Back in July I booked a cottage in its own wood for the last week of the school summer holidays. I was fondly thinking of my boy and his partner’s five kids, aged between one and nine, and what larks they would have running free in Nature. I was, I suppose, romantically casting them as the innocent characters in books such as Five Children and It and Swallows and Amazons, and bestowing on them the same idealised kind of camp-making, fire-lighting opportunities as I enjoyed at their age.
Let me introduce them in descending order of age. The eldest three’s father, my boy’s partner’s ex, is a mild and gentle man, rather spaced out, addicted for many years to heroin and alcohol, and one of the all-time greats of the arcane world of small-town shoplifting. It’s as though he’s invented a magic cloak that renders him invisible to shop assistants. I don’t like to enquire too closely about their provenance, but my bathroom shelf boasts several unopened bottles of moderately expensive aftershave, which I suspect might be the fruits of the eldest three’s Dad’s labours during the busy run-ups to the last few Christmases. He really comes into his own and performs during the festive season. The rest of the year he seems barely alive, as though quietly husbanding his meagre energies for the next one. His three kids stay with him at weekends in his cupboard-like room at a halfway house for addicts who have promised a magistrate that they can stay clean for at least a year.
The eldest of his three, Alice, is nine. She’s thin and graceful and sweet-natured (though occasionally vain and overemotional) and so bright she’s top of her class at English with absolutely no help or encouragement from outside. I look at her dear, trusting, gap-toothed face sometimes and become emotional myself, so certain is it that her lively artistic and literary gifts will soon be snuffed out by education and culture.
Next comes Scott, aged eight. Scott is such an aggressively out-and-out male, he’s a credit to us all. He likes to dress from head to toe in army combat gear. His main interests are death, violence and poo. His unbelievably appalling, slightly weird behaviour led to talk of attention deficit disorder until it was belatedly realised the poor lad was half-blind. Has terrible nightmares. Wears a nappy at night.
Then there’s Molly, aged seven, who is the silliest, most selfish creature in the United Kingdom possibly. The sole purpose of her pea-sized, vestigial brain is to help identify which of her wants and appetites needs satisfying next, and then to devise an uncomplicated means of obtaining its immediate gratification. When Arthur Schopenhauer was composing his notorious essay ‘On Women’, he must have had someone very like Molly uppermost in his formidable mind. No detectable soul. Sometimes I look at Molly and pity her. And then I realise that in evolutionary terms she is actually the perfect model for a human being of the next generation.
Then comes golden-haired Oscar, nearly three, my eldest grandson, light of my life, bringer of hope, and a future charismatic leader of the English resistance. Small, frail, asthmatic, but with lightning wit, charm and intelligence, he runs effortless rings around his thuggish elder brother and sister. A devoted bibliophile. Current favourite book: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Also loves tractors and spiders.
And finally there’s little one-year-old Jack, my other grandson, a sturdy chap, but an as yet unfathomable personality. Jack appears to exist entirely in a blithe and beautiful world of his own making, that bears little relation to the fraught, contentious and sometimes violent atmosphere of the reality surrounding him.
So that was the line-up (plus my boy and his partner) at our remote Dartmoor cottage last weekend, which fell, let me tell you, far short of my antiquated fantasies of dens and campfire singsongs and treasure hunts. How far short, I shall illustrate with just one instance.
Unless forced outside, these kids refused to set foot beyond the thick cottage walls. So finally I ordered them, like some furious, red-faced Colour Sergeant Major, on a route march with me up to the top of the nearest tor, which was Hound Tor. We took binoculars. Their inane and selfish chatter all the way there, and their complaining, and their incessant bickering about who was going to hold the binoculars next, drove me to such a state of apoplectic, eyeball-popping fury that, near the top, I finally lost my temper. Scooping a large and crusty cow pat off the sward, I lifted it above my head and hurled it at them, screaming, ‘If you lot don’t stop arguing about those FUCKING binoculars, someone is going to get killed.’
As I say, that was just one instance. The little shits.
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