The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  Very few grown women enjoy listening to this sort of thing. I like it because it makes me feel young again.

  So my view is that it’s endemic, beyond culture. We can worry about what television is doing to children but it won’t do any good. They’re going to turn out their own way. And removing them from computer games won’t necessarily improve their imagination. The real world outdoes anything on film – if only because it’s real. Sending children off to the bracing atmosphere of a working farm can produce far more macabre effects than anything electronic. Last year, Alexander was lying in the bottom of a punt on the Cherwell, gliding through Oxford’s most civilised quarter and calling out: ‘Hey, swan dudes! You look out or we’ll get a knife and rip open your stomach and pull out your guts!’ He wasn’t under the spell of the zombies in Resident Evil 2, or the mad birds of South Park, it was because he’d been out in the glorious sunshine on Selby’s farm and seen a semi-wild turkey caught, slaughtered, gutted and carried off to the plucking shed.

  Alexander is amused by what he sees on screen, or excited, or bored – but he is never offended and very rarely frightened. On the other hand it’s true that one of his neurotic fears – the one which drives him out of the bathroom before the lavatory starts flushing – was inspired by a film (a psychotic clown came up round the S-bend). But he was offered the deal that would free him of that anxiety as long as he never saw a violent film again. ‘No way!’

  There is only one indicator which would put me on the censor’s side and stop me showing the boys these films: if they had bad dreams. But this hasn’t happened so far.

  Where his critical detachment comes from is a mystery. His mother’s credulity was permanently suspended. I was the same, a sucker for it. As a result, it seemed to me that when I was his age we had far more horrible films, far nastier, far more bloodthirsty – but it can’t have been true. If you’ve seen Steven Segal pushing his finger into someone’s brain (through their eye, since you ask) in Under Siege 2, you’ll know that such an idea is far-fetched. But nonetheless it is true that films in those days affected me far more than films these days affect either of my boys.

  Forty years ago I sat through films sobbing silently at the hideous, U-certificate carnage. Saturday afternoon cowboys were shot in sieges at their mountain hideouts. Indians attacked wagon train innocents; a cavalry troop would come across the terrible, arrow-studded remains of the travellers; a man would be hanged for rustling. If there wasn’t a tree one of the trail hands would say: ‘Drag hang him.’

  The body count of early films moved me to the roots of my emotions. This was because the concept of actors hadn’t yet revealed itself to me. So the question I agonised over was this: how could so many people be slaughtered for our entertainment? Where did the film company find so many volunteers for death? There could only be one answer: these people were citizens who had been convicted of a capital crime and who had chosen this way to be executed. It was horrible, it was fascinating, it was proof of the hardness of a world where punishment was unusually cruel.

  ‘But it’s not real,’ my mother explained at last, when she eventually discovered the tears (you can cry privately in the dark a great deal). But what did she mean, not real? What did she mean it wasn’t real? How did that work? If it wasn’t real, why was I sobbing so much? I sat in my seat, repeating to myself, ‘It’s not real, it didn’t happen, it’s only a film!’ and choking back the tears.

  But then we saw a film about the Californian gold rush – ‘Actually based on an historical event,’ Mother said approvingly – and I had no defences left. ‘Then it’s real! It really did happen!’ I wailed silently as the man was yanked off his galloping horse by a bullwhip round the neck. ‘It isn’t only a film!’

  And then, later on, A Tale of Two Cities made a terrific impression on my view of how life worked. Dirk Bogarde was in the tumbril going off to be executed for entirely admirable reasons. Making the journey with him was a slip of a girl, an upper-class waif with that sort of Audrey Hepburn allure. Maybe it was her mouth (her lower lip offered the world). Perhaps it was her eyes that combined fear and promise in a complicated way. Or possibly it was that with all her frailty and gentleness she was stark naked – quite shockingly naked – underneath her execution shift. There was a charge being given off by the scene that was intensely erotic. She snuggled into Dirk’s chest as the guillotine blade sheared away in the background. He stood there manfully as the queue moved forward. Finally, she asked the poignant question, ‘Will you tell me when it’s time?’

  Then she made him kiss her – and Dirk couldn’t have enjoyed that much – but there was a lingering kiss, plangent with all possibility except for the fact that she was going up the steps to have her head cut off. That certainly chimed with my erotic experiences so far. Love was accompanied by pain and sacrifice. The ordeal has to be endured before love reveals itself. Some people say life isn’t like that, but only recently have I thought that might be true.

  The reason for that new optimism goes back to a square in a Provençal village, the summer we all went on holiday. One night, when the moon was full, I spoke to Jose and said something to her that made her look at me very seriously, and then her eyes filled with tears. She hadn’t heard a man speak like this to her for a long time and so her eyes brimmed. We looked at each other for a while, until her other powerful desire came to the surface and I went to buy her cigarettes.

  ‘Hello, Beedle Bop,’ I said to him in the bar

  He didn’t answer at first. Then he asked, ‘Why was Jose looking at you like that?’ He’d been playing at the football table, but keeping us under observation at the same time. There was a strange sullenness in his face, which I hardly noticed at first.

  ‘I just told her that I liked her,’ I said casually. It wasn’t at all clear how much trouble we were in.

  ‘You’ve told her you like her before. Why has she got water in her eyes?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, she’s a girl.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I told you, I just said I liked her.’

  ‘But you’ve told her that before.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s only just realised it.’

  ‘So why’d she get water in her eyes?’

  There was no suitable answer to that, but we had been caught in flagrante. That our relationship was essentially innocent was no excuse.

  After an ominous withdrawal, lasting some days, I think, he said quite angrily, ‘You promised you’d never do that with a friend!’ What had I been thinking of when I’d promised him that? Could I really have said I’d never do it with a friend?

  ‘But what’s wrong with you? What’s the matter? What difference does it make to you? Everything will go on just like before. Hugo doesn’t mind, do you, Hugo?’

  ‘Not in the least. Anything that makes you happy.’

  ‘So what are you so upset about?’

  ‘I think it’s disgusting,’ Alexander said.

  ‘You’re just thrown. It’s just something new. You’ll get used to it.’

  He thought about that and said, ‘No, I won’t. Not for years. I think it’s disgusting. When I’m fifteen I won’t think it’s disgusting, but when I’m eleven I’ll think it’s just as disgusting. When I’m twelve I’ll think it’s disgusting, when I’m thirteen I’ll think it’s still disgusting. When I’m fourteen I’ll think it’s a bit less disgusting, but not much, and when I’m fifteen it will be all right.’

  This commenced a six-month campaign, beginning with a total withdrawal of affections, starting with Georgia. Quite abruptly he stopped going round to her house. Suddenly he produced a stream of complaints against her.

  I asked him, ‘Why are you so cross with Georgia?’

  ‘Because she copies everything I do,’ he said moodily.

  ‘You copy her, too.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘You do! What about those sunglasses you want to get, like she had at Christmas?’

  I thou
ght I was on firmer ground. It was like the time I asked him to itemise exactly where my housekeeping and fathering was inadequate and he produced such a list that I had to write it down. On and on he went. He must file this stuff. ‘That’s so not fair!’ he exclaimed, beginning his examination of Georgia’s plagiarism. ‘I had Banjo Kazooee and then she got Banjo Kazooee! I got a new bike, then she got a new bike! I got The Hobbit, then she got The Hobbit! We got dogs, now she’s going to get a dog! I go to karate classes, now she’s going to karate classes! I get a new lock and a pannier and she gets a new lock and a pannier! She boasts and says I boast too much, and I barely boast in front of her. And she copies Hugo and says that I’m a massive fluke artist whereas she’s the biggest fluke artist in the world. And she’s got the same drawing book. And if we get an air rifle, she’ll get an air rifle.’

  This catalogue is arguable in all its details, but not in its intensity. I know how fond he is of Georgia and can only guess at the intimacy they have shared. But to defend our peculiar family culture and his place in it he rejected her brutally. And if it was out of self-preservation it didn’t make it less painful for her.

  It was a comprehensive campaign. He stopped looking at Jose. Then he stopped talking to her.

  ‘Look,’ I told him. ‘I’m not going to give up Jose for you, so you might as well get used to it.’

  ‘That’s what you said about Angie. So I expect you will.’

  ‘No way. Forget it. If you’re counting on that you are going to be disappointed.’

  He just repeated with remarkable composure, ‘I expect you will.’

  Basic instincts

  It wasn’t at all fair of Alexander, considering how indulgent I have been of his excursions into this line of country. All this sort of thing starts so much earlier than we think and Alexander was no exception.

  There’s a note in my book about him, six years ago; he’s lying on his back on the sofa in the middle of the day. He’s five. He has on a T-shirt and nothing else. He is casually watching a video, rubbing himself and sporting a surprisingly large erection (it comes from his mother’s side of the family). This wouldn’t have been a picture you’d see around our house when I was five. It wasn’t like that in my day. Although, in fairness, it probably wouldn’t have been like that in his day either, not if his mother were alive.

  ‘My doodle’s got big,’ he said absently.

  ‘Stop doing that,’ I told him.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  I considered the principle of Just Say Yes and said, ‘Just stop it, okay? Not in public.’

  ‘This isn’t public, though.’

  ‘Just stop it!’

  There’d been other opportunities for him down there in the southern hemisphere, where the girls are not just gorgeous but also game. And out there, their shrubberies are larger and the days are warmer. Whatever he did with his girlfriends from down the road may never be known, but there was nudity and maybe advanced medical games. Certainly it was the older girl down the lane who taught him to hold his equipment and waddle forward going ‘Wss! wss! wss!’. It’s unlikely there was any erotic content in that, just the exuberant scatophilia of little children.

  However, there was something else more significant going on at about the same time. ‘Why does Chase Meridian like Batman?’ he asked when he was six. Not everyone’s seen Batman Forever so I should say that it’s a mildly fetishistic kids’ film with shiny PVC surfaces and slightly restrictive clothing. In a costuming sequence, the bat butt is presented in a way you normally only get in special-interest magazines. So the question ‘Why does Chase Meridian like Batman?’ has more than one answer. However, that wasn’t something we needed to go into until puberty had worked its magic, so I just said: ‘It’s because she fancies him.’

  ‘What’s fancy him?’

  ‘She wants to press her hot face against his and kiss him.’

  ‘Urghoo!’ We both do five-year-old faces.

  ‘Do you like Chase?’ I asked.

  ‘No!’ he answered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she’s a girl.’

  ‘There are some girls you like,’ I said. ‘You like Rose. You seemed to like her, anyway, in a letter which …’ but I didn’t get any further. He ran static interference until I couldn’t hear myself speak. I was drowned out, crushed out of the conversation, it was like an airbag had gone off in my face.

  He had met Rose at a beach party; a monstrous eight-year-old. She had a face that already betrayed signs of gross sensuality. Her mouth was large and her eyes wide. She grabbed Alexander, kissed him and laughed wildly in his face as if she’d done the most disgusting thing it was possible to do (as in Alexander’s view she had).

  Her father watched her with resigned exasperation. She pushed Alexander, abused him, jeered at him, took his toys and ran away with them. She accused him of stealing from her, of hurting her, of lying about it. She tugged at his shirt and yelled in his face. She denounced him for not sharing, for watching television, for not watching television, for not listening to her. She made him apologise for faults real and imagined. For the little boy it would have been like scrummaging with the All Blacks.

  In many ways it was the courting technique of my first wife, so I know how successful it was. Alexander was angry, shocked, bewildered; he didn’t like it at all. But he was powerless to resist. For all his shuddering with comic revulsion whenever her name was mentioned she had lit some secret fuse in him. The letter I had found in his pocket in his handwriting said: ‘Dere Ros. I would like to mary you and kis you on the lips.’

  But we never came to discuss it. I never mentioned it again (don’t tell him I’ve told you).

  Children get a lot of sex thrown at them. At least that’s something that hasn’t changed. Presenters for children’s shows on television have always had voluptuous mouths, inviting bosoms and eyes full of promise. In my day we had a woman called Muriel who presented a five-minute show with a cat called Willum (‘A,B,C,D,E, Goodbye from Willum and me,’ she sang. ‘F,G,H,I,J we’ll see you another day!’). She was a very attractive woman to us six-year-olds (she took a terrible career dive, it seemed to us, when she became a senior drama producer at the BBC). We also had Natalie Wood in her white dress in The Great Race. We had all the Dr Who girls.

  Children, as ever, are up to their middles in a general sex fizz of advertising, fashion, pop, television drama, movies, editorial, women’s make-up and gender dialectic – along with a thumping pulse of sex stories in the news bulletins, Viagra, Monica, Jeffrey Archer.

  Thirty years ago there was the skipping rhyme that girls sang: ‘Hee hee hee, Ha ha ha,/ Left my knickers,/In my boyfriend’s car.’ Alexander’s seven-year-old friend Charles (his half-brother’s half-brother) doesn’t sound any different singing: ‘Everybody come up here, it’s nice and safe and sexy! Oh babee!’, while his younger sister is going, ‘Hands up everyone who wants to sex their sexy girlfriend in the toilet!’

  But here is one advantage of single-parent, same-sex households. The boys and I can talk about sexual mechanics without any subtext along the lines of, ‘So that’s what your mother and I get up to, boys, when you’ve gone to bed. Now give her a goodnight kiss and hurry along.’

  That was always true until Alexander started to find the whole thing disgusting.

  But from this relatively disengaged viewpoint there are two views that may help to soothe conservatives’ anxieties about sex and children.

  First, you can seriously question whether the level of sex knowledge is much higher than it was before sex education started. And second, the general wash of sex around children is nothing new; it’s how we were brought up ourselves – and we’re all right, aren’t we?

  To hear eight-year-old Tim talking about how children are conceived you couldn’t date it within thirty years. ‘It’s about sexing up,’ he announced in the car. ‘The man sexes the woman up. They take their T-shirts off and get into bed. But they keep their pants on and rub tummi
es together, and that’s sexing up.’

  True in too many cases, I fear, but let’s hear from the back of Bolly’s car where one boy among four announced the discovery of flavoured condoms. Through the general chorus of disgust (‘Eww! Argh! Wurgh! That’s disgusting!’) one boy asked, ‘What’s a condom?’

  This was something of a short-arm tackle, but eventually another was able to say, ‘It’s what stops women getting pregnant.’

  ‘Where do you put it?’ the first boy wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, you stick it down the front of your pants,’ he was told.

  Three decades ago we knew no more than that. We sang along with the pop song of the time, ‘I told my mommy/If I was lonely/That she could buy me/A rubber johnny.’ And if you’re of an age that needs to be told what a rubber johnny is – well, so were we. All we knew was that it was a comic object and we knew it was comic because we kept laughing at it.

  In the same way, we sang along with Petula Clark: ‘Maybe you know/A little brothel to go/To where they/Wear no clothes/Downtown!’ What was a brothel? No one needed to know anything except it was where you went to ‘wear no clothes’.

  At the age of eleven there was a conversation in the dormitory where we discussed the workings of the sexual act. It was clear to me that the male and female parts fitted together somehow, and that there should be some sort of fluid (urine, most likely) passing from the male to the female.

  At thirteen, our headmaster gave the traditional talk in his study to the leavers. We filed in one by one to hear the same story: ‘You may find, at your senior school,’ he said, ‘that certain older boys ask you to go for a walk with them in the woods. My advice to you is: Don’t.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You may also find as you get older that if you muck about with yourself in the night you can produce a pleasant sensation. My advice to you again is: Don’t.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Mucking about with yourself. It can become a habit,’ he said, jiggling his hand in his coat pocket. ‘A bad habit.’