Fathers and Sons (18 page)

Judy must have forgiven me, because when we came back from the Canaries we got married.

The ceremony took place in Manchester’s registry office on
Jackson’s Row, just off Deansgate. It was very different from my first wedding, not least because my son was present, as well as my stepsons, plus a large contingent from both the happy couple’s families.

But, for Judy, there were undeniable echoes of her first nuptials twelve years earlier. Because they, too, had taken place in Jackson’s Row. There were at least three offices couples could get married there and when we all trooped into the one designated for us, Judy whispered to me, ‘I
knew
this would happen…they’ve given us exactly the same room as David and I had last time.’

Her family realised this too–after all, most of them had been there back in 1974. It didn’t really matter, but it did feel a little odd.

But once the ceremony was under way, we all forgot about it and everything went swimmingly, until the designated photographer–Judy’s younger brother, Roger–moved forward to snap us signing the register.

Roger is something of a perfectionist and kept adjusting the focus and getting us to alter positions slightly. Judy loathes being photographed and after a couple of times she began to fidget. ‘Surely you’ve got enough by now?’ she asked at last.

I squeezed her waist, remembering all the photoshoots we’d endured together for publicity campaigns promoting
Granada Reports
. ‘Come on, darling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t done this before.’

The Finnigans froze. Judy stiffened. ‘
What?
’

Too late, the double meaning revealed itself to me.

‘Oh God, I didn’t mean…That is to say, I was talking about–’

‘Never mind. Just leave it now.’

Later, in the car on the way to our reception, I managed to explain and a somewhat mollified Judy said, ‘OK, but you’d better explain to my lot when we get there. God knows what they must be thinking.’

So round the room I went. ‘So, you see, when I said, “It’s not as if you haven’t done this before,” I wasn’t talking about, you know, I was meaning…’ and so on. Judy’s elder brother, Cal, told me years later that I had reminded him of a slightly desperate Basil Fawlty.

Explanations over, we got on with the celebrations. It was wonderful; I felt the purest joy. I knew I had finally found the right woman for me and, halfway through the wedding breakfast, Jack woke in his carrycot at the side of our table and pushed himself up to peer over at us. I waved at him and he gave a great big gummy grin. It seemed to me like an unambiguous thumbs-up.

Richard. That was what the now-toddling Jack called me once he started talking. Not Dad or Daddy–Richard. And why not? It was what Tom and Dan called me. But as time went by, an increasingly sentient Jack was clearly developing some confused ideas about fatherhood.

David had arrived to collect his sons for the weekend and Jack marched up to him. ‘David, are you my daddy too?’

David looked like he’d swallowed a 50p piece and after he’d
retreated in confusion, I decided it was time for a little chat with my four-year-old son.

‘Mummy’s your mummy, and Tom’s and Dan’s as well,’ I explained, sitting with him on our sunny doorstep. ‘They live with Mummy and me because we all thought that was best. But David’s their daddy, and I’m your daddy. Do you see?’

Jack processed the information. ‘So Tom and Dan have two daddies.’

‘Er…well, sort of. I’m what’s called their stepdaddy.’

‘Are you my stepdaddy too?’

‘No. I’m just your daddy.’

More deep thought.

‘Which are best, daddies or stepdaddies?’

Now there was a question with topspin. I paused for a moment.

‘Neither, really. As long as they love their children, they’re about the same.’

‘Does David love me?’

I tried not to smile. ‘No, although I’m sure he thinks you’re a nice little boy.’

‘Why doesn’t he love me though?’

Christ, this was getting complicated.

‘Because he’s not your stepdaddy. You don’t live with him, do you? You live with Mummy and Daddy. See?’

Jack nodded. ‘But he still loves Tom and Dan, even though he doesn’t live with them any more?’

‘Exactly.’ I thought that was probably enough for one day but felt obliged to ask him: ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’

He nodded and looked up at me intently. Here it comes. The big one.

‘Can we have McDonald’s?’

Meanwhile our family continued to grow. Judy was pregnant again, and for the first time in her life she was expecting a girl. We were thrilled, if slightly taken aback. Sons we knew we could do. Daughters were unknown territory.

Back at St Mary’s, and in the same operating theatre Jack was delivered, the baby we’d decided to call Chloe was prised into the world with the same brutally efficient force as her brothers. But there was no hint of the diplodocus or brontosaur about this baby.

‘My God, she’s beautiful,’ Judy said, as I placed Chloe on her breast. ‘I mean, really, literally beautiful. Just look at her…she’s such a little girl…’

It was true. With her rosebud lips and delicately lashed eyes, Chloe looked nothing like the primordially fierce Jack had in his early weeks. Or as formidable as Ustinov’s newborn daughter, come to that.

That lovely, utterly peaceful atmosphere that comes just after a baby has been born had descended. Judy and her little girl drifted off to sleep. I took some Polaroids of mother and daughter gently nuzzling each other and tiptoed out. When I got home, Jack was long in bed and Anne was sitting at the kitchen table, playing cards with her twin grandsons.

‘Well, what do you think?’

Anne shook her head slowly. ‘Oh, Richard–she’s
lovely
…’

‘Boys?’

‘Honestly?’

‘Here we go…Of course. Just don’t tell me your sister looks like a dinosaur.’

‘No…she looks like a kitten.’

We took a marker pen and drew some whiskers on each of Chloe’s pink cheeks.

Blimey. They were right.

Four was plenty, Judy and I decided. As she’d had quite enough of surgery, I volunteered to drop in at the Family Planning Centre for The Snip. I opted for local anaesthetic, and it lived up to its billing: it was extremely local. Too bloody local, in fact. I didn’t feel a thing when the surgeon made the preliminary incisions with his scalpel, but when he got to the business part of chopping and tying off the tubing deep within, I felt like I’d fallen into the hands of an especially enthusiastic Gestapo doctor.

‘Sorry, old boy,’ he muttered apologetically as I went into vertical lift-off from the operating table, snorting and bellowing like a castrated horse. ‘Looks like you’ve got some scar tissue down there–old sporting injury, probably. It’s blocked the anaesthetic. Can’t stop now though, I’m afraid.’ And he sawed on.

Judy had driven me to the clinic as vasectomees weren’t allowed to drive for a day or so after. When I tottered back into
the waiting room, slightly greener than its painted walls, she stared at me in alarm.

‘Good God. What have they done? Cut it off?’

‘It’s perfectly possible. That did
not
go well. Take me home. I need a massive drink.’

She was sympathetic, up to a point. Later that evening, when I described my agony in lurid terms once too often, Judy said drily, ‘Hmmm. I’m sure it was horrible but try having a baby.’

‘Try having your balls slit open without anaesthetic! You can’t, and I can’t have a baby either!’

We glared at each other for a moment, an incipient battle of the sexes crackling in the air.

But I’d overdone it, and as I grumpily went to bed I realised my wife had never really complained about the pain following her Caesarean sections. Time to pipe down about the vasectomy.

(But it really hurt. Honestly.)

My father wouldn’t have dreamed of having a vasectomy and, had he been alive, he would certainly have tried to talk me out of it. Not because I would be ‘shooting blanks’–he didn’t think in such crude terms–but because he would have thought it fundamentally unmanly to volunteer to be sterile.

In fact there were quite a lot of ‘unmanly’ things my generation were willing to do within a marriage that would have been anathema to men born in the interwar years. Going with their partners to antenatal classes, for example, or appointments with the gynaecologist.

My father would have been appalled to sit in on a consultation between his wife and her ‘baby doctor’, let alone an
examination of any kind. Stirrups and speculums? Not today, thank you. I’ll be at the office.

Being present at the actual birth was another big no-no. My dad went out and mowed the lawn while I was being delivered in the front room of his home on Dagenham Road, partly for something to do, and partly to drown out the disconcerting noises drifting from the house. It simply wasn’t done for fathers to watch their children being born. The delivery room was the preserve of the midwife and, if there were problems, the doctor.

It is quite incredible how quickly these attitudes changed. Centuries of received wisdom and tradition were swept away in a handful of years. As late as the 1960s, young fathers patrolled hospital corridors, chain-smoking and swapping nervous jokes with each other, while ‘the wife’ had their babies out of sight and out of earshot.

Yet, by the 1970s, no self-respecting young husband could refuse to be in the delivery room, holding his partner’s hand, mopping her brow and tenderly urging her to ‘push’.

What happened?

In Britain, it was surely a combination of feminism and its mighty war-wagon, the National Childbirth Trust. Between them, they swept away the old shibboleths surrounding men and childbirth and dragged fathers-to-be by the scruff of the neck into the delivery room. It was a matter of taking responsibility and supporting their partners, they were told firmly. And most men found, to their surprise, that they were actually happy to go. I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything.

But does it draw modern men closer to their children, ‘bond’
them any closer than previous generations of fathers were to theirs?

Actually, I don’t think so. My father loved me no more and no less than I love my own son. That is to say, completely.

But what about the question four-year-old Jack didn’t ask me that morning in his catechism on the doorstep about step-parenting? What about the four people I helped bring up, two from the age of seven, two from birth?

Tom and Dan; Jack and Chloe. Did I treat my children differently from my stepchildren as all of them grew up together?

We’ll start with the easy bit. I certainly treated Chloe differently from all the others. Still do, always will. I’ve yet to meet a father with children of both sexes who wouldn’t say the same.

All one’s children provoke and inspire a powerful protective reflex. It never goes away. It doesn’t matter how old they become or what the specific threat to them is; the instinct to circle the wagons, saddle up and ride out at the head of the rescue posse to bring one’s chicks back to safety is a constant. But the quality, the flavour, the essence of that emotion differs depending on whether we’re talking about a girl or a boy; a son or a daughter. At least, in my experience it does.

The protectiveness I have always felt towards Chloe has a more tender, all-encompassing nature than the more robust, critically laced support I extend to her brothers. It’s more elastic. More forgiving, I suppose.

Is that sexist? I don’t really care either way, although perhaps the seeds of paternal doom lie in such seeming sentimentality.
Caveat pater
. Look at what happened to Lear. Although my Chloe has more of Cordelia about her than of Goneril or Regan. Lucky for me.

I long ago gave up trying to fight or rationalise this powerful, instinctive differential. It just is.
Vive la différence
, and all that; Chloe is a girl and I treat her more gently and indulgently on most levels than I do the boys. Go fish.

It doesn’t mean I love her one scintilla more or less than the others.

So what about Tom and Dan, and Jack? What about their ‘differential’? Is there one? I am always being asked if I treat my stepsons differently from my own son.

Absolutely. Of course. In the same way as I treated the twins differently from each other right from the start. They may be from the same egg but they’re separate human beings.

Long before Jack was born, Judy and David, and then I, would grind our teeth at school parents (and step-parents) evenings, where teachers regularly confused Tom and Dan. One couldn’t really blame the faculty–the boys looked identical–but underneath the physiological genetic cloning, they were developing into psychologically separate individuals who required different approaches to parenting, and teaching.

Today, one twin has a university degree and one doesn’t; one works as a pop-video director in London, the other as a fashion designer and buyer for a multinational company, living in a city hundreds of miles from his brother.

I love these young men, my first children, completely and
equally. I always did, from our very first year together when we were drenched in Cornish sunshine and later when the twins behaved with such grave courtesy before my mother.

But have I loved them as much as Jack–my first-born, their half-brother?

I certainly came to treat him differently, in his turn.

But come–no prevarications. Which is it to be; which bond has the first call on a father’s and stepfather’s primal emotions? Surely the selfish gene will have to make its declaration of supremacy, now we come to it?

At this point, I am seriously tempted to yawn. Because it honestly isn’t like that. It doesn’t have to be a case of one versus the other and neither should it be. Otherwise, why would any natural parent ever freely and lovingly adopt the children of others?

When I see our four gathered together, laughing, arguing, teasing each other, I just see four people I adore. I feel uncomplicated happiness and affection for them all. When I try and help one of them with their problems, I don’t add or subtract a little extra tender loving care depending on which one carries my DNA and which one doesn’t.