Chapter 37

Bringing up three small boys is all about moving on from one point to another. They develop and change and I do so with them. Life is busy, but remarkably normal. I have three sons who depend on me, look to me as an example, who love me and are loved. ‘Daddy cuddle! Daddy cuddle!’ They bounce up and burrow themselves into me.

Had I not written it down at the time, nature's safety valve would have been triggered and some of the less pleasant parts of the journey to this point would have been shut out of the memory. I knew that my experiences were a 'story', though. I was not just a father. Against all the odds, I had created both a family and a precedent.

Although all the correspondence and calls I received from the British public and overseas were warm and supportive, I bore in mind the barbed words of those who were not.

I decided to look closely, critically and far too introspectively at possible motivations.

Had I done it to become my mother? Was it that when she died, I had felt as though I had nothing? With children I could assume her role and be to them as she had been to me. If so, I had reckoned without the hormones. My love for them had developed as they had. It had not been absolute from the start.

Had I seen the end of my filial duties approaching? First one parent dies, then the other. Without my role as carer, did I lack a focus to my life? Faced with the great emptiness of freedom, had I decided to exchange one form of servitude with another—that of caring for children?

Both of these hypothesised that I wanted my life to carry on the same way while the storm of change was battering down my accustomed landscape. I would have no mother, but be a mother-figure; I would have no father to care for, but swap him for children. I had to accept that the effect my father's condition had on me had been a physically exhausting and emotionally draining for decades. I was on my own. It was all up to me. I was alone and utterly responsible. There were no regrets. I did what I had to do and would do it all again but, in a sense with the children I doing exactly that. The difference is that this time it is a getting-better situation. There is hope, development and growth. All these are denied to the carer

Was I being too hard on myself?

Or was it that—surrounded by children the horizons of whose vocabulary extended no further than ‘wee-wee, potty’ and a nanny whose cultural aspirations were fully satisfied by Radio 210—I was indulging myself with imaginative fantasies?

These thick-coming fancies were making me brain-sick. I would pluck them out. There were no ‘authorities’ at my door. They had been conspicuously absent.

No one was judging me. I had been in thrall to this fear from the outset.

Claire had to go into hospital. Part of the undergrowth her car had crashed into was embedded into her arm and a mass was developing. I started looking after the boys on my own while she was in hospital having it excised. It was great to have my life back again.

However accommodating those who helped me had been, while someone else’s constant presence was there, neither my home, my life, nor my children felt my own. I needed to be the father I had intended to be when I started on this journey.

It was quite easy to be this by taking control again. Claire had taught me a great deal. I could not have chosen a better instructor. I felt confident to take over. It had to come sometime. During the four weeks she had been away, the boys did not mention her name. I assumed this meant that my two year-olds were not inextricably attached to her and that this would be the right time to make the change.

We parted amicably. She has visited several times since and taken them out.

On her last day with us there were tears. ‘I’ve managed to do it up to now, but this time I’ve failed. I’ve come to love them. I don’t think I’ll carry on nannying.’ (She did, of course, I am glad to say. She had been wonderful.)

The dining area had been upstairs, next to the nursery. I moved their high chairs into the kitchen.

‘OK, boys, we having lunch downstairs’. They walked past the alcove without a second glance and into the kitchen they trotted. At this age, they were utterly adaptable.

I decided the boys would benefit from the cut and thrust of nursery; from being with girls and boys their age. They were duly enrolled. From the first day they loved being with other children and I loved getting them ready in the morning and talking to them about ‘school’ when I collected them.

‘What did you do at school today, Lars?’

‘Painting.’

‘What did you paint?’

‘The table and my nose.’

For the first time I felt like a ‘normal’ parent. They were my children. I was no longer the interloper in the nursery.

‘Daddy do it’, was the phrase I heard from my sons most often. And Daddy was doing it. And he didn’t think he was making a bad job of it.

From then on I knew what it was like to be a father, mother, referee, playmate, cook, cleaner, teacher, driver and factotum sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in succession and often multiplied by three. I realised what a sensible lady Mother Nature is. One at a time, and two to help each other.

Toddlers do not usually come in threes. It is on those rare occasions when I must deal with one or the other on his own that I realise the compromises essential for dealing with three at the same time.

I had assumed chicken pox would strike them all together. No such luck. They were away from school one at a time. Ian caught it, Piers caught it from him and Lars caught it two years later.

When each was in the house with me on his own, life slowed to a gentle trot and there was even silence.

Maybe it’s only the single parent of triplets who can say that one baby is easy. When the three are together, they are obsessed with and their lives are dominated by their sense of each other. Lars tosses his pyjamas into the air as I undress him on the changing table. They flutter to the floor.

‘Thanks, Lars. Daddy had them all ready to put on you.’

‘Piers did it’ is the immediate reply.

‘I want my ... (fill in the blank with whatever toy, book, building brick, crayon, sock, piece of paper a sibling has).’

‘Are all the toys yours, Piers?’

‘Yes.’

The demands change, but from my perspective, the changes are essentially easier. The similarities between the elderly dementing and young children remain, too. One never knows quite what to expect and, if they are left alone, the unexpected is bound to happen. But they are smaller and the element of random violence is hardly a factor. At least one is unlikely to be belaboured round the head with a full nappy or given a karate chop to the back of the neck while bending to fasten a clean one. My work as a carer has stood me in good stead. It goes so far back that I cannot remember a time when I have not had to wipe other people’s bottoms.