Keir Royale

When people used to ask me about having kids, I’d always reply,

“I’ll think about when I get to thirty.”

Thirty came and went, and I was still no nearer feeling adult enough to take the plunge.
Thirty-five came and went, and I started thinking I’d better get on with it.
But I was thirty-nine before the right combination of circumstances –man, job, house – coalesced, and baby number one was born.

I didn’t wait around to have another, and by forty-one we were a two child family.

And now, when people ask me if I ever wished I’d had them earlier, the only reason I would say “yes” is for the sake of the grandchildren.
Mine.
Will I ever have any?

My mother, who had me at twenty, spent my childhood telling me to “have children until you’re older, when you’ve had a bit of a life”.

I shall be doing the opposite with my two.

“What? Fourteen and no kids? Better chuck those condoms out or your eggs will be rotting inside you.”

“Come on now, sixteen and no string of babies, each by a different mother? Call yourself a man?”

Oh yes, my kids will be brainwashed all right. No university for them, just endless nappies for darling daughter, and copious child maintenance payments extracted from dutiful son’s bank account by whatever’s taken the place of whatever’s about to take the place of the CSA.

That way, with one clever stroke of dysfunctional upbringing, I score a double whammy.

I get some grandchildren, while also neatly sidestepping university fees – which by then will probably cost tens of thousands of pounds, but every student will be guaranteed a First for the trouble of turning up to Freshers’ Week.

Now that is what I call forward planning.

Well it was definitely worth it, even with all that frantic arranging and double checking.

One child picked up by one person, the other by someone else, a coat abandoned somewhere in between the two, a bedside light broken and Put Upon Friend’s Spaghetti Bolognaise dismissed as “disgusting” by our son.

Still, we had a good time – lounging in the Spring sunshine, sipping Sauvignon Blanc  and gazing out at the Atlantic waves crashing onto the shore of the Lizard peninsula.

We met new people, we laughed, guffawed actually, made the lives of the Murder Mystery actors a tad more difficult than they might have been, and quaffed our way through as much alcohol as we could – considering we’re all older and more sensible than we used to be.

And now we’re back.

One night away, at least five different adults to inform about said night away – two teachers, the office manager at the kids’ school, Put Upon Friend who’s having them for the night and Other Friend who’s picking one up and taking her to Put Upon Friend’s house at a convenient time, after dragging our dear daughter along to watch her own daughter doing tap.

All because we live nowhere near our parents.

But then, even if we did live near them, they’d still be unavailable.

We have three lots of grandparents in our family - owing to divorce and re-marriage on my side - but was one of them available to look after our kids so we could attend this Big overnight birthday party in Cornwall?

No siree.

One of the grannies had eight kids of her own, followed by 15 grandchildren, and won’t have us to stay the night any more. She says she’s done her bit and is too old to cope.

Another set of grandparents is on a cruise up the Amazon for five weeks.

The other lot are basking in Spanish sunshine – for the entire Easter holidays.

So the wonderful Put Upon Friend has had our two, on a school night, when her kids don’t even go to the same school as ours.

No willing, white-haired, knit-one purl-one grannies for us.

A sign of the times, I fear.

Parents, and mothers in particular, are used to being The One on Whom All Blame Falls. Just this morning my son told me it was my fault he’d decided to lie in bed instead of getting up and coming down for breakfast.

But The Media are worse.

They love to criticise us for hoiking our kids relentlessly from one extra-curricular activity to the next, but surely if schools were to venture a step or two outside the limited box set of Numeracy, Literacy, Science and ICT, we’d all be able to enjoy our weekends a little more.

When I was at primary school – admittedly this was another time and another place - we did swimming every week of the summer term (in the sea, not in some nancy heated indoor pool), we also did netball, tennis and athletics. We learned the recorder, we entered singing festivals and we did French from the age of five. We also did raffia plaiting, basket weaving and public speaking.

All this was considered to be part of the curriculum, not after school club fodder.

I can’t say I’ve done a lot of raffia plaiting since then, but it’s stood me in good stead for my own hair and now my daughter’s.

I’m not over eighty, nowhere near it, but I did go to a very small, old-fashioned primary school, run in a rambling old house by two elderly sisters whom we had to call “Miss Phyllis” and “Miss Norah”.

Miss Phyllis wore big red bloomers and when she sat at her desk in front of us, on a small raised platform, we could see her milky white flesh oozing out over her pull-up stocking tops.

Miss Norah had a stammer. She ran the tuck shop, taught us Arithmetics and how to play “Now Thank We All Our God” on the recorder.

In schools now though, anything not tested has been axed from the curriculum and we have to pay for our kids to do it if we want them to learn it.

As for my two, they do a few after school activities, but my son has always refused to go to anything at the weekends - he says he has to get up all week for school and at the weekends he wants to stay in.

Then he discovered there was a climbing wall open on a Sunday morning.

I repeat, a Sunday bloody morning.

So now it’s one climbing club on Friday evening, and a different one on Sunday morning.

And he’s still on at me because he wants to climb mountains, specifically Mount Everest, and not just boring old climbing walls.

I think mountains would be a bit of a break actually.

Do you even care? These people do.

I fear my car speaks volumes about me, and not in a good way.

When you see it from a distance (if I tell you it’s a Renault Clio, will you continue reading?) you can tell: –

- I was once – eleven years ago - well off enough to buy a new car. Now I’m not.

- I didn’t have children when I bought it - the back shelf’s long gone, the boot space filled with bikes, sundry broken toys, buckets and spades, and a spare booster seat. There is no room for shopping if the car contains two adults and two children.

- I had no interest in cars when I bought it - still don’t, if truth be told. Anything smart enough to need TLC is not ok with me.

When you look at it more closely you can see: -

- I don’t clean it

- It has green mould growing on the rubber window seals

When you get into it you can see: -

- It leaks, copiously after heavy rain, which we get a lot of down here

- The central locking only works if you almost touch the infra red sensor with the key

- It’s beginning to smell like the old jalopies my mum used to drive – things like Morris Minors and ancient Minis with gear sticks that exited directly through a hole from the engine compartment and bent at an angle of 45 degrees before reaching hand-holding distance

- The clock doesn’t work - fixing it would cost more than the car’s worth.

In fact it’s evolving into the kind of car I drove when I was in my early twenties - a VW Beetle, originally a two door model which became a one door model when the driver’s door stuck fast.

It began its life a dull shade of beige, but soon acquired one pale blue and three dark blue wings, after I crashed into a deer on a night drive through northern Scotland.

There was a hole in the floor, made by leaking battery acid, through which you could poke your feet and run – a la Flintstones – whenever it ran out of petrol.

This happened quite often as I only ever put a couple of quid’s worth in when the needle dipped significantly below empty… except when I was returning from low tax Jersey, when the tank would be full and so would two petrol containers hidden in the boot.
Strictly forbidden by the ferry companies but well worth the risk when the only card you could flash when paying for theatre tickets was a UB40.

Ah, times past.

Power steering and central locking are now one of life’s little necessities.

But every morning on the way to school we pass a lovingly maintained old VW Beetle, and I muse on what happened to my much-loved but sorely neglected car, after I sold it for £50 (cash) to a probable criminal on a dodgy estate in South London.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t used as a getaway car.

It started, not with a kiss, but with a simple question from a five-year old:-

Hannah - Mummy, can a woman make a baby on her own?
Me – (thinks “oh oh, here we go”) No, she needs sperm from a man to make the baby grow inside her.
H - How does the sperm get into the woman?
Me – It comes out of the man’s willy and goes into the woman’s vagina.
H - Do you have to stand close to each other?
Me – (trying not to smile) Yes, pretty close.
H - Do you do it standing up?
Me - You can do, but usually you lie down.
H - Do you have to do it in hospital?
Me – (how funny, I used to think you had to do it with a doctor supervising) No, you can do it at home.
H - You and Daddy have done it haven’t you, because you’ve got me and Ben?
M - Yes.
H - Did you stand up or lie down?
Me - Lie down.
H - Well I wouldn’t want someone lying on me, I’d want to be the one on top.
Me - (thinks “go girl, go!”) Hmm. Tea time soon, better get the oven on.

So, not much left for her to learn when she gets to PHSE in Year 3.

When you’re about to leave the office to set off on holiday, it often feels like it’s not worth going, what with all the extra tasks you have to do to help things tick over while you’re away.

Now, it’s the same with children.

We’re about to go away for a day and a night without them, mid-week, for a friend’s birthday party in deepest Cornwall.

I know I’ll spend the day away trying to get used to all the extra time I have - hour upon hour without grilling fish fingers, arbitrating over who had the most Sainsbury’s Active Kids vouchers to take to school, or tying them to the kitchen table until their homework is done.

I know this is what I will feel, as I’ve done it before within living memory. But now they’re at school, there’s all the other stuff to sort.

- School needs a different emergency number in case either of them goes sick, in case the school’s heating fails, in case a few flakes of snow fall on a nearby town, or in case an after school club is cancelled

- Then there’s the after school club. One goes and one doesn’t, and the one that doesn’t absolutely refuses to do so, even for JUST ONE DAY. So favours have to be called in for the one without the club so that Put-Upon Friend doesn’t have to fetch her kids, then one of mine, then the other of mine over a period of one short, extremely irritating hour

- School has to be warned that children will be late to school the day after, as Put-Upon Friend’s kids have to be at school at exactly the same time as mine, but they go to a different school. Even super-reliable P.U.F. can’t be in two places at once

- Of course there’s the Big Favour from P.U.F. who’s having them both to stay, on a school night, when she doesn’t have a spare room to stash them in

- Clothes, book bags, reading books and library books have to be packed and passed to relevant adults

- Children have to be warned to be on best behaviour, on pain of no M.I. High for two weeks, maybe even a month if my dear son tells Put-Upon Friend to “Shut it” again

And I will be left in debit to P.U.F. to the tune of two sleepovers for one child at a time, or one sleepover for two children at once.

All this, for one night away. It had better be good.

These are some of the questions I’ve had to answer since the children listened to a tape of Sandi Toksvig reading The Story of Tracy Beaker:-

Q - What’s a foster mother?
A - It’s someone who looks after children when their own parents can’t look after them

Supplementary Q - Why can’t their own parents look after them?
A - They might be too poorly, or they might have died, or they might just not be up to looking after them for a while.

Q - What’s a social worker?
A - Someone who makes sure that whoever is looking after the children whose parents can’t do it, is doing a good job.

Q - How can Tracy Beaker not have a Dad?
A - Well, Tracy Beaker’s Dad left her Mum before Tracy was born. So he’s not around any more.

Supplementary Q - (from Hannah, in an incredulous tone) Can that really happen?

Well, what can you say? How can you begin to let in a little knowledge of the wider world without your children learning just how awful it can be?

I was always very anti-Tracy Beaker when I’d just caught occasional glimpses of it on the telly, as I think my children see enough examples of rudeness and undesirable behaviour in the real world.

But then the musical came on tour and a friend offered to take them to it - for free. So we listened to the original book, and I discovered it’s actually very funny, while also being sad and touching.

It does though, give them new ammunition when they’re furious with me for saying “no” to more sweets, another hour of telly, or staying up an extra half hour.

“I wish I had a foster mother and not you!”

I’d always looked forward to a time when I could embarrass my children just by turning up to collect them in the wrong jumper, but I’d assumed I’d have to wait until they were teenagers before this particular source of enjoyment was open to me.

But already, I’m not allowed to run, speak or sing in public, and my son’s only eight.

On our morning walk to school I have to fall suddenly silent in the middle of whatever I’m holding forth on, as soon as Ben sees someone approaching us on the pavement. I’m only allowed to crank up again once the stranger has passed.

I’ve asked him why he thinks they care what I’m saying, but all he does is hiss at me,
“Ssshhhh!”

My daughter has no such qualms, and her joyful tones can be heard chatting to invisible friends from half way down the street. This also annoys her brother.

Perhaps it’s a boy thing.

He stopped letting me kiss him goodbye in the playground when he became a Junior, but says a hug is just about acceptable if I confine it to the path between the trees, where few fellow pupils will spot our loving embrace.

But today I went into his class (I’m a parent governor) to observe a literacy session, and he sidled up to me for a hug and a kiss.

This, apparently, wasn’t embarrassing.

How can a parent be expected to know the rules when they change with the wind, the mood and probably the phases of the moon?

I’m sitting at the kitchen table with the children, and they’re munching chocolate money.
I pick up one of the empty gold foil discs and decide to have a bash at being Craft Mummy.

“These would make a good mobile,” I suggest.

“How?” demands my son, looking up from some serious chewing.

I suggest ways we could hang the shiny discs from different lengths of coloured string: if only we had some coloured string and if only the plain old hairy hessian string hadn’t been purloined by Ben for making booby traps in his bedroom.

How does Craft Mummy keep enough stuff in the house for all these spur of the moment activities?

I look up from my reverie and notice my son staring at me as if I were speaking a foreign language.

And then he asks, “How would that make a phone?”

21st century children, eh?