‘Hey, guess what?’ said David, thudding into bed and removing my book at bedtime. I’d just reached the chapter where Frodo meets Bilbo again, at Rivendell, so Tolkien enthusiasts will understand that I only tolerate late-night interruptions of a very serious nature. David certainly knows this, since he spent all last year buried deep in Middle Earth and shushing my every word.
‘Whatever is it?’ I mumbled crossly. ‘And it’d better be good.’
‘It is – or at least I think so. Rick has just asked me, formally, if he and Anna can get engaged.’
‘Goodness me,’ I said, as much bowled over by the old-fashioned courtesy of ‘asking the father’ as by the news itself. Which didn’t altogether come as a surprise, once the initial adjustment was made to the fact that my daughter – so recently, it seems, a tiny, owlish stare from a fluffy pink blanket – is now a highly perceptive and remarkably likeable (if untidy) University student with her own refreshing individuality.
But I do still sometimes ask myself whatever happened to all those fast moving years between the day we introduced her to the Dr Seuss books and the day she introduced us to The Lord of the Rings?
I haven’t got any older and nor has David. So when did that chubby-legged toddler in the miniscule Liberty print dresses start skilfully running up Laura Ashley skirts and tops for herself?
And learning to smoke – silly chump.
And demonstrating to me how Rick’s sister does her super lasagne. It was only yesterday I was giving Anna and her small school friends those little lessons on rock cakes. In their own individual mixing bowls. With real ingredients, just like Mummy’s. And now my kid makes a much better Yorkshire pudding than I could ever do!
I expect all parents experience that jolting moment of truth when the children, so recently on the receiving end of watchful guidance, advice and generally superior intellect, suddenly turn around and give us a telling lecture on the economic state of the Third World. Not to mention earnest advice on where we’re going wrong in our interior decoration/general philosophy/and/or use of eye liner.
It’s a strange feeling, too, to overhear them going on about ‘the good old days when we lived here or there’ – brief stopping places we only registered lightly in passing but which they apparently see as cornerstones in their young lives. Daniel at twelve (Ye Gods, it’s his birthday next week when he too will be a teenager!) still tells everyone about ‘the worst moment of his life’ when, with the best possible intentions, we fitted up a two-way baby alarm system by his nursery door and trotted off to our next door neighbour’s to connect the other end. ‘Daniel – Daniel – can you hear me?’ I warbled through the microphone from the neighbour’s house.
‘Eeee-aaah-eeek!!’ came the chilling reply.
‘What’s the matter – whatever is it?’ we panted, hurling ourselves back through our own front door.
Only to find poor, chubby little Dan, turned ashen pale and clinging to his cot bars screaming ‘Mummy, Mummy, Grandma’s in dat box up dere!’
So cherubic, so rosy, so curly and cuddly was our Daniel in his early days that I really find it hard to look back through our family albums and note the passing of time. Did my ears deceive me or did I really hear our little lad recently say solemnly, from the back seat of the car, ‘J just can’t seem to help whistling at air hostesses!’
I think perhaps I became aware of this particular turning point in his life when I took him to lunch with a very pretty member of the Good Housekeeping staff and told him, in my fussy mum-ish way, to take his elbows off the table. Whereupon he requested me, very firmly, to please be quiet – and I looked up surprised and caught him winking at her! Luckily, at the moment, sport still seems to have a firm edge on his enthusiasm, plus Scouting, swimming and tracking us down to try out new card games.
But then, it was only yesterday that Anna too, was badgering Dad to play ball and shaking with excitement at the birthday arrival of her first doll’s pram. (Oh, how proudly, but how slowly, we trundled round our village shops that year!) Then came the magic, for an eight-year-old, of raising a baby fox cub from near-starvation to vibrant mischievous manhood. And the sadness when he left us and took to the wilds. All this plus the richly unfolding pageant of good school teachers and not so good. The well chosen friends and the oh dears. The later anxiety of a bad car accident – and the taken aback feeling when the solicitor dealing with the resultant damages case starting writing directly to her instead of to us since she’d ‘reached the age of majority and could handle her own affairs’. And now the nice, blue-eyed fiancé twinkling away at us all from his semi-permanent seat on our sofa. So much to have happened so quickly …
‘My goodness me,’ I repeated, sinking back on the pillows and unthreading my specs from my current tangled Afro. (That’s a hairstyle, by the way, not some extra chap who has suddenly crept into my lifestyle.) And yes, I do admit to furtively-worn reading glasses these days. I wouldn’t be wearing them quite so furtively, actually, if I hadn’t made the mistake of choosing wire granny frames. Which look simply fantastic on everyone else but make me look exactly like a wire granny.
And that’s something I’m definitely not ready for yet awhile. Although at the rate our little pink bundles reach womanhood, I suppose that’s another mental adjustment I’ll be making much sooner than I think.