The Spectator is a civilised paper. If they give you a weekly column, they are pleased for you to say what you like. The only editorial interference you can expect, apart from being hired, is the sack. They’d all rather die a slow and horrible death than exert the slightest influence over what you write.
Each week I email this column to the infinitely forgiving Arts editor, Liz Anderson, who has cheerfully fielded my usually late copy for ten years. The only time she interferes with the content — and always with tremendous reluctance and a profusion of stricken apologies — is when the lawyer has indicated that he is ‘uncomfortable’ about something and that we should change a name or delete a libellous word. It’s happened once, maybe twice.
But I had an immediate response from Liz about last week’s column — a litany of woe about my boy’s current financial, domestic and employment situation. It was depressing, she said.
I emailed back my apologies. I hadn’t meant it to be depressing, I said. I’d meant it to be ridiculous. There are plenty of good things about my boy’s life, I said, but I was sticking to a theme. Well, let’s hear about those good things, she emailed back. So here they are — the blessings.
We’ll start with the kids. There are four, two boys and two girls aged between 15 months and seven years — plus one in the oven. (My boy is father of Oscar, the youngest. The one in the oven is another boy.) Children are the treasure of the poor, isn’t that what they say? These ones are the most beautiful, fun, funny, cheery, faithful, exciting creatures imaginable. They keep us on our toes. Our lives, we feel, have never been richer, nor will be again. If I need taking out of myself for an hour, I pop round there and spend an hour in the bear pit. All four kids are striking blonds. When they are sitting around the tea table it’s like a meeting of the Young Aryans Society. The racket is deafening.
With their mad joys and their terrible griefs, their wild enthusiasms and their bouts of listlessness, these four kids set the tenor, the tone and the agenda of my boy’s life. To keep them warm, fed, dry and dosed with medicine when they are poorly are his chief concerns. But he and his partner are both young and they have the energy and the love in spades. If they get into terrible debt, so be it. They can’t hang you for it. And 21 is not a bad age to have four kids, as people are always trying to tell me it is. Raising kids, you could argue, and I do, is every bit as absorbing, educational and fruitful as a gap year and then going to ‘uni’, for example.
His partner’s last pregnancy was a difficult one and for seven months her condition became my boy’s chief concern. She was vomiting almost from the start, then there was low blood pressure, then gastric problems and internal bleeding. He was driving her to and from the hospital almost daily. Compared with that, this current pregnancy is a piece of cake. So here is another benison to weigh against last week’s jeremiad. We look at her sitting there, serene and blooming, and remember how she was before. And we marvel. If anyone comments on the difference, we reach out and touch wood. And she’s cut right down on the fags, too. Which is good.
Her chest infection is clearing up. So is the eldest boy’s conjunctivitis. He no longer cries at night. My boy has recovered from his tonsillitis. Oscar, my grandson, grievously unshod last week, is now staggering around in the stoutest leather shoes available locally. His vocabulary has doubled this week, too, with the addition of the surprising phrase ‘See you later!’ He has a sweet, clear, melodious voice. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I first heard it.
And to cap it all, my boy’s partner won £70 on a lottery scratch card this week and another £25 at bingo. The three eldest received a scooter each. More reasons to be cheerful. Not that my boy isn’t cheerful most of the time anyway, in spite of his material poverty. If I gave the impression last week that my boy was bowed down with misery over it, I did so falsely. But he’s been out of work only for four months and maybe the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.
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