ANOTHER VOICE
Huh, I thought. Double Income, No Kids.
That's what we have here. Bastards
BORIS JOHNSON
The plane was full of middle-class Brits, tanned by the alpine sun, fit, in so far as the chalet diet allows it, and the charter compa- ny had made the usual balls-up. Every time you turn up with a load of children, they decide for some reason that you are to be dispersed as widely as possible throughout the flight. So when my wife, baby and one child had installed themselves in row one, seats A and B, and I had installed myself and two other children in row 20, I turned to my neighbours. Usually one might ask a stew- ardess to help out, but I decided to trust my own powers of charm. The plane was still stationary. The flight was still at the gate and would be for about ten more minutes. `I wonder,' I began in the most cordial and winning way to the husband-and-wife team seated on my right, 'I wonder whether I could persuade you. . . . ' What I was about to ask was whether they might be able to see their way round to swapping seats with my wife and her section of the children. As far as I could see, this was a win-win situation for the lucky couple. They would extricate themselves from the company of myself and my two children and find them- selves in the front row: the coveted position from which they would be the first out of the plane. As for us, the manoeuvre would enable us all to be together, and share the joys and sorrows that go with taking four children on an aeroplane. As I say, it is a piece of trivial diplomacy which I have comfortably pulled off several times. So you can imagine that I was astonished when the man, sitting furthest from me, by the window, did not allow me to complete the sentence. 'No,' he snarled. 'For Christ's sake, the flight only lasts an hour and a quarter. What are you staring at?' I realised that I must have been gazing dumbly at him, and muttered something about not meaning to stare. 'What are you staring at?' he repeated, more belligerently. 'You asked me a question and I've given you an answer; now what are you staring at?' I must have appealed mutely to his wife (she had a wedding and engagement ring), but she rolled her eyes, looked away and said that 'it had been a bad day'. Well, I dare say it had been a bad day. We had all been struggling back from the slushy passes, looking for gloves under beds, waiting in our coaches in inter- minable traffic-jams in Bourg St Maurice and all the rest of it. But nothing, or so it seemed to me, could conceivably justify this sheer downright nastiness. As my wife pointed out later, she would have given the couple what for. She would have said some- thing snappy, like 'I'm staring because I've never come across anyone so rude and unpleasant in all my life.' Alas, I didn't have the nerve. I quivered, like a puppy unexpectedly kicked. I had one brief, feeble moment of retaliation, when one child said he wanted very badly to be sick, so I said in a voice loud enough to be heard for several rows, 'Why don't you come and be sick on this chap here?' But mainly I sat there, seething and brooding. And my thoughts turned to a fragment of the newspaper that I had come across, soggy and sat-upon in the chalet, about some bishop who had been laying into those who elect, for one reason or another, not to have children.
Yeah, I sneered to myself, as I sneaked a good look at them both. They were in their early thirties, plainly married and pretty well-off. He had a watch by Tag Heuer, designer spectacles and — though his face was buried in the window in an effort to avoid meeting my eye, and though my mem- ory may be contaminated by loathing — it seemed to me that he looked very much like a priggish, puffy, pathetic squashed tomato. She was reading Taller. In fact, to com- pound my distress, she was buried in an arti- cle by our own Toby Young, one of his ones about dressing up as a girl or going to bed with supermodels or something. Huh, I thought. Double Income, No Kids. That's what we have here. Bastards.
As if sensing my gaze, the couple started huddling away from me and twining their hands together, and he was rubbing her hair with his hands as if to say it's all going to be all right, darling. Yuk, I thought, and stoked my rage with half-remembered fragments of the bishop's remarks. It was 'selfish' not to `I just hope it's another of his jokes.' have children, the bishop said. Yoh! Mar- riage was all about having children, and those who opted out were frauds, he said. Right on, bro. Only people who didn't under- stand what it was all about could behave like that, I told myself, and sat fizzing and pop- ping until, for such is our training, my intel- lectual faculties demanded a change, and I began to argue in the adversative.
Hang on a mo, I thought. Why the hell should the childless couple always be expected to defer to other people's snotty little kids, the product of nothing but their selfish desire to replicate their genes? Wasn't it grim enough already for the child- less mother — and Heaven knows why she might be childless — without being forced to abase herself before the noisy, smelly, inconsiderate fecundity of other people? Why did I think I had a divine right to shove people about an aeroplane, just because we'd gone to the trouble to have a `family'? Family schmamily.
Good for old Tag Heuer, I started to think; perhaps, after all, he was evincing nothing but that old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon bolshiness so admired by Rudyard Kipling. Perhaps, in refusing to budge from row 20 to row one, he was showing the same mul- ishness which defeated Hitler. . . .
I think I must have been lost in medita- tion because at that point one of the chil- dren spilt his water and it was necessary to mop it up, and the other one wanted to go to the lavatory, and I knocked my coffee over; and I thought how much handier and jollier it would have been if we were all together, and my incontinent rage returned, against Tag Heuer and his wife.
Remember this, Mr and Mrs Tag Heuer, if you are sensible enough to have jacked Tatler in favour of The Spectator you may be paying for the absurd child benefit that mounts up in our children's bank accounts, but when you are old and frail, and in need of state- subsidised nursing and medicine, it will be our children who are paying, out of their earnings, to keep you alive.
So next time you face a bashful, sheepish request to swap places for the sake of the kiddies, I suggest you leap to attention; or else it won't be long before some smart political party pledges, as part of its pro-fam- ily crusade, that it will be illegal for indolent charter companies to separate children and parents on planes, and anyone making any trouble will be put off at Geneva airport.
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