In the late lunch of my life (I prefer that to ‘the twilight of my days’) a small miracle occurred. I had known all along that Hilary was pregnant, because not only had she told me so, but she had begun to look pregnant, attend ante-natal classes and acquire a cot, a pushchair and all the usual infantanalia. However, part of me remained unconvinced – perhaps it was simply a dress rehearsal to test my reaction. Would I panic and make a run for it? In my fiftieth year was God pulling my leg? Why news of Matthew’s birth on 29 April 1987 didn’t make the evening newspapers I will never know and why a push-by-push account of the delivery wasn’t made into a TV special I can only put down to the fact that a miracle ceases to be a miracle when it happens all the time (but isn’t that even more miraculous?). Even to this day I can’t see a woman in the street with a baby without wanting to stop and applaud. Women who can’t drive, who know nothing about football, do it. Women of every shape and size do it. Peel themselves back and push out another life.
‘The waters have broken,’ Hilary calmly announced at 6.30 that bright spring morning, an expression that always had me puzzled. The idea of water being breakable. Waves break, not water, it leaks, it spreads, it spatters, but break? Anyway, as morning broke, so did the waters, leaving little time for a discussion about linguistics. A firm believer in natural childbirth, she went through the whole routine as if it were her hobby and she had been doing it for years, while I busied myself with cold flannels and cooling water sprays feeling as useful as a synchronised swimmer stranded on Ayers Rock.
The contractions are coming faster now.
Every ten minutes or so
A crush of pain made bearable
Only by the certainty of its passing.
Midwives come and go.
At nine forty-five, a show.
It must go on. The floodgates open,
A universe implodes.
Although I joked, after Matthew was born, that the main drawback to late fatherhood was that it prevented my wife and me from going out to the cinema or to restaurants in the evening, its effect was to provoke an intensity of feeling that otherwise I might not have experienced. In the period that followed I looked again at the relationship I’d had with my father and writing about it helped me to face up to the role that I’d suddenly been given. When Finn and Tom were babies I was young enough to be optimistic and selfish. Of course, there had been football in the park and bedtime stories and family holidays, and although they wouldn’t have nominated me for one of the Great Fathers of our Time awards, they knew that I would always be there for them, but I was cocooned by poems, cut off from their real world by my need to daydream. Now, however, being equally selfish but older and therefore less optimistic, I worried deeply about my new responsibilities. Spike Milligan didn’t help either, when he telephoned one morning only days after Matthew had been born. He began by congratulating Hilary and me, then started off about there being too many people in the world already, and about there not being enough resources, and about how the food was going to run out very soon, and what with the ozone layer and global warming we were all going to die. Doomed, do you hear, we’re all doomed! It was not Spike at his best.
My father died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of fifty-three. So many of his workmates on the docks died too at his age that it seemed like a plague, a contagious disease with an appetite for big, strong men just past their prime. They weren’t all smokers either, like my dad, nor were they heavy drinkers, so perhaps it was the stress of the war taking its toll all those years later. He came out of hospital after his first attack, gave up smoking and went on a diet and, hardest of all, gave up going each week to Goodison Park to cheer on his beloved Everton. He hated the idea of being ill, a state synonymous with weakness and he’d always been tough. Hadn’t he come home from the dentist that time, after having all his teeth pulled out and eaten an apple? Well, that was his story and I wanted to believe it. But tough or not, the new regime didn’t work and within the year he was back in Walton General. He was fond of Jo and I dreaded telling him about wanting to break off the engagement, especially when we visited him together on the ward and he seemed so dispirited, despite the news that he would be let out at the end of the week. At five o’clock in the morning two days later the phone in the hall rang. You know, don’t you? The way the incessant ring grips you by the heart, stops you breathing. Brenda and I let Mum rush downstairs to answer it because we knew it was for her.
And then, there’s Dad, laid out in a coffin in the parlour, and Grandma McGarry saying how peaceful he looked, almost smiling as if that’s how he’d passed away. And us saying yes, and me thinking, no, Grandma, for I’d disposed of the pyjamas he’d been wearing and they were still wringing wet, and he’d died alone and in agony.
But thanks for the kind thought anyway.
Thirty-odd years later when I was fifty-three I realised just how young he had been. At the time it had seemed the age that most men died, unlike the women who appeared to go on and on. And here I was at the same age and how was I feeling? For someone who had decided pretty early on not to get married and settle down and have children for fear of disturbing the Muse, I was a complete failure. There had been two marriages and three sons, and now, at fifty-three, the age that my father died, Isabel was born. My father had died not only before knowing any of his grandchildren, but before reading a poem of mine or seeing me on telly. I was a son who’d gone away to university and never really come back.
And so, looking at Isabel I was beset with complex emotions. Would I live long enough to see her learn to walk? Hear her first words? Lend her money? Hilary’s family are from Knaresborough and one Christmas we took Matthew and Isabel to Harrogate theatre to see the pantomime Cinderella. The next day, thinking of Prince Charmings and happy endings, of ashes and golden carriages turning into pumpkins, I sat down to write ‘Cinders’:
After the pantomime, carrying you back to the car
On the coldest night of the year
My coat, black leather, cracking in the wind.
Through the darkness we are guided by a star
It is the one the Good Fairy gave you
You clutch it tightly, your magic wand.
And I clutch you tightly for fear you blow away
For fear you grow up too soon and – suddenly,
I almost slip, so take it steady down the hill.
Hunched against the wind and hobbling
I could be mistaken for your grandfather
And sensing this, I hold you tighter still.
Knowing that I will never see you dressed for the Ball
Be on hand to warn you against Prince Charmings
And the happy ever afters of pantomime.
I have this theory that all children are poets before they go to school, where they are taught how to see the world in a rational and adult way. Making links between seemingly unconnected objects, they can animate the inanimate with ease, but formal education very often succeeds at the expense of the imagination. I’m thinking of examples from my own kids: Finn on watching a lighted candle on the table, the wax melting and running down the side, ‘Ah, the candle’s crying.’ Tom, looking up at the new moon, ‘Look, a bit’s fallen off the moon.’ Matt in pain, charging into the house with a splinter in his finger, ‘Daddy, daddy, the wood’s bit me.’ I wish Isabel had been the girl on the train at Didcot who had pointed at the huge cooling towers and cried, ‘Ooh, look, a cloud factory.’ Poetry everywhere, but inevitably the well-meaning parent or teacher will say, ‘The candle isn’t crying, silly, it’s the energy caused by the agitation of the molecules resulting in the change from a solid to a liquid state.’
When education marches in with its book of rules, its right and wrong answers, all too often the poetry, that way of seeing the world and describing it in unusual ways, goes out of the classroom window. Poetry, music, art, drama, dance have been seen by successive governments as the icing on the curriculum cake, whereas if they were at the core, with the academic disciplines radiating from them, schools might well turn out more imaginative young adults, able to respond to the fast-changing world. Montessori and Steiner are not central defenders in Chelsea’s midfield, but educationists whose visionary ideas could be incorporated into the state system.
And while I’m holding forth as the new Minister for Education, might I just add that every school will be garnished with playing fields and sports facilities to include tennis courts and swimming pools. Home Economics and Cookery for all, the handling of personal finances and relaxation techniques would be par for the coursework. And if you are worried about Physics or Geography, have a word with my secretary and we’ll sort something out.
‘The Way Things Are’ is a poem that I very often read when I’m at one of those conferences for Headmasters and English specialists, because it encourages teachers to foster and maintain in their young charges a fresh, childlike view of the world, as if making sense of it for the first time, as well as warning them against the dangers that lurk in the darkness. It’s a poem that I wouldn’t have written had I not had children, so perhaps the Muse was less disturbed than I had imagined all those years ago.
No, the candle is not crying, it cannot feel pain.
Even telescopes, like the rest of us, grow bored.
Bubblegum will not make the hair soft and shiny.
The duller the imagination, the faster the car,
I am your father and this is the way things are.
No, old people do not walk slowly
because they have plenty of time.
Gardening books, when buried will not flower.
Though lightly worn, a crown may leave a scar,
I am your father and this is the way things are.