New life

Minor eruption

Zenga Longmore

The natural event which springs to mind when watching a child's tantrum is the eruption of a volcano. There are two main reasons for these childish fits of temper. The over-twos tend to throw themselves around banging their heads on the floor when they are deprived of sweets.

The under-twos' tantrums, however, usu- ally stem from an entirely different source. You see, the average toddler suffers from a maddening combination of clear thought and cloudy tongue. The brain is willing, but the speech is slurred, if you get the gist. Take Omalara, for instance, now 22 months old and a lucid thinker if ever there was one.

Yesterday, on the way to an appointment with Shaka Boom Boom, I was hurrying down the so-called Front Line as fast as the pushchair could wobble. All of a sudden, Omalara shouted in an excited voice: 'Mummy!'

'Yes, dear?'

'Helitope!'

'Yes, dear.'

'Helitope!'

'No, dear,' I hazarded.

`Aaagh! Helitope, helitope, helitope!' Her back was beginning to arch, and I could tell by the way a Japanese demon mask expression was starting to cloud her chubby features that trouble was brewing.

'Helicopter? Here's your coat? Have a stoat?' I guessed wildly, stabbing, if that's the expression I want, in the dark.

`No-o-o! Hepi-tote!'

'Oh! Hepitote! Really? How interesting! Good girl.'

'No, no! Hepitote! Aaa-ha-haagh!'

I only just managed to catch her as she hurled herself head first from the pushchair. Neither dolls, stories nor the dirty looks from passers-by could pacify the frustrated child. Descartes, I imagine, would have suffered in similar vein had he announced after hours of meditation that he thought, therefore he was, and everyone had just replied, 'Yes, dear'.

Baby books advise the mother to reason with the bawling infant,tut I ask you, how can a child who is whacking you in the face with a plastic sheep and screaming 'Hell- toper be reasoned with? No, the only method one can apply is diversion, and I managed to divert Omalara by dancing with her in my arms, pushing the baby buggy with my elbows. Finally we arrived at Shaka's workshop, a Victorian building with a door marked `Shaka-Leroy Enter- prises'.

I rang the bell and the man himself appeared.

'Hello, Shaka, you said you were going to tell me why you were collecting broken pens, remember?'

'Don't you dare mention pens to me, ever again! I spent the whole of last week building a reconstruction of the fall of the Berlin Wall out of broken pens, and —'

'You spent the whole week doing what?'

`To qualify for an Arts Council grant. That's the sort of thing they lavish pounds on, innit, so long as you've got the right patter. You know, stuff like the pens signify that communism is a write-off and all that sort of eye-wool. Anyway, it was going a treat, and we were carrying it to the town hall, when Leroy went and tripped, didn't he! The result being that the Berlin Wall shattered into a thousand ballpoints.'

`So it's nothing doing with the council?'

'Blouse and skirt, man! If the council guy had seen the state of my Berlin Wall, all he'd give would be an Arts Council grunt!'