
I turned to Judy, trying to keep a straight face. ‘It’s a battle of wills. This is your Cuban missile crisis; you can’t blink first. Ask yourself: what would Kennedy have done?’
‘Shut up, I’m trying to think…’
Hearing our voices, Tom ratcheted up the volume. ‘F-F-Five Alive!’
‘You can’t give in to him, Judy.’
She brightened. ‘No–but I can negotiate, like your precious Kennedy. Go get the bloody Five Alive and an eggcup.’
By the time I was back Tom had stopped wailing and was sitting up in bed, hiccupping and sniffling. Judy sat next to him, holding his hand. She turned to me with her serious face on. ‘I’ve explained to Tom why he can’t keep drinking Five Alive all the time and he’s promised to only have two glasses a day from now on. To show we trust him, I’ve said he can have an eggcup of it before he goes to sleep tonight. Pour it out, would you?’
So the brimming thimble was solemnly handed over and Tom took five minutes to slowly sip it dry.
Downstairs again, I asked Judy if she thought the Five Alive pledge would hold.
She seemed surprised at my question. ‘Of course. The boys always keep their promises. You’ll learn that for yourself.’
When did I realise that I had come to love the boys? As far as I can remember, I think it was three or four months after I stopped killing spiders. We’d all driven down from Manchester to my mother’s house in rural Essex. She’d remarried a couple of years earlier and now lived with her new husband in his beautiful Tudor farmhouse just outside Danbury. It looked like something out of the property pages of Country Life.
My mother had met Jim in 1981, four years after my father died. She had been very lonely. So was Jim–his wife had died a few years previously, coincidentally of heart trouble. My mother had called to give me the news of her engagement as I was dashing out with a film crew to cover a breaking news story. I took the call in the studio reception.
‘You’ll have to be quick, Mum, I’m on a story. What is it?’
‘Have I mentioned Jim at all?’
‘Uncle Jim? What about him?’
She laughed. ‘No, another Jim…we’ve been seeing each other a bit…well, quite a lot.’
I could guess what was coming.
‘Anyway, last night he asked me to marry him and I said…well, I said yes. Do you mind?’
Did I mind? I was hugely relieved. I was still working up north, for Yorkshire Television at that time, and felt incredibly guilty that I didn’t get back to see my mother more often. My blessings on her impending nuptials were extravagant.
Sadly the marriage was not to last. Jim died suddenly of a stroke in 1987. My mother would be a widow a second time.
But not for the last. A few years later, she met and married her third husband, Eric. Eric was an ex-commander in the Metropolitan Police. He made my mother very happy, which was a blessing because her marriage to Jim had, in the end, turned sour. I never really knew exactly what went wrong between them, but shortly before Jim’s stroke my mother was actively considering divorce.
Things must have been pretty bad. When I arrived at her house for Jim’s funeral, she came out in the drive to meet me. She was in her widow’s weeds and sundry mourners peered glumly from the windows of the house.
I walked across the gravel to greet her, stretching out my arms in sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry, Mum…’
She embraced me and at the same time whispered in my ear, ‘Meet the merry widow!’
Blimey. That bad.
Eric restored her faith in marriage. But they would have barely a decade together before cancer took him from her.
It was the first time Judy or my new stepsons had met my mother. I think, to be honest, I’d been putting it off until everything at Old Hall Lane had settled down. Everyone, including me, was slightly nervous as the car crunched up the gravel driveway and I pipped the horn to let our hosts know we’d arrived. I turned to look at the anxious little faces in the back.
‘Don’t worry
. She’s really nice. You’ll like her–and Jim.’
‘Is Jim your steppy?’
‘Well, yes, but as I was explaining on the way here, it’s a bit different from how it is with me and you. I was all grown-up when Jim met my mum and they decided to get married. I’ve never lived with him, like I do with you. He’s a sort of…well, friend. I don’t love him like I do you two.’
There. It was said.
And the twins merely took it as their due, nodding their understanding as they climbed out of the car. Casually telling them I loved them had made no more impact than if I’d said the sun was shining or today was Tuesday. That was because, I realised as I grabbed our cases and followed Judy and her sons into the old half-timbered house, my feelings for them had gradually become a fact of life as indisputable as the weather or the date.
Later, at dinner, Tom and Dan were on their unasked-for best behaviour. They were studiously polite, avoided the usual opportunities to bicker between themselves, and did their best to join in the conversation. When they offered to help clear away the plates and had disappeared for a few moments into the kitchen with my mother and her husband, I turned to Judy.
‘Aren’t the boys being amazing? Dinner was like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life…I’ve never known them be so good. I’m so proud of them.’
‘That’s because they want you to be. They may be little but they know this is a big deal for you. I’m incredibly proud of them too.’
Our first Christmas together came and went. The boys divided their time between us and their father, who was destined himself to remarry and have more children. Judy hated being apart from her sons, even for a few hours on Boxing Day, but the new arrangement seemed to be working. We both kept our radar alert for any signs of disturbance or unhappiness in the twins, but as the months passed they seemed as happy and tranquil as ever. The kind of rifts and crises in step-family setups that I’d read about and were, according to those glum self-help books, inevitable, refused to materialise. The boys seemed quite stable and there were no reports from their school of any behavioural problems.
Fathers and Sons Page 17