Family

Although a historian, until very recently I have been curiously incurious about researching my own slightly peculiar family. How was it, for example, that my grandfather, originally a penniless Welsh peasant, sired a dynasty that in three generations has spread to three continents and includes a squillionaire who founded a multinational club business with 75 branches in 42 cities around the world? And on the dark side of family secrets, why did my father marry a dying woman just released from Holloway jail after killing her own child? What diseases did my immediate ancestors suffer from, and are they likely to kill me too?

‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.  For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed her up. Sure, we had some argy-bargy at the moment of drop-off, but in she went.

My own episode of Long Lost Family doesn’t involve a hug from Davina McCall or a visit from Nicky Campbell, armed with a box of tissues and the kind of tight smile that tells you that you’re about to cry your eyes out. It begins with an unexpected call from my brother who lives in the United States. Had I got a minute? Perhaps I should sit down… We have a sister living in Matlock in Derbyshire, he said. She was born in August 1976 – making her a year and half my junior – and had come to light through the wonders of a genetic match on the family history website Ancestry.com, which my brother had put his DNA on. Was I surprised? Not massively.

As we approach the final countdown to the school summer holidays and I am faced with the prospect of lots more quality time with my almost-five-year-old, and absolutely no idea what I will fill the days with, it seems a good moment to evaluate my style of parenting and seek out some advice to help the family get through the summer with our sanities intact.  These days, there is a whole animal kingdom of parenting styles to choose from: could I be an elephant mother? A panda, a jellyfish? Or the better-known tiger mum – usually associated with parents pushing their children towards over-achievement.

Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land? Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious breach of health and safety regulations were the noise emanating from a hairdryer or lawnmower.  But your children aren’t wearing ear protection.

I tried getting my husband to go with me, but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged him so I forced a friend’s son to come instead. I’m talking about going to see Tyler, The Creator at the O2. That’s Tyler, The Creator, the magnificent hip hop artist who was banned from the UK in 2015 by then Home Secretary Theresa May on the grounds of supporting homophobia and acts of terrorism.  What, you’ve never heard of him? Well, that’s clearly because you are not as down with the kids as me. I may be a middle-class boomer from Chiswick but I’m also a raging hip hop fan and I know my stuff. Hip hop, drill, rap, trap: you name it, I love it – the more guns, the more swear words, the more misogyny the better. You call Hamilton rap? Oh, please.

‘Centrist dad’, a term that has been with us for a decade or so, has never exactly been a compliment. In 2017, even Tony Blair – then still pretty close to being political toxic waste – disavowed the label, declaring: ‘I’m not a centrist dad.’ In that same year a chap named Matt Zarb-Cousin, a spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn – who astonishingly was the leader of the opposition at the time – described centrist dads as ‘middle-aged men who cannot come to terms with the world and politics changing.’ Zarb-Cousin added hubristically: ‘They think they must know better because they are older and wiser.’ (Fortunately the centrist dads did know better, and so did the country, rejecting Corbyn in 2019.

In Dad’s Army, Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, fought in six campaigns, from the Sudan in 1884 to the second world war. Well, my great-grandfather, Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, can beat that. He joined up at 18 in 1859 and stayed in the army for 65 years, until his death at 83, 100 years ago, on 27 January 1925. And then, in a tragic coda to his extraordinary life, he gave his name to Grenfell Tower, where 72 lives were lost in a fire in 2017. This week, Angela Rayner told bereaved families that the tower is to be demolished. Lord Grenfell was the ultimate Colonel Blimp – he even looked like him, handlebar moustache and all. The Zelig of the British Empire, he saw everything.

I was a late starter at everything. After drifting through my youth, and numerous false starts in life and work, I only found a committed relationship in my thirties and married in my forties. Even my second career as a writer waited until my fifties. So, too, did my unexpected third career, as a parent. For years, my significantly younger wife and I ached for a child. When it didn’t happen naturally, we embarked on a long, uncertain, painful and stressful IVF journey to fulfil our longing. When we accepted that we had reached the end of that road – or rather our endurance of its rockiness was exhausted – to our amazement and joy, a precious embryo decided to stay, and our daughter was born after a smooth and trouble-free pregnancy.