The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  The battlefield of marriage has a lot of casualties, many of them children too young to be enlisted.

  We also serve who only stand and wait

  Fathers have feelings, obviously. There are women who say: ‘So do fish.’ And it’s an easy mistake to make. Certainly halfway through their first year on earth my feelings for the boys were still formal. I can only remember one real emotional reaction when Hugo was born: ‘Well, I don’t have to worry about the purpose of life any more.’ That had been a problem for me, incidentally.

  Of course, from the day they were born I’d have been first into the burning building to rescue them – but if asked why I’d have had to say it was largely because their mothers expected it. Nowadays I still think about the burning building and prepare myself for the time I’ll have to rush in. But now I rehearse the wet shirt over the face, the crawling across hot floors – and the motive rises from a part of me that just didn’t exist before.

  These days I consider the Deer Hunter role, playing Russian roulette with my son in a Saigon dive to bring him back home. How far would we go? What would we do? Would we actually make that journey? Sit at the table? Pick up the gun? Sometimes I think I would pull the trigger on myself if I thought it would bring him back from the edge. Unless he was rude to me, then it would be a different story. There are complications, it’s true, but all in all, it’s a very different position now from those early days of fatherhood.

  Very little of their first year comes back spontaneously through that haze of sleep deprivation. There was the standing there, looking at them sleeping, their most attractive condition, we all agree. And I know I thought they were the most complex, intricate creatures, with their hair, and fingers and toes and so forth. The noises they made, like birds. That first smile you get around six weeks. The luggage you take when you go out to lunch with them: like moving house – the bottles, the nappies, the carrycot, the blanket, the changes of clothes. What were we doing, going to Paris for the weekend? That part was the same, from one baby to the other.

  But mostly my two experiences of babies in the first year have been very different. The things Angela and Susie had in common? They were both New Zealanders, both glamorous, highly charged, both marvellously loving mothers.

  But Angela regulated access carefully. It’s possible she suspected from the first that our troubled relationship wouldn’t last. Maybe she was always preparing for the day when she’d have to go back to her home country, taking Hugo with her.

  There was one area where I had undisturbed access: bottle-feeding at night. Health professionals had told us not to allow the baby into the bed. ‘You can roll over in your sleep and suffocate them.’ They said it happened enough to cause concern, but it’s more likely that they like frightening people.

  Subsequently an American survey showed how much needless anxiety has been created. Nearly four million babies a year are born in the States. In any year of a four-year period, sixty-four babies suffocated in their parents’ bed. In the same period, two and a half thousand babies a year died alone in their cots, far from their mothers’ heartbeat.

  But we didn’t know that then, so Hugo was left in his cot in the other room and the twice-nightly bottles fell to me to heat and administer. So there must have been tender scenes on the sofa between the two of us, but they have left no more impression than shadows moving around the room.

  A mother finds it hard to rest when her baby is in danger of not waking up. In those first weeks Angela would get out of bed hour by anxious hour to see whether Hugo was still alive. The nurses warned us about cot death. They said that in order to prevent this it was essential we have him sleep on his front. Or on his back; or on his side, the style of the time was very specific. So she would lie there in bed, listening to him breathing in the other room, on his back, on his front, on his side. When a period of silence would become unbearable she’d get up and check on him.

  ‘Is he okay?’ I’d ask groggily.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she’d say. ‘You check him next time, will you. I’m exhausted.’

  We’re all exhausted, I’d think mutinously. And anyway, it’s pointless. There was a line of logic that evolved as one broken night followed another. Getting up to check was all very well, but you’d never actually catch him when it matters. Your window of action is only open a couple of moments. He’s got to have stopped breathing for long enough so you know he’s in trouble, but not so long that he’s horribly brain-damaged. Therefore, if he’s breathing there’s no point in getting up and if he’s stopped breathing there’s no point in getting up either. And if the worst has come to the worst it’ll all be easier to face after a good night’s sleep.

  Lack of sleep may have given logic more importance than it deserved, but I wasn’t so fuddled as to try the reasoning out on his mother.

  Something happened towards the middle of Hugo’s first year that made things different between us. He’d fallen asleep on my chest. Our breastbones were touching; I could feel his heart beating next to mine, the two of us together in double time. I could feel the life in him. It wasn’t a mystical experience but then it wasn’t strictly physical either; it seemed to be halfway between – perhaps it was the bond, the parental bond that people talk about. At any rate, after that we were connected. Like magic. Maybe I’d grown up suddenly. For the first time I could feel the reality of a life outside my own. Some part of him joined me and some part of me joined him.

  As he grew older his mother described him as her ‘right arm’. Even with the bond I was so proud of, even with our heart-to-heart connection, my feelings were more distant. I never felt him as a physical part of me, as an extension of myself. But he had the quality of a mobile camera out there in the world beaming pictures back to base. And that was an amazing source of information. To see the world through his eyes took me into that magic world I’d first seen thirty-five years ago.

  And that’s what I missed when she took him back to her own country to live, to be happier. Married couples in our parents’ generation stayed together for the sake of the children; we got divorced for the same reason. It’s unclear which course of action produces more heartache.

  Officials say that thirty-eight per cent of fathers lose touch with their children during the second year of separation. It’s doubtful whether mothers would do the same if, in a Planet of the Apes reversal, children were normally given to the father. But then again, it’s doubtful whether mothers would put up with the standard access arrangements fathers get – every other weekend and one day a week.

  My own access arrangements were more difficult (New Zealand is as far away as you can go before you start coming back again).

  However difficult Angela was to be married to, she was marvellously generous in divorce: the more separated we were, the more freely she fostered my contact with our son. When I came out for his birthday she arranged somewhere for me to stay – sometimes even with her family. She always had him call me Daddy. On my first visit, when he was two, he came to me in a corridor and I picked him up, rather shyly. He gently touched my lower lip with his forefinger and piped in his little two-year-old voice: ‘Daddy home.’ Whew! I thought later. Daddy home. They certainly know how to roll you, children. Daddy home! No, actually, Daddy was in London in the throes of a consuming love affair with a white-Russian barrister. Daddy, who had been colonised by this vivid New Zealander, was trying to liberate his occupied territories so he’d be free, in the words of the song, free to love again. Angela was one of the new world’s Camelot creatures. She’d gone but was very far from being forgotten – and that was necessarily the case because she was, in a very deep sense, irreplaceable.

  Returning home to the northern hemisphere after Hugo’s birthday, the less I saw of him the more I missed him. My diary of the time says: ‘She [new white-Russian girlfriend] will never get as much of me as she needs because most of me is walking in and out of doors on the other side of the world.’ In the dark, in a hotel room in Paris, while my new p
assion slept beside me with her thumb gently in her mouth, I lay quietly watching transmissions from my mobile camera. I could actually see the view offered by my blithe little boy tumbling out from the dark of the vine veranda as he ran across the lawn under that brilliant sky, see at the bottom of their garden the lake spread out like a huge dream.

  At the time I was living in Hammersmith where the tube ran through the third bedroom and the streets were full of outpatients. Hugo’s absence gathered, year by year, getting stronger rather than weaker.

  So it happened that after four years of visiting on his birthdays, there came a year when I decided to give up English journalism, emigrate, be a father to Hugo and thereby ease the depression that was steadily growing inside me.

  I had a plan; Angela and I were going to be modern divorcees – we’d push out the edge of what was possible. We’d have an arm’s-length relationship and I’d buy a house in the same street. We’d say things to each other such as: ‘I’m going out tonight, can you have Hugo?’ or, ‘Hugo doesn’t like what I’ve cooked him. Can you do that thing you do for him?’ or, ‘Can your boyfriend / girlfriend fix my fuses / bring round the jump leads for the car?’ We’d be nice to each other. We’d go out for dinner sometimes. Hugo would commute between us, toddle down the road in a short, unsupervised walk. He’d have two parents and his parents would have partners and he’d grow up in a wide, extended family. Both sides of his character would be developed; he’d be flying on both wings.

  This divorce would be more like an old-fashioned marriage. We’d be separate but together, two planets revolving around one son. Angela and I would enjoy physical proximity but emotional distance. Hugo would be no worse off than those Victorian children you read about.

  It hardly mattered in the event because the practice didn’t work out according to the theory. I turned up on the other side of the world one morning and checked into a nasty hotel. When I went round to her house, Angela looked at me doubtfully and suggested a stand-down period before we saw each other regularly.

  I said mockingly, ‘What do you mean? Not see each other at all? For how long? A week? Two weeks? A month?’

  She was endlessly surprising. She said: ‘Three months would be better.’

  The new world collapsed around me; I was a victim of the General Theory of Videotape. It’s a male thing. We’ll come to that in due course.

  Five years later, Alexander’s first year was very different. My second wife, Susie, had more confidence in our future. She allowed all the access I wanted, and I was genuinely surprised it could be so free and easy. He was our baby. But perhaps as a result, I remember very little about our happiness together. Our bond didn’t happen until much later. I look through the photographs and we seem to have all the time in the world, out in the English countryside, at the animal park with the enormous boar. Leather-jacketed Susie standing in front of the chalk man in the hillside with his vast white phallus. Watching the cricket in the grounds of Chiswick House. How fleeting are the memories of pleasure.

  I did find a pet name for him, I do remember that. ‘Little one!’ I’d coo at him; and it turned into ‘Leedle one!’ and that turned into ‘Leedle beedle!’ which finally evolved into ‘Beedle Bop!’. And that was odd, because I learned later that President Kennedy called his children Beedle Bops (maybe there’s some general principle here). Alexander’s eleven now and I still call him Beedle Bop, and he likes it.

  There was another thing, now I think of it. Children inspire all the emotions – love, care, tenderness, warmth and fantastic power surges of anger. No one can make you more desperate than your children, because only they know exactly how to do it: that noise they can pitch perfectly to get into your ear, under your defences and throw you into chaos.

  How can they keep at it when you’ve done so much for them (and for what thanks, incidentally?). They cry but they can’t be hungry. They’re not hungry. You’ve fed them. They’ve had plenty to eat so why are they crying? You’ve changed them – they cry but they can’t be soiled, you’ve taken pains about that. You’ve put them over your shoulder – they cry but it can’t be gas. You’ve played with them, they can’t be lonely – yet they wilfully insist on yelling in your face their most fundamental accusations: ‘You thick twat! You call yourself a parent! What’s the matter with me? Why am I crying? Stop letting me suffer! You’ve got no idea! You don’t even know what’s wrong! I’m suffering here and if’s your fault! Do something! Why aren’t you doing something? You’re so crap at this! You don’t deserve to have a baby! Why are you allowing me to be so unhappy?’

  When reading about people who have abused babies – mothers, fathers – and done so with cigarettes, flat irons, by shaking them, by doing things that shouldn’t even be written down, I thank God that I came out of it all right.

  Making children do what you want

  At the level of sheer power, I developed a special voice that could stop both boys in mid-stride like cartoon characters. It’s the voice parents need when the children are toddling for the road and you can’t catch them physically. You have to get this voice under their level of argument, so it needs to go in early and you have to use it rarely. It’s a sort of military command that operates at an unconsciousness level – but not a voice of panic, it’s not even shouting. At its most powerful it is accompanied by a cold cessation of emotional activity. Your whole interior world stops and this communicates itself via your voice to the child, who then stops, as if about to step on a snake.

  If you can develop this part of your parental armoury, your children can go so much closer to the edge of things without your getting anxious for them. You can be far more relaxed when you have access to this sudden assault.

  How does it come about?

  Years after this, I bought a couple of dogs, sisters from the same litter, fox terriers. When they were little they didn’t know anything – not what their names were, nor that they had names. They didn’t know how to be taken for a walk. They’d dig in their heels and sit back on their haunches. You had to stand and wait as they suspiciously took little steps forward.

  I took them out on to the four hundred acres of Oxford’s Port Meadow and slipped off their leads. It was possible they would run off and never be seen again; that they’d take up with other dogs and have fun and be gone for ever. But they looked out over the endless grasslands and stuck very close beside me. When exciting scents drew them more than half a dozen paces away they suddenly stopped and panicked. They’d realised how alone they were and were looking around wildly for me, hardly being able to see so far. At that point I whistled for them – relief and excitement bonded with the whistle; they followed it back and bounced around me going, ‘Yippee!’ That whistle can still call them from as far away as their ears can stretch. The sound is part of their character, it’s a fundamental sound, it should be able to stop them in mid-stride, but they are only dogs, after all.

  Why children are boring

  You see divorced men with their children in a playground, on their day with the kids, trying to look at ease and rarely pulling it off. We share a terrible guilty secret there among the gaudy slides, that stupid plastic warren with the holes in it, the roundabout, the squashy blacktop. We’re bored. As the children run around in that single-minded way they have, we’re calculating how long we have to do this before we can do something else. And that includes almost anything else. We long to read the paper we’ve got rolled up, but that’s not what other fathers are doing and certainly not what mothers are doing.

  We could join in, but we sense that we look kind of clumsy when we do that. We saw a father joining in and it looked awful. Mothers have taken the precaution of coming in pairs; some solo mums just chat to the kids as they play and their voices don’t have that unconvincing note that ours do when we talk, like we’re talking to foreigners or outpatients, or people with much less money than we have and we’re trying not to sound condescending.

  So we stand awkwardly like we’ve gone to the wr
ong party. We’re going on to McDonald’s after this and we’ll sit there making conversation – but not one that either of us enjoys very much. There is a rack of newspapers to which our eyes guiltily return.

  There’s a law governing this predicament. The less attention we pay children, the more boring they become. Yes, yes, of course, we still love them. We’ll pull them out of the burning building. We’ll pay their tertiary fees. Love and boredom can co-exist, we know that (we’ve been married after all). But we do assume we can hold up our end of the conversation with a little boy without putting down the paper. How difficult can it be? How old is he, four? Five? The questions aren’t hard. We don’t exactly have to concentrate. We won’t have to remember any of it.

  But that’s precisely what makes the little one’s conversation starters a series of interruptions. They’re irritating because we’re not concentrating. It’s the rule governing all bores: if you don’t pay attention they will bore you far more. The rule of bores is that you have to retaliate. You have to take control of the conversation and bore them back.

  The fact is, conversation with kids is unrewarding because we haven’t learned the rules, the tactics, the strategy or the score. Or that there is a score. Or an objective. Or a conversation, indeed.

  I had two identical lessons along these lines, first with Hugo when he was four and then, five years later, when his half-brother Alexander was the same age.