Low life | 13 September 2012

Back in July I booked a cottage in its own wood for the last week of the school summer holidays. I was fondly thinking of my boy and his partner’s five kids, aged between one and nine, and what larks they would have running free in Nature. I was, I suppose, romantically casting them as the innocent characters in books such as Five Children and It and Swallows and Amazons, and bestowing on them the same idealised kind of camp-making, fire-lighting opportunities as I enjoyed at their age.

Let me introduce them in descending order of age. The eldest three’s father, my boy’s partner’s ex, is a mild and gentle man, rather spaced out, addicted for many years to heroin and alcohol, and one of the all-time greats of the arcane world of small-town shoplifting. It’s as though he’s invented a magic cloak that renders him invisible to shop assistants. I don’t like to enquire too closely about their provenance, but my bathroom shelf boasts several unopened bottles of moderately expensive aftershave, which I suspect might be the fruits of the eldest three’s Dad’s labours during the busy run-ups to the last few Christmases. He really comes into his own and performs during the festive season. The rest of the year he seems barely alive, as though quietly husbanding his meagre energies for the next one. His three kids stay with him at weekends in his cupboard-like room at a halfway house for addicts who have promised a magistrate that they can stay clean for at least a year.

The eldest of his three, Alice, is nine. She’s thin and graceful and sweet-natured (though occasionally vain and overemotional) and so bright she’s top of her class at English with absolutely no help or encouragement from outside. I look at her dear, trusting, gap-toothed face sometimes and become emotional myself, so certain is it that her lively artistic and literary gifts will soon be snuffed out by education and culture.