MRS VICTORIA GILLICK, that self-appointed custodian of teenage morality, has been on the war-path again, chuntering furiously about parents’ wishy-washy attitude to their children’s sex-life.
But surely she must heartily approve of children’s attitude to their parents’ sex life, which is invariably both vigilant and disapproving. Most single parents trying to find a new mate discover they have a Mini-Gillick in the house rotting up any attempt at amorous encounters twenty-four hours a day.
Take my friend Fiona, who is thirty-eight, widowed and very beautiful.
‘I have one admirer who rings up occasionally from abroad,’ she says. ‘Instinctively my two daughters, aged ten and twelve, know it’s him and go into an incredible routine of slamming doors and shouting at each other, so I can’t hear myself speak. Last week, he took me to Annabel’s, the sort of treat I haven’t had for years. Next day he dropped in unexpectedly bringing a box of chocolates. Knowing I was frantic for them to behave, the children were appalling, hanging round boot-faced, playing green-eyed gooseberry, constantly referring to my admirer in the third person: “What’s HE doing here? When’s HE going to go?’”
Normally these are sweet polite children but, having lost one parent, they regard any of their mother’s suitors as a threat and play up accordingly.
Added to this antagonism from the Mini-Gillicks, is the astronomical cost of courting for the single parent. One mother, knowing her children will act up if she brings her lover home, spends her entire salary from her part-time job on an all-night baby-sitter twice a week. Others opt for the home fixture, and have all the expense of feeding their lovers. Whereupon the Mini-Gillicks, smelling Boeuf Provencal in the oven and seeing kiwi fruit and out of season strawberries marinading in kirsch in the larder, naturally kick up when they are fobbed off with spaghetti hoops and early bed. Repeatedly the candle-lit dinner will be sabotaged by little faces peering through the bannisters, complaining of sore throats and tummy aches, or embarrassingly demanding why mummy’s put freesias on her bedside table.
Away fixtures are often even more traumatic. Take the single parent returning shattered from the office, having to change gear into devoted mother for two hours as she supervises supper and baths. Toenails drying, hair in Carmens, she reads a bedtime story. Then, guiltily shrugging off tearful suffocating hugs that mess up her make-up as she sets off, she has to change gear again into party temptress. Invariably, just as the party’s hotting up, and the only attractive man in the room is sidling towards her, she has to bolt home to relieve the baby-sitter. Sometimes she makes the error of smuggling the only attractive man home with her.
‘I tried it once,’ said a friend sadly. ‘Both children, woken by the dog barking, wouldn’t go back to sleep. The cat had been sick in the bath. The landing was strewn with toys, and finally he tripped over an un-emptied chamber pot in the bedroom doorway – hardly a lover’s bower.’
Nor do locked doors provide one hundred per cent security. Another friend, having ensured her daughter was asleep, bolted herself and her lover, Peregrine, into the dining room. They were just warming up on the Wilton when four-year-old Natasha, apopleptic as any Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street, burst through the hatch, thundering: ‘What are you doing to my Mummy?’
To which Peregrine, through gritted teeth, replied: ‘Trying to keep her warm.’
It must be a terrifying experience for the child, but not much fun for the lover, particularly when an eighteen-month-old Mini-Gillick with sodden nappy, running nose and ice-cold feet clambers into bed to play chaperone at five in the morning.
One suitor was put off for good after the child burrowed down the bed and, after a pause, emerged, enquiring: ‘Why isn’t your willy as big as Daddy’s?’
But it’s not just a question of the child frantically fighting to hang on to his mother. The stumbling block for children of all ages – from J.R. rotting up Miss Ellie’s relationship with Clayton to Adrian Mole bristling over his mother’s amorous capers – is that they cannot handle their parents’ sexuality.
The whole ambiguity is summed up by six-year-old Max, when asked by his mother if he liked her boy friend. ‘Yes and No,’ he replied. ‘I love him when he drives his car fast, but I hate him when he’s in your bed.’
Or six-year-old Scarlet, who when told that her mother had died comforted her father that at least he could sell his double bed now, as he wouldn’t be needing it anymore.
Textbooks claim that children need time to adjust, that the suitor should make a friend of the children before moving in with the parent. But that doesn’t always work. A year later, Scarlet’s widowed father met a lovely girl, who played everything by the book, taking Scarlet and her brothers to the zoo, kicking footballs, mending punctures, building snowmen, until they were clamouring for her to move in.
But when she did, Scarlet became quite hysterical and had tantrums for weeks because she discovered her father and the lovely girl were sharing the same bed, not sleeping in separate rooms.
The potential stepmother found it easier to get on with the brothers than with Scarlet. Just as a male suitor can usually cope with a sweet little daughter who clambers on to his knee, but feels threatened by a small boy who is often neurotically bound up with his mother and sees himself as the surrogate husband.
When the children reach adolescence, however, the Mini-Gillicks are more likely to be of the opposite sex. In direct competition with their mothers, they will sabotage the relationship even more ruthlessly. One of the most poignant stories I know concerns a very attractive middle-aged man who fell in love with a widow the same age, and moved in with her very happily. Then her two teenage minxes came home from boarding school, and drifted round the house, bath towels slipping. Unable to handle the pressures, the man moved out.
But is the future that bleak? Is the single parent destined to face the arctic sweep of the double bed alone each night, until she becomes so set in her ways she resents any intruder. She must remember that Mini-Gillicks in the end grow up and leave home, and while respecting that they may feel threatened, she shouldn’t kowtow to their bullying and blackmail. Take things slowly, hang on, and remember an awful lot of people make happy second marriages.
Scarlet of the tantrums, for example, has been contentedly living with her father and stepmother for eighteen months now. Natasha, who burst through the hatch, is also happy that Peregrine has been keeping her mother warm at night for three years.
Finally the most touching wedding speech I heard was when the bridegroom beckoned to the bride’s seven-year-old son saying with genuine warmth: ‘Where’s my good friend, Henry, without whose approval this wedding could not have taken place?’