Chapter 42

‘How on earth do you manage?’ is a question often put to me. Looking after three children without any family support is a tall order. Although the primal parent is certainly present and my barometric inner ear can sense the change in pressure from the tiniest cry of distress at night, when I relinquished nanny and went solo, I knew it would only work with organisation. As they went to to Nursery School, this not only gave them a socialising experience, but freed up precious daytime hours for running a business and earning a living.

The priority was to get the children on side. As their nanny had been firm to the point of strictness, this was made easy for me. I think the trick was to make everything their achievement rather than mine. Their nursery has floor-to-ceiling wardrobe mirrors along a wall. It was covered with hand prints. ‘Look boys, this is a mess, isn’t it? Daddy has to clean it, you know. You’ll be able to see yourselves better without fingermarks, won’t you?’ Only a couple of reminders were needed. ‘Gosh, these mirrors look great. What a clean nursery you have!’ They love the mirrors. Even during the most intense Daddy-cuddle, I catch them looking at themselves.

But amazingly I have never seen even the slightest mark of a finger on them again. ‘And not on the car either, please.’ Sure, enough, they did not touch the windows there. ‘And not the walls on the corridor.’ Again. No problem. They self-corrected. If their little fingers strayed, they would remind themselves out loud.

To say that I owe it all to my mother may be trite, but it is true. The more I am with the boys, the more the memories flood back. I am doing what she did; what she would have done. In many ways, I have become my mother. I catch myself using her words.

Perceptively, someone had asked me if I knew who the boys’ mother was. My response was that I knew who their grandmother was.

I am talking to them as my mother talked to me. From the earliest days she taught me to value everyone for who that person is.

I have an early and vivid memory of being in London when I was about three. I was on a bus with her. She took my hand and drew me to her. ‘You’re going to see something you haven’t seen before. There’s nothing to be frightened of.’ The bus pulled in at a bus stop. She had seen the queue of people. As he put his hand on the rail and pulled himself in, I gasped and pressed into my mother, terrified. This was the first black man I had seen. That was 1950. Back then, we started the day at Primary School with a hymn, the first verse of which started in a low, confidential tone:

How different it is in today’s multicultural Britain. ‘There’s a man running.’ The boys had seen him through the car window. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He a ...’ I paused and rejected the qualifier. ‘A man—running.’ The child in their nursery group whose name I don’t know is the girl with the pale blue top and dark hair, not the Chinese girl.

At my primary school, all the families were the right wing press's ideal. There were no single parents and no divorces or separations. Whether these were happy nuclear families was a question never asked. Relationships were not spoken of.

Fifty years later my children’s friends’ parents speak openly of their emotions, sometimes in front of their children. Family structures are a reflection of a seismic social shift. Many parents are single; several are splitting painfully; some are openly critical of each other; one family takes holidays together—cuckold, lover and all.

‘You’re the ones who should be on the ‘Trisha’ programme’, I remarked. ‘You’re far more interesting than I am.’

* * *

Even in such a short time, I can see how different my children’s lives are from mine. I would be walked to nursery school. We had no car. Most people had no car. When we did have one, it was a pre-war banger. I would listen to the wireless. We had no TV. Hardly anyone had one. It was a special treat to go down the road to view the Coronation in 1953. The doors of an ornate wooden console were opened to reveal a small, curved screen on which, when it had warmed up, appeared a fuzzy black-and-white image of Her Majesty. Now, as new houses stand in the way of a short-cut to a five-minute walk to nursery school, they ride in a car while listening to CDs and at home they watch DVDs.

I had no idea of foreign countries or their languages at their age. Through my work, they meet people from all over the world and know that they use other tongues. As a child I was aware of Germany and the influence of the war on my family’s life. The family home had been hit during the Blitz. My uncle, who had been cleaning his bicycle, was sucked out and had been found up a tree, alive and still clinging to his bike. Everything else had been lost except the numbers on the front door—22—which adorn the garden shed to this day.

Perhaps it is from this that I became interested in Germany and the German language. All parents, consciously or otherwise, pass on their interests to their children. I did so quite consciously.

‘It’s an aeroplane’, the boys would say every few minutes when we were in the garden. They picked up the faint drone of planes in transit between Heathrow and rest of the world and scoured the skies to find the source. ‘Yes, it’s an aeroplane,’ I would repeat with some tedium.

Then I thought, why not try it in a different language? Children love playing with words and sounds. So ‘it’s a plane’ also became ‘it’s a Flugzeug’ and, carrying on the idea of ‘zeug’, a toy became a ‘Spielzeug’ too.

Planes weren’t the only objects in the sky. Soon the boys were as likely to come out with ‘it’s a Hubschrauber’ as ‘it’s a helicopter’.

I tried to match the languages to those their Godparents speak. They loved the funny accents, too. Lars was able to ride in Daddy’s ‘bil’ and look at a passing ‘tog’. ‘What’s ‘butter’ in Norwegian, Lars?’ ‘Smør’ he would reply with a perfect lilt. ‘And how about your ‘pocket’—what’s that?’ ‘Lomme.’ Ian adored travelling along the ‘Autobahn’ and Piers would greet me with ‘Bonjour’. As they came into contact with all my students from round the world at the weekend, they were well aware of words and accents. ‘What’s ‘hello’ in French, Ian?’ He lowered his head and in a gutteral voice said ‘Alo.’

Yet the boys seemed to have a special affinity with German and Germans, just like their father. A thirteen year-old became a great friend of theirs during one summer course. ‘Gib mir fünf’, they would say, echoing him, raising their hands to a ‘high five’ greeting. Their favourite viewing became the BBC’s ‘Muzzy’ in German. It should be French to prepare them for what will, no doubt, be the main second language at ‘big school’, but I have far more to do with Germany than France.

‘Do you want ‘Kipper’?’ I would ask.

‘We want ‘Mutzi’!’ was their reply with perfect German intonation 'Auf deutsch.'

Some old habits die hard. I find it surprising when the boys mention adults at the nursery by their first name with no honorific prefix. I invariably refer to their Godparents as Auntie and Uncle. Lars’ godmother Esther told them, ‘The whole world calls me Esther. Even my own children call me Esther. Your Daddy’s the only one who calls me Auntie Esther. You have full permission to call me Esther, boys.’ The Godparents are our family.

Having my own children has made me value those of my mother’s and father’s sisters—cousins, blood relatives. There is a large extended family of which the boys are a part. We now have reunions a couple of times a year. The boys come with me and are much cuddled. ‘You look so well on it’ was one cousin’s comment. ‘You were made for this’ was another’s.

Bicker though they do, the boys’ love for each other, too, is absolute. When Ian had to go into hospital for a tonsilectomy and adenoidectomy, I took his brothers to visit him so they knew where he was. All seemed normal until I brought them back. Lars was sick after each meal until Ian came home. He missed him so much.

As I mediate between Piers, quietly putting the jigsaw together and Ian casting the pieces into the air, with Lars providing a running commentary, I find it diverting to reminisce.

My initial instincts had been right—and wrong. Wrong in that I had assumed babies would be on the parent’s side and co-operate in being nurtured and provided for. Babies are tricky. They have their own agenda. But I was fundamentally right in thinking that I could do the job. The hurdle I found most difficult to overcome was that put in front of me by the QC.

I had come to believe that there must be a woman involved at all times, that is to say that I had to relegate responsibility for their own good. The subconscious thought that, if I had the temerity to manage on my own, some authority would come along and take them away had sunk deep. I automatically ensured as often as possible that there would not be the slightest chance of this.

I advertised for weekend help and went through a succession of more-or-less reliable and worthy staff before I realised that, not only were the authorities not remotely interested in me or my family, let alone plotting to take the children away, but that I was perfectly capable of bringing them up. This realisation came to me slowly, but I was helped towards it by one of the less-than-reliable weekend help who blithely asked me:

‘If you had decided to abort one of them, which one would you have chosen?’ She it was who had told me: ‘There’s nothing difficult about looking after babies. They’re the same as animals.’

Where I had been absolutely right all along was in knowing that I could do the job. I would never have experienced so many deliciously life-changing moments and three lovely children would never have existed. I am certain every parent feels like this. But what with hindsight I fail to see is why British lawmakers put so many obstacles in the way of those who want to have a family.

What are they afraid of? The western world needs more children and there are people with hearts breaking with love who want so much to be parents. I was lucky. I could do it all privately. The route to parenthood actually turned out to be a straight road. But along it, chicanes had been placed to slow the traffic.

There is science with its amazing possibilities and here we are, free, but struggling with our self-imposed restrictions. I took advantage of the freedom the US offers. Had I met the doom merchants and self-righteously religious pro-lifers before making the decision, perhaps I would not have gone ahead. I would have eschewed freedom, viewed it with suspicious caution, sidestepped it, felt that, as here was something that could be abused, it should not be entertained. But there again, anything can be abused and there are plenty of those who will seek to outlaw whatever might fall into that category.

Human nature—as evidenced by the letters I received—is, I believe, fundamentally good and decent. Having done what I did is hardly going to open the floodgates of hoards keen to become single fathers. Very few would wish to. And those who do wish to will have put into the decision as much thought as I did and go ahead only in the knowledge that they would do their utmost to make it succeed. That’s all a parent can do. Those who make a conscious decision to achieve parenthood will go through agonies analysing how best to do it.

It may not make them better parents than those who do it accidentally, but it is in no way a disqualification. I found what I thought I would find—prohibitive legislation; restrictions based on the fear of what human beings might do. The joy of what they can achieve given the freedom to do so is boundless. J.-J. Rousseau was quite right. ‘Man is born free, but shackled everywhere.’

Maybe fear of litigation will stop the route I took in the fullness of time, but the scope offered by a turn-of-the-century free-thinking American society and state-of-the-art technology has created a new British family with shoots that will reach well into the new millennium.

I realise how extraordinarily lucky I was. ‘You got away with it,’ our GP said. ‘Multiple births are very risky.’

Had I realised all the complications, I would not have sanctioned the implantation of four embryos. Triplets are hard work. Nevertheless, I am glad I did not know all this when I started as I would not be without any of my sons for the world. Now that those fuzzy specks have become real people with diverse characters and personalities, I look at the earliest photograph of the boys which must be as early as any family photograph can be and wonder which is which. I also wonder about the one that never made it. The one who never made it. And I see in my mind’s eye a fourth variation on a theme that was somehow subsumed into the other three. And I feel a loss.

What about the frozen embryos? Those four little incipient life-forms sitting in a Californian freezer. What should I do with them? I used to think that any form of medical research on embryos was grisly.

My belief that life begins at day one is also one of the pro-lifers’ tenets, but now that I have personal experience of their capacity to inflict pain through doctrinaire adherence to fundamentalist beliefs, I can see this as another dogma.

An embryo has life. So has a sperm. There is no certainty that an embryo will become a life as we know it but, through the medium of stem-cell research, there is the real possibility that it may save life. I cannot see the difference between the time limits and criteria for abortion and the use of embryos for stem cell research. I can see that the relief of suffering and the improvement of quality of life are noble aspirations and part of what make us human. In time it may well be that such research can cure the sort of illness that blighted my family.

Nevertheless, in my mind’s eye I can see four little copies of my three waiting to be brought into existence. I need time for my thoughts to adjust to the idea of using these embryos to advance what I see as a laudable aim.

In fact, my first thought was to give them to ‘Snowflakes’, an organisation in Los Angeles that donates spare embryos to infertile couples. But if I were to donate them, how would my sons react to the idea that they have siblings out there? Would they make it their life’s work to track them down? Would they think that I had simply given their brothers and sisters away?

There is no use-by date on the embryos. I have time—maybe even enough time to ask my sons much later how they might feel about a donation. Or perhaps I should leave the embryos where they are in case my sons’ wives have difficulty conceiving. They could have these little fellows implanted and father their own brothers or sisters. Whatever next?

Deciding to remain undecided brings its own relief.