My friend operates an open-door policy on her country home. So when I wandered into her kitchen the other day to find it deserted I decided to make myself comfortable, as she has often stated I should, and put the kettle on while I waited for someone to appear.
As I did so, her two young grandchildren burst through the kitchen door, screaming and fighting with each other.
I don’t know much about children, having never had any, but I do know that these were what you would call toddlers.
‘Where’s mummy?’ I shouted, above the din.
‘Waaaaaaaaaaah! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ they screamed back. ‘Woof! Grrrrr!’ said someone else.
My spaniel was now tussling with my friend’s dogs, a Labrador and a bulldog. As the children wrestled each other to the floor, the three dogs tumbled over and over each other barking and growling.
‘Where’s grandma?’ I shouted, barely making myself heard.
‘Waaaaaaaaah! Grrr! Woof!’ they all screamed, tearing chunks out of each other. The older boy grabbed a little scooter and started to zoom around the kitchen, knocking over everything that got in his way.
There then followed a collision between the boy and the dogs resulting in a morass of child, scooter and dog so that it was impossible to make out where toddler ended and hound began. As I tried to disentangle them, the little girl tottered up to me, shoes on the wrong feet, to reveal that she had somehow, in the two seconds I had not been watching her, painted her entire forehead black with a felt tip pen. ‘What on earth have you done?’ I asked. ‘Mummy eyebrows!’ she said, evidently much pleased with herself.
After prolonged interrogation, they revealed that daddy was looking after them, but from the sitting room on the other side of the house where he was watching television. And so they preferred to stay with me, whoever I was.
‘What’s for breakfast?’ said the boy.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘I want pancakes!’
Oh dear. ‘Look, er, why don’t we go and find daddy! Yes, that will be fun!’
‘Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!’ the girl sobbed. ‘Pancaaaaaaaaaakes!’ shouted the boy.
I don’t know whether my ego took over at this point, but I determined to show my friend, when she reappeared, that I had done a good job of entertaining her grandchildren.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘let’s do that then…’
But the little girl grabbed another pen and started to eat it and the boy, for some unaccountable reason, opened his mouth until I could see his tonsils and began emitting what I can only describe as a battle cry. It was one long note, which seemed to have no end, and whether or not designed specifically to instantly shred my nerve endings, it achieved precisely this.
I called the boyfriend. ‘Quick, you have to come. I’ve managed to promise my friend’s grandchildren I will make them breakfast and they’re screaming and running all over the place and eating knives and pens.’
‘How old are they?’
‘I don’t know. They’re about three feet high. I think they’re going to kill me.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said the boyfriend, who knows my limitations.
I put the phone down and made a phew sound. ‘OK, stay calm, you can do this,’ I said to myself as I did my breathing exercises.
‘You’re stupid!’ said the boy, eyeing me with a strangely knowing expression on his face.
‘Now look here, I most certainly am not stupid and if you don’t behave yourself I’m not going to get my boyfriend to come and make you pancakes. So there.’
I have a feeling you’re not supposed to deal with children by descending to their level, but as I couldn’t seem to muster any natural authority I had to go with what I had.
‘Milk!’ said the little girl. So I gave her a plastic beaker of milk, which she immediately upturned and poured down the front of her trousers.
Thankfully, the boyfriend soon arrived and made everything better by sweeping the little girl off her feet to play aeroplane. ‘She needs changing,’ he informed me. ‘No, she doesn’t, it’s milk.’
‘Well, you still need to change her trousers.’
‘Really?’ I don’t know how he knows all this stuff, but I have mentally put another tick in the column marked ‘marriage material’.
He then knocked up a delicious breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs — so delicious the boy didn’t even notice it wasn’t pancakes — and got the children to eat it silently.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.
‘Oh, please don’t leave me.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
But as soon as he was gone everything started barking and screaming again.
‘Where’s the man who made us pancakes?’ shouted the little boy, as the little girl wailed. ‘We want the pancake man!’
‘So do I,’ I blubbed.
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