Chapter 29

The media people's questions had all been the same. Some had expressed themselves more tactfully than others. They ranged from the urbane Stuart Norval’s ‘Why, Ian, did you work so hard to achieve this?’ to Radio Berkshire’s ‘So you think that if you’ve got the money you can buy babies?’ Most were in-between. Sally Taylor of ‘South Today’ responded with a ‘So that’s what you wanted, but what’s best for the children?’ assuming an incongruity. Difficult to respond with the hearing aid in my ear providing a time lag to her question and an echo of my previous response, while I had only the camera’s black rectangular eye to focus on. A news agency in Bristol wrote ‘I would really like to write a piece on how you recently took the very brave and groundbreaking steps towards purchasing triplets over the internet.’ It was really quite easy to decline their offer.

In the middle of the mayhem, West Berkshire Council phoned to tell me that, as the Daily Mail had revealed a ‘large office’ in my home, they would be requesting business tax.

‘Actually, that’s my sitting room. Don’t believe all you read in the newspapers.’

Nevertheless the Council sent in their inspector who, confronted by sofas and a coffee table, had to agree with me. The alacrity of this department to squeeze money from me was impressive. Significantly, their colleagues down the corridor in the Social Services department must have felt comforted by what they read. They didn’t call.

David Rendel, my local MP, did phone. He offered whatever help he could with the Home Office. He thought it was daft that they hadn’t given a decision before this and thought a nudge from him might help. I thought I would stick to the rules, wait for the six months to be up and then take him up on his offer. But by the next day, I had changed my mind. My own passport had still not arrived and the Home Office was clearly going to sit on it for a while. I phoned David Rendel and asked him to intervene. His secretary called back to tell me they needed the request for my passport in writing. I told her it had already been faxed and posted. She told me I could expect to wait another three months for the file to be dealt with, but that I should get my passport back shortly. It was nice to have a helping hand among the chaos.

It was on the morning of Tuesday 18 September that the doorbell rang at a quarter to ten. I was making breakfast for my father. A tall, white-haired woman in black had arrived as a deus ex Mercedes.

‘I’m Mary.’ she said brightly, offering her hand. I shook it.

‘Mary?’ I assumed a surname would be volunteered.

‘Mary Riddell.’

I thought I might have heard the name before.

‘I’m sorry I’m early.’

‘I’m just getting my father ready for day care. We’re in the kitchen. Come through.’

He finished his yoghourt and milk, I removed his apron, put his shoes on, tied his tie and put a dimple in it and then helped him on with his jacket. Mary Riddell twittered approval at what I was doing.

‘I think it’s important he goes out looking as he would have wished to look before all this.’

Her agreement was immediate; her praise for my work fulsome. I took my father out to the taxi and then told her I would ‘Just change out of my getting-father-into-the-shower-and-getting-wet clothes.’ She and my assistant went into the room that had been my previous assistant’s office. He made coffee for her and chatted.

Mary Riddell was charm personified. She was eager to ask about my father’s condition. She was sympathetic and sensitive; warm and friendly. I told her what had happened when I was eight and how the diagnosis six years before had helped me accept full responsibility for looking after him. When I assumed that the interview had finished, she asked me, as in passing, questions about my life; my feelings for the babies; relationships I had had. I asked her about her own children. I chatted quite freely, although I could not see its relevance to my father. I was surprised when she wanted to photograph the children. I told her I did not want any newspapers to photograph them, but that she could copy one of my pictures.

‘Do you want to see them?’ It seemed the polite thing to offer. She had come all the way from London.

‘Oh, yes, if I may.’

I took her to the nursery. She approved of the look of the babies. They carried on crawling over their toys, oblivious to the power a columnist wields. I felt I had been with her long enough.

Off she went to be followed by a writer from another tabloid. I had forgotten about her. This one seemed particularly interested in the Godparents. This was not such a friendly chat over coffee. The questions were pointed; the questioner insistent. I told her I would not tell her who they were. The interview was not long, but she wanted to wait for a photographer and hung around for an hour or so while I got on with things.

How trusting I was! I should never have given either of them the time of day. This was when I thought that it was right just to tell the truth. I learned quickly that the truth can be spun so far that it becomes something else entirely. That something else was about to hit me like a physical blow.

It was an Irish radio programme on Friday 21 September that alerted me to what had happened. It was my last day of media innocence. A charming female brogue had almost persuaded me some days before to talk to Gerry Ryan on his phone-in show. She had spent nearly half an hour telling me how wonderful what I had done was and that her 67-year-old father had provided her with a 6-week-old sister.

‘No, it’s you women who are the lucky ones,’ I had said.

‘No, no!’ she assured me. ‘You men can father children whenever you want. Look at Picasso, he was 87.’

‘Oh, yes, and have the press come back on me for creating orphans? No thanks.’

‘But you don’t have a biological timebomb inside you.’

On the Friday, the same voice rang to ask if I would do the following Tuesday—and added ‘wasn’t it a dreadful article that woman wrote, accusing you of controlling the babies like a business and even condemning you for getting cots and clothes in Mothercare? To be sure, where else would you go for them?’ Well, maybe there was no ‘to be sure’, but it sounded like it.

‘Why do people have to write such things? You were doing something so good.’

I was taken by surprise. I hadn’t seen any article. And then it dawned on me what had happened. I cancelled arrangements with Irish Radio and drove to the newsagent.

Mary Riddell's article was cleverly written - and venomous. I could hardly recognise myself. It was like being done over in the playground by the school bully—nice to your face, but destructive afterwards. My boys were spread across two pages with horrible words all around them. ‘Made to order’, ‘Just bought three babies’, ‘How can he think he’ll make a good father’, ‘Controversy’. This was a totally new experience. Why would anyone want to do this to us? Nasty it certainly was. Nevertheless, it also had a ludicrous side. Having adjusted to the shock, I tried to see it for the fictional imaginative prose it was.

She clearly had a thing about cleanliness. My house was too clean. My tables were unsmeared. It had escaped her needling eye that my little babies were not even at the crawling stage, so how could they provide the smearing she thought so integral to a happy family home?

And ‘he has even been to Mothercare for cots and clothes’ was there, as had faithfully been relayed by the Irish Radio researcher. It was preceded by ‘He had organised his new life as clinically as a corporate acquisition’. I laughed. Are fathers off-bounds at Mothercare? Or was her implication that they should have slept in nappies on the floor for a while—a bit like middle-management on a survival course perhaps—till I finally got round to finding an acceptable shop?

The world of the tabloids is rooted in an idyllized golden-age ’50s when life was simpler, gentler and no one locked their doors. That they did not lock their doors because most people had so little there was nothing to steal does not fit this image and is ignored. It is the fundamental honesty of the ’50s that shines through instead. Theirs is a world in which all suburbs are leafy, all drives are gravelled and all families are nuclear. In this view single-parent families are of course still anathema, rather than a fact of life for a large number of children raised in this country. Fortunate and, therefore, untypical I may be, but it is with the same depth and passion that all single parents feel that I love my children.

I felt vulnerable and sad to know that this was journalism in the twenty first century.

It wasn’t just the fact that it was me they were attacking. That I could just about live with. It was the fact that my babies were being objectified, as if their existence was just a pretext to make some cheap points. There was no way they could respond to this verbal lashing. I had unwittingly been placed in a situation where I had not been able to protect them.