Chapter 44

In all the filmings and photographings, the implications for my children have been uppermost in my mind. Setting the record straight is one thing. The ramifications of exposing one's family life on a continuing basis is another. I suppose that when a distorted version has already appeared, anything that resembles the truth and over which one has some control is a relief. After the shock of the original 'exposée' in 2001, the next was less of a shock; the next even less. The threshold of personal pain was lowered. Having then revealed my inner feelings in my book, the dividing line between my private self and my public persona became blurred. But all this is about my own privacy. In writing about them, in giving interviews and by inviting the film crews in, I was involving my children in decisions over which they had no control and from which they would experience repercussions. As I had nothing to hide, I assumed the same for them. But I was the 'urban sophisticate' of Mary Riddell's original piece and they were just small boys, charming, friendly and funny, but also awkward, limited and without guile. Always when writing or speaking to tape or camera, I would be aware that whatever I said might come back to haunt me. They would have no such reservations, yet they might be similarly haunted.

When 'Films of Record' asked me to be in an uplifting documentary they were making about single dads, the working title for which was 'Mum's Gone', I could not see a problem, although in our case it was more a case of 'Mum's Never Been'. After two days of filming, the boys were at ease with the crew. Their behaviour was unchanged. I am not sure mine was, though. I felt myself keen to facilitate the continuity of the storyline, unwilling to interrupt it with small admonitions. I suspect they noticed this and took advantage of the newly laid-back Daddy. The film-makers captured milk and biscuits, bathtime, the bedtime story, all the intimate parts of normal family life with its strictures, its laughs and its cuddles. Almost casually, I asked which other fathers they would include. Shades of the 'Esther Programme' came back to me. One had a severely ill daughter; another had lost his wife. There I was, someone who had quite consciously put himself in this situation and was having a great time, being compared with those who were looking at tragedy from the bright side. However the story was told, I feared being seen as the dilettante dad of children who were privileged beyond the dreams of the others in the broadcast. If there were to be comparisons - and I failed to see why the story should be presented in juxtaposition - these should be of like with like. Let them take others who have made conscious decisions about their lives, not those who have had to deal with circumstances beyond their control. Of course, my own life could be presented as a tragedy - my best years taken up as a carer - but I do not see it that way. Life happens. You make the best of it. This is the approach I want my sons to adopt. I am positive. I am able to be so. It is purely a state of mind. The glass is half full. The same glass is half empty. It all depends on your outlook. There is no link between my sons and sad situations, no matter how optimistically these may be portrayed. Any similarity can only be contrived from a distortion of the reality. Delightful though they were and although their producer assembled my flatpack hosereel between takes, I declined this particular invitation.

Another company was keen to include me in a piece on older parents. Although ageism is illegal in the workplace, nothing is out-of-bounds in the quest for TV ratings. Age was something I had never considered before having children. I had no age-related health problems and I was generally taken for far younger than my real age. Yet I was two generations older than my sons. This must have some effect on the way I parented them and the way they perceived me. I was gradually working out what it was. Part of the answer came at Harvest Festival time.

'Piers was quite scared of the old people. He cried.'

Nursery school had invited some senior citizens to hear the children sing songs and receive gifts of food. I had imagined and, indeed, sang to them in the car as we drove to Nursery School that morning the hymn that, for me, is synonymous with Harvest Festival. 'We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land and it is fed and watered by God's almighty hand. He sends the snow in winter, the warmth to swell the grain, the breezes and the sunshine and soft, refreshing rain. All good things around us are sent from Heaven above. Oh praise the Lord, oh praise the Lord for a-a-all His love.' In these days of ecumenicity, however, such Bible-thumping was evidently potential dynamite and although the elderly would have related to it instantly, they were treated to an rendition of 'Way up high upon a tree, two red apples smiled at me. I shook the tree as hard as I could. The apples fell down. Mmm they were good.' Piers had run crying from the room. It wasn't the anodyne lyrics that had upset him.

'They were all old, Daddy.'

'And they had long bushy beards.' Lars was using one of his favourite phrases of the time. I wanted to defuse this.

'And that was just the ladies, was it? No, seriously, there's nothing to be frightened of.'

'But we don't want you to get old.' Ian looked concerned and touched my face.

'You're quite old, aren't you, Daddy?' Lars looked at me critically. 'You're...' He struggled to find a more acceptable word and, failing to find it, refined the qualifier. '...a little bit old.'

'Older than you certainly, but you don't need to look after me quite yet.'

He ran his finger along the crow's feet at the corner of my eye. 'You've got lumpy bits.'

'We don't want you to die, Daddy.'

'I'll try not to, Ian. It will happen, but not for a long time yet.'

The age and decrepitude they had seen had made them relate these qualities to their own lives and, young for my age though I was, they had only to look at their friends' parents in their twenties and early thirties to realise that their Daddy was different. While I saw it as enrichment in terms of experience and wisdom, they sensed that it was several steps along the road to death. A few days before, I had entertained the parents of one of their friends to dinner. We had talked about education. 'I know it was different in our day,' the husband had said. He could not have been more than thirty five. It was the greatest compliment I had heard in weeks. I did not disabuse him.

My own childhood experiences in the 1950s coloured all my choices. Decisions about bedtime stories in the early years was made easy by the small library of 'Kipper', 'Meg and Mog', 'Old Bear' and other such titles that had arrived with the christening, the first Christmases and the birthdays. Just pre-school, when I thought they could manage something a little meatier, what I had read during my own childhood sprang immediately to my mind. No problem with Enid Blyton's 'Faraway Tree' series. The concept was great and the boys often went into the dark woods - in reality the undergrowth at the end of the garden - to search for a tree at the top of which they might find forest creatures and revolving lands. I assumed that Ms Blyton's overuse of certain words (I counted three in the same sentence and five in a short paragraph) was because she was aiming at a very young reader. I automatically and without difficulty sought a synonym for 'queer' (the word used so frequently) as it had practically changed its meaning in the seventy years since the writer's time. I could even get my sons to understand why the boys sent the girls away from the action when the Trolls attacked the tree. After all, they were exceedingly silly and prone to giggling at inopportune moments. I had some difficulty with Dame Slap and her school and found it hard to suspend my disbelief in a mother who would quite happily let her children go off to stay with strange people she had never met who lived in a tree. It was when I tried the 'Famous Five' that the difficulties became impossibilities. While 'Anne had never seen a television before' was a charming reflection of its period, less delightful were the spankings Julian was fearful of receiving, while everyone apart from his close relatives touched their forelocks to him and called him 'young sir'. All this was laced with a repetitive vocabulary inexcusable in a series aimed at the not so very young and formulaic plots that had enabled the writer to achieve her production-line prolificacy. And this was what I had cut my literary teeth on! I shuddered that I had never noticed until I felt it touch my children's lives how unkind were the assumptions of her characters and how hierarchical the society in which they lived. Had I not realised this when I first read the books because they were bound up in the society I myself inhabited at the time? Or was it just a reflection of the writer's own childhood in the nineteenth century? I abandoned 'The Famous Five' and turned to C.S. Lewis's 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' - a book of similar age, but as different as a burger is from a gourmet meal. Perhaps it was just a matter of literary merit.

I wondered about the wider implications. Was I right to take it for granted that the same basic standards that had applied when I was growing up in the 1950s pertained in the early twenty-first century? A possible answer came out of the blue one Sunday morning or, more accurately, out of a long unopened drawer in the unlikely form of the colour chart for my first new car. It was 'Your Colour and Price Guide' for the 1969 Ford Capri - 'the car you always promised yourself' - and was all about what was then known as 'colour keying', later to become known as 'colour coding'. Among the coloured patches of bodies and trim was some trendy text. 'Another nice thing about colour keying' it announced 'is that it's a good way of involving your wife. Without her getting too involved.' It got better - or worse. 'While you're deciding which engine you're going to have, she can be sitting quietly somewhere. Choosing the carpet.' Impossibly patronising nowadays. There was the main purchaser - male and in holy wedlock with a wife who should be kept away from big decisions and could easily be kept amused with the merest trifle. But in 1969 it turned not one hair. Far from it. It helped sell hundreds of thousands of Ford Capris. This was the society of my developmental years and this text, penned by the mighty Ford Motor Company's UK Advertising and Sales Promotion Department, mirrored its assumptions and aspirations.

My 'time' has become a historical era. Weekly soaps give an echo to these golden days. 'Heartbeat' and 'The Royal' have been stuck in 1969 for years, their characters living out a 'Groundhog Day' existence, their programme-makers not daring to enter the '70s - the decade that taste forgot. It was a time when my children's friends' grandparents were raising children. And here am I doing exactly what they were doing nearly forty years later in what is clearly a world in which social mores have somersaulted, but in which I still see the 1969 Ford Capri as the car I always promised myself. Had I been in my children's place, my father would have come from the nineteenth century. My children are happy to tap the keys of computers. My parents remembered the roads populated with horses and carts. The furniture of life has changed out of recognition. What about standards and values? I would have to take a critical approach to mine to see if the hopes and expectations I have for my children are not as outmoded as those in that colour chart.

By appearing in the older parents' documentary, I would accept that my age alone made me different enough to be televisually interesting. That was a concept I had not thought through when I embarked on the journey towards parenthood. I just knew I could do the job. Yet age was clearly a fascination. It would have prohibited my adopting a child, had I wished to do so. Even David Miliband, a Cabinet Minister, found it more conducive to his happiness to go to the United States to take responsibility for his adopted son whose mother handed him over at birth. All perfectly legal and no one doubts that he will be well cared for and loved by his new family. Had he, at 39, tried it over here, the barriers would have come up and the molehill of 'age' heaped into a mountain of despair. 'We want to give the adopted child the best chance of the longest, happiest life with their new parents' would be the standard answer as if the biblical three score years and ten were all that could be envisaged and that the poor little 31 year-old mite would have to be protected at all costs, from being orphaned - even at the price of deciding that he should not exist. No matter that life expectancy is increasing by the generation; irrelevant that there is an ageing population in which deaths outnumber births and which, with a diminishing workforce, will find it difficult to provide for itself. How many perfectly suitable men and women are denied a family because of any single dogma or combination of them? Too old, or fat, or a smoker, or single, or stigmatised by some other perceived disability that would be actionable as a reason for dismissal by an industrial tribunal, people brimming over with love for children are consigned to childlessness. Had I thought of going down the adoption route, I am sure that, at 52, I would have been ruled out on the spot. Poor prospective child, brought up with orphancy looming among the teddy bears in the nursery. That I am single and male would have been two more insurmountable obstacles. Poor motherless potential waif, without affection or any teddy bears to cuddle while waiting for imminent parentlessness. Having looked west and circumvented the whole UK adoption nonsense, I suppose a documentary could make the points retrospectively. How long might I last? Does he look slightly out-of-breath after playing football with his three boisterous sons? Indeed, many are the times I have laughed out loud at finding myself playing catch, kick, and bat-and-ball simultaneously with three boys each of whom wants to do his special thing with Daddy. Surely they deserve better - a dad who can keep going all day and all night rather than just all day? However well one does for one's age, one could always be accused of not doing better. Logically, appearing in a documentary on age should be out, too.

Maybe not, though. Age and decrepitude is an obvious angle, but age and attitudes would be more subtle. I had looked at the zeitgeist of 1969. I looked back even further. I was at my children's age in 1951. That was a time of austerity; of ration books. A time when there was little to have. Generally the young had an automatic respect for the old. Wartime discipline prevailed. Naughtiness resulted in punishment. Children acted within a rigid framework. They knew where they stood. By and large, they did as they were told. Although it was a time of remarkable intolerance - being different from the norm was often an imprisonable offence - it was also quite straightforward. People were treated according to the position they held, often without regard to their merits or lack of them. Parents were to be obeyed. I certainly expect my children to obey me. I am the one who knows best - better than them anyway. When they told me that one of the staff at their Nursery had called the new manager 'old', I told them that word should never be used a criticism; that age and authority were to be respected. It struck me at the time that my words seemed old fashioned, but I could see nothing wrong in this. Mulling it over afterwards, I knew that it was a gut reaction, but the right one. When children think they can disregard authority with impunity, it's downhill all the way. This hit home when I went to pay my windowcleaner. I could see there was something wrong. She was close to tears.

'She hits me. She tells me to eff off.'

She was describing her twelve year-old daughter, the outcome of a failed relationship. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

'I've told her she can't go down town this weekend. I'll hide her shoes.' Her eyes brimmed again. 'But she'll just take mine. She hit me with a bottle last week. And she hit me when I was driving. I had to pull over. I feel a failure'

Unthinkable in 1951 and just as unthinkable for me now, here was this family's reality in 2006. Is this what happens when the rules loosen their grip and children's demands hold sway? More the stuff of Channel Four documentaries than my own story. Just before this, I had met a mother and her 14 year-old daughter I had known years before in the supermarket.

'No school?'

'She just come from court.' Her mother was nonchalant and had clearly been through the same scenario several times. 'She's been bound over for shoplifting while truanting. We don't know what to do with her. She's living with a boy in our house right now. He's 17 and has children by two different girls and another baby on the way with a third.'

Do you suddenly wake up and find that your child is suddenly off the rails? Of course not. There are steps along the way at any one of which the issues can be addressed. What joy can there be in parenthood in these cases? Is it just my luck that I have three boys who, while they constantly test the boundaries, are fundamentally well-behaved, co-operative, appreciative and good company? Maybe, looked at in a different way, the hard work that bringing them up undoubtedly is could get me down, but I see them as a laugh a minute. I am in charge and they know it; more than know it, they want it, expect it, would be lost without it. This is how it should be and whether it's age, experience, an innate reasonableness, patience, sensitivity or just sheer determination, it works. 'Children don't come with instructions', nursery told me the day I arrived with them. 'But parents do,' was my reflex response. 'They instruct children in what's right and good and positive. By every action and inaction, they set the parameters they believe are right and which their children will, by extension, absorb into their own morality.' I doubt it has to do with the angles at which the documentary makers choose to view their subjects. Age, gender, or status are as nothing compared with a parent's standards of goodness and truth, decency and honesty and these are gained so subtly from all that has passed before that generalisations are futile.

'Even if I didn't agree with you.' I told the new Nursery Manager one morning when we had arrived too late for breakfast, 'I'd still support you in front of the children.'

'I wish you'd tell my staff that,' she replied. A twitch of the lips told me that she meant every word and I had a good idea what lay behind the facial response. She must have picked up on what the boys had told me had been said a few days earlier.

'She's old' Lars had informed me with a confidence that meant the idea had come from above.

'Who told you that?' He named one of the staff at Nursery School.

I could hardly have told him that someone in authority should never have been so indiscreet as to use age in a pejorative sense. I sought the right words.

'Well, I don't think she meant that it was bad to be old.'

Lars looked unconvinced and repeated the assertion.

'Never tell me that to be 'old' is somehow wrong or a bad thing. If someone is old it means they've lived a lot longer than you and gained wisdom on the way.' Sensing I might have strayed into philosophising, I tried to bring the point back to their own reality. 'E... is in charge of you. She looks after you. Daddy trusts her. She knows what she's doing.' I felt like adding 'and she's right, even if she's wrong', but thought this might be going too far.

And I realised that it was all one and the same thing. Small children need authority and to have respect for the figures who represent this. They are not able to make anything other than the tiniest and least important decisions on their own. They need to believe in the people who make decisions for them. If the authority is absent or is sending out confused messages or is being contradicted by other authorities, there will be unpredictable consequences. The abreactions to parental control and the muddle-headed juvenile behaviour that I had come across were just manifestations of this.

'May I introduce Miss X?' She extended her hand. 'Piers, Ian and Lars's Daddy is just letting them see their classroom before they start with us.' Another lady approached. 'I'm Miss Y,' she said and offered hers. 'And I'm Mrs Z.' Another lady came to greet us. 'Hello. These are Ian, Pierce and Lance then?' I briefly corrected her on the names and pondered on the solecism. When I was young I had been told that the honorific prefix was a title other people gave you and never one you gave to yourself. I looked at the roomful of five year-olds. Of course, this is why they did it. These children would never think of the prefix as honorific unless they heard it used in real situations. It was all part of the building up of a chain of authorities who had different roles. Parents were called mummy or Daddy. They had their status in the infant psyche. Teachers were honorifically prefixed. This established their position. Friends had first names. They had their roles. It is later, much later, when the nuances are understood, when what people do can be qualitatively valued that authority can be questioned. All the control that authority implies is essential at an early age. Its absence or abuse is paid for later. How reassuring that this Infant School applies these criteria, non-'U' though they may be. I could only hope that the parents of these teachers' charges had similar views. I could see it happening in all walks of life.

'Brumas is chocolate brown. Like Toby.' Piers was looking at the cat spreading his food across the kitchen floor.

'Yes. It's a very handsome colour to be, isn't it? You know there are some people who don't like chocolate brown. Strange, isn't it? You're white, just like Cresta. That's a handsome colour, too.'

I thought I would establish these credentials right from the start.

'But Toby's not the same colour as me?' Lars's rising inflection told me that a response was required.

'And you're not the same colour as him and Cresta's not the same colour as Brumas and neither of them is the same colour as Pandora, but we love them just the same, don't we?'

Although it happened right in the middle of clearing away the breakfast plates, I hoped, more than that, I knew for sure, that this was a pivotal conversation. I also knew that almost every other conversation, every action, every shade of meaning at this age assumed a significance out of all proportion to those that would be acquired later. It made me question all my values, all my prejudices before inadvertently passing them on.

I used to think I knew what I was doing; used to cover all my bases. Not any longer. Now there are four of us—and they are not all little versions of me. I am not the me I was. Three other characters are developing in front of me and all are clamouring to be taken into consideration at the same time.

Relating to each of them one-to-one without another impinging is hard to arrange. This tends to happen at cuddling time before bed when those not being cuddled are playing with toys. It seems to work. The logistics of how to arrange it in any other way escape me. I wonder how other parents manage.

I can see that they are far from being the tragic motherless infants that some sections of the media have accused me of creating. I never thought they would be. If I needed any external verification, their nursery school tells me they are perfectly well-adjusted and happy. ‘It makes my day when they come in,’ one of the staff there told me.

Challenging it is, yet even so I feel a confidence different from anything I have felt before. I know that I can be what these little ones need me to be. And I know it not just because I must be their guide and protector. It’s what I want to be. It is my being.

My experience is only with three. Whenever I have been with just one of them, generally when that one is ill, I see the difference. The relationship is easier; more fluid; without the tensions that rivalry engenders and the restrictions that impartiality demands. I can be reflective, empathetic; need to plan less; can have a spontaneity that three small children and only two hands precludes. I had never really considered that there would be more than one child. ‘Just the one, then?’ I say when I hear that a friend is expecting. ‘A cinch.’ In comparison, it is. A child is hard work. The load with three is increased exponentially. Now that I know what it’s like, I am filled with admiration at the work parents do and have the greatest respect for single mothers—and fathers.

All through this journey, the children—my own and the many others I have come to know—have been great. It is with some of the adults that I have issues that I find hard to resolve. While they were taking pot shots at me, I wonder if the media hacks had any idea of the hurt I felt. Now it would be my children who would share that hurt. Would that adults had the openness and straightforwardness of children.

Now that we are four, I find I have to try to explain away adult behaviour. In this I am quite unsuccessful as I cannot fathom much of it myself. I had not bothered with it before but, with a family, values and attitudes assume greater significance. Seeing the world from a child’s point-of-view has made me more questioning; less accepting. I look at the children and think: ‘What a world have I brought you into?’ The mix of optimism and horror that is history remains. I had never seen it in juxtaposition to a tiny, innocent baby.

In this context, the colours are more vivid. The black is darker. Now my instinctive perspective is that of a vulnerable child who will, in the fullness of time be left with a legacy of challenges from melting glaciers to drug-resistant pandemics.

When I watched the events of 9/11 unfold, I squeezed their hands. I brought out my camcorder and filmed them with the TV in the background. ‘This will change the world for the next fifty years or more’ my commentary runs. Later, I would think of the attack on Pearl Harbour that served to ‘awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.’

As I prepare to walk my three four-and-three-quarter year-olds to their new infant school in the grey murk of a January morning, I have vague memories of my own first walk to school holding my mother's hand in an age that was altogether simpler and less aggressive and wonder how prepared they will be to encounter those whose upbringing has perhaps been less reasoned, less structured, less considered. It is not easy to make out a case for the essential goodness that is, I believe, human nature. I have to help my children pick through the morass of misunderstanding in which we live. The mirror that is a new parent’s eye may be a distorting one. Its reflections are nurture, protection, security. I see all these threatened. In a world slowly cooking in its own effluent where religious dogma battles with political pragmatism and business expediency and spawns the grotesque events that have unravelled post September 2001, I fear for my sons' future. I know that now, I would never, absolutely never, do it again. But looking at my three sons today, I am delighted that I did... And I suspect that I will learn just as many lessons as they do.