Home life
Baby talk
Alice Thomas Ellis
Iwas sitting quietly in the drawing-room yesterday evening when I heard somebody calling my name in the garden, so I stepped on to the balcony and there below was a total stranger. `Yers?' I said — my habitual mode of address to strangers. He accused .me of not recognising him and I had to admit that he was right, whereupon he reminded me that I was engaged to him, or rather that I had been some years ago. Hearing this, I invited him in and gave him a drink. He said that I had hardly changed at all, though since as the evening pro- gressed and we indulged in reminiscence he went on say dreamily that I had been a terrible mess I was not as flattered as I might have been. A touch scatty perhaps, but a terrible mess? Never. He made me feel a bit guilty because he had bought a barge for us to live on and when I hopped it the rotten thing sank. Still, it was a long time ago and I think he's got over it. He's a very nice man and I still can't remember why I didn't marry him. He told the daughter that he had once loved her mother very much and she looked amazed.
It's been a fairly nostalgic week all round. My dear friend Gully popped in on her way from New York to France, bring- ing her little baby. We sat in the garden and it all came back to me. When babies get off their bottoms and start crawling, one can do absolutely nothing but watch them like a hawk every single minute they're awake. Take your eyes off them for a second and they're experimenting with the dietary possibilities of earthworms or worse. This particular baby was very partial to dirty little stones, and her mother leapt up and down through the whole course of a hot afternoon, persuading Rebecca to 'spit it out in Mummy's hand' — a phrase as familiar to me as 'good night' or 'good morning'. When she wasn't consuming nameless bits and pieces the baby was trying unsuccessfully to befriend Cadders or scaling the garden steps. She was a very clean baby when she arrived, but when she left she wasn't. She also preferred her Marmite sandwich with a rich admixture of earth. I reflected again that it's a miracle how the small creatures survive and remembered with some awe that at one time we had four little boys under five and no one to help, since at that time Janet would only have been ten.
Some of my friends are longing to be grandmamas (come to think of it some of my friends are grandmamas), but I have put it around the family that while I will be enchanted to entertain any possible little ones to the occasional tea I will not be available for extended summer holidays as, to coin a phrase, I have had babies. I vividly recall an occasion when the eldest son was starting to crawl. We were sitting in a garden in the country with acres of velvet lawn and I picked him up and ran with him, dropped him on the touch line and flew back to sip a drink in comparative peace before he could get at me again. He came thundering over the lawn on his hands and knees and peed on Randolph Churchill who had ill-advisedly taken him on to his lap. I can't imagine why. It was a most uncharacteristic gesture — on the part of R. Churchill, I mean, not of the son. There's nothing you can say, really. Apology seems inadequate and explana- tion otiose. My cousin Pansy was once on a bus with her baby when he suddenly and without warning threw up in the brim of the hat of the lady in front. My cousin said nothing — what can you say? 'My baby's been sick in your hat'? It sounds stupid. Anyway, she simply got off the bus at the next stop, bang in the middle of the wastes of the North Wales littoral and waited for an hour or three for the next bus. I would have done exactly the same thing myself.
There is, however, one broody creature in the house. Puss cannot differentiate between socks and kittens. We could never understand why, each morning, there were bundles of socks not in the laundry but littered (littered) round the kitchen. Then one night going downstairs to investigate a strange noise, or raid the fridge or some- thing, I caught her with a rolled-up sock in her mouth. She was carrying it, head high, with that mixture of pride, tenderness and responsibility that cats evince when moving their babies to a place of safety. I cried. We have had her spayed, so she can't have any more kittens, and I felt like the most awful monster. I think I'm going to cry again.
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