The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  ‘She can’t have me,’ I said. ‘I’m occupied territory.’ But all I heard was sad, ironic laughter.

  So Alexander fell into a friendship with Georgia, the youngest daughter, and spent enough time with her to turn my eyes in on my own delinquencies. He’d come home from school and go round to Georgia’s. He’d let himself into her house, sneak up the stairs and wait in her bedroom for her to come home, a little face at the window. There were periods when he stayed there overnight two or three nights a week.

  Jose would make him have baths and sometimes she’d wash his hair. There were ecstatic times I heard about, from my hovel down the way. Nights when they’d turn out the lights and dance wildly to very loud music; evenings when they’d all cuddle up on the sofa in her maternal arms. He slept at the foot of Georgia’s bed and the next time she’d sleep at the foot of her bed. Sometimes they shared the bed. It was the sort of relationship you’d want to last for ever.

  Meanwhile, back at Southmoor Road, the cooking, the cleaning, the chatting, the working, the drinking, all started taking the familiar toll (I’m a slow learner).

  But this time I could see the symptoms starting and was experienced now, and able to do something about it. The cleaning, the laundry, the cooking and washing up. How do solo mothers do it? All this and talk to their children, and earn a living? Well, one thing that is done in England quite frequently is to pay someone else to do it all for you. Live-in help again, but this time it seemed to be more of an established tradition rather than an admission of domestic weakness. We could get an au pair.

  And that was why, after a series of exasperated phone calls with various agencies, Nadia came to live with us. Nadia was French, a farmer’s daughter, used to animals, undaunted by us. She kept the house clean and tidy, arranged the laundry, cooked dinner and washed up. Five days a week, three hours a day, thirty-five pounds plus board and lodging. She didn’t expect to be talked to, but she was allowed to have her boyfriend to stay and to go back to France for doctors’ appointments, and she was never criticised – even implicitly – for any inadequacies in her housekeeping. She seemed happy with the arrangement; and so, I have to say, were we. People complain about au pairs, but we’ve had Nadia and then we got Lenka, and they, one after the other, transformed our home.

  Some credit must go to the outer markers again. The boundaries were set up when she first arrived – the agency makes you fill in a sheet with what must be done when, broken out into morning and evening. It’s a series of hieroglyphic instructions; laundry; hoover; the bathroom; the stairs; cook dinner and wash up.

  Note, there weren’t instructions like do the windows outside monthly. Feed and walk the dogs daily. Change the water in the flower vases. Take all the jars out of the pantry, wash them and wipe down the shelves. No, actually, there wasn’t even Make the Beds. It was a brief but powerful list of outer markers – laundry, cleaning and cooking. Looking back, I can’t remember ever having told Nadia or Lenka to do anything, but everything necessary has been done.

  Our standards were low, our gratitude high. The fact that the family was all male must have helped; we didn’t generate the special feeling that two females produce when they’re operating in the same kitchen (‘Did you fill that pot from the hot tap or the cold tap? Did you wash the tomatoes? Could you clean your fingernails before tossing the salad?’).

  And so we got to sit down together every evening at six o’clock and have dinner, like a family, struggling to find things to make conversation about. You’ll recognise the picture.

  Boobies and bosoms

  Alexander, forever searching for different and more authentic names to call me (he gloatingly repeats them when he finds a good one), started calling me Booby. ‘Booby!’ he cried when he saw me coming into the room. Booby: a fool, a gullible fop, in eighteenth-century drama. And while I could see the logic of that, I think he meant something different, more akin to boobs. This was clear when he refined his etymology and came up with Bosom. ‘Hello, Bosom,’ he used to say in greeting (when he was pleased to see me). ‘Bosom!’ he’d coo, working his face against me like a cat’s. ‘Booozum!’ He won’t let me slim, he doesn’t want me to lose weight round my middle. Why? ‘Because it’s all nice and soft and squishy and comfortable to use as a pillow.’ And that’s the point; it’s not a stomach. It’s a lapsed bosom. It’s a large, comforting geographical feature of flesh that he can cuddle up to and disappear into. It was my solution, in this gender isolation, to the solo-father problem.

  But he got bored of Bosom, or the song fell down the charts (‘Everyone Needs a Bosom for a Pillow, Everyone Needs a Bosom’). Now he calls me Pee-Wee. I’ve explained to him why Pee-Wee Herman no longer works with children but it makes no difference. ‘Pee-wee!’ he calls when he hears my key in the door. ‘Peeee-weeee!’

  This narrative looks like a celebration of indolence and fatness – and it’s true there is more of that here than seems healthy. But the boys were getting to an age when they would require some active guidance. They’d need some of that bringing-up stuff that parents do. Even I, who think most things go in by osmosis and example, even I could see that I’d soon be having to say things about the right way to behave.

  Not all parents are as unambitious as me. There are special mothers, the supermums, who have a tigerish sense of what they can do for their children. Tiger-mothers believe they can do everything – not only with their children but with anyone who has contact with them.

  Apparently there was a don’s wife trying to get her son into a boarding school, Bryanston, at a time when waiting lists were long and exclusive. The school refused her point blank. She wouldn’t give up. They stonewalled. The start of term was approaching; still she couldn’t get her way. Eventually, at the last moment, she bought the boy a uniform, took him through the school gates, pointed out the class he should go to and left him there. It was three days before the authorities discovered they had a stowaway on board. The headmaster summoned the mother and gave her a terrific rollicking – but she bore it complacently because the boy was established there and she knew the school wouldn’t send him away. There was nothing that could be said to hurt her.

  There is the converse to this. Angela told me of a mother who forbade her son to ride a motorbike because it was too dangerous. When she motored up her long drive one afternoon and caught him motorcycling she ran him off the road. He broke his leg. She scolded him furiously: ‘See! You wouldn’t listen. I told you how dangerous motorbikes are.’

  But how much active guidance is possible? How much, actually, can we change children? What educative influence do we really have over them? Jesuits were said to have needed just seven years to produce their desired result; Spartans, communists, fanatics, perverts would agree. In our normal bourgeois world I unambitiously say that we can swing our children thirty degrees for better and maybe a little more for worse. But all things being equal, it’s hard to move them much more off their centre line. At the extremes, children can be sexually abused into suicidal alcoholism or intensively coached into ten-year-old undergraduates. But for the ordinary household my proposition is this fairly limited thirty-degree arc of influence either way.

  But it is influence nonetheless. One of the Bible’s many scary ideas says this: ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the third and fourth generations.’ If that sounds unfair, it’s an optimistic approach compared with modern poet Philip Larkin’s: ‘Man hands on misery to man,/ It deepens like a coastal shelf,/ Get out as quickly as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.’ He begins this poem with his famous line: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’

  The hoary Old Testament view is more benign. The Bible believes that sins (bullying, sexual abuse, for two) perpetuate themselves with decreasing intensity. As nettles lose their sting over the year, so family sins just wear themselves out. The various flaws of my great-great-grandmother (born in the Regency, not long after the battle of Waterloo, for goodness’ sake) will have no in
fluence at all on my boys. However, my grandmother, born at the height of Victorian power in the middle 1860s, might still remotely touch them (through my mother, through me) with a chill sense of how children should be brought up.

  But, as Larkin correctly says, I will give them some defects of my own, just for them. In fact, I tried to download one of my more useful defects into Hugo. He had been teased in New Zealand for sounding English; here in England he was teased for sounding Australian. He’d make some contribution to the lesson and the class fatso would say, ‘Aw cripes, look out, mates, here comes a bushfire!’

  I told Hugo to bully him. ‘Take him by the wrists,’ I told him, ‘and bend him backwards. He goes down on to his knees, grinning like an ape and making this high-pitched keening noise. It doesn’t look painful so it’s much more humiliating for him. And you’ll only have to do it once.’ But Hugo wouldn’t descend to his level; he’s more mature much earlier. I’m working towards his example – it goes both ways.

  But there we were, settling down to the long, arduous business of living in England. We got dogs: Milo and Squidgy, little fox terriers. I walked them every day round Port Meadow and up the towpath of the canal, envying the gardens and the boats.

  The boys grew in spurts; and without their mothers. How could we do without mothers?

  Hugo was hit in the face on the basketball court; he bled, felt nauseous, dizzy. When he came home he was standing on the stairs vaguely describing his symptoms. I said, ‘I think you’ve got mild concussion, Hugie. You poor fellow, it must have been terrible. Er …’ I reached deep into my limbic system for the most comforting possible response: ‘Would twenty quid help?’

  Love and tenderness have a wonderful effect all of their own, but as I handed Hugo the note the symptoms of concussion evaporated and stayed like that until the money wore off. When he woke up feeling vague, I recommended Cable Therapy (a day off school to lie on the sofa watching cartoons). He didn’t take my recommendations seriously so we ended up in casualty waiting for two hours, before the doctor absolutely confirmed my treatment and sent him home to the sofa.

  And this is a useful life discovery: after benign neglect, money is the next most underestimated therapy. When my first wife left me I was so unhappy I bought an old Bentley to cheer myself up (it’s shaming to admit how well it worked). When Alexander was sobbing his way through his first discovery of chickenpox spots I offered him a dollar for every pox and two dollars for every new one. He stopped sobbing slowly enough to barter his way through the offer in order to get a copy of Crash Bandicoot 3 instead of the money, but the idea remains a good one.

  However, in spite of these male disabilities, there is one circumstance that opens me up with that helpless empathy and longing to reach out and make everything better (that motherly feel, from all accounts). It’s when they’re isolated in a group and they don’t know what to do, and their friends – if they have any friends – refuse to help. During Alexander’s first week at his big, six-year-old school he was taking part in a supervised game of Stick in the Mud. He hadn’t understood the rules and didn’t know what to do. But he had to do something so he was running up and down the side of the game, pretending to be a part of it all. He wouldn’t dare to meet people’s eyes, but just ran up and down the edge of the crowd, while all the boys dashed confidently about the playing area, shouting and ignoring him while he pathetically ran up the sidelines, pretending to be in play.

  Unbearable things happen at school. The playground is always a brutal place. A friend of mine told me that when he was at school forty years ago, a boy came back after his father had died. He got a new nickname: Dad’s-dead. Those things aren’t allowed any more, but the scale of unhappiness has been recalibrated.

  This was Alexander’s first day at his new school in his new country, when he was nine. ‘First, I couldn’t find my bag. Second, I didn’t know where to sit or what to do. Third, I walked around for the whole lunch waiting for someone to ask what to do and no one came because they were all having lunch. Only one boy wanted to sit with me and he was really short. And I didn’t get any lunch.’

  It was worse when I was young, but only for me.

  The year developed; the little garden at the back of Southmoor Road lost the sun earlier and earlier. And suddenly daylight saving was withdrawn and it was dark at six, then at five, then at four. There were certain dismal days when the clouds were low overhead and the drizzle so thick that street lights put out their sullen sodium glow at half past three. On the other side of the world it was high summer and the gangs of children would be out rolling around together in the ecstatic union you can never recreate when you’re older (not unless you become football hooligans).

  There we were, in a small house in a dark country at the wrong end of the year. That made demands on all of us. We were now living without a safety net. There was no one to send the boys away to if I got angry. So I had to be increasingly careful about that, very careful indeed.

  All his sixteenth year, Hugo and I butted heads. Even when he said something funny I found myself wanting to argue. ‘Two wrongs can make a right,’ he had once said. ‘A wrong can be thought of as a negative and a right as positive. Two negatives cancel each other out, so therefore, grammatically, Hitler was right to burn the Reichstag and invade the Sudetenland.’ This is a marvellously inventive joke for a fourteen-year-old; what was I doing quibbling with it?

  Here’s one exchange among many. He had asked me to play his computer game. There was only one response, really: ‘Starcraft? Sure, I’ll play that, it only looks boring because I don’t know how to do it.’ But I said to him: ‘I don’t want to play Starcraft, do I? It’s not exactly a learning experience, is it?’

  ‘Well, it is,’ he said, ‘because it’s something new.’

  ‘But it’s not new. At least, I know what it is, broadly speaking, because’ (and I must have said this just to start an argument) ‘I’ve played Tetris.’

  ‘It. Is. Nothing. Like. Tetris.’ Hugo used the inflections, the determined emphases that denote he was really, really, really serious about this. To that extent, things were going as planned.

  ‘It is very like Tetris – I know what you’re going to say – but it is in the same category as Tetris because you press keys in order to make things change on a screen.’

  ‘That is such a gross generalisation!’

  ‘It’s absolutely particular!’

  ‘Oh yeah, well, chalk is like cheese, too.’

  ‘In what way, exactly? How is chalk like cheese?’

  ‘They’re both made of atoms, for a start.’

  ‘Well, that’s a generalisation, that’s what a generalisation is, everything’s made of cheese’ (atoms, I meant to say atoms) ‘everything’s made of atoms. That is the most complete generalisation there is.’

  ‘Just don’t worry.’ He walked away with a gesture.

  ‘I do worry’ – calling over my shoulder because I’m walking away as well – ‘I always worry. I’m turning into a mother.’

  He made a noise as if to say that would be a very sub-optimal outcome.

  And dark feelings were still blowing up out of nowhere. At dinner one evening I found something to say: ‘I think we might be able to afford to go skiing at Christmas.’

  ‘That’s great, Daddy,’ Hugo said, ‘but you will remember to book the tickets, won’t you? And book the lessons before we get there? I have this vision of us standing around, like the time we couldn’t get into the cinema because you hadn’t got the tickets and … Are you all right, Daddy? Uh-oh.’

  These episodes weren’t exactly a videotape problem, but something deeper, some essential masculine struggle.

  One day I gave Hugo a page of a book to read about academic standards. It appeared that students with top marks in their German A level were starting university without knowing much in the way of German. After he’d read the passage, I said, ‘The sentences these students were given to translate were so simple – “I like to drink
Chinese tea.” Seven out of forty-three get it right. “I prefer to drink strong coffee.” Four out of forty-three get it. Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘Is it? Why? I can’t really understand what they’re saying.’

  ‘Well, you have to read it.’

  ‘I have!’ he said indignantly.

  ‘Well, it’s very straightforward.’

  He looked at it again. ‘He’s saying that in translating the sentence “I like to drink strong coffee” the maximum amount you can score is four out of forty-three.’

  ‘No,’ I said carefully, ‘he’s saying that these students are very bad considering their A levels because only four out of forty-three can translate “I like strong coffee”.’

  ‘Oh! … I see where you’re coming from. I’m on your level now. I mean, I see what he’s saying, but I don’t have enough German to comment. I mean, eight out of forty-three got “The teacher gave the pupil a book”. But I don’t know enough German to know whether that’s a more difficult sentence to translate. That might be a really difficult sentence.’

  I was ten seconds ahead of all this, wanting to get to another point, and knowing that I wouldn’t get there now, as we’d got so blocked, I started steaming. ‘But that’s a perverse interpretation. The man is telling you why he is saying this! God, I’m getting angry! Why am I so angry?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ he said coldly and shortly afterwards left the wreck of the conversation to go to his room.

  When I apologised later, I did something I rarely do: returned to unpack the argument some more. ‘It’s just that I felt you resisting the argument because you didn’t want to get it – maybe you felt I was forcing it on to you. But you need to find another way of telling me to back off, because it’s awful getting manoeuvred into acting stupid when you’re as clever as you are. It’s an emotional block, not an intellectual one. And you can only be as clever as your emotional set-up will let you be. Everyone has talent, but it’s character that gets the talent out.’