The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  And to say it again with informed admiration – the creative principle in all my households had hitherto been female.

  Maybe it’s cultural, maybe it’s chemical, maybe it’s genetic. The debate rages on. But research tells us that the vast majority of men still don’t pick up socks. Men still don’t know where their child’s other shoe is. Men still don’t know where the vaccination certificates are or what their second child’s collar size is.

  There are men who can run households, of course, even without being paid. But the routine of it, the essential day-to-day routine, is something that undoes me. I can do a dash, I can do a hundred yards in cleaning, cooking, ironing, shopping, washing, but housekeeping is more than a mile, more than a marathon, it’s endless. Alexander said once, when asked to wash his face: ‘But I washed it yesterday. Here we go again!’ And I can’t criticise him for this because that’s exactly what I’m like about the shopping. Buying in the stuff for a couple of days’ eating produces a glow of accomplishment which outlasts the food. I can still be thinking how well I’ve done when the fridge is empty and the boys are staying with their friends to find the things they like to eat. And when they once complained about there being nothing to eat, I found myself thinking, ‘But I’ve done the shopping. Here we go again!’

  I have said the creative principle of a home is female, but after all, it’s not necessarily a woman’s. They say that women athletes who work out with power exercises naturally produce more male hormones, and this affects the way they look and act. Maybe the converse is true: maybe those traditional womanly activities of looking after a household produce female hormones. It’s certainly true that the more I do of it, the more it’s possible to do it.

  For instance, the more I ironed the boys’ clothes the more I thought about them, the more I internalised them, the more I was with them. In the passive, meditative state that ironing produces I’d be visualising them at their schools, imagining them unobserved, talking to their friends, laughing, concentrating, being excluded from groups, making the class laugh. And feeling close to them in this range of ordinary behaviour produced such a rush of mumsy hormones – so mumsy that I’d be turning the trousers inside out to iron the pockets. When the condition really started to grip and I was determined to make a proper household the maternal drive came out from the dark side. I found I’d only vacuum when the boys were in the room, making them lift their feet, standing between them and the television. I started to demand they take their school bags straight up to their rooms, and hang up their coats and put their plates in the sink. I became increasingly irritable at the lack of recognition for my unending efforts. I cleaned before the cleaning woman came to do the cleaning. I washed up angrily, clattering the plates just this side of breaking them. ‘No, no, I’m not angry, what makes you think that?’

  And finally I developed the commanding generalisation: The Only Person Who Can Clean A House Properly Is An Angry Middle-Aged Woman. And that, I realised, was what I was turning myself into. I was becoming an angry, middle-aged woman and I didn’t like it. I was too young, for one thing, and too cheerful for another. But Alexander scarily showed what I was becoming: I had told him to eat his beans and he rounded on me in an exasperated sing-song: ‘Oh God! I have to eat my beans, I have to go to the loo, I have to put on my pyjamas, I have to do everything round here!’ That showed with great clarity what was happening to me. It wasn’t just that I was turning into a scold, I was turning my son into a scold as well.

  And so, round about then, I gave up my housewifely ambitions. I bought in help and although my dubious Mrs Doubtfire was no more, other problems multiplied.

  To run a household you need domestic energies. There was a slothfulness in me that had a poor effect on the general hygiene but a very favourable effect on Alexander’s sleeping arrangements.

  He used to insist not only on my reading bedtime stories to him, but also getting into bed to read them. And when he had discovered me sneaking out of bed after half an hour, he insisted I come to read him a story in my pyjamas. ‘Oh Alexander, that’s a bit much!’ I protested ineffectually. So we lay there together. After the story, in the absence of anything to do in a dark room, I’d close my eyes for twenty minutes. When sober, there was an outside chance of staying awake, but after an evening’s intake I invariably beat him to sleep and this was obvious because he used to wake me up for snoring.

  Of course, he had no competition for my company in those days. And I empathised with him, remembering the desolation of being alone in bed from the age of six onwards. When my sister got her own room I was left alone in mine, a constant supplicant for company. But no one willingly put up with the noisy breathing, fidgeting, scratching, and sudden exclamations and absurd bursts of laughter. It was no fun being in bed with me in those days. So it was quite a change to my routine, the next two years, going to bed five nights out of seven at eight o’clock.

  It’s still not something I bring up freely with people. My son’s eleven and still sleeps with me when he wants. We don’t do this entirely for his sake either and, frankly, it would be impossible on rational grounds to persuade us to do anything else.

  An education in ethics

  ‘And, Pinocchio, when you know the difference between right and wrong, then you’ll be a real boy.’ I was reading a bedtime story with the lights down low and a harvest moon over the valley. ‘Are you a real boy, Beedle Bop? Do you know the difference between right and wrong?’

  ‘No. What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got to learn the difference between right and wrong, little one,’ I began. ‘What is it? Right and wrong. Well, it’s not really my field, but right is always telling the truth. You must be sure always to tell the truth, even if it gets you into trouble.’ Hang on, thinking about it, that couldn’t be it. You don’t want your children always telling the truth, that’s extraordinarily dangerous, that’s like a curse. They’ll be saying, ‘Hey, Antonia, why doesn’t my daddy like the way you let your eight-year-old swear and drink alcohol?’ Or, ‘Hey, Miles, Daddy says he thinks you’re a holiday hog.’ Or, ‘Hey, Mummy, Daddy’s new girlfriend walks around with no pants on and makes screaming noises in Daddy’s bedroom, and Daddy says she’s got rabies.’

  No, children have to be economical with the truth in today’s complicated world. So I hurriedly told him: ‘Back up a second. It isn’t always right, telling the truth absolutely all the time, okay? There are exceptions. Because you’ve always got to be kind to people, little one. Even if they’ve hurt you and even if they continue to hurt you, it’s important always to give them kindness.’

  But no, wait, that’s not true either. We hadn’t always been kind to Alexander. Not when I yelled at him. No, not when he got whacked by his mother, you couldn’t say that was kind but then you wouldn’t say it was wrong either. He’d be grizzling about going to school, refusing to get dressed, sitting on his bed half-crying, sniffling, spending ten minutes defeatedly pulling on one sock. His mother would come in, pick him off the bed, whack him briskly three times and after ten seconds of tears he was as bright as a button, cooing and giggling and running off to school. That wasn’t spanking, incidentally, we don’t approve of spanking except between consenting adults, but it was a certain brisk brutality which had a terrific therapeutic effect.

  No, kindness is a complicated matter which, if taken too far, ends up in Sting’s absurd song ‘Love is stronger than justice’. That can’t be right.

  What other leads have we got? Thou shalt not kill. Well, we won’t be facing that sort of decision for a few years yet, but is it true? Do we never kill? Really never? So what are army chaplains up to, then? What’s abortion about? And turning off life support systems? And what about deliberate murder? Wouldn’t you really have shot Hitler if you had him in your sights? And it was 1939? And your name was Moshe Dayan? Do we really teach our children that life is sacred? What does that mean, anyway, in the world’s most bloodthirsty century? And when the first act of Homo s
apiens was genocide (as Neanderthal man found on his introduction to Cro-Magnon man)?

  Can it be right never to hurt living things? That rules out a career in journalism, politics, gamekeeping, merchant banking, farming, fishing or anything in heavy industry. And what about when you’re really angry, in a fight?

  ‘Daddy! Keep reading the story!’

  Selfishness? Can we say that being selfish is always wrong and thinking of others is always right? Is being a proper boy always thinking of others? Only if you’re Ned Flan-dannelly-anders. Even a cursory reading of Cosmopolitan tells how important it is to think of your own needs. My therapist was telling me exactly that and he had a degree in moral philosophy.

  ‘Daddy! I’m trying to read but I can’t do the words!’

  Left on my own, my sense of right and wrong is very ad hoc. I think we should do what we say we’re going to, by and large, but let’s not get obsessive about it. Honesty, integrity, yes, yes, in principle, we like all that within certain broad limits (I worked in politics and that muddies ethical discussions. When asked if we could trust someone I said, ‘To do what?’). I do believe in karma – that barring accidents we tend to end up pretty much with what we deserve. But that’s not quite puritan enough, not quite Western enough to get on in the world today.

  ‘Da-dee! I’m begging you! I’m begging you with all of my mouth!’

  Hang on: parents are supposed to put in more affirmative rules than this, aren’t we? We need some big stuff here, we need guidance. Christianity (which I quite like, having read the New Testament in the plain English version) is obviously a most unsuitable creed for children today, especially if it’s taken seriously. But what about the ten commandments? Are they good for children? ‘Thou shalt have no other God before me.’ Is that something we should go into? This one, jealous, angry God whom you have to worship or be consumed by fire for eternity? Is that a good psychological basis for our little ones?

  And the rest of the commandments aren’t very neat. They’re good on property rights, but then there’s so much property around these days it seems less important somehow. Thieves don’t deserve to be mutilated in these times of plenty – when we care so much less about our movable property. But nonetheless, Alexander: stealing is always wrong – almost always wrong. Not for the damage it does to the victim but for the damage it does to yourself. The same ought to go for coveting your neighbour’s goods but that’s an impossible demand on a child. And if he doesn’t covet things, how’s he going to be an active member of post-industrial society? Adultery? Well, if you’re not the married one, it’s not always out of the question, particularly if people don’t find out, but never with the wife of a friend, that really is essential. How should I phrase that?

  Yes, okay, this has gone on long enough. Here it is. It’s messy. Right is going to school – like Pinocchio has failed to do here and been turned into a donkey. So you certainly have to go to school. Right is being polite to adults and not interrupting them. It’s not swearing. It’s doing what you’re told and not leaving your dinner plate on the coffee table where the dogs can get it. Those are all wrong things. Other wrong things include: thinking you’re too cool for school and walking like a film star.

  So, let’s summarise. Right is going to school and working hard, having as much fun as you can with as many friends as possible and being polite to grown-ups. And that’s what being a real boy is. But Alexander had given up long ago and was sleeping the sleep of the just. Or if not quite the just, he was sleeping the sleep of the child who’s just been canoeing all afternoon in the broad, lazy river that ran through the valley of his childhood.

  How nice we are now

  ‘How indulgent we are these days of our children compared with our parents. How nice we are to them. How we include them in our plans. How we pamper them. How we don’t smack them!’ I’m imagining what our parents thought as they were bringing our generation up in the 1950s. ‘Don’t we spoil them? The money we give them! The treats they get. They’re wasting their youth sitting in front of screens on such beautiful days. They’ve no idea what hardship is.’ And there’s another perennial theme: the primitive conditions when we were young. ‘Modems that took data at fifty-six kilobytes a second!’ I’m thinking of what our children will be saying to their children in the future. ‘Computer games you had to play yourself. Pay-per-view videos – and you had to walk to a shop to rent them. And play them on tiny televisions with hardly any channels and no holographics. And when you tell kids today, they’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.’

  It’s not just the comedy of looxury. My grandparents were born at the end of the nineteenth century and were formed by Victorian values, the real thing, an austere code which was reinforced by the depression and two world wars. It took a baby boom, psychedelic drugs and solo parenthood to get on top of all that.

  My generation just missed the full force of it, a decade after Suez. But we did catch the tail end of it, like the last flash of a hurricane. It was a particularly impressive form of child-rearing. When I originally went to my boarding school the prefects were so grand, remote and beautifully dressed that at first I called them ‘Sir’, like masters. There was still an unchangeable hierarchy. Authority still had its glamour. That’s why the system could still threaten us with cold showers in the morning. The violence of the routine was almost comic by today’s standards.

  When my lovely artist friend Angie lived in France in the early Nineties she used to wake her daughter by lifting her from the bed and lowering her into a bath slightly warmer than blood temperature.

  ‘Wasn’t this a bit of a fag, first thing in the morning?’ I asked.

  ‘It was worth it to see the smile on her face,’ Angie said and she showed me something of that smile with her own.

  Oh, it wasn’t like that when we were young. There was no one smiling in our faces at 7 a.m. Our wake-up bell brutally shattered our sleep; we were hurled into the day. We had to be in our slippers and running past a certain partition before the bell stopped ringing.

  At the junior school, dormitory beatings were not uncommon. The headmaster would walk softly in the corridors in the evening, before lights out, hiding one of his bamboo canes up his sleeve. The canes had names. The one with sellotape was said to be the most painful. The old man (his nickname was Past-It) would come into the dormitory and stand by a boy’s bed. The boy would hurry to put on his slippers and bend over the end of his bed. Past-It would say, ‘I’m going to give you four.’ Or on special occasions, he’d say, ‘I’m going to give you six.’ He left dark-red indentations for us all to inspect later; the nodes made a particular, unforgettable pattern.

  At secondary school it was worse because prefects were authorised to beat you – which they did pitilessly. ‘This is not for anything particular you’ve done, Cowling,’ they said to a friend of mine. ‘We just don’t like your attitude.’ Strong young men were able to raise welts which lasted a week. But then that’s what society was like in those days. Out in the world, louts could be sentenced by a judge to be birched – the louts would be stripped, tied to a whipping frame and lashed until they bled. The judges were said to have the same done themselves, but on a more voluntary basis.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, we had to eat everything on our plates, especially if it was inedible. The sodden cabbage, the watery swede. ‘Eat thart fart!’ the Latin master used to say to us in his odd accent, pointing at the cold white rind on our Sunday gammon. ‘Eat thart fart!’

  No, that’s all gone now and, frankly, I don’t miss it.

  ‘Can I teach you some manners, Alexander?’ I said once, when he was five years old.

  ‘En oh,’ he replied. ‘You just mind your own business.’

  No, I don’t think we said that when we were young. When adults told us to wash our hands before dinner we didn’t chant: ‘Kiss my feet, they smell so sweet!’ did we? When departing grown-ups called to us, ‘See you!’ children didn’t call back, ‘Wouldn’t wanna be
you!’ When adults said, ‘See you later, alligator,’ children didn’t say, ‘Don’t forget your toilet paper!’

  One day he asked: ‘Daddy, can I have some Coke?’

  I replied sternly: ‘Can I have some Coke, what?’

  That took him aback. He struggled to think what I meant and said, ‘… Can I have some Coke now?’

  But this indulgence of our children is not just a solo-parent thing. Digby told me about the breakfast regime that prevailed in a household he knew.

  It seems there was a two-year-old boy who would not eat unless he was tenderly coaxed. Eventually a routine evolved out of the arguments and entreaties. Each mealtime, the son would sit on the draining board with his feet in the sink. The water had to be very precisely warm – neither cold nor hot. Mother would stand at the sink with a loaded spoon, waiting for the moment. Outside, the father would start up his motorbike and ride round the house; every time he passed the kitchen window Dad would raise both hands over his head to wave to his son. When the boy saw this wave, he would take one mouthful.

  Digby claimed it was a friend of his on the bike, but I suspect, actually, it was him.

  The problem of nakedness

  The problem of nakedness has changed over the years. I can’t remember seeing my mother without her clothes, except that one time when I failed to knock at her bedroom door (goodness knows what reverie I roused her from, but I never failed to knock after that). I saw my father once in the changing rooms of a swimming shed. Once, as a family, we took off our togs and swam round our little boat in the Mediterranean, but took particular care to keep away from each other.