Random reminder

Press, 17 April 1980, Page 25

Random reminder

AT SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

A father in St Albans — or Eastern Merivale if you prefer — regrets now the whole tedious business of parenthood. The decade — yes, the swinging one — was in full swing when he traded the B.S.A. and the monophonic hi-fi for the love of a good woman and for domesticity. The love lasted. The babies, of course, grew up. Bath time had always been Daddy’s special time. Bath time was riot of rubber ducks, and boats, and bubbles, and ruba-dub bathrime songs including every part — and for parents crippled by white middle-class upbringing, it wasn’t automatic — every part of the body. Bathrime was more than soap and water. It was towels and slippers, and pyjamas by the fire and a story and “up the stair to Bedfordshire . .

Stairs? In a New Zealand house? Well, stairs or not, it was fun. Wasn’t it, children? he reminisced. Eh? they said,* these teen-age louts who arrived -intermittently to take squalid occupation of what had once been a family home. Eh? They remembered no bath nights. Their clearest recollection — their only recollection — of childhood was shivering hungrily in darkness as grownups shrieked drunkenly at parties. Parties? gibbered Father, fingers scrabbling through whitened hair. Parties? In a decade and a half in this house (he turned to his wife for confirmation) we have had two such grown-up’s parties. Two. His listeners levered themselves off the wallpaper. Two, eh? Yeah. Well, you admit it.