The sand in his pockets

Children’s Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

- R. S. Thomas

Our children have a way of being present, even when they're not. After they've gone to bed, numerous teddy bears and rabbits lie on their sides on the floor, with ears flopping - like unconscious roadies in the aftermath of some great rock star's three-day bender. Going to wash our son's little red shorts, we find that he has filled both his pockets completely full of sand from the beach. He obviously meant to take some home to play with later. Sometimes my wife will stop everything for us to listen to the sound of them both sleeping upstairs - maybe the greatest sound there is.

Our son started school this month. I cannot believe the nursery years are all over, and so soon. That said, he is still small enough not to really resist being snuggled and kissed. At breakfast time he will still migrate over from his chair to sit on my lap. This makes eating breakfast hard, but I know these days are numbered, so I try to appreciate them. His hair is still baby-soft and like silk on my lips when I kiss the top of his head.

There's no rhyme or reason to the things I remember from my childhood. A boiled egg, eaten in front of the telly as a treat. A wooden plane, made as a present by my father. An early attempt to make tea by putting teabags in the kettle. Games of "Frogger" with my friend Tim. A wet day on Buckden Pike with socks on my hands for gloves. My Granny O'Brien playing the one armed- bandits in Saltcoats. Her glass coffee table one day randomly shattering into a million bits.

My mother gave me a bunch of old photographs recently. Birthday parties and holidays and lots of brown furniture and brown wallpaper too. A picture of all of us in Millport. I remember that holiday, and being small enough to have a sort of bath in the little sink in the caravan kitchen. I remember the cosy tiny beds. I remember the same cosy feeling at home, at the top of my bunk bed at night, listening to Radio Leeds very quietly on a little blue radio.

 My father and I would play a game called "headie football" on our driveway, and he'd discourage me from bashing all the pink pebbledash off the house. I guess I assumed at the time that the rules of "headie football" were all very formal and laid down by some professional, maybe even international sporting body. Only as an adult did it occur to me, that he was making it all up on the spot. My son and I have recently started playing a similar game.

Nothing much ever changed during my childhood. We always lived in the same house. The seasons turned round and round, and were the same every time. Throwing sticks for horse chestnuts in Autumn. A hot face on a cold bonfire night, and my birthdays with Roman Candles and similar calm and not-too-loud fireworks for small children. Blue-black-grey winter afternoons with deep snow and slightly grubby looking snowmen and igloos. Springtime in the big muddy pond we called the "bog", chasing round after frogs. The orange light filtering through the little curtain at bedtime in summer. Only once I grew up and met people whose family had had loads of money, and who were mental as a result, did I realise that we were, in all the most important ways, rich.

At my uncle's funeral my father turned to me and said that he wanted to have "You'll never walk alone" at his funeral. I thought: that's going to be pretty emotional, and it was.

Driving to his funeral and following the coffin I couldn't help but think that it was the last time I'd see any kind of physical evidence of him. The people from the funeral parlour took the long way round to avoid the traffic lights between Huddersfield and Elland. As it happened, that turned it into a kind of tour of our lives together: past our primary school and then our secondary school, underneath the hill behind ICI which used just to smell of pear-drops, past where my father worked, and over the hill past where my mother worked.

My father worked with his best friend, and when his friend went away to America for a good ten years or so, they used to talk on some sort of primitive email system, which seemed like a miracle at the time. When his friend eventually came home, he walked into his usual chippy, and without asking, the people in it made him his usual order. Or so he said. 

At eight our daughter's hands are suddenly very capable. She has learned to play the cornet in just a few brief months, and it's nice to wake up to her parping her way through the Ode to Joy downstairs.  It seems like a couple of weeks ago that I was warming her tiny cot before we put her in it. Back in the day, when I was making her bed after she had gone off with her mother, I would hug her little soft toddler sleeping bag, which smelled like her, and seemed kind of like a part of her. Present even in her absence.

Time passed much more slowly when we were children. It seemed like it would go on forever. When you are tired and a parent and responsible for huckling the children through their day, it’s easy to feel tired and bored and not enjoy it. And then you feel like it’s slipping through your fingers. And then, unpredictably, there are beautiful moments which stick in memory. Rubbing noses with my daughter, as she pretends to be a dolphin. A riotous trip to the supermarket with one child in the trolley, the other steering, and both conspiring to get things we don't need, and me just trying to stop them crashing into things.

When our daughter was in the womb, we would use a Doppler probe to listen to her racing, foetal heartbeat - woosh-woosh-woosh-woosh. At our bedtime she would wake up with hiccups in the womb, and we could feel her, and see the little jerks. The time since seems to have whooshed by. I try to hold on to the thought that we are beyond lucky. Our son came from out of our eighth (and definitely final) round of IVF. I remember that the pregnancy test showed that it hadn't worked, but a few minutes later there was the faintest hint of a rumour of a line on the test. And now here he is, off to school. He is the wild shot on goal in the final minute of extra time that seems off-target but somehow, miraculously, finds the net. He has somehow just, just, just caught the bus to existence, and gets to see what Larkin called "the million-petalled flower of being here."

When I met my father in a cafe in a dream after he died he apologised that this was the only way we could meet now, and he apologised about the background music, which was certainly characteristic. He never liked background music.

I don't know what our children will remember of us when they're bigger. Probably some random thing. I don't think I do as good a job as a parent as my mother and father did for me, but then that's a very high bar to reach. I remember the one time my father shouted at me as a child, but only once I was a parent did I realise that the interesting part of that sentence is "the one time".

Probably my abiding childhood memory is the incredible peace of it. Our street was so quiet. The cows reaching over the garden fence to munch our flowers. Sunday nights with all of us in the front room watching Poirot on telly with hisses of steam from mum or dad ironing while they watched. My parents’ incredible calm, and the muffly laughter from downstairs when they had their friends round. 

I don't know what I will remember of my children's childhood. Probably some random thing. The softness of his little legs when I'm helping put his clothes on. Her riding around the garden on a much-too-small bicycle, like a comical bear in an old-fashioned circus. My sense of gratitude to be part of their childhood. The sand in his pockets.