Confessions of a Bad Mother (22 page)

‘I’ll sit down at the table if I can have a biscuit,’
he tells him, as I am about to serve supper. We’re getting to the point
where in order to achieve anything, we’ll have to get in teams of
mediators.

And that still leaves us the problem of reverse bargaining. When I say
to Lawrence: ‘You can have a sweet if you do your teeth afterwards’
– he only has to keep his end of the bargain
after
he’s had
the treat. So not surprisingly, I get screwed. When I say: ‘You
won’t get a sweet next time,’ he replies: ‘I don’t
care.’ Of course, when it comes to next time he does care, and I get
stuffed again. Peter says it’s because kids, unlike adults, don’t
appreciate anything once it’s in the past. They never say:
‘Remember that time I was bawling my eyes out and you bought me a toy
car? Cheers for that!’

Similarly, Lydia goes to a friend’s house to play, but fails to
keep her end of the deal, which is to put her own clothes back on to go home.
If I explain beforehand: ‘When I come to get you, promise you’ll
get ready without a fuss?’ she nods dutifully and says: ‘Yes,
Mummy. I promise.’

Cut to: Me arriving at friend’s house to find her dressed as a
fairy or a princess or a lion, or with nothing on at all. And it always follows
the same pattern: ‘Lydia, time to go. Can you get dressed,
please?’

Lydia (running upstairs): ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’

One afternoon, I promise Lawrence we will get Lydia and definitely be
back in time for
The Simpsons
, which I want to watch myself. But not
wanting the Other Mother to think our lives are ruled by television, I say:
‘We can’t be late. We’ve got someone coming round at
six.’

‘Who, Mummy? Who?’

‘Er … Katarina.’

Lydia drops everything. ‘Katarina! Katarina!’

And while the Other Mother is kindly searching for Lydia’s socks,
I whisper: ‘Not really. But if you come now you can watch
The
Simpsons
.’

‘THE SIMPSONS!!!!’ yells Lydia, making a fool of me in front
of the Other Mother, and becoming so excited she forgets about getting dressed
altogether.

Which is, I believe, where we came in.

I have no answers to any of this, so I’ll just close on this
thought: the three most devoted couples I know don’t have kids. On the
other hand, when they argue, who is there to blame?

Peter’s sister and her boyfriend have offered to have both
children to stay the night. The excitement on all our rparts is too much.
Jessica is their favourite person. She rhas a dog, a cat and endless patience.
What’s more, her two sons are nearly thirty and still speaking to
her.

Unable to make a decision about a hotel, we decide to have dinner and
see a film.

‘There’s the new Jack Nicholson.’

‘Sure! Anything with him in it.’

On the way, we read the blurb in the paper.

‘
A retiring police chief pledges to catch the killer of a
young
child.
’

‘Ah.’

But: ‘
Jack Nicholson in a tormenting, riveting
performance.
’

We love Jack Nicholson. It’s harrowing, but the harrowingness is
offset by Vanessa Redgrave doing a Swedish accent. And anyhow, we have worse
visions in our heads.

I remember once trying to defend
The Silence of the
Lambs
to a man who didn’t like horror films.

‘Um, well, I think when you see a film with a monster in it, and
you experience your fear, and the monster is killed or conquered or whatever,
at the end, it’s quite, you know, satisfying,’ I said. And he
replied: ‘I think that’s entirely fatuous.’

But he was wrong. That book single-handedly rescued a holiday in a dark,
gloomy house in France when it rained all the time and the ‘swimming
pool’ was five feet across and inflatable. We had only one copy, so took
turns. I read the last chapter locked in the car, with the rest of the family
circling outside like wolves. But that’s not the reason I respect Thomas
Harris and his kind. He knows the insides of people’s heads are not
fundamentally nice and sweet. And of course it’s not true only of
grown-ups.

Children love stories about monsters; everyone knows that. They are avid
for horrible, beastly tales and fascinated by violence. But obviously,
there’s violence and violence. Lawrence and Lydia are still at the age
where they think it would be hilarious to be hit by a lorry and be
‘squashed as flat as a pancake. Or an ice-cream van!’ – the
prospect of being hit at thirty mph by a ton of strawberry cornets being
utterly thrilling.

But it’s hard to gauge the bedtime reading matter just right.
Well, it would probably be easier if we stuck to the books labelled for their
age. But we get bored. Also, children don’t progress in their taste in an
incremental, linear way – any more than adults do. They’re
extremely nostalgic for some of the first stories we ever read to them –
and no wonder; several are absolutely brilliant. But then there are the books
which they
can
read themselves, or will soon be able to, but which they
still insist we read to them. And these are often the ones we like the
least.

Chief offenders at this stage are the
Mr Men
books, with their
so-called ‘plots’ in which the main character always goes for a
walk and meets the other characters. The aim seems to be to stamp out
individuality. Everyone ignores
Mr Noisy
until he learns to be quiet.
Mr Messy
gets ‘re-educated’ into being tidy by communist,
Cultural Revolution-style thugs.

‘
Neat and Tidy
,’ they say, ‘
Tidy and
Neat.
’

Doesn’t it just make your blood run cold?

Or Lydia wants
The Lion King
, which I’ll use any excuse to
get out of. Peter, being nicer, tends to give in, but speeds up more ruthlessly
than I do. He can do
Lion
King II
in 108 seconds. I don’t
know which is worse, that, or Disney’s cutesy ‘retellings’ of
the classics. I can’t wait to see how they’ll do
Madame Bovary:
‘In ancient France, a
humble country doctor’s wife longed to
seek beyond the simple pleasures of village life …’
Or have
they got onto Shakespeare yet? ‘
In ancient Denmark, a noble young
prince sought
to avenge his father’s death while asking himself
some pretty tough
questions along the way …
’

This is why we’ve sent the children to schools where they’ll
be hot-housed, so they can hurry up and learn to read to themselves. And
it’s starting to work already, up to a point. Lawrence will read Lydia a
few pages – of something pretty infantile – just to show that he
can do something she can’t. But it only lasts for a few minutes. So,
until they’re completely self-sufficient, one way to keep control over
bedtime reading is to make up our own stories, as both my parents –
effortlessly, it seemed – used to do. As well as spinning fictions out of
thin air, my mother told tales from Greek myths, opera and folklore, although
looking back on it she did rather tend towards the macabre. She was very keen
on Tosca, and I can remember the sinking feeling after the firing squad scene,
when the lover didn’t get up. She was also quite fond of Cupid and
Psyche, in which Psyche is tricked into losing Cupid for ever by his jealous
mother Venus, and then there were her versions of reports by Mayhew, the
pioneering Victorian journalist also not known for his happy endings.
I’ve never forgotten the interview with the infant watercress seller, who
could not play in the park because she had to work from dawn till dusk for a
few farthings, or starve. The fact that the park outside in which she stood was
our own playground, made it all the more heart-rending.

My father, being less intellectual, created cheerier narratives such as
the story of Mr Today and his friends – Mr Today’s body was a
calendar which he flipped over every morning – who went on a journey
through the Forest of Feelings to the Palace of Pleasure, which was guarded by
fierce birds named after an – at the time – well-known brand of
shampoo. The saga continued over many nights, taking whichever direction he
fancied at the time. At our urgings he wrote some of it down, but we
couldn’t understand why it was never finished.

Because it’s bloody exhausting, that’s why, improvising a
story on the spot, then trying to recall the exact details on subsequent
nights. On holiday at the seaside I have a go, but the best I can manage is a
kind of imperious, superannuated mermaid, a bit like Margaret Thatcher with a
tail. The Sea-Fairy Queen has sea horses for servants and I invent her as a way
to stop the children running along the sea wall and falling onto the rocks on
the other side. I tell them she’ll push them off the wall if they
disobey, because she owns the beach.

Bizarrely, they like the idea of this scaly despot, and I am forced to
think up more adventures for her, such as setting impossible tasks for her
daughter’s suitors and so on. But the effort wears me out. Peter does a
little better, with improvised meanderings that involve Lawrence and Lydia and
whatever objects – a flying boat, a diamond potty, a chocolate tree
– that they want him to include. But this too cannot be kept up for long.
So, guiltily, we resort to tapes. But these do not produce the hoped-for
results; Lydia likes
Puffin Poems
, while Lawrence will only be quiet for
The Greek Myths
. Fights break out over whose turn it is to choose, so
that when we come up for final kisses,
Theseus and the Minotaur
pales by
comparison. I yell: ‘GO TO SLEEEEP!!!’

And, eventually, they do.

‘Why read the Twelve Labours of bloody Hercules when you can live
it,’ says Peter, reeling out of their room.

Around this time, I see a copy of
My Family and Other Animals
in
a charity shop which – due to my previous indifference to the charms of
the furry and feathered fraternity – I’ve never read. It suits us
perfectly. Most of the characters are totally self-absorbed, especially the
sneering Larry, who complains constantly and sets the house on fire, and
Leslie, who wants to shoot dear little Gerry’s pets. Gerry reminds me of
Lawrence; he’s lately begun stopping to examine spiders and shield bugs
on the way to school, and we have a stag beetle in our salt dish, though it
hasn’t moved for a while.

‘Do stag beetles like salt, Mummy?’

‘Yes, but not that much.’

The whole Durrell household has so captivated me that I desperately want
to be Mrs D, who drifts through the chaos without ever losing her temper, and
have started to fantasize about moving to Corfu in the 1950s. Eventually,
though, even this literary treat starts to pall. They lose interest in
Gerry’s last tutor, a hunchbacked, pathological liar and like
Sheherezade, we have to come up with a new plot, or die.

Thank God we’ve still got so many of our own childhood favourites.
Catherine Storr’s
Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf
I have kept for
over thirty years. Polly and the Wolf have a relationship characterized by
humour and ambivalence. The Wolf tries to be brilliant and predatory, but is
stupid and lazy. He comes round on various pretexts to try and eat her, but she
always outwits him. She feels slightly sorry for him, though, a bit like Lisa
Simpson with Homer. Indeed, the sitcommy quality of their escapades goes down
well, and, emboldened by my success with Polly, I decide to try and train them
to like everything else by the same writer.

Here’s my old copy of
Lucy
, a girl who wants to be a boy,
and to prove herself catches a gang of burglars. The only problem comes when
she stows away in their van and ends up having to escape from their
hideout.

‘But of course
you
wouldn’t do this, would
you?’ I point out.

‘We would if the burglars were bad.’

‘Well, no, you see, because it might be dangerous. It
would
be dangerous.’

‘But Lucy can do it.’

It was written, of course, in 1962.

In
Lucy Runs Away
, she gets so sick of not being a boy that she
gets a train all the way to Cornwall – again by herself – and
outwits the guard who thinks she’s escaping her cruel parents and offers
to call the welfare. On the beach she saves an old man from drowning by calling
the lifeguard, but I rather overshadow this triumph by emphasizing the risks
inherent in getting trains to distant places without adults. At least nowadays
they’re so often delayed the parents would easily catch up. But I feel
denigrating Lucy’s autonomy is a pity, because I do want them to be
independent – not least so I can have some of my life to myself while
I’m young enough to enjoy it. Anyhow, it’s with my next choice that
I get out of my depth.

Polly, the Giant’s Bride
is about a young girl on holiday
with her family in Birling Gap who meets a giant. He starts off politely
enough, by giving her a stone bracelet and ring. But the ring and bracelet
won’t come off, and then he starts sending her horrible, creepy notes. In
other words, he’s an enormous stalker. ‘Eights and Over’ says
the blurb on the back, not, as in Lydia’s case, ‘Five And
Under’ – i.e. four. I have a sinking feeling as I read it, for
Polly, the Giant’s Bride
is, I remember now, absolutely
terrifying.

Lydia’s sitting bolt upright in her bed. Her face is becoming more
and more anxious; she’s nearly crying. No, she’s not, she’s
– gripped, and wants to hear it again. And – again. Thank God it
does actually have a happy ending, and the heroine is not assaulted by a man
who jumps out from behind the cliffs with an unfeasibly large cock.

Shaken by my lack of judgement, I over-correct, and try to repair the
damage with
Robin
, which though by the same author is the polar opposite
of
Polly
, written in a completely different style, with long passages of
description and very little action except towards the end, when Robin rescues a
storm-tossed ship by dialling the coastguard, all thanks to his magic shell.
You see what I mean? He is ever so slightly soppy. And inevitably by chapter
three I am skipping more and more, and flipping the pages furtively to see if
there might be a helicopter chase or machine-gun attack I’d forgotten.
But no, Robin continues to go for walks and examine his magic shell, to not
entirely surprising taunts from his older brother and sister. So I resort to
trying to make the thing more exciting by varying the modulation of my voice.
However this doesn’t help much, as I find that yelling the line,
‘
“ARE YOU MAGIC?!!” he asked the shell!
’ only
irritates my audience more.