Fathers and Sons Page 19

  Her obsession with Tony Wilson quickly became apparent and the officers immediately used it as a psychological lever to get her to open the door.

  ‘Come out of the house and you can talk to Tony,’ they promised. ‘He’s on his way, but you have to come out if you want to see him. He won’t want to talk to you through his own letter box, will he, love?’

  The ruse worked. Eventually the door slowly opened and there she stood, docile, drenched in Hilary’s blood.

  From upstairs came the faint but unmistakable cries of a baby waking up. It had been that close.

  Hilary survived and, amazingly, recovered her pretty looks. She made valiant attempts to overcome the trauma, although understandably this took time. Her attacker was sectioned indefinitely. The atmosphere in the road changed abruptly.

  Old Broadway’s easy-going open-door culture evaporated overnight. Security chains, which had long dangled, unused, were oiled and clicked into place; vans belonging to burglar alarm companies were seen parked in the street. The Broadway Bombers were grounded until further notice. Tony’s on-screen colleagues–ourselves included–found themselves looking uneasily over their shoulders, as many presenters did thirteen years later after Jill Dando’s brutal murder.

  But things almost always return to normal faster than most of us think they will. After a few months of uneventful tranquillity, Old Broadway began to breathe easily again. The Bombers were allowed back on the street and up in the trees.

  And Hilary had another baby. A girl.

  That autumn we took the boys and the baby to the Canaries for a fortnight. Judy, the twins and me came back with suntans.

  Jack returned with black eyes and bruises. I had dropped him, and was in the doghouse.

  It happened on the side of a busy road. Jack was in his pushchair. At five months he still wasn’t able to sit up by himself so I’d only loosely strapped him in. But as I tilted the front wheels down off the kerb ready to cross over, he picked that precise moment to sit up for the very first time in his life. The result was spectacular. He cantilevered over his strap, performed a perfect parabola, and finished with a beautiful swallow dive. Had Jack had something soft to land on and someone been pointing a camcorder at him, it would have been a comedy exit worthy of You’ve Been Framed. But there was nothing funny about the crunching thud as his forehead bounced off the kerbstone.

  The front of the human skull is the thickest part and Jack hadn’t actually fallen all that far, so the damage was superficial. Babies are surprisingly tough. One of the first stories I ever covered was about an infant who fell four storeys from a tower block and survived with nothing worse than heavy bruising.

  But I was consumed with guilt, especially next morning when Jack greeted me from his cot with a gummy smile, a black eye, and an egg-shaped bump square in the centre of his forehead. There were one or two suspicious glances down at the hotel pool later.

  Judy was forgiving enough–‘it could have happened when I was pushing him; stop beating yourself up’–but I knew I had let my son down. I should have strapped him in properly. What if he’d fallen into the path of a car? I shuddered.

  That night we got back to our rooms after dinner at a restaurant in the next village. As I switched the car ignition off, there was a simultaneous power cut all along the coast. We laughed at the coincidence. Not for long.

  ‘You go ahead with the boys and light candles. I’ll get Jack into the carrycot and follow on.’

  ‘OK.’

  The others disappeared into the dark while I transferred Jack from his baby seat into the high-sided carrycot, and tucked him tightly in. No more cock-ups on my watch.

  The sirocco was blowing, probably the reason for the electricity outage; a tree must have fallen on to power lines somewhere. As I carried my son through the near pitch-dark, only pinpricks of candlelight beginning to appear at windows, I heard a branch crashing down ahead of me from one of the palm trees that lined the path to our rooms. Careful, now.

  Suddenly, white light exploded inside my head. Yes, it was another comedy classic from père Madeley, clown father extraordinaire. I’d trodden on the curved end of a palm branch and the whole thing upended and smacked me hard in the face. You know, that old garden rake routine.

  ‘Fuck! Jesus! Ow!’

  In the same instant the carrycot suddenly felt horribly light as it swayed violently in my hand.

  Oh, please God, not again.

  There instantly followed that now-familiar crunching sound as my son’s face made contact with the pavement.

  A couple of minutes later I arrived in our room.

  ‘Um, Judy, look, I, er, just–’

  ‘We’ve found the candles. Looks quite pretty in here, doesn’t it? Can you–’

  ‘Judy, I’ve dropped him again. I stood on this fucking branch in the dark. I think he’s all ri–’

  ‘Again? You idiot! Let me see…’

  We hauled Jack into the candlelight. He gave us a cheerful grin, as far as we could tell through the blood that had only just started to stop pouring from his nose.

  ‘You’re not fit to take care of a fucking hamster! Get ice from the freezer. I hate you!’

  The twins beat a tactical retreat to their room.

  I’d never seen my wife so angry, before or since. Once we’d established Jack wasn’t seriously hurt, she swept off to bed without a word. I spent the night on a horrible plastic sofa next to my snoring son. Penance was due.

  Almost all fathers drop their kids at some time or another. But not twice in two days. We laugh about it now, but at the time I felt like the most incompetent, bungling father on the planet. When I carried my battered baby to the pool next morning, the unspoken hostility from other parents there was palpable, partly because of my hangdog, guilty air. It was a good job we weren’t on network television back then. The News of the World would have been on our case in no time.

  Judy must have forgiven me, because when we came back from the Canaries we got married.

  The ceremony took place in Manchester’s registry office on Jackson’s Row, just off Deansgate. It was very different from my first wedding, not least because my son was present, as well as my stepsons, plus a large contingent from both the happy couple’s families.

  But, for Judy, there were undeniable echoes of her first nuptials twelve years earlier. Because they, too, had taken place in Jackson’s Row. There were at least three offices couples could get married there and when we all trooped into the one designated for us, Judy whispered to me, ‘I knew this would happen…they’ve given us exactly the same room as David and I had last time.’

  Her family realised this too–after all, most of them had been there back in 1974. It didn’t really matter, but it did feel a little odd.

  But once the ceremony was under way, we all forgot about it and everything went swimmingly, until the designated photographer–Judy’s younger brother, Roger–moved forward to snap us signing the register.

  Roger is something of a perfectionist and kept adjusting the focus and getting us to alter positions slightly. Judy loathes being photographed and after a couple of times she began to fidget. ‘Surely you’ve got enough by now?’ she asked at last.

  I squeezed her waist, remembering all the photoshoots we’d endured together for publicity campaigns promoting Granada Reports. ‘Come on, darling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t done this before.’

  The Finnigans froze. Judy stiffened. ‘What?’

  Too late, the double meaning revealed itself to me.

  ‘Oh God, I didn’t mean…That is to say, I was talking about–’

  ‘Never mind. Just leave it now.’

  Later, in the car on the way to our reception, I managed to explain and a somewhat mollified Judy said, ‘OK, but you’d better explain to my lot when we get there. God knows what they must be thinking.’

  So round the room I went. ‘So, you see, when I said, “It’s not as if you haven’t done this before,” I wasn’t talkin
g about, you know, I was meaning…’ and so on. Judy’s elder brother, Cal, told me years later that I had reminded him of a slightly desperate Basil Fawlty.

  Explanations over, we got on with the celebrations. It was wonderful; I felt the purest joy. I knew I had finally found the right woman for me and, halfway through the wedding breakfast, Jack woke in his carrycot at the side of our table and pushed himself up to peer over at us. I waved at him and he gave a great big gummy grin. It seemed to me like an unambiguous thumbs-up.

  Richard. That was what the now-toddling Jack called me once he started talking. Not Dad or Daddy–Richard. And why not? It was what Tom and Dan called me. But as time went by, an increasingly sentient Jack was clearly developing some confused ideas about fatherhood.

  David had arrived to collect his sons for the weekend and Jack marched up to him. ‘David, are you my daddy too?’

  David looked like he’d swallowed a 50p piece and after he’d retreated in confusion, I decided it was time for a little chat with my four-year-old son.

  ‘Mummy’s your mummy, and Tom’s and Dan’s as well,’ I explained, sitting with him on our sunny doorstep. ‘They live with Mummy and me because we all thought that was best. But David’s their daddy, and I’m your daddy. Do you see?’

  Jack processed the information. ‘So Tom and Dan have two daddies.’

  ‘Er…well, sort of. I’m what’s called their stepdaddy.’

  ‘Are you my stepdaddy too?’

  ‘No. I’m just your daddy.’

  More deep thought.

  ‘Which are best, daddies or stepdaddies?’

  Now there was a question with topspin. I paused for a moment.

  ‘Neither, really. As long as they love their children, they’re about the same.’

  ‘Does David love me?’

  I tried not to smile. ‘No, although I’m sure he thinks you’re a nice little boy.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he love me though?’

  Christ, this was getting complicated.

  ‘Because he’s not your stepdaddy. You don’t live with him, do you? You live with Mummy and Daddy. See?’

  Jack nodded. ‘But he still loves Tom and Dan, even though he doesn’t live with them any more?’

  ‘Exactly.’ I thought that was probably enough for one day but felt obliged to ask him: ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’

  He nodded and looked up at me intently. Here it comes. The big one.

  ‘Can we have McDonald’s?’

  Meanwhile our family continued to grow. Judy was pregnant again, and for the first time in her life she was expecting a girl. We were thrilled, if slightly taken aback. Sons we knew we could do. Daughters were unknown territory.

  Back at St Mary’s, and in the same operating theatre Jack was delivered, the baby we’d decided to call Chloe was prised into the world with the same brutally efficient force as her brothers. But there was no hint of the diplodocus or brontosaur about this baby.

  ‘My God, she’s beautiful,’ Judy said, as I placed Chloe on her breast. ‘I mean, really, literally beautiful. Just look at her…she’s such a little girl…’

  It was true. With her rosebud lips and delicately lashed eyes, Chloe looked nothing like the primordially fierce Jack had in his early weeks. Or as formidable as Ustinov’s newborn daughter, come to that.

  That lovely, utterly peaceful atmosphere that comes just after a baby has been born had descended. Judy and her little girl drifted off to sleep. I took some Polaroids of mother and daughter gently nuzzling each other and tiptoed out. When I got home, Jack was long in bed and Anne was sitting at the kitchen table, playing cards with her twin grandsons.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  Anne shook her head slowly. ‘Oh, Richard–she’s lovely…’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Here we go…Of course. Just don’t tell me your sister looks like a dinosaur.’

  ‘No…she looks like a kitten.’

  We took a marker pen and drew some whiskers on each of Chloe’s pink cheeks.

  Blimey. They were right.

  Four was plenty, Judy and I decided. As she’d had quite enough of surgery, I volunteered to drop in at the Family Planning Centre for The Snip. I opted for local anaesthetic, and it lived up to its billing: it was extremely local. Too bloody local, in fact. I didn’t feel a thing when the surgeon made the preliminary incisions with his scalpel, but when he got to the business part of chopping and tying off the tubing deep within, I felt like I’d fallen into the hands of an especially enthusiastic Gestapo doctor.

  ‘Sorry, old boy,’ he muttered apologetically as I went into vertical lift-off from the operating table, snorting and bellowing like a castrated horse. ‘Looks like you’ve got some scar tissue down there–old sporting injury, probably. It’s blocked the anaesthetic. Can’t stop now though, I’m afraid.’ And he sawed on.

  Judy had driven me to the clinic as vasectomees weren’t allowed to drive for a day or so after. When I tottered back into the waiting room, slightly greener than its painted walls, she stared at me in alarm.

  ‘Good God. What have they done? Cut it off?’

  ‘It’s perfectly possible. That did not go well. Take me home. I need a massive drink.’

  She was sympathetic, up to a point. Later that evening, when I described my agony in lurid terms once too often, Judy said drily, ‘Hmmm. I’m sure it was horrible but try having a baby.’

  ‘Try having your balls slit open without anaesthetic! You can’t, and I can’t have a baby either!’

  We glared at each other for a moment, an incipient battle of the sexes crackling in the air.

  But I’d overdone it, and as I grumpily went to bed I realised my wife had never really complained about the pain following her Caesarean sections. Time to pipe down about the vasectomy.

  (But it really hurt. Honestly.)

  My father wouldn’t have dreamed of having a vasectomy and, had he been alive, he would certainly have tried to talk me out of it. Not because I would be ‘shooting blanks’–he didn’t think in such crude terms–but because he would have thought it fundamentally unmanly to volunteer to be sterile.

  In fact there were quite a lot of ‘unmanly’ things my generation were willing to do within a marriage that would have been anathema to men born in the interwar years. Going with their partners to antenatal classes, for example, or appointments with the gynaecologist.

  My father would have been appalled to sit in on a consultation between his wife and her ‘baby doctor’, let alone an examination of any kind. Stirrups and speculums? Not today, thank you. I’ll be at the office.

  Being present at the actual birth was another big no-no. My dad went out and mowed the lawn while I was being delivered in the front room of his home on Dagenham Road, partly for something to do, and partly to drown out the disconcerting noises drifting from the house. It simply wasn’t done for fathers to watch their children being born. The delivery room was the preserve of the midwife and, if there were problems, the doctor.

  It is quite incredible how quickly these attitudes changed. Centuries of received wisdom and tradition were swept away in a handful of years. As late as the 1960s, young fathers patrolled hospital corridors, chain-smoking and swapping nervous jokes with each other, while ‘the wife’ had their babies out of sight and out of earshot.

  Yet, by the 1970s, no self-respecting young husband could refuse to be in the delivery room, holding his partner’s hand, mopping her brow and tenderly urging her to ‘push’.

  What happened?

  In Britain, it was surely a combination of feminism and its mighty war-wagon, the National Childbirth Trust. Between them, they swept away the old shibboleths surrounding men and childbirth and dragged fathers-to-be by the scruff of the neck into the delivery room. It was a matter of taking responsibility and supporting their partners, they were told firmly. And most men found, to their surprise, that they were actually happy to go. I wouldn’t have m
issed the experience for anything.

  But does it draw modern men closer to their children, ‘bond’ them any closer than previous generations of fathers were to theirs?

  Actually, I don’t think so. My father loved me no more and no less than I love my own son. That is to say, completely.

  But what about the question four-year-old Jack didn’t ask me that morning in his catechism on the doorstep about step-parenting? What about the four people I helped bring up, two from the age of seven, two from birth?

  Tom and Dan; Jack and Chloe. Did I treat my children differently from my stepchildren as all of them grew up together?

  We’ll start with the easy bit. I certainly treated Chloe differently from all the others. Still do, always will. I’ve yet to meet a father with children of both sexes who wouldn’t say the same.

  All one’s children provoke and inspire a powerful protective reflex. It never goes away. It doesn’t matter how old they become or what the specific threat to them is; the instinct to circle the wagons, saddle up and ride out at the head of the rescue posse to bring one’s chicks back to safety is a constant. But the quality, the flavour, the essence of that emotion differs depending on whether we’re talking about a girl or a boy; a son or a daughter. At least, in my experience it does.

  The protectiveness I have always felt towards Chloe has a more tender, all-encompassing nature than the more robust, critically laced support I extend to her brothers. It’s more elastic. More forgiving, I suppose.

  Is that sexist? I don’t really care either way, although perhaps the seeds of paternal doom lie in such seeming sentimentality. Caveat pater. Look at what happened to Lear. Although my Chloe has more of Cordelia about her than of Goneril or Regan. Lucky for me.