by Hatch, Ben
Staring closely at the swollen red behind of a Barbary macaque monkey in the Trentham Monkey Forest, Phoebe tells me: ‘Daddy, they’ve not got our bums, have they? They have their own bums.’ They have indeed got their own bums. And also one of Charlie’s Roary the Racing Car socks. We’re in Staffordshire at a 60-acre reserve of 140 free-ranging monkeys not exactly sure why we’ve come – but that isn’t unusual. Our itinerary was compiled weeks ago, and with no spare time to adjust it, or even to read it until the day we’re supposed to do it, we quite often turn up at places blind with only two or three written words to go on. In this case it just says beside the address and phone number in the blue file: ‘Monkey Forest, the Trentham Estate, Southern Entrance, Stone Road. Pick up passes from Monkey Forest ticket office. They’re not in cages.’
We’ve been away six weeks now, have driven 2,000 miles and eaten out so often Phoebe’s come to believe everything laminated is a children’s menu. In PC World buying a replacement Bébétel lead the other day she attempted to order spaghetti from a flyer for the Samsung M1640 laser printer. And we’ve stayed so briefly in that many cities and large towns – Hereford, Worcester, Gloucester, Northampton, Warwick, Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Coventry, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham – we’re starting to feel like a touring rock band minus the fans, the glamour, the adrenalin rush of performing, and with Organix Goodies Organic Alphabet Biscuits instead of hard drugs.
Veterans of the road, we drive in the mornings after checkout when the kids are fresh, and late afternoon when Charlie and Phoebe are liable to sleep. To cheapen and quicken lunchtimes we steal rolls from hotel breakfast buffets. We did this secretly to start with, slipping them into the buggy basket when waitresses were out of the room refilling butter dishes or fetching coffee. Semi-feral now, we snaffle large portions of the buffet – not just bread but cheese, yoghurts, cake, fruit. Sometimes we even ask for napkins to wrap it all up in. The censorious stares we’ve learnt to almost welcome. (‘Nosey bat at five o’clock, seen me swipe the camembert triangles, give her a big smile on the way out.’) We rejoice in living off the land; pride ourselves on this. We steal every branded pen left in hotel rooms to make notes with. We swipe hot chocolate sachets from refreshment baskets for the days we’re in serviced apartments; soaps, toothpaste, bubble bath and hand lotions for the same reason.
If we’re all in one room, we’ve discovered if we screen off Charlie so he can’t see any of us, he, and therefore we too, will sleep better. It’s the first thing we do now – rearrange our hotel room. We’ll move beds, bookcases, wardrobes if we have to. We’ve learnt never to be without treats. To be without sweets in a car with two under-fours is the imprudent equivalent of walking through a vampire-infested graveyard without a silver cross. OK, you might get away with it – but why the hell risk it?
A routine’s finally emerged. While Dinah dresses the kids in the morning I call my dad. He tells me what he’s eaten for breakfast, how he slept. I tell him where we are. I clean Charlie’s Avent bottles from the day before in the bathroom sink using free shampoo sachets in place of washing-up liquid. I fill up two water bottles, pack a day bag of their favourite toys. After breakfast I load the car up while Dinah orders hot milk for Charlie and another load to decant into the flask to keep warm for his lunchtime feed. We’re on the road by 9.30 a.m. and, after celebrating the bill, (‘Absolutely nothing. Hooray!’ High five) we’ll hit our first attraction by 10 a.m.
In fact, we’ve begun to enjoy ourselves. Why not? Each day is different. We’re seeing new things. It’s become an adventure. We’ve no household jobs, very little responsibility. All we need do is check out baby-changing facilities at aquaria, Munch Bunch lunch boxes at small breed farms. We give restaurants one to three stars based on their child friendliness, their propensity to supply dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and hand out colouring-in sheets. We devise ‘Did You Know?’ box copy, Frommer’s insider tips. I take pictures of the kids looking cute in front of landmarks and furry animals. That’s it, that’s our whole life.
As the baby monkey chews Charlie’s sock, a yellow-shirted guide wanders over. She explains baby monkeys are exceptionally curious about everything (including toddler footwear) and that it’s important from now on to keep our children close lest they’re kidnapped by these monkeys, assumed into their monkey troupe and taught, who knows, to come running for melon rind at fifteen minutes past every hour.
Phoebe’s still looking for closure on the monkey bums issue at the Banana Cafe at the end.
‘We have people’s bums. And monkeys have monkeys’ bums. We don’t want a monkey’s bum, do we? That’s their bums.’
‘That’s right. We have our own bums, Phoebe.’
‘And other animals have their bums as well.’
‘They do.’
We eat our stolen buffet cheese inside our stolen buffet rolls. The kids watch a nature film in a hut next door, where the ranger finds us and returns Charlie’s chewed sock, and this is the hardest part of the day – when Phoebe’s happily debating monkey bums, when Charlie’s charging around, and we must bully them on to the next attraction. Charlie squeals like a pig bound for the slaughter house as I strap him into the buggy. In the car seat Dinah must virtually karate chop him in the middle to bend him into it. And the only way to get Phoebe back into the Astra nowadays is to make a mini assault course of the experience. Already allowed to enter via any door and given three minutes to clamber about muddying everything her feet touch before she settles into her seat, today she wants to climb in through the hatchback boot.
‘What do you think?’
Dinah shrugs.
‘Go on then, pops. But this is a special treat, OK? This isn’t happening every day.’
It’s at times like this, waiting impatiently as Phoebe scrambles over bags, squashing food in the cool box – becoming more and more like an actual monkey – that I wonder how our world will look further down the line, with so much ground already conceded. Will Charlie, by the time we reach Cornwall, be sitting unbelted on my lap in the driver’s seat scoffing through a family-sized bag of Mini Cheddars? Will Phoebe be curled up in the roof box playing Cooking Mama on a Nintendo DS, banging down on the roof every time she fancies a Magnum Feast? It’s hard to know what to do about discipline. Half the time we think Phoebe needs reining in; the rest of the time, feeling guilty we’ve dragged her on such an arduous trip, we give her more leeway. In Brighton a solitary chocolate button was a treat. Now Phoebe has a chocolate croissant for breakfast, sometimes Coco Pops as well, normally a buffet-swiped blueberry muffin when we set off, and every afternoon she expects a Cornetto or a vanilla ice cream with a flake. At dinner if chocolate ice cream isn’t a dessert option, there’s more trouble. Before this trip she watched ten minutes of In the Night Garden before bed. Now it’s CBeebies every morning as we pack, an afternoon film in the car, more CBeebies when we get in, and last night she wouldn’t go to bed until she’d watched Gok’s Fashion Fix.
In the Wedgwood Visitor Centre in Barlaston, just outside Stoke-on-Trent, we’re in the Ivy House cafe eating a complimentary buffet lunch waiting for our factory tour to begin when Phoebe insists on a high chair for her cardigan.
I look at Dinah. She sighs. I fetch the high chair. Anything to avoid a scene. In the absence of the toys we had no room for in the car, Phoebe’s been making do. That’s another thing worrying us.
She plays with attraction leaflets, pay and display tickets, gravel, wild flowers she collects in a pink beach bucket. She plays with sugar sachets and mini milk cartons that she takes from hotel rooms and calls ‘my treasure’. It shows a degree of creativity, I’ve argued up until now, to make a game out of tea and coffee-making facilities, but maybe, I think today, watching Phoebe strap her cardy into the high chair, it’s gone too far.
Trying to get into the game, I ask Phoebe, ‘Does cardigan want dinner?’
Phoebe spasms with anger. ‘No, Daddy – she’s not called cardigan. Her name’s Ella. And she�
�s my baby and I’m her mummy and she’s three.’
I ask if Ella wants dinner and Phoebe shouts. ‘No, she’s had dinner you silly billy and now Ella’s tired and you’re waking her up. You’re very naughty, Daddy, and there will be no mint Cornetto for you ever, ever again.’
‘Is she doing me, or you?’ I ask Dinah.
‘I don’t know. Phoebe!’ says Dinah, ‘Please don’t talk to Daddy like that.’
Phoebe folds her arms in the learned pose of the huff.
After dinner, Phoebe and Charlie are gifted sessions in the demonstration area, making pots. While Dinah supervises this I complete the factory tour. I’m led through a series of open-plan booths, where I learn about the fettling process, jigger heads and the 1764 fluting lathe designed by Josiah Wedgwood that’s still used today as no computer works as accurately. I’m told Paul McCartney’s a fan of the Asprey Collection and that Josiah Wedgwood had a leg amputated after a childhood infection and was the grandson of Charles Darwin. The factory floor’s split into small work stations. Craftsmen listen to headphones as they work, the atmosphere reminiscent of college art classes.
Returning to the demonstration area, I find things aren’t going well. Ella’s now ruling the family with an iron fist. As Phoebe paints a ceramic plate, Charlie attempts to sweep £5,000 Asprey Collection teapots off the shelves while munching through an assortment of modelling substances like he’s at an all-you-can-eat clay buffet.
‘Charlie, take that out of your mouth. I’ll put you in the buggy.’
‘No good!’ says Dinah.
He’s already been turfed out of the buggy, she explains, because ‘Ella needs more sleep’.
Not only this, Ella is also demanding she be allowed to press a rabbit in clay for £5. It’s one thing to be bossed about by a three-year-old, quite another to be bossed about by a three-year-old’s cardigan.
‘OK, Phoebe that’s enough.’
‘NO!’
‘Phoebe, if you want ice cream for dinner.’
‘NO!’
‘Right. We’re going.’
‘NO!’
As I carry her rigid body through the remote-controlled double doors under my arm like a surfboard, Dinah laden with gifts – key rings, Peter Rabbit toys, gift-wrapped Portland thimbles – the head of publicity’s shoulders visibly un-tense. If we’d threatened to stay to watch the life of Josiah Wedgwood film in the Experience Centre, she’d probably have given us a £5,000 Asprey Collection teapot as well to get rid of us.
We take the A53 north through Leek. The Old Hall Hotel in the spa town of Buxton is a large, square, brown-stone ivy-clad building beside the beautiful Victorian opera house. The hotel has creaky, sloping floors and boasts it’s the oldest hotel in the world, the claim dubiously resting on the fact Mary Queen of Scots stayed here under house arrest, the equivalent of calling Wormwood Scrubs the largest hotel in London.
After checking in, we ascend to our room on the top floor in a wooden lift so jerky we arrive feeling like we’ve been physically thrown upstairs. Dinah flops on the bed, exhausted. We have two beds, separated by a curtain. There’s a round window overlooking the opera house. I throw the bags down and before I even unpack I march Phoebe back to the lift. Out of the hotel we turn left past St Ann’s Well. We cross Terrace Road and I march her down pedestrianised Spring Gardens, where I buy her, from various charity shops, a dolly, four teddies, a Princess Diaries jigsaw and a bucket of Lego bricks.
In the oriental-themed Pavilion Gardens, opposite the hotel and next to the opera house, Phoebe plays with these new toys. The River Wye meanders through the park and I can see Solomon’s Temple on top of Grinlow Hill across the main road. A brass band is trumping out Beatles tunes from a bandstand and there are several strange red-faced turkey-like birds looking at me as I talk to my dad. There’s good and bad news. The bad news is Dad’s stent definitely needs refitting. There’s something wrong with the plug. The fluid’s not draining properly. But on the upside he’s been told there’s a small hope that if his liver functioning improves he’ll be able to have some targeted chemo.
‘I’m not hopeful, my son, but we clutch at this and if this falls through our fingers we clutch at something else.’
‘That’s great news,’ I say focusing on the positive.
‘And where are you now, my son?’
‘Buxton.’
‘Ah, the lovely opera house.’
‘I’m looking at it right now. As well as some very strange ducks.’
‘Muscovy ducks,’ says Dad.
‘Dad, I was wondering if you played here.’
After Cambridge my dad was going to be a history master, but during his teacher training at Wroxham College, he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights. In 1963 he was part of its revue show, A Clump of Plinths, which, renamed the Cambridge Circus, transferred from the Edinburgh Festival to the West End before Dad ended up performing off Broadway. The show was made into the radio series I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and from this platform most of Dad’s contemporaries went on to become household names in comedy: John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. My dad moved to the other side of the mike and became a light entertainment producer at the BBC. ‘I played the straight men, my son. That was my role. The army majors, the policemen, the headmasters. The authority figures. I knew where talent was and it wasn’t with yer old man. I was a good producer, though,’ that’s what he used to say.
‘You’re thinking of the Georgian Theatre Royal in Yorkshire,’ says Dad, coughing before he’s finished the sentence. ‘Are you going there?’
‘I’m not sure.’ We’re not but for some reason I don’t want to disappoint Dad.
‘And where’s next, my wandering boy?’
‘Chester via Knutsford tomorrow.’
‘Ahhh, Knutsford!’
‘I’ve never been back, have you?’
‘Not for thirty years,’ says Dad. ‘Happy times there, my son. Like yours now with your wonderful family.’
Every hour Dad’s bag fills up and needs emptying. The egg timer goes off now.
‘I’m being summoned,’ he says.
We say goodbye and, walking back though the gardens, I notice I’m doing Dad’s walk again.
At dinner in the George Potter Bar Dinah tells me she’s noticed something.
‘What’s that?’
‘You are getting more like your dad.’
‘His walk?’
‘No. But I have seen you copying it.’
‘It’s comforting. I don’t know why. Why is that?’
‘I copy the facial expressions of people I like sometimes. What I was going to say is you make the best of everything,’ she says.
It’s what my mum used to say about my dad and it makes me feel so ridiculously proud for a second I struggle to blink back a tear.
‘I mean, obviously you’re a terrible bully as well…’
CHAPTER 12
Draft Copy for Guidebook: The good people of Chester have three main hobbies: shopping at Browns of Chester for scatter cushions, dressing up like Romans and murdering the Welsh. Chester folk have been murdering the Welsh for centuries and are so keen on it they have ensured, despite many significant advances in human rights, that it’s still perfectly legal to slaughter Welshmen with a crossbow within the city walls provided it’s after 9 p.m. Chester has other impressive claims to fame. It has the best preserved Roman city walls in Britain and is also where the teen Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks is based. Besides (if you are my wife) looking out for actor Jeronimo Best (the annoying Spanish dance teacher Fernando) from the top deck of a City Sightseeing bus, families can boat along the River Dee or have their picture taken with one of the many costumed Roman centurions sweating like greasy pasties near the Eastgate Clock. Within striking distance are the aquarium in Ellesmere Port and Chester Zoo, where our daughter’s highlight was watching a schoolgirl from Rainhill getting wedged in the Marmot Mania tunnel because of her overlarge sand
wich bag, prompting mournful shouts from the darkness to her concerned/highly amused friends,
‘Get Mrs Harris – I’m stook.’ My own top moment, however, was overhearing a man with a heavy German accent at an ice cream stand near the elephants asking for ‘Von Nobbily-Bobbily’, a phrase that has become a family joke as in: How many Nobbily-Bobbilies do you want? ‘Von Nobbily-Bobbily.’
We drive round two sides of Knutsford common and make a right onto Northwich Road and then another right up Ladies Mile. And there it is. The house we moved to when I was eight is squat, red brick and set back from the road with a strip of common land between it and the front garden that Buster and I used to play headers and volleys on.
‘What are we doing?’ says Phoebe.
‘We’re looking at the house Daddy used to live in.’
‘When I was a little boy, Phoebe.’
She grins.
‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’
‘You lived here when you were a little boy?’
‘When I was a little boy.’
‘What were you like when you were a little boy, Daddy?’
‘I was like Charlie. I liked football, cars and trains. I had ginger hair over my ears and lots of freckles.’
And as I say this a memory returns. I’m sitting in a white T-shirt with a picture of a tiger on the front on the living room floor with Buster swishing cars across the parquet floor. The Living Room Grand Prix, the Dining Room Grand Prix, and Our Bedroom Grand Prix. ‘Well,’ I’d say into my mike fist. ‘Would you believe it? Lorry, under the telly yesterday, written off with no chance, takes the Dining Room Grand Prix!’ Buster tried harder for cars he preferred. He’d put more into their swish, make sure they went straighter. When his favourites lost, he’d be supportive. ‘Scooby van, did well, didn’t he?’ And if I felt there was a story I’d back him up. ‘Scooby, on his first Bedroom Grand Prix wins third place, but that long ginger hair of Mum’s wrapped round the wheel axle that his team can’t get rid of, might cost him dear in the living room.’
