by Simon Carr
He walked well behind me, angrily. That wasn’t very nice at all, after all that cable car. Now I was getting testy. ‘Any more of that’, I told him nastily, ‘and I’ll throw Harold out of the window.’ I’d also bought him Harold the Helicopter. It went straight home, this shaft, it was a brilliant tactical offensive.
He veered away from me, sobbing. He suddenly realised he was living in a world where Harold the Helicopter was in danger. This mightn’t have been the optimal outcome but at least I’d found a point of leverage, a hostage. He started to cross the road without me (one of the few very serious crimes he could commit). I grabbed him by the shirt, in the way bullies grabbed you at school, lifting you up off your toes. This was the first time he’d been manhandled like this in his life and he didn’t like it, as was apparent from his sobbing, which sounded exaggerated to my ears, but was effective enough to cause embarrassment.
‘You hurt my arm!’ he gasped (it was true, I had squeezed it – it’s the only form of child abuse suitable for public discipline). When I went to take his hand to cross the road he cringed away from me as if I were going to hit him (an option I was starting to consider). He was also rubbing his neck and making low moaning noises, as if I had been trying to strangle him.
‘It’s not very satisfactory, both of you sulking like five-year-olds, is it?’
‘Look. I’m doing what I can. He’s asking too much.’
‘Talk to him. He’ll come round.’
‘No. He’ll think he’s won. It’ll just encourage him.’
‘So how long are you planning on keeping this up for?’
‘I don’t have any plans.’
‘Why don’t you take him round to Rosie and Nevil’s?’
‘I want to see it through myself, I suppose.’
‘Hm. That’s an interesting strategy. Why don’t you ask for help?’
‘For the same reason I don’t stop the car to ask for directions.’
‘Oh, that’s intelligent.’
‘No. The reason for not asking directions is different. At the moment it’s not that I don’t know how to get there, it’s that I don’t know where we’re going.’
‘We aren’t supposed to do these things by ourselves. He’s got no one to go to and say how mean you’re being.’
‘Yes. That is true. That is certainly true.’
This is the worst of the one-parent family, there’s no partner to come in from another angle and nudge the child out of his depression. He can’t go from one to the other and rebuild his self-respect. That’s the overwhelming difficulty. A single parent has to be the eye-dog and the huntaway, the tough cop and the nice cop, the momma bear and the poppa. Neither benign neglect nor cosy domesticity is enough; both are essential, but only easily done when there are two of you to do it.
Alexander and I walked all the five hundred yards to the station and he wouldn’t be carried. He stayed lingering behind, or hurrying ahead to avoid my touching him. Passers-by smiled indulgently at us – a middle-aged man alone with a five-year-old boy in the middle of the week. Little did they know how much he was hating me.
Getting out of the car to do an errand, I briskly said to him, ‘Do you want to come with me, or stay in the car? Answer me or I’ll throw Harold out of the window.’
Suddenly his chemistry collapsed. He said something quietly, without sullenness, and I made him repeat it. ‘I’ll do what you think,’ he said indifferently and fell asleep. I left him alone in the car while I did my errand. He was still sleeping when I got back. When he woke he was happy again. I was so relieved I was happy too. That was the end of that.
But this was going to be a problem. How to cope with these moods?
When a child lies face down on the floor, lamenting, or sobbing, or howling for no reason you can discern, what’s the correct thing to do? When people say, ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!’ it never makes them stop. How do we make everything all right? His mother had her instincts to trust. Sometimes she might pick him up and envelop him in warmth, love and comfort; at others she might pick him up and whack him. Two instinctual procedures, I noticed, but timed correctly, both resulted in Alexander laughingly going to school.
In the absence of experience or any appropriate instincts, what was I to do? Advice was largely useless. Family cultures are so different there was very little useful crossover. But there were general observations about boys that helped. One mum’s General Theory of Videotape turned out to have enormous explanatory power.
When Alexander had got to the age of four he could be thrown down by trivial accidents. He’d be at the kitchen table watching you butter his piece of toast and you’d scuff the surface. Suddenly his eyes would roll in his head, he’d sink to the floor moaning faintly and lie there. Even Susie was baffled by it.
Bridget, a mother of three boys, gave me an insight to why this happened. ‘They live in the future, you see. They’re watching a videotape of what’s going to happen. If reality diverges from these pictures they’re watching it’s like their world has collapsed. The whole picture they’re living in collapses around them and they’re left in this terrible broken world. The only thing you can do is to go back to the point where things went wrong and remake the tape but this time make it turn out in the way he’s expecting.’ (It was why she didn’t run a strict routine. ‘If it’s always Ribena before bedtime,what happens when there’s no Ribena?’)
In any event it was excellent advice. In the matter of toast-scuffing, just go back to the moment prior to the disaster and remake the film for him – new toast, softer butter, more careful application and the world is whole again: ‘Look, Beedle Bop, your toast is how you like it. Everything’s going to be all right.’
This may be why children are said to drive you mad – you enter into the dream world that they have created and in which they are living and you have to collaborate in maintaining it. You become the person in charge of hallucinations. ‘You say the toast was scuffed. The toast was never scuffed. Where’s your evidence? Look! The toast is whole. The toast is unscuffed.’
So that was the way to deal with the more obvious of his moods. But there was an equally important and rather more intractable problem that we had: my moods.
It was possible to remake the tape when it broke by accident. But if you tore the tape to pieces in front of his face, then you needed a whole new show to take his mind somewhere else.
By the following year I had added the technique of begging and sobbing to my repertoire of making up. But this year my inspiration was a big, dumb, physical affection, a counter-intuitive burliness.
On our big trip we stopped off at a farmhouse for drinks with friends of mine. Alexander looked at the six-year-old who answered the door. Then he said: ‘Chase me!’ and ran past him into the house. Nicholas looked at me and wheeled in after the intruder, yelling for the fun of it. That’s not unusual in that part of the world, that’s what welcomes are like. There are big fridges, they’re always full, so when you come for a drink one evening you can still be there for breakfast the following day.
So it was that at breakfast the following day Alexander wouldn’t say ‘Thank you’ for his morning toast no matter how hard I tickled him, no matter that I pushed my finger into the side of his butt. He squirmed, he tried to suppress his smile, but he refused to say ‘Thank you’. This was embarrassing, losing an exchange like that in front of our hosts. So I took the toast and offered to eat it myself. That was an effective change of attack and had an immediate reaction. It sent him into a very steep decline; he went as comatose as you can while standing up. He stood there like a sock. He stared at his Lion King book without reading it, then he wandered out into the garden, a lost little boy.
There he turned back and, in a surge of inspiration, invented his most effective look. It was one of those cold, innocent stares that children use in films about demonic possession. They point their faces at you and use slightly lowered eyelids, and the edges of their mouths go down
a little. They radiate malevolent nothingness. It works, that look. It frightens you and depresses you. You think: ‘Well, that’s that. It’s obviously all over. We’ll never speak again.’
Then, having completed this task and exhausted by his anger, he collapsed slowly to the canvas of the trampoline. I walked out towards him. He was fifty yards away when he saw me. He wearily began the process of standing up. He was starting to reassemble his brilliant new look. It was touch and go when I started running, but the timing was right.
‘I’m going to get you on the trampoline!’ I called. This was the game he pleaded to play. ‘Come and get me on the trampoline!’ he’d call to the house. The game had me patrolling the perimeter and lunging ineffectually at him as he danced out of range, taunting me. But this time I lunged unexpectedly up on to the trampoline, grabbed him, rolled around with him and surrounded him in brutal warmth. This burly thing is a great comfort for boys. These days, the technique has decayed into an indolent bigness. But even that works surprisingly well. I can comfort him now in moments of distress just by being enormous and near him in bed. It’s why depressives go swimming with dolphins. But there on the trampoline his mood broke. He lay on top of me and we were a T. So I sang ‘Tea for two, / and two for tea, / And me for you, / and you for me …’ And suddenly he thrust his arms round my neck and hugged me in convulsions of affection.
But these lessons don’t come easily; they have to be repeated in different forms in different situations.
Looking back through diaries of the time, it’s amazing how snappy I was with him – ‘Do this! Say that! Watch it, you’re pushing me!’ – things I hardly ever say to him now. At the beginning, in those days of driving five hundred miles around the country, we just didn’t know all the daily things we needed to know about each other to co-exist.
We were writing letters one afternoon, in a friend’s guest house (Digby’s, as it happened, his feelings towards me had improved). I was replying to letters of condolence; Alexander was writing to his mother. ‘Dere mamy. I mis you. Do you mis me? I wis yu dint hav to dye.’
The conversation went like this, with Alexander starting: ‘Who are you writing to?’
I told him, ‘Margs McKenzie.’ He asked why and I said, ‘She wanted to say how sorry she was Mummy had died. Look, here’s your name. She says, “We wish you and Alexander all the courage and support for the future.’ ”
‘I want to draw Margs a picture,’ he said.
‘What do you want to draw her a picture of?’
‘I’ll draw the day the man came to take Mummy on a tray.’
He drew the picture of the stretcher trolley with the wheels and Susie lying on it with her prominent smile. Then he wanted to write the story and that was when I started to spoil the moment.
‘I’ll write the story on the next paper,’ he said and I told him to write the story on the same page as the picture. ‘I haven’t got much paper left,’ I explained. ‘Can’t you write it on the other side of the paper you’ve already used?’ He seemed about to cry so I said, ‘Don’t cry, all right, okay, use that fresh piece of paper.’ Then my voice changed: ‘But you’re pushing me.’
He bent his head to his work, but my temper had penetrated him. While we had been working companionably he was able to face these things comfortably. Suddenly I’d pushed him away and he stumbled. Now he was by himself and sinking. He wrote: ‘Dag ye. Im veray sad tat mye mam dide …’ And then his mood deepened. He drew again his mother on the trolley.
‘That’s very good, Pops,’ I said, with a note of desperation, because I could see what I’d done. My apology forced him down further; it was quite the wrong approach.
He looked down at his paper and prepared his exit. My scramble to make amends came too late. The darkness was gathering and he welcomed it in. It was awful to watch, how he scratched out every word he had written, individually and deliberately. Then he obliterated his drawing of smiling Susie lying on the trolley that took her away. Slowly he got up and walked out of the room, taking the darkness with him. He scuffed his way across the gravel to the courtyard gate. He opened it and shut it behind him. I heard him gently but lethally closing the bolt against me.
By some grace I knew what to do. I ran across the carriage sweep and rather lumberingly climbed the eight-foot wall. He was standing there, very small, on the other side of the gate. The walls loomed over the lonely boy. Our hosts were in the other part of the house. He was standing with his hands in a vulnerable, uncertain position at his chest. I pointed at him and said loudly and unsympathetically – but not too unsympathetically – ‘Oi! You! Open that gate.’
‘No!’ he said, immediately struggling to suppress a smile.
‘Open the gate!’ I said more loudly.
‘No! You’re locked out.’ And he bent forward over his hands, which were now clenched at his chest, trying to contain his mirth, his relief.
‘Open the gate!’ I said.
And he said, ‘No, you’re locked out!’
And I said, ‘Open. The. Gate!’
And he said, ‘You’re. Locked. Out!’
‘Let! Me! In!’
‘You’re! Locked! Out!’
‘Lemmein! Lemmein!’
‘Lockyouout! Lockyouout!’
There’s an important discovery for this age group: repetition is the highest form of wit. The laughter came bubbling out of him like brilliantly refreshing spring water.
So that was a lesson and a discovery. But before we got home there was another discovery far more important than these clever tactics. It was called Just Say Yes and was a strategy that had the power to change the way we lived.
We had holed up in a motel; I was too tired to drive any more so we checked in to an upmarket motel and started working our way through the fridge. Chocolate bars and orange juice for him, miniatures and Chardonnay for me. In the bathroom, when we finally opened its door, we discovered a vast, spa-like, de luxe tub with jet nozzles below the waterline. Because Alexander was five he started to use the tub as a diving hole. He filled it up to the lip, climbed four feet to the window ledge and leaped into the air. He hit the water with a swimming pool crump and great sheets of it shot up around the room, knocking the tooth-mug off its shelf above the basin. ‘What the dickens are you doing in there!’ I called.
‘Come and see, Daddy! Come and see!’ he yelled.
I’d been watching an American drug documentary, so by the perverse mechanism that runs me sometimes I had the phrase Just Say Yes in my mind. That’s why I didn’t stop him at once and couldn’t stop him later.
He leaped and climbed and plunged and splashed for an hour. Even though I’d been drinking really quite a lot, it did occur to me this was somehow inappropriate behaviour. But it was unstoppable and if the room was soused, well, it was a bathroom after all.
Should I have let him do this? It occurred to me that a mother wouldn’t have allowed it, no matter how much she might have been drinking. She would have said one of these things, and understandably so: ‘You’ll hit your head on the bath. You’ll fall off the ledge. You’ll cut your head open. You’re soaking the place. You’re making too much noise. You’re wasting water. We’ll be thrown out of the motel. It’s past your bedtime. Have you cleaned your teeth? I want to dry my hair. Stop jumping into the bath!’
The water leaping round the room was exhilarating. The hilarity it caused was deeply significant. It was the most efficient form of chaos either of us had experienced. A very small boy in a very structured environment with fifteen cubic feet of water. We felt like rock stars. My God, you laugh when the water hits the ceiling. The towels were swamped with water. This is how bathrooms ought to be treated.
I can still see Alexander in mid-air; the tub is sloshing around like storm water; he’s almost on his back, curled up in the bomb position and he’s squealing with delight as water slides down the tiling.
There it was, the energy that was released when you Just Said Yes.
It was harder
– much harder – than I’d expected to bring this new idea into the world. Especially as there was no plan. It was important to work without a plan. A blueprint would make us vulnerable to the forces of routine. If we needed rules we’d make them up when they became necessary and discard them with equal insouciance. We were to live like geniuses, we were to Just Say Yes.
Hygiene, for instance, was a case in point. There has always been too much washing in households, especially of hair. When Lucy Irving went off to live as a castaway she didn’t wash her hair at all. It became increasingly greasy for a month and then the oils abruptly vanished – left her with the glowing vitality you normally see in the most bogus shampoo ads. I went through the same experience, but as a student, going for a month without having a bath (your clothes keep you clean, if you change them, and experience shows you are surprisingly inoffensive).
So why should Alexander have a bath every night if he wasn’t dirty? Why should he go to bed early if he wasn’t getting irritable the next day? Why shouldn’t he see films beyond his years as long as he didn’t get bad dreams? Why shouldn’t he sit on the bonnet of the car and get driven around the park? Just because you get odd looks from well-wishers?
Spoil him? Up to a point it probably did. But he’d been on the sidelines of a drama that had dominated most of his life, it was catch-up time now. It was his turn to have the centre stage, where young children naturally belong.
And our joint project was to make a household where we could follow our own peculiar natures.
Now, because we weren’t gender separatists we enjoyed quite a strong female support structure – two grandmothers, a nanny, a babysitter, an occasional housekeeper, a number of valuable female consultants and, eventually, girlfriends. But they were all – uniquely, in my experience – junior in the hierarchy. They were guests, or employees. The central authority was male. That was very unusual. Women had always run households. When there weren’t women, the household wasn’t run (The Young Ones has a documentary element in it). Even in equal partnerships the subtle influence was decisively feminine. And that has a definite effect on boys, because there’s no question – we are different.