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.