. . . and the children's teeth are set on

edge

Andro Linklater

SONS AND MOTHERS edited by Matthew Glendinning and Victoria Glendinning Virago, £16.99, pp. 262 The drama of modern motherhood can be crudely summarised: the growing child requires more than a mother can give. In the past, aunts, grandmothers and the like might have made good the deficit, but now the excess of demand over supply pushes the price, or in this case the desirability, of what is wanted ever upwards. In response, some mothers flood the market with ges- tures of increasingly devalued adoration, others ration demonstrations of affection with Bundesbankian austerity, while still others behave like Tory Chancellors veer- ing from boom to bust as they try to dis- guise the incapacity of the emotional economy to meet its citizens' expectations.

Yet, as this book of recollections by eight mothers and eight sons indicates, the nature of what is actually wanted is not at all clear — at least not when the child is male. Love is the obvious answer, and on the mothers' side there is no doubt about the immensity of their devotion:

He was without any doubt the most beautiful thing I had ever seen [observes Sara Parkin of her newly born son]. His small wrinkled head, pulled into a Martian deformity by his monitored delivery, expanded my heart up through the sixth layer of my skin until it burst with a waterfall of love flooding my senses.

Or Kate Saunders:

I love Felix to distraction . . . It is the stormiest love affair of my life. If this was a real love affair, my friends would beg me to leave him.

Recognising that their sons must anxiously transmute this engulfing mater- nal love into a separated masculine person- ality, the mothers' outpourings come with a commensurate sense of inadequacy:

Notwithstanding the fact I have to work all the hours God sends to keep us solvent [says Saunders] I feel wicked. I am sure I shall sink into his consciousness as a selfish, rejecting harpy.

Or Victoria Glendinning agonising 20 years later about having left Matthew to be by himself rather than with her:

I didn't want to violate his need for privacy. I didn't know that 'being with me' would have been any lure at all . I got it wrong.

Like an echo, the commonest theme of the male contributors is frustration. Most attention has been directed at Jon Snow's admission that he felt irredeemably scarred by the shock of discovering that his mother wore a wig — a memory which evidently hides other, more complex reasons for his self-confessed distrust of women — but running through nearly all of them is the stoical line best expressed by Adam Mars- Jones' bleak ending to a lapidary memoir of his mother:

One of Sheila's virtues as a mother was to have stopped telling us, quite early on, that everything was going to be all right.

The fact that nearly every contributor is a middle-class, articulate Londoner with high expectations probably explains some of the dissatisfaction, and, crippled by its narrow horizons, the book throws no other light. Just one of the sons is an orphan, and none of the mothers has a dead son, a handicapped, black, brown or yellow son. Thus its themes are repeated to the point of tedium, and it lacks the variety to offer perspective on what it is that boys really want, pace Freud, of their mothers.

Two contributions show what might have been gained from a wider net. Father Michael Seed, who was adopted, gratefully recalls the fragments of affection he received from his adoptive mother, who later committed suicide, from an inspira- tional teacher, who left, and from an ever- present but invisible faith. It throws light not only on his own ability to feed his growing self on starvation rations, but on the way the other men writing here gagged or swelled on richer maternal fare. And in the most distinguished piece of writing in the book, Susan Richards describes her role as Wicked Stepmother to Roger Graef's Max after his natural mother was killed in a car crash: I had been dealt a role that was beyond my character.. . I might have said that if I stuck at it I had the power to change Max's life for the better. But the idea that he might trans- form mine — that never crossed my mind.

Yet transform her he did, and, tracing the course of their increasingly close relation- ship, she emphasises an aspect of love which otherwise only Seed and the writer Michael Bywater bring to the fore:

I now feel about Max as a person might who wakes up to find a bluebird in their garden. As long as it stays I lay out the best bread and hope that it will keep returning. But since the bird is not 'mine', when it goes I will be left with no recrimination, only gratitude.

If any single feeling can make good the disparity between what is wanted and what is offered, it is surely gratitude which acknowledges both the generosity and the individuality of those who give and those who receive in such abundance.