Chapter 26

Nannies all have their peculiarities. I tried to adapt. I realised quickly that if you have two nannies in a room at the same time they are likely to come to blows, so idiosyncratic are the ways of their trade. Nanny A would cut the nails, only to be told off by nanny B who bit them. Nanny A would then get huffy and, behind her back, belittle nanny B’s feeding routine. The type of bottle, the type of teat, the brand of milk—all were open to discussion. One nanny would want large, angled bottles, the other was happy with the straight variety that had come from America. As long as I had only one at a time, the nanny would get on with the job of nurturing and the babies readily responded to each of them. I tried to make sure each had her equipment of choice.

When the babies had become adjusted to a feeding routine, the maternity nurse made way for a regular nanny. She had her own way of working. The boys thrived on it, but I am not sure I did. I was further relegated to being a bystander.

‘Not like that,’ was the reaction to my bottle-holding. She preferred to communicate in writing. I would receive my instructions in list form and ticked off what I had obtained.

On the occasions that she spoke, I found I was dealing with a language in which the words used did not mean what they said. After little Ian had been operated on for a hernia, I was told, ‘His scrotum’s gone completely black.’ I phoned the surgeon on the spot and made an appointment to go to see him in Oxford that day. I then took a look to see the tiniest trace of a small grey bruise less than half the size of my fingernail.

Later, when he lost weight between one health visit and the next, I was told, ‘He isn’t sucking. If he doesn’t drink, he can’t eat or he’ll get constipated. If he doesn’t eat, he won’t be able to carry on like this.’ Rather than steel myself against his imminent demise, I paid a visit to the GP. ‘Put anything he’ll take into him. If he’s constipated, we’ll deal with it when it happens.’

Having seen ‘Mary Poppins’, I thought I knew about nannies. Not so. ‘Watch Me Play Daddy’ was written on the case of a surprise video one nanny gave me at Christmas. The surprise was the absence of a comma in front of the noun. ‘But I’m really a Daddy, not playing at it,’ I told her.

Retitled in my head as ‘Watch Me Play, Daddy’, I was able to do just that. What was fascinating was not so much the videoed toddling at playgroup, but the banality of the background soundtrack of nanny-to-nanny dialogue which by its continuous insistency seemed the main purpose of the activity. The tots just got on with being tots. I wondered if, a year or so on, my sons would have personal experience of the same vacuity of conversation.

Nannies have their own inner lives which they fortunately cannot communicate to their charges. I was soon made aware that some have maternal feelings that are given sharpened focus in the absence of an actual mother; feelings that transcend logic and in which the nanny becomes the substitute mother while the actual father is either dismissed as an inconvenience or resented as an intruder.

One of them, who told me she loved my sons as much as her own children, seemed to enjoy being with them all the time. In fact, she was lonely and unhappy, setting me up as the reason for her woes.

Her replacement told me with some relish that her predecessor’s vilification had been so thorough that I had become a hate figure at one of the play groups she took them to. I also gathered that neighbours had been given the benefit of this woman’s appraisal of my character. She had told them how terrible it was that the children had never had a mother and how dreadful I was to leave things to a nanny. I wondered why she had taken the job in the first place. I had always been completely frank about the situation and it was not as if she had suddenly discovered my single status.

It was when she wrote to tell me I did not know how close she had been to handing in her notice over a request I had made that was so trivial that I had forgotten all about it that I decided to end the nonsense.

Up to this point, I had just got on with my life. Now I was being judged. It was a new and odd feeling.

But the lawyers had told me a nanny was a prerequisite to getting settlement from the Home Office, so I persisted in having one. I would just have to remain out of favour with the Twins’ Club. Fortunately, I managed to find two reliable and uncomplicated nannies—one for weekdays and one for weekends.

Later, one of the ‘Esther’ programme’s audience told me that the babies would be distressed at having different people feeding and changing them. I never saw them being other than contentedly responsive to whoever was busy with them. There was also the fact that I remained the constant presence in their lives. They smiled and wriggled when they heard my voice. They knew who I was all right. Piers was the largest and the most advanced. He was the first to take solids, to make distinguishable sounds, to smile and to coo. After his early operations and an ongoing glue ear, Ian remained the smallest and least-developed, the last to achieve these goals. It was when I was with them on my own that Piers took his first steps, not one but several. Once he got going, he did not stop until a plastic toy felled him.

'Walk,' he announced when he had regained his breath.

'Great. Well done, Piers,' I replied and waited for his brothers to follow suit. It took a few weeks, but Lars and Ian managed their first tentative steps almost simultaneously. In fact, it was with me rather than a nanny that all their milestones happened, from their first words to managing the potty on their own. On the one hand were these three little ones learning and doing more each day and on the other my poor father losing his faculties one by one.

How I longed for the time when I could do everything for them on my own. It would come. But until they were officially mine, I would have to defer to the nannies. At least the two who became the regulars also knew how to relate to a grown-up.

No one from Social Services visited. The Health Visitor and the GP came from time to time. All was well and I began to wonder what all the panic had been about. The babies were looked after and were doing fine. For all the notice the authorities took, I could have been bringing them up on my own.

Although I had no legal rights, not even the right to authorise an operation, I simply went ahead as though I had all the rights. So far as the hernia operation was concerned, I dealt with the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and no one raised any questions. All of them visited the Children’s Clinic locally. Never was my authority queried. They acquired NHS numbers and ‘red books’. It was just as if they were UK citizens.

The Royal Berkshire Hospital once sent me a letter asking how long they had been in the country. I did not respond. Their follow-up letter was easy to answer. It told me the hospital understood that I was a visitor to the country and queried my date of entry and purpose of visit. I was delighted to respond to this one. I heard nothing more.

Time went by with nothing from the Home Office. I had to travel overseas for a day on business. I needed my passport and on 12 September 2001 faxed a request for its return even though this might mean going to the back of the queue. I could not keep my life on hold.