May Contain Nuts (3 page)

‘It doesn't matter, Philip, stay outside.' Ffion bristled.

‘Of course, one shouldn't stifle their imagination too much,' shrugged Philip, stamping on his cigarette and returning indoors. ‘He does, of course, know that the dinosaurs were extinct by the time of the Romans … What happened to the dinosaurs, Gwilym?'

‘Their eggs stink!'

‘You see?' said his father with a proud smile.

‘Would anyone like to listen to
Peter and the Wolf
again?' offered David.

I had met David when we both worked in the City; I was a PA and he worked in banking. By the time we were married he had given up trying to explain exactly what he did. People who had never worked in international finance always struggled to understand how it was possible to ‘buy and sell
money'. Perhaps David didn't understand it either; maybe that's why he got the sack. After that he set himself up as a freelance financial consultant, which he said was the best thing that could ever have happened because working for himself would give him more time to be at home with the children. And he said this as if it was a good thing. Now my husband managed to pull off a scam in which he advised people what to do with their money while taking a large chunk of it off them. We remained sufficiently prosperous for me not to understand all the extra lines of numbers on the National Lottery draw.

I still worked full time as a PA, but now to three children called Molly, Jamie and Alfie. (No one had told us that the -ie/-y suffix wasn't actually compulsory.) I organized their diaries, made sure they had the correct soft toy for sleepovers, arranged their meals and transport; like any good personal assistant, I knew they would never be able to manage without me. Jamie had to be cheered from the touchline at tag rugby club, and Alfie had to be applauded for splashing his legs at Little Ducklings Water Confidence classes, and Molly still needed me to sit with her while she practised her violin or she would say she couldn't do it and it was too hard. ‘No, it's not too hard, darling, you're doing really splendidly. I think that's the most beautiful bit of violin I've ever heard. I really do think you're doing marvellously.' Praise inflation had spiralled out of control in our home.

When I was pregnant with our first baby, David and I had bought this nice house near Clapham Common, where we could watch the sailing boats on the pond, drink coffee by the bandstand or have gay sex with strangers in the woods at night. It's funny how when you live somewhere you never use the facilities for which it's most famous. But as the children
grew older it became a struggle to shield them from the dark underside of urban life. The expensive kids' school was separate, of course, and our friends came from a similarly protected minority. Our children played outside, but only in our back garden; they went to swimming lessons, but only at the private health club. Apparently you get a much better class of verruca. On the occasions when we did walk out of the house and down the high street, I wanted to shield their eyes from the drunks and beggars and smashed car windows and the big yellow police signs calling for witnesses to a recent stabbing.

‘“Appeal for witnesses. Serious assault.” Mummy, what does that mean?'

‘It's just a sign, darling. Ooh, look at that funny pigeon in the road. What's he found there?' At which point I would realize that the pigeon was pecking at a dead fellow pigeon that had been squashed by a passing truck. ‘Oh, and look over there, what pretty flowers in the shop window!'

‘And look, Mummy, there's more pretty flowers over there, tied to that lamppost.'

‘Oh yes, so there are.'

‘Why are all those flowers tied to the lamppost? And there are cards – can we read the cards?'

‘No, come on, darling, let's get to the bookshop before they run out of books. Look at that funny bicycle locked to the railings – it's got no wheels. I wonder why it's got no wheels?'

‘Because someone stole them,' Molly would explain tersely.

Their school reading books hadn't prepared them for any of this. Not that it would necessarily be a good idea if they had.

Biff and Chip have found some dirty needles in the gutter. ‘Let's have a sword fight!' says Chip. ‘Stop!' says Dad. ‘Stop!' says Mum. ‘Those old needles have been left there by
smackheads. They are probably infected with the AIDS virus,' says Dad. ‘Which is also why your father and I never have unprotected sex with total strangers,' adds Mum. Everyone laughs.

I could cross the road three times to avoid them, but Alfie would still spot the spaced-out beggars slumped beside the cashpoint machines. ‘Mummy, can we give that man some money?'

‘No, Alfie dear, you're not supposed to.'

‘But his sign says he's hungry. If we give him some money, he could buy some rice cakes and hummus.'

‘You can put some money in the pretend dog outside the chemist's.'

‘But he's got a real dog. Why's his dog got lots of big bosoms?'

‘She must have had puppies recently, dear.'

‘Where are the puppies? Can we get one of the puppies?'

‘Oh yeah, right, if you want to fish them out from the bottom of the Thames.' Obviously I only thought this; I managed to prevent myself actually saying it.

In the end I found it preferable to avoid taking the children down the high street altogether and would drive them up to the King's Road for their shoes and books and Harry Potter stationery kits. Ideally I'd have liked to keep them inside a giant version of the rain cover that used to unfold over their pushchair: a big protective bubble that would shield them from breathing in the lorry fumes and stop them from witnessing the dirt and the sleaze of the inner city outside their front door. Instead I strapped them into the back of the 4x4 and whisked them off to their preparatory school on the other side of the common.

A four-wheel drive is vital in this sort of terrain. When you are transporting children across a remote mountain region such as Clapham and Battersea, the extra purchase you get with a four-wheel drive is absolutely essential. Ordinary vehicles would have to be abandoned at Base Camp at the bottom of Lavender Hill, while only hardy Sherpas with mules and four-wheel drives could cope with the sort of incline you face as you pull away from the KFC towards the Wandsworth one-way system. Of course, the traffic on the way to school is terrible, forcing us to leave so early in the morning that sometimes the children have to eat their breakfast while strapped in the back of the car.

‘What's six times nine, Molly?' I would chirp on the day of her test as I swerved down a back street to try to beat the gridlock.

‘Fifty-four,' she would splutter, spitting out bits of Marmite toast onto the upholstery as her brother shouted, ‘Mummy, Molly talked with her mouth full!'

On one occasion a child stepped out on the road in front of us and I had to do an emergency stop. How could a mother just let her child walk to school on his own like that? Thank God it was me, I thought. Imagine if it had been one of those speeding drivers who tear down Oaken Avenue. Obviously I am aware that I'm contributing to the traffic by driving the children to school, but there's simply no choice; there are too many cars on the road to let my children out of the car. I do my bit for the environment in other ways. When I do my supermarket shop on the internet, I always try to click on the little green van symbol so that I have a delivery from a driver who's already in my area.

I suppose I liked my 4x4 because I felt safe in it. I could climb in, lock the doors and ferry my children through the
dangerous traffic out there without feeling vulnerable to the big wide world. It helped me feel separate from everyone else. Except all the other mothers at Spencer House, of course. Ffion had a huge Japanese one: a ‘Subaru Big Bastard' I think William said it was called. Even that mother with an only child drove a people carrier – or ‘person carrier' in her case. Every morning at half past eight there was chaos outside the school as all the middle-class trucker-mums executed three-point turns to get round the mini-roundabout.

This world of school fees and purple blazers and children who shook their teacher's hand at the end of the day was not something I had started out with. Growing up in a leafy suburb in Middlesex, I had been among the last few children in the country to take the eleven-plus exam. This was a universal test once taken by every eleven-year-old in the country, which would determine whether you went to the nice traditional grammar school, whence you would progress to university, or the scruffy secondary modern, which you left at sixteen to get a job sweeping up in the hairdresser's. Basically it was a fairly crude test designed to establish whether you were middle class or working class. The questions themselves rather gave this away. Question one: What is a motor-car? Is it a) A smart vehicle for driving Daddy to his job at the bank, or b) That rusty thing stacked up on bricks in your front yard? Question two: What is a pony? Is it a) That lovely little horsey at the bottom of your garden, or b) Twenty-five nicker and a lot less than a monkey. You even got a head start for putting the right sort of name at the top of your sheet. ‘Timothy' or ‘Arabella' got full marks, but if you were called ‘Wayne' or ‘Rita' you were losing points already.

But occasionally the social sorting hat got it wrong, as I discovered on the afternoon that the results were announced to
the class. It never took me as long to walk home as it did that day. In the end my parents cobbled together enough cash to send me to a third-division private school, which for generations had supplied the British Empire with its estate agents and PR girls. Soon after that they abolished the eleven-plus in Middlesex. In fact, they abolished the whole county as well, just to make sure. And all these years later, the only thing that my third-rate education had taught me was that my children were going to have better. They would know the capital of Canada and that a quaver wasn't just a type of crisp. They would naturally understand all those frightening dilemmas of modern etiquette, like is it rude not to reply to a humorous email that's been forwarded to every name on the sender's address book? That is why we were paying all that money to Spencer House and why Alfie had started at the best private nursery, where young teachers were already steering his limp four-year-old hand into making barely recognizable letter shapes, so my children wouldn't spend the rest of their life feeling that everyone else knew more than they did. By the way, it's Ottawa. I just looked it up.

Having failed the first big test of my life made me determined that I'd do everything possible to help Molly pass hers. When she was nine, we realized her friends' parents were already paying for extra coaching to get their children into Chelsea College two years later. And so the recommended private tutor was contacted and diaries were compared. Obviously when somebody is incredibly busy they can't always find the time to fit in another lesson. But Molly had an hour's window on Wednesdays between violin and ballet and so was able to squeeze her new tutor in there. Our children were like Olympic athletes: years and years seemed to be spent preparing for a single event, this one far-off academic high
jump on which everything depended. If Molly was off-colour on the day, if her approach was wrong or her timing was out and she crashed through the bar, it would all have been for nothing.

Obviously we tried not to make a big deal of it in front of her, though I feared she was picking up our tension.

‘Lots of kids bite their nails,' said David.

‘Yes, but not on their toes as well.'

So I tried not to appear too worried about it. It was just that if she continued to let herself down in exams and failed the entrance test to Chelsea College, then she'd probably end up becoming a drug addict and selling her violin to pay for her next hit of crack cocaine. I'd always promised that I'd support my children in whatever they wanted to do, so if Molly ended up working as a prostitute under the derelict railway arches of King's Cross to pay for her drug addiction, then obviously I would try to back her decision.

‘Mum, Dad – this is my pimp, Sergei.'

‘Hello, Sergei, delighted to meet you at last.'

‘Sergei's offered to handle all my finances for me and just pay me in low-grade heroin.'

‘Whatever you think best, dear. I'm sure Sergei has only your interests at heart.'

It seemed a harsh punishment for failing a school's entrance exam back when she was eleven. And so we were determined to tutor her, test her, encourage her and bribe her. Oh, and there was one other thing we decided we had better do, just to give our precious eldest child the best possible chance. We would cheat.

 

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