My daughter’s class did an assembly on the Battle of Hastings. She played Tostig, brother of Viking claimant Harold Hardcase, or whatever he was called. Rachel was very convincing, easily the best portrayal of an imaginary axe-wielding, treacherous Norwegian warlord by an eight-year-old girl wearing school uniform I have ever seen.
Later, Tostig having got what was coming to him at Stamford Bridge, she took part in the Norman attack on the legendary Saxon plastic shield-wall under the basketball hoop on Senlac Hill. This was then followed by the famous feigned retreat towards the emergency exit followed by the devastating about-turn to cut down the pursuers near the piano. Yeah, that old trick.
Just before the thing started my wife got anxious that while a lot of Rachel’s classmates had brought in toy swords and suchlike props, Rachel didn’t have anything. I said not to worry, I’d take her my woolly hat. With its stupid (yet practical) ear flaps, it looks a bit like a helmet, or at least like something a scrofulous medieval peasant might wear to grovel around in a rubbish heap beneath the walls of a castle.
To deliver the hat, I had to walk from the back of the hall to the front, picking my way from year six to reception (that’s fourth year juniors to first year infants, to those of us educated in the good old days of blackboards, the three Rs and vicious corporal punishment). Rachel saw me coming. She blushed. Then she began making violent scissor movements, chopping her hands across her chest. Then she started hissing: “Go away, just go away.” I kept walking.
Yes, my daughter has reached the age when any interaction we have in public alarms her. And this will only get worse. My friend Barry, whose eldest daughter is 12, has been instructed not to speak at all, under any circumstances, on any subject, ever, when she is with her friends. She has calculated that the likelihood of her father letting slip something humiliating (“Have a good time” would count) is simply too great for her to risk allowing him to open his mouth. Thus does Barry spend his weekends ferrying carloads of girls around East London while remaining mute.
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That hasn’t happened to me yet, but the rot is setting in. Already, for instance, I am monitored in case I put anything embarrassing in her packed lunch. I tried to smuggle in some dates recently, but she spotted me and hoicked them out, even though I happen to know she is fond of dates. “They dry up,” she told me, “and look like poos.” Peer group pressure? It’s a terrible thing, but I had to laugh at that one.
The other day, when I tried to interest her in the music of Joy Division, she remained aloof. Even when I played Love Will Tear Us Apart seven times straight and said it was in my all time top ten and called on her to listen to the way the drums were so innovatively prominent at the front of the mix, she kept right on staring at her DS. Twelve, six months ago, that wouldn’t have happened: the top ten reference would have lured her in. “Really, Daddy? What are the others?” Well, that’s a hard one, but since you ask, allow me to bore you witless as I sift through the contenders?
Saddest of all, she no longer finds flatulence amusing. Not even a little bit. Women, eh? I’ll never work them out. We were discussing preferred special powers over breakfast and she said I already had one. “What’s that?” I asked. “Farting,” she said. “That’s true,” said my son, sighing proudly, his expression taking on a faraway look, and I knew he was thinking, maybe one day, when I’m a fully grown man, perhaps I’ll be able to break wind like my dad. Thanks, Sam, I said, ruffling his hair, but I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.
In theory I should back off and play it cool, yet in practice, in the time-honoured way of male-female relations, I try ever harder to impress her. Even though, as we chaps all know, or should know, act desperate and you’re toast. I do silly walks past the living room door when she’s watching TV. I concoct limp puns. I perform disrespectful impersonations of members of our extended family. I undermine my wife’s authority on the requirement to tidy up Sylvanians before bedtime. I read out the dialogue from stories in different accents to amuse her, except I can’t do accents very well, so the same character veers from Welsh to Pakistani to West Indian in a single sentence, like some ghastly catch-all racist comic. I start telling a joke, realise the punchline requires an expletive, tell it anyway.
Yet even these transgressions buy me only the briefest reprieve from her scorn. Back in the hall, my journey complete, Rachel, resigned to my arrival, laughed nervously, shrugged, turned to her giggling friends. “Who is this man?” said the gesture. “Do you know this man? I don’t know this man.” Needless to say, my offer of the hat was rejected.