And so now, as I sip my whisky, I see that intense concentration again, as she lines up her ruler on a squared pad and starts to draw.
‘What are you designing?’
‘A bed. They’re all too expensive, so I’ve decided to make one.’
She has a boyfriend now, so a larger bed makes sense. Anyhow, I’m Not Drawing Attention to it. She liked him from the off because he once made his own wolf costume, and he has a film degree so I can now mention François Truffaut to someone who doesn’t roll their eyes.
And I think that deciding to make her first bed after seeing an Alien film might make a great anecdote for The Graham Norton Show:
‘And so, Lydia . . .! How did you first get the inspiration for your – I have to say un-uuu-sual furniture designs?’
Cut to still of extraordinary bed, commissioned for someone like Tim Burton or Lady Gaga: trademark ironic look to camera. Audience laughter.
‘Well, Graham! I’d just been to see Alien: Covenant with my family . . .’
For a moment I’m lost in the reverie. Then I remember the actual design is sitting in front of me.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Show me.’
She unfolds the graph paper, and I can’t stop myself from saying:
‘Oh!’
And she says,
‘What?’
‘No, no – it’s great.’
To my absolute amazement, it’s rectangular, with dovetailed corners, and no weird headboard of any kind: a completely normal bed.
With her you just never know what to expect.
At the weekend we’re in the garden, Lydia assembling our new barbecue set, when we have another arthropod encounter: with a stag beetle, our first in ages. It’s been so long I’d forgotten we ever had them.
‘It’s a female,’ she says.
They’re smaller than the males, with smaller antlers, but still pretty big.
Up close they look huge, as if on steroids, and when flying as if too heavy to stay in the air. The larvae feed on decaying wood, which makes them the ideal offspring, although thanks to the decline in the amount of woodland and ‘untidy’ open spaces they’re now endangered. Also, people kill them because they ‘look frightening’. No wonder I feel a bond.
Lydia watches closely.
The beetle strides boldly across the patio, starts to climb up the back wall of the house – an acrobatic sort of female, a bit like Lydia. But she falls off, onto her back.
‘Turn her over!’
I can’t bear to see her struggling.
But Lydia says,
‘No, she can do it.’
I’m itching to right the frantically waggling creature, but Lydia holds me back.
‘I believe in you!’ she chants, relishing my frustration.
After what seems a long time but is probably only about six seconds, the beetle wiggles herself back onto her front and ambles off into the undergrowth. And Lydia resumes screwing together the barbecue, fixing me with a knowing look.
‘Don’t say it,’ I say.
‘I’m not!’
And she doesn’t.
Play ‘Beetroot’ for Me
I get out my old ghetto-blaster and put in the first tape I made for the car when the kids were small.
‘Aaah! Remember this?’
It’s ‘Mrs Robinson’, from The Graduate, and although we haven’t played it for ages, Peter and I both remember exactly what comes next: ‘California Dreaming’, then ‘The Age of Aquarius’ and ‘Let the Sunshine In’. Then: ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’, ‘Trains & Boats & Planes’, ‘Walk On By’, ‘The James Bond Theme’ and ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head’, from the only soppy scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I don’t know why, when we both forget a whole load of important things pretty much daily, the songs on our old cassettes are fixed in our heads, in the right order, forever. No wonder music is the last thing to go; I can see us one day in our care home, shouting,
‘No, no, next should be “White Rabbit”!’ as we’re injected with something nice and calming for the sake of the other residents.
I can remember my dad getting the Simon and Garfunkel LP with ‘Mrs Robinson’ on it when it came out, and my mother coming back from seeing Hair when it opened here, the same year, elated from having got up with half the audience and danced onstage. She could sing the whole soundtrack, if you didn’t stop her.
I made this tape for Lydia and Lawrence when they were three and four, with a selection not just of my own taste, but tracks that as children they could easily latch on to and remember. And to avoid the theme songs from the likes of Bob the Builder – which got to number one the year Lawrence turned four and was therefore quite hard to escape. To the question, ‘Can we fix it?’ one could only reply: ‘Yes, but only by closing all the windows to blot out the radios of passing traffic and hurling the VHS into the pond.’
Car journeys became enjoyable. They loved the pop classics and quickly chose their own favourites.
‘Play “Beetroot”.’
‘What’s that, darling?’
‘“Beetroot”! YOU KNOW!’
They went on and on asking – with increasing frustration – for this song that neither of us could recall ever having heard. Eventually it came round on the tape and they cried,
‘THAT’s it! Why did you say we didn’t have it?!’
It was in fact ‘Be True to Yourself’ sung by Bobby Vee.
And thus the whole tape was renamed ‘Beetroot’, with the next one, of a similarly eclectic range, ‘New Beetroot’.
Then, because she too is a bit nostalgic, Lydia loads the contents of both Beetroots onto the iPod for us, and on the way back from a trip out of town Peter and I play the whole thing.
Then a track comes on I’d forgotten was on there.
‘Not an obvious choice on a tape for children,’ says Peter somewhat disapprovingly, and I listen as Donna Summer’s multi-orgasmic disco anthem ‘Love to Love You Baby’ issues from the vehicle’s pretty powerful speakers – the kind that turn the heads of passing police patrols, or would if we weren’t white.
‘This was your choice,’ I say. ‘I only included it so there’d be Something For Everyone: along with The Beatles, Hair, and all that West Coast hippy stuff you like.’
‘And that the children also do like.’
I avoid bringing up the menu of sexual practices we discovered on the Hair soundtrack album that Lydia would announce with:
‘This is the one you have to skip over, Mummy,’ during a phase of being demure she went through for about a week.
‘All right. Whatever. The point is you chose it, so its unsuitability or whatever is your fault not mine.’
The Donna Summer smash was unfortunately never the same for me after it was played repeatedly at the hotel in Tunisia where I went on holiday with my friend Claudia and her mother the summer after it came out. The creepy MC who controlled the turntable would talk along with the lyrics in a dire monotone – not to mention a way too tight, traditionally embroidered waistcoat: imagine Edina from Ab Fab but with stubble – every single time.
‘Lurve-ta lurve-ya, bebeh . . .’
Forty years on, I still can’t quite shake it free of his sleazy growl.
Peter is frowning at Donna’s mounting excitement issuing from the speakers in the front, back and both door panels, as we crawl through the fringes of South London.
‘How old were they, though?’ he says. ‘About four? Five, tops.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with children seeing sex as a positive thing,’ I say. ‘And besides, at that age they wouldn’t even have noticed what it was about.’
‘What, they just thought it was a recording of a woman moving a wardrobe?’
‘Hilarious. As I say, not my fault.’
Just then the traffic slows right down, and as we grind to a halt, windows open, the sound of that really quite convincing climax – where all the music stops and it’s just her, breathing – booms out clearly to the c
ar in the next lane. No one looks round.
‘Ah, well that’s Croydon for you,’ he says.
At least on this occasion the children aren’t there; they have lately begun to ruin our happy reminiscences with self-righteous complaints about our alleged failure to provide age-appropriate entertainment when they were younger.
This issue next rears its head over supper one night before Lawrence goes back to Manchester, when the conversation turns to curious phrases and sayings.
‘Talk to the Hand,’ I say, recalling the title of the Lynne Truss book. ‘I suppose that’s gone now, because of Game of Thrones and the Hand of the King. Because, you know, people really do talk to the Hand.’
‘Anyway it’s Queen now.’
‘All right.’
‘Or “gun of the hand” in Witness,’ adds Peter. ‘When the Amish dad talks about Harrison Ford’s revolver.’
‘Yeah!’ says Lawrence.
‘Ah . . . Witness,’ says Peter. ‘We must watch that again at Christmas.’
Although it’s only August we’re already compiling our list. Last year we watched four films on 25 December, the upside of having almost no relatives.
Then Lydia says:
‘That’s the one where the guy has a bag put over his head and gets his throat cut.’
‘What?’ I say. ‘I think most people remember it as the film in which Harrison Ford doesn’t sleep with Kelly McGillis and it’s unbearably romantic.’
‘Yeah, well I remember the guy having his throat cut. In the railway station toilets.’
For some reason this detail has slipped my mind.
‘We were only, like, eight when you made us watch it.’
‘We didn’t “make you watch it”. God . . .’
‘You were always showing us things too young,’ Lawrence chimes in.
‘No, we weren’t. And you definitely weren’t eight. More like twelve.’
‘We were no way twelve!’
Peter and I look at each other: are we the only people in Britain whose children wish their viewing had been more bland? I know Saturday Night Fever was a mistake. And Spartacus: Lawrence was definitely too young for crucifixion. But I’ve apologized for those. Yet here we are again, as if in front of some kind of tribunal.
‘What about when you watched Fifty Sexiest Pop Videos?’ I ask Lydia, ‘when you were about nine?’
‘That doesn’t count. Anyhow, it was my choice, so obviously not the same thing.’
‘They’re worse than my dad,’ says Peter. ‘Actually, wait – come to think of it, he took me to see A Clockwork Orange.’
That was X-rated, i.e. 18+, and considered so violent that Anthony Burgess, the writer of the original book, campaigned successfully to have it withdrawn.
‘Your father really took you to see it?’
I remember mine shuddering at the posters.
But now I think about it, both my parents showed me quite a lot of films and TV dramas that were rather – shall we say, sophisticated – for a child.
Once, the TV was on, showing the trial of some captured Nazi doctors, with testimony from survivors they’d experimented on. And my mother, who had several Jewish friends – not to mention her ex, my father – didn’t want to miss any of it by attempting to send me to bed, because the inevitable pleading to stay up would interrupt her viewing.
So aged about nine or ten I found myself watching that, and, round at my father’s, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which contains news footage of the monk who set himself on fire to protest against the Vietnam War. Oh yes, and in the same film, a hand with a nail being banged into it, although at least that was faked. I think.
‘I saw all sorts of “unsuitable” films when I was young,’ I tell Lawrence and Lydia firmly. ‘And it was FINE.’
The weird thing is, it was.
But if anything changes, and I become a Nazi doctor or start setting fire to any clerics, tempted though I am from time to time – I’ll get back to you.
Pier Group
What really influences people’s behaviour?
I go to a talk by a leading scientist on the Teenage Brain and learn, among other things, that young male drivers have more accidents when their friends are in the car. Well – duh!
In the talk, peer pressure comes up a lot. In my day, if someone went off the rails her parents usually blamed her friends, and I bet that hasn’t changed. But are teenagers genuinely more suggestible, more likely to copy each other than adults are?
True, Lydia and some of her friends did all suddenly dye their hair two-tone recently, in a brief trend that left them with a lovely rich auburn on top – and peroxide blonde underneath. To ensure the full impact wasn’t lost on the teaching staff, Lydia put hers in a ponytail to expose the bleached bit, leading to a firmly worded call from the Head of Middle School, who after a grovelling apology from me, conceded that at least it would soon wash out.
‘Um, it’s semi-permanent,’ I mumbled, ‘But I wasn’t there when it was done. I was – away.’
But that wasn’t peer pressure – it was fashion, though on the same spectrum.
No, I know what the scientist meant: young people do reckless things sometimes because their friends do, or to play to the crowd. What, and adults don’t?
What this world view also doesn’t allow for is their emotional awareness, and how lovingly they look after each other. Those who are depressed, or whose parents are splitting up, or whose siblings are having problems, are given a lot of support from their friends. One of them who was recently going through a family crisis called ours a Sane House. She should have seen me at her age. Mind you, these terms are all relative. Generally, the sanest house is one that isn’t yours.
‘It’s all thanks to PSHE,’ says Lydia.
A contribution schools don’t get enough credit for.
And both she and Lawrence have sat up watching over drunk, puking partygoers to prevent them passing out and choking on their own vomit.
Aaaah.
And they’ve been meticulous about not identifying them, including the boy they once took to A&E on a night bus. Maybe it should be renamed pier group: it leads you away from the solid ground of familiar territory and safely back again.
‘Of course,’ I say, ‘your generation does drink quite a lot. We used to drink way less than teenagers do now.’
‘I can’t believe you’re saying this,’ says Lawrence. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘In a typical night at the pub,’ I say, ‘when I was fifteen, sixteen, we’d have about two halves of lager, max; the boys a bit more. Maybe two or three pints. The most I ever drank in one night was a pint and a half.’
‘What? No way!’
‘You went to the pub??’
‘Yeah. Some places just used to chuck us out because we were too young. But at our regular, the owners knew us and kept an eye on us. You didn’t misbehave or they’d bar you.’
They are amazed.
‘We didn’t have the money to drink that much anyhow. And no one drank shorts.’
‘Shorts? What are shorts?’
‘Gin and whatever. Spirits.’
They find this quite astonishing and take every opportunity from now on to bring up my under-age pub-going as proof of my supposedly debauched youth. It does seem ironic that we who were allowed illegally into pubs drank so little, while this generation, who have to show ID for everything, drink so much more. I didn’t know anyone who’d had their stomach pumped.
As for drugs, we haven’t really discussed them since that homework of Lawrence’s in Year Five. As it happens, I’ve just read a helpful article in the paper which advises:
Resist the temptation to show how ‘cool’ you are by sharing stories of your own drug taking.
Aha.
I sense an opportunity.
‘Kids,’ I say, ‘have I ever told you about the time I fell down the stairs of a club after three large rum and Cokes and quite a lot of dope?’
I was with a guy who was
several years older: at least twenty-six. You bought the Bacardi in half-filled bottles – not half-bottles – then filled them up with the Coke, and everyone was smoking weed. I soon passed the point where even bad dancing was possible, then abruptly realized I had to get outside. But the club was below ground, and the stairs seemed to go up a long way.
‘I got about halfway up, then felt myself falling backwards, and my head bounced onto the floor, as if in slow motion. But it didn’t hurt. Then I somehow got up, got up the rest of the stairs to the exit, and threw up outside.’
Skunk? This was Badger.
‘How awful,’ shudders Lydia, not – I fear – at the possibility that I might have had a head injury, but the thought of everyone turning to stare.
The bouncer was very kind; he stayed with me, and I did my best to aim away from his shoes.
What I don’t tell them is that my so-called boyfriend at the time stayed put because I’d embarrassed him in public, and only took me home in the hope of some post-puke sex. Nor do I add that when we got to my place, the minicab driver joined in trying to persuade me to let that dickhead come upstairs. When I edged myself delicately through my front door and closed it behind me, they were still talking.
So this too – as they say – is a Thing. Not: how to prevent their peer group from convincing them to take drugs – which assumes they have no will of their own – but how to raise kids with enough self-esteem not to end up dating a so-called adult who has no concern for their welfare. My pier group, had they been there, would have done better.
Saw, Starring Lauren Bacall
Lydia’s been on about having a fringe.
I’ve always talked her out of it on the grounds that she shouldn’t hide her lovely face. But she’s eighteen and a half now, so I no longer have a say.
It’s a challenge, getting a teenage girl to even hear the words ‘lovely face’ without emitting an agonized cry and fleeing the room – but she’s just about managed to tolerate it, and each time the threat has been seen off.
Today, though, she comes in with the fringe already cut, and it’s also rather short.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years Page 19
