Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill Read online

  ‘So, what are your interests?’ asked the headmistress.

  The child delivered her prepared address without faltering. She enjoyed reading (her favourite novelist being Jane Austen), playing the piano (‘She has Grade Five,’ added the mother), swimming (‘She’s won cups,’ added the mother), was in the Guides (‘And has numerous badges,’ added the mother) and did ballet (‘She took a lead part in this year’s pantomime at the Civic Theatre,’ added the mother). The child continued to say that she liked theatre and enjoyed writing stories.

  ‘And what television programmes do you like?’ asked the headmistress.

  ‘Documentaries,’ said the child. She then looked in her mother’s direction before asking, ‘And what else do I like?’

  ‘I’m a big fan of Pop Idol,’ said the headmistress. ‘Who do you think will win?’

  The child suddenly became animated. ‘Oh, Gareth is my favourite, much better than Will.’

  This headmistress leads and manages a first-rate school. Her prime aim is to provide a cheerful, welcoming, happy and optimistic environment, where the pupils feel secure and valued and where each one is helped to realise her potential. There is no undue pressure, no obsession with league tables and targets, just good quality teaching, effective support, plenty of encouragement and high expectations. Sometimes, she told me, children develop later than others; the seeds take a little while before they become established and the shoots appear, but, with careful and sensitive nurturing, the flowers eventually blossom. She was not, she told me, in the business of producing ‘hot-house plants’.

  Dr Levine makes the very same point when she writes that: ‘We would do well to remember late bloomers like Albert Einstein and John Steinbeck. Sometimes a nudge is helpful, a shove rarely is.’

  So let us allow our children to enjoy their childhood, a childhood joyous and carefree, where they are reared in a loving and supportive environment by parents who encourage their efforts and celebrate their successes, but who will always be there with a helping hand if they should stumble, and a reassurance that it is not the end of the world to sometimes fail.

  Last week, I read in the paper about the mother of the tennis superstar, Andy Murray, who has beaten Roger Federer, the world number one, in straight sets. On her website, she advises ambitious parents that their offspring’s best chance of success is not to heap excessive pressure upon them. She, of all people, should know.

  The Simple Pleasures of Life

  We had several wonderful family holidays when our children were very young. On one memorable holiday in Ireland, the three little boys and myself would spend many a happy hour walking down the beach, collecting pebbles, bits of coloured glass smoothed and polished by the sea, shells like tiny pink fingernails and little pieces of red coral. We would sit on the end of a jetty on a deserted stretch of shore, fishing for crabs. Each of the boys would be equipped with a piece of string, some strips of bacon rind and a bucket, and they would compete to see which of them could catch the most crabs. Gently, gently, they would pull in the string with the crustacean clinging on, determinedly.

  One morning we were joined by two youths.

  ‘What are yous doing?’ one asked.

  I explained we were fishing for crabs.

  He peered into the buckets and looked bemused. ‘Why, sure you can’t be eatin’ those!’

  ‘We’re not going to eat them,’ I told him. ‘We’re just catching crabs for the fun of it. Then we throw them back. Have you never fished for crabs when you were young?’

  ‘Never,’ he replied.

  ‘Would you like a go?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure, I would,’ he replied.

  ‘Could I have a go too?’ asked the other young man.

  Half an hour later, they were well into the competition until, with fading light, we called it a day.

  The following afternoon the two youths appeared again, as my sons and I were attempting to stem the oncoming tide from destroying our sandcastle. We had built a barricade, which continued to be breached, and we shovelled sand frantically to try and hold back the sea.

  The two young men joined us in our endeavours and then, when our futile attempts failed, we all watched as the great ocean devoured our sandy fortress.

  ‘Sure, that was great craik,’ said one of the youths.

  They shook my hand, thanked me and waved goodbye.

  ‘You don’t want to be encouraging those two,’ the landlady told me later. She had observed us from the window of the boarding house. ‘They’re always in trouble. Real tearaways they are. Always up to no good.’

  Research says that many youngsters these days spend up to thirty hours a week inside the house in front of a screen, watching television or playing games on the computer. Many, it is said, have television sets and DVD players in their bedrooms, and spend an increasing amount of time texting their friends. They are bought more and more expensive and sophisticated toys and gadgets, and have little experience of the simple pleasures enjoyed by youngsters of the past. How many these days, one wonders, go fishing for sticklebacks and minnows, collect frogspawn, build dens, play football on a piece of waste ground, cycle into the country, visit the swimming baths, catch a bus into town, run errands, play marbles, compete at conkers and pick blackberries?

  Perhaps I am turning into a grumpy old man and it has been ever thus that the older generation looks back, through rose-tinted spectacles, to a halcyon time when life for the young was less complicated and more enjoyable. Certainly, back in 1824, the great philosopher, J J Rousseau, writing in Emile: Or Treatise on Education, had a deal to say about the simple pleasures of life which seemed, even in his age, to have sadly disappeared:

  We no longer know how to be simple in anything, not even in our dealings with children. Gold or silver bells, coral, elaborate crystals, toys of all kinds and prices – what useless and pernicious furniture! Nothing of all this. No bells, no toys. Little branches with their fruits and flowers, a poppy-head on which the seeds are heard to rattle, a stick of liquorice which he can suck and chew, will amuse him just as much as these gorgeous trinkets and will not have the disadvantage of accustoming him to luxury from the day of his birth.

  Do You Speak French?

  Another of our holidays was a camping trip to France. Each year I would drive down to the south coast in the early morning, and we would take the ferry to St Malo. Then I drove to the campsite at La Tranche, in the Vendée, where a friendly courier from Eurocamp would be there to greet us and show us to our tent.

  There was always a get-together on the first evening, when the courier introduced all the happy campers to each other, described the facilities on offer and took us through a few golden rules. My wife and I were both teachers at the time, but never revealed this. I did once, and then I had to listen to a diatribe from one red-faced parent in khaki shorts, about his son’s failing school, sympathise with another whose daughter was dyslexic and try and give some advice to a mother whose son was being bullied by his classmates. After this experience, I told people I was a systems analyst with British Fuels and thankfully was left alone.

  One summer, our tent was sandwiched between a miserable know-it-all and his ever-complaining wife on one side, and a very pleasant and good-humoured couple and their teenage daughter on the other. The girl, Melanie, a very capable and articulate young woman, was only too happy to baby-sit for us on a few evenings, and we got to know her quite well.

  One morning, Melanie rushed over to our tent, beaming widely.

  ‘I’ve just got my GCSE results,’ she told us, excitedly. ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve got five As, three Bs and an A star in French.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘Very well done. That’s brilliant.’

  When the girl had gone, the miserable know-it-all in the next tent, who had been eavesdropping, shared with me his considered opinion. ‘Hardly brilliant,’ he commented. ‘Exams these days aren’t anywhere near as hard as they were in the past. A monkey could pass some
of them.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you work in education, do you?’

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘You mark examination papers then?’

  ‘No, I fit double glazing,’ he told me. ‘I’m just saying that standards in school have declined and that the exams are easier. Kids these days don’t know half as much as what we did at school.’

  The following day I came across the ‘educational expert’ in the supermarket.

  ‘Do you speak the lingo?’ he asked me.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘French. Do you speak French?’

  ‘A little,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, the wife wants to know the name of this cheese we’ve been eating. She wants to see if they have it back home. Can you come and ask the fellow at the charcuterie what it’s called?’

  I accompanied him to the counter to find ‘the wife’ was pointing and nodding and mouthing something volubly, in a sort of pigeon English.

  ‘May I help?’ I asked.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said, ‘I can manage.’

  ‘If you would like me to ask—’ I started.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she interrupted sharply. ‘I said I can manage.’

  At the checkout the couple were ahead of me.

  ‘Did you discover what sort of cheese it was?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the man, holding up a large wedge in greaseproof paper. ‘The wife’s going to ask for it back home at Sainsbury’s. It’s called fromage.’

  ‘Actually I think it’s called Roquefort,’ I ventured.

  The woman gave me a sort of sympathetic smile. ‘I’m sure the man on the cheese counter knows a little bit more about cheese than you do,’ she told me.

  Bon Appetit!

  On another French holiday, my wife took the three little boys and me on a nostalgic journey. As part of her training as a modern language teacher, Christine spent a year as an assistante in the beautiful French town of Arcachon on the River Garonne, famous for the Pyla Dunes, the highest sand dunes in Europe. One evening, my wife, keen to introduce our children to French cuisine, took us to a restaurant she had frequented when a student, and ordered a typically French meal. When I saw the plate of oysters, langoustines, lapin en aspic, escargots, cuisses de grenouilles, bifteck saignant, moules marinières and calamar, I recalled my first visit to a French restaurant as a boy of fifteen, with my mother and her friend.

  It was a smart restaurant in Montmartre, a sumptuous place with white tablecloths, shining silver cutlery and great glittering chandeliers. A rather arrogant waiter, attired in a black apron which very nearly touched the ground, presented us with the menus – huge, square, fancy-looking folders with all the dishes written inside in French. None of us could speak a word of the language and we stared for an inordinate amount of time until my mother’s friend, taking the initiative, called the waiter over, and, pointing to the set menu, placed the order. The waiter returned to the table some time later carrying a bowl of cut lemons in small glass dishes, a large bottle containing a liquid which looked a lot like vinegar and a huge plate of oysters, open and sparkling in the bright lights, and resting on a bed of brown shiny seaweed. Then the snails arrived, on a special china plate with small hollows to accommodate the little shelled creatures. I stared in horror as the waiter placed the small fork before me, to enable me to extract the garlicky-smelling gastropods, and said, smirking, ‘Bon Appetit!’

  We were cautious eaters in our house back in Rotherham, and tended to look with great suspicion upon the rare occasions when we were faced with food with which we were unfamiliar. We never ate spaghetti (unless from a tin and soaked in tomato sauce), any cheese (other than Cheddar); we never touched garlic, mayonnaise (we ate salad cream from a bottle), veal, shrimps, yoghurt, noodles, brown bread, sweet potatoes, pâté, any spices other than salt and pepper or anything else deemed ‘foreign’. Fish was invariably cod, and came perfectly rectangular in shape and smothered in bright orange breadcrumbs. When the fish arrived that evening – head, skin, tail, fins, eyes and all – I lost my appetite. The third course – cubes of white meat suspended in a pale yellow jelly – made me feel sick.

  Some say that memories, even the most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly with time. Well, the recollection of my mother’s face, when she saw the oysters, the snails and the fish with the popping eyes, will never fade. Her mouth dropped open. The three of us must have appeared a comical trio as we sat upright and motionless, staring at the untouched food with expressions of distaste. My mother called for the bill, which she paid hurriedly, and we left, I am sure, much to the amusement of the waiter and the other diners. The whole meal remained untouched.

  In the restaurant in Arcachon, my three sons surveyed the repast before them with eyes like chapel hat pegs. Christine explained that the meal comprised of rabbit in jelly, snails, frogs’ legs, steak, mussels and octopus. Richard and Matthew pulled faces and, reaching for the baguettes, announced they would settle for the bread. Dominic, the youngest, licked his lips and tucked in with gusto. He tried everything, much to the disgust of his brothers and the amusement of the waiter and the other diners. Henceforth, he became known as Dominique, la poubelle, an appellation he delights in to this day.

  Parents’ Evening

  Just before my first child, Richard, started school, I completed a three-year research degree in reading development and put my findings into a book. I was also appointed as a school inspector. The day before the first parents’ consultation evening, my wife Christine gave me a stern warning.

  ‘And don’t go telling Richard’s teacher what you do. She’s only in her first year and will be nervous enough without you telling her you’re a school inspector and putting the fear of God in her.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I replied.

  ‘And don’t go on and on about all that research on reading you’ve been doing.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said again.

  Miss Smith, my young son’s teacher, smiled warmly when we sat down in front of her. If she was nervous she certainly was not showing it.

  ‘Richard is doing very nicely,’ she said confidently, scanning her mark book. ‘He’s a well-behaved child and has settled in well.’ Before we could reply, she continued: ‘Now, reading is perhaps the most important skill he needs to learn in these early years.’ My wife gave me a sideways glance. I smiled smugly but remained silent. Miss Smith continued enthusiastically. ‘It is fundamental to learning and we must work together, not only to get Richard to read clearly and fluently, but also to help him become a lifelong reader.’ This young woman was very impressive, I thought. She continued: ‘So let me explain about early reading development and the reading scheme we are using, and give you a little advice on how you, as Richard’s parents and most important teachers, can help him at home.’

  I said nothing but felt my wife tapping my foot under the table. After five minutes listening to Miss Smith, Christine, a former infant teacher herself, felt she ought to say something.

  ‘Actually, Miss Smith, my husband and I know a little about reading development and the various schemes,’ she said amiably.

  Miss Smith smiled a sympathetic smile, the sort of resigned expression of a teacher responding to a child’s willing but incorrect answer. ‘A lot of parents think they do, Mrs Phinn, but they often get the wrong end of the stick.’ So we sat it out.

  Next morning, Miss Smith told Richard how she had enjoyed her conversation with his daddy and mummy, and asked what they did for a living.

  ‘Daddy goes out in the morning with a big black bag and comes in late with his big black bag.’ I must have sounded like Jack the Ripper.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed the teacher, ‘your daddy is a doctor?’

  Like all infants, Richard was bluntly honest. ‘Oh no, my daddy’s a school inspector who has just written a book about reading, and my mummy used to teach infants – just like you.’

  That afternoon, Richard came home with a brown envelope addressed to Rich
ard’s parents. Inside, on a sheet of coloured paper, four words were printed in bold lettering: ‘Ha, ha, bloody, ha!’

  Something on My Plate

  There is something about auctions that brings out the worst in people. I suppose it’s the fiercely competitive nature of the business: people bidding in public against each other for a desired object, sometimes going way over the value of the item, just so they can have the satisfaction of having done the other person down. But I have to admit I do love auctions. Many a Sunday morning I have spent at the local auction room with the best of the bargain hunters, rooting through cardboard boxes crammed with cracked plates and chipped jugs, garish glassware and old bottles, pot lids and costume jewellery, and flicking through dusty tomes and stamp albums, folders of carefully mounted cigarette cards and old photographs. Like all the other bidders, I hope to come across an undiscovered and priceless Canaletto or an unrecognised piece of unique Clarice Cliff pottery.

  Before we were married, Christine collected Willow Pattern plates. When we were courting, I thought I would surprise her on her birthday with a fine specimen I had seen displayed in the auction house window. Unfortunately, on the day of the sale, the auctioneer rattled through the lots like a Gatling gun and, by accident, I bought another plate. It was without doubt the ugliest piece of pottery I had ever set my eyes upon. It was a large plate depicting three stiff Chinese figures walking across a crudely painted bridge. The picture looked like one executed by a small child. Worst of all, there was a long hairline crack right across the centre.

  Christine was aghast when she saw it and even more aghast when I told her how much I had paid for it.

  ‘It’s horrendous!’ she cried. ‘I wouldn’t eat my fish and chips off it.’

  The plate was consigned to the back of the cupboard, where it stayed for many years. It saw the light of day one afternoon when Christine decided to attend a social event at our children’s school. The head teacher had prevailed upon another parent, a local antique dealer, to talk about and value small items brought in by the parents and teachers.