Lately, the awful truth has been dawning away at the back of my mind. There are gentle, sensitive children and there are others. And I am pretty sure my sixteen-month-old son Daniel is flexing himself in readiness to become one of the others.
For the first few months he lay around flashing the odd tooth and guzzling food and drink to excess. Once his co-ordination was up to it, he unpicked and ate the lining of his pram as a curtain-raiser, and then practised acrobatic tactics on his harness. Many is the time we’ve peeped fondly out of the kitchen window, to find him standing there on the lawn in his bootees, suspended from the pram by one hook, in a nonchalant, semi-detached way.
When he was about nine months, a friend gave us a baby-stroller, a sort of canvas bucket seat in a metal frame on wheels. It seemed a good idea at the time, but Daniel soon discovered its potential and spent most of the summer strolling round the garden eating roses.
Then we acquired a playpen. Peace at last, I thought, as I put my feet up. With a ripple of milk-fed muscle, Daniel tucked the thing under his arm and lurched off to twiddle the Light Programme into obscurity, eat a couple of cigarettes and probe deeply into the cat’s ear with a ball-point pen.
Gradually, over the next few months, our living-room changed from a dog-eared, but cosy flopping-out place for all the family, into a big, bare adventure playground. We didn’t actually put down asphalt, but we did find it necessary to remove the carpet and replace it with easily-wiped tiles. I don’t like our particular choice of tiles much, but perhaps it is just as well, because no amount of wiping ever catches up with all the thickly-spread substances and dragged furniture marks they have to contend with when Daniel plays.
At about twelve months our son developed two other characteristics which didn’t exactly help me in the gentle art of child-raising. One was the continual removal of all clothing attached to the lower half of his person and the other was his decision to do without sleep.
No matter how early or late we crept into the nursery, there was his rosy face leering at us through the bars of the cot.
After lunch he would spend a comparatively quiet hour or so back in his cot trying to figure out how to let the side down and make a quick get-away. Some time ago I noticed that he was watching me intently as I slid the two metal catches into place. I’ve outwitted him so far by waving teddy-bears about and clicking the thing into position at great speed when he is looking the other way – but it’s only a matter of time.
At present we do know where he is once he is bedded down – although often at night we are awakened in the small hours by wild laughter and boozy singing in the next room.
‘At least he’s a cheerful little chap,’ says my husband, who sees him only briefly at breakfast-time on weekdays. But he has to agree, as weekends draw to a close, that cheerfulness isn’t everything.
Have you ever settled down to a peaceful Sunday crossword puzzle, closed your eyes for a moment of deep thought, and opened them to find that the crossword has been torn out and eaten?
Have you ever found a plate of bread and butter under the hearthrug?
Or had a loaded ashtray emptied into your handbag? Or discovered all your family’s toothbrushes down the lavatory?
‘Never mind,’ says my husband. ‘At least it shows an alert, original mind. Perhaps he’s going to be a genius.’
Back at work, however, he is subjected to enthusiastic stories from a colleague with a ten-month-old who already speaks in sentences.
‘Come on, say dad-dad,’ we coax.
‘Bye-bye,’ says Daniel.
‘No, dad-dad,’ we stress.
‘Mum-mum,’ says our genius decisively, before shunting off outside to eat the cat’s dinner.
Bath time comes round and in he goes clutching boats, beakers and, as an afterthought, the bathmat.
‘Let go, Daniel,’ I pant, but the bathmat is definitely in by now, so there seems little point in rescuing it. Instead, I make unsuccessful attempts to remove cement-hard cereal from various nooks and crannies on his person. Meanwhile, the beakers are coming into their own. Daniel is bailing out!
His grandmother pops in to share the bathtime fun, but retires hastily with a lapful of bathwater.
Just think, we sigh, as we flop down damply in our sad relic of a living-room, soon he’ll be eighteen months old – and that, I am told, is when the fun really begins.