What We’re Teaching Our Sons

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This Ebook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Owen Booth 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Owen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008282592

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008282608

Version: 2018-08-20

Dedication

To Stan and Arthur

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Great Outdoors

Drowning

Heartbreak

Philosophy

Work

Whales

Grandfathers

Women

Money

Geology

Sport

Emotional Literacy

Sex

Plane Crashes

The Big Bang

Ex-Girlfriends

The Loneliness of Billionaires

Crying

Europe

Empathy

Haunted Houses

Relationships

Mountains

Drugs

The Bradford Goliath

Gambling

Food

The Life-Saving Properties of Books

Crime

Glaciers

What Happens When You Get Struck by Lightning

The World’s Most Dangerous Spiders

Friendship

Single Mothers

The Conquest of the South Pole

Monsters

Romance

Nostalgia

Practical Life Skills

Teenage Girls

The Abominable Snowman

Violence

Rites of Passage

Vikings

The Particular Smell of Hospitals at Three in the Morning

The War Against the Potato Beetle

Relativity

Pirates

Hotels

The Aftermath of Disasters

Drinking

The Pointlessness of Guilt

War

The Fifteen Foolproof Approaches to Making Someone Fall in Love with You

Life

The Wonderful Colours of the Non-Neurotypical Spectrum

Martians

The Ones that Got Away

Video Games

The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

Art

Women, Again

The Importance of Good Posture and Looking After your Teeth

Fatherhood

Death

Ghosts

The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

The Great Outdoors

We’re teaching our sons about the great outdoors.

We’re teaching them how to appreciate the natural world, how to understand it, how to survive in it. As concerned fathers have apparently been teaching their sons since the Palaeolithic.

We’re teaching our sons how to make fires and lean-to shelters, how to tie twenty-five different kinds of knot, how to construct animal traps from branches and vines. We’re teaching them how to catch things, how to kill things, how to gut things. Out on the frozen marshes before dawn we produce hundreds of rabbits out of sacks, try to show our sons how to skin the rabbits.

Our sons look over our shoulders, distracted by the beautiful sunrise. They don’t want anything to do with skinning rabbits.

Out on the frozen marsh we explain the importance of being self-sufficient, and capable, and knowing the names of different cloud formations and geological features, and how to identify birds by their song.

‘Cumulonimbus,’ we say. ‘Cirrus. Altostratus. Terminal moraine. Blackbird. Thrush. Wagtail.’

We hand out fact sheets and pencils, collect the rabbits. We promise prizes to whoever can identify the most types of trees.

‘Can we set things on fire again?’ our sons ask.

The stiff grass creaks under our feet as we make our way back to the car park. The sky is the colour of rusted copper.

‘Can we set fire to a car?’

‘No, you can’t set fire to a car,’ we say. ‘Why would you want to set fire to a car?’

‘To see what would happen,’ our sons mutter, sticking their bottom lips out.

We look at our sons, half in fear, wondering what we have made.

Drowning

We’re teaching our sons about drowning.

We tell them how we almost drowned when we were four years old. How we can still remember the feeling of being dragged along the bottom of the swollen river, the gravel in our faces, the smell of the hospital that lingered for weeks afterwards.

We don’t want this to happen to our sons. Or worse.

We take our sons swimming every Sunday morning, try to teach them how to stay afloat. Each week we have to find a new swimming pool, slightly further from where we live, slightly more overcrowded. The council is methodically demolishing all the sports centres in the borough as part of the Olympic dividend.

We are being concentrated into smaller and smaller spaces.

In the water our sons cling to us. Our hundreds of sons. They splash and kick their legs gamely, but they don’t seem to be getting any closer to being able to swim. We have to bribe them to put their faces under the water, and the price goes up every week.

We’re sure it wasn’t like this when we were children.

The water is a weird colour and tiles keep falling off the ceiling onto the swimmers’ heads. A scum of discarded polystyrene cups floats in the corner of the pool. It’s hotter than a sauna in here.

Also, we keep being distracted by the sight of the swimsuited mothers. The mothers who come in all sorts of fantastic shapes and sizes. They look as sleek as sea otters in their black swimsuits. They make us ashamed of our hairy backs, our formerly impressive chests, our pathetic tattoos.

We hope they can look at us with kinder eyes.

We crouch low in the water like middle-aged crocodiles, stealing glances at the sleek sea-otter mothers, and our sons put their arms around our necks and refuse to let go.

In the changing rooms we hold on to our sons’ tiny, fragile bodies; feel the terrible responsibility of lost socks, and impending colds, and the effects of chlorine on skin and lungs. We wrap our sons in towels, blow dry their hair, try not to consider the future and all the upcoming catastrophes that we can’t protect them from.

We promise ourselves that next week we’ll get it right.

Heartbreak

We’re teaching our sons about heartbreak.

Its inevitability. Its survivability. Its necessity. That sort of thing.

We take our sons to meet the heartbroken men. We have to show our credentials at the gate. We have a letter of introduction.

Our jeeps bounce across the rolling scrubland under huge blackening skies. As we approach the compound a group of men in camouflage gear watch us carefully. They all have beer bellies and assault rifles.

The heartbroken men are heartbroken on account of the breakdown of their marriages, and the fact that they never see their children, and the fact that they’re earning less than they expected to be at this point in their lives, and the fact that no one takes them seriously any more. In their darkest moments the heartbroken men suspect that no one took them seriously before, either. The fathers of the heartbroken men loom large. Their hard-drinking, angry fathers. And their fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.

The heartbroken men like to dress up as soldiers and superheroes. It’s embarrassing. How are we supposed to respond?

We don’t like the look of those skies.

‘We have a manifesto,’ the heartbroken men tell our sons. They want our sons to take their message back to the people. Their spokesmen step forward. There’s a banner too. They’re planning to hang it off a bridge or some other famous landmark.

‘Are those real guns?’ our sons ask.

‘We –’

‘Can we have a go on the guns?’ our sons ask.

‘No, you can’t have a go on the guns,’ we tell our sons. ‘Don’t let them have a go on the guns,’ we tell the heartbroken men, ‘what were you even thinking?’

The heartbroken men go quiet. They look at their feet.

‘Well?’

‘Fathers are superheroes,’ the heartbroken men say, quietly.

‘What?’

‘Superheroes,’ say the heartbroken men, starting to cry. Tears roll down their cheeks and fall upon the barren, scrubby ground.

This is turning into a disaster.

We should never have come.

Philosophy

We’re teaching our sons about philosophy.

We’re discussing logic, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. We’re covering philosophical methods of inquiry, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind. We’re asking our sons to consider ‘if there is something that it is like to be a particular thing’.

We’re on a boat trip up a Norwegian fjord and our sons are gathered on deck to listen to our lecture series. The spectacular mountains slide by as we talk about the sublime. The steel deck is wet from the recent rain.

Our sons are doing their best to feign interest, we have to give them that. They’re disappointed that there are no whales or polar bears to look at.

We’re trying to remember which famous philosopher lived in a hut up a Norwegian fjord.

Not all the children on deck are our sons. The boat is full of beautiful, strapping Norwegian teens on a school trip. They’re all six foot tall with no sense of personal space. They make our sons look stunted and reserved. They keep asking our sons if they have any crisps. This has been going on for five days and everyone is getting sick of it.

‘Why are we here?’ our sons ask us.

‘Yes!’ we say, pointing to our sons with the chalk, like we’ve seen lecturers do in films. ‘That’s exactly the crux of it!’

‘No,’ our sons say. ‘Why are we here, on a boat, halfway up Norway? When we could be exactly just about anywhere else?’

We have no answer to that one.

In the evenings everyone eats together in the dining hall and then the older sons sneak off to try to get a glimpse of the beautiful Norwegian teen girls and boys who gather at the back of the boat singing folk songs and playing acoustic guitars. We put the younger sons to bed and tell them about Descartes and Spinoza, try to pretend we don’t wish we were still teenagers.

Then we sit up long into the night nursing our glasses of aquavit and listening to the distant music and laughter.

We came to Norway in the hope of seeing the aurora borealis, but it’s summer and the sun never sets.

Work

We’re teaching our sons about work.

We’re taking them to the office, the factory, the school, the hospital. They’re coming with us on film shoots, on home visits, on our window-cleaning rounds. They’re helping us to study the births and deaths of volcanic islands, to collect unpaid gambling debts, to project-manage billion-pound IT infrastructure transformation programmes.

Other children, we remind our sons, would be excited to see where their fathers work, what they do for a living.

We’re teaching our sons that it’s important to have a vocation. And that even if you don’t have a vocation you still have to turn up every day and pretend you care. We’re teaching our sons about compromise. We’re teaching them how to skive, how to slack off, how to take credit for other people’s work. We’re teaching them how to negotiate pay rises and how to have office affairs.

We tell our sons the stories of our many office affairs, back in the good old, bad old days.

We tell them about our affair with beautiful Stephanie from reception, and the magnificent sunset in Paris, and the helicopter ride, and the horrible accident. We tell them about our affair with Cathy the kickboxing champion, and how it ended with a spectacular roundhouse kick to our head. The gay dads tell the stories of their affairs with Steve and Mark and Sunny and John and David and Disco Clive and the two Andrews. The mothers of our sons, overhearing, start to tell stories of their own wild workplace affairs, their own crazy and dangerous pasts, which makes us all a bit nervous.

We go on for a while, until our sons start to wander off.

They’re convinced they’re going to be film stars and astronauts and famous comic book artists. They’re not interested in all the ways we managed to screw up our stupid lives.

Whales

We’re teaching our sons about whales.

Their habits and habitats, their evolutionary history, their cultural and economic relevance, the many stories told about them.

An adult male sperm whale has washed up, dead, on a beach on the Norfolk coast, and we’re following the clean-up effort on TV and the radio and the internet. People are worried that the build-up of gas inside the decomposing whale carcass may cause it to explode. Onlookers have been moved back to a safe distance.

Our sons are gripped by the unfolding drama.

We tell our sons about the long relationship between people and whales – about the whaling industry, and the historical uses of baleen and blubber and ambergris and whalebone. We tell them about the hunting of minke whales and pilot whales and bowhead whales and fin whales and sei whales and humpback whales and grey whales and so on. We tell them the stories of Jonah and the whale, and Moby Dick, and what we can remember of the plot of the film Orca the Killer Whale, and about the whale that got lost and swam up the Thames in 2006.

‘Did you see the whale?’ our sons ask, excitedly.

‘Well no,’ we say, ‘we were out of the country at the time, but –’

‘What happened to the whale?’ our sons ask. ‘Was it rescued?’

We explain to our sons that, despite the best efforts of various organisations to save it, the Thames whale died two days after it was first spotted, from convulsions caused by dehydration and kidney failure. Everyone was very sad, we say. People had taken to calling the whale ‘Diana’. It was one of those moments when the whole nation comes together.

‘Except you, because you were out of the country,’ our sons say.

‘Well that’s true, yes,’ we admit.

On the TV, scientists and whale removal experts and members of the local council are reviewing their options. Dynamite is considered. Or burial. Apparently the smell is becoming unbearable. Luckily it’s winter, so the tourist trade hasn’t been too adversely affected. Nobody knows what caused the whale to wash up here – whether it was illness or a wrong turn or just old age.

‘Maybe he was murdered,’ our sons say. ‘Maybe sharks did it, or other whales. Maybe he had it coming. Maybe he was a bad whale.’

Eventually the experts decide to load the whale onto the back of an eighteen-wheel lorry. It takes two days to lay the temporary metal road across the beach, twelve hours to roll the corpse of the whale onto a cradle, hoist it up onto the trailer, tie it down under yards of tarpaulin and plastic sheeting.

Then, under cover of night, a police escort leads the lorry and its stinking cargo through the dark lanes of East Anglia.

At an undisclosed location, the television reports tell us, tissue samples will be taken and the whale will be cut up and incinerated.

And we will be left to explain to our sons what the whole thing means.

Grandfathers

We’re teaching our sons about their grandfathers.

Their silent, phlegmatic grandfathers who have survived wars and fifty-year marriages. Their grandfathers who are spending their retirement building model worlds out of balsa wood, plastic and flock.

We go round to see the grandfathers. We give the secret password. The loft hatch opens and a ladder is lowered. We usher our sons up the ladder, up into the darkness.

The grandfathers have been working up here for the last five years, tunnelling further back into the eaves, back into their own pasts.

At first they managed to maintain their relationships with their wives by coming down for meals and at bedtimes. They still mowed the lawn at weekends. Interacted with neighbours. Read the paper in the evening.

Then they built a system of pulleys that meant they could have their food sent up to them, so they could eat while they worked. The lawn grew wild. Social occasions were missed. Eighteen months ago they started sleeping among the miles of miniature railway track, the half-finished buildings, the replica suspension bridges and goods yards. Waking up to find the trains had been running all night, the endless tiny whirr and clatter rattling through their dreams.

The grandmothers, with their own interesting lives to lead, barely notice their husbands’ absence any more.

Fairy lights run the length of the roof, hanging above the miniature town like stars. Below, a single evening in the lives of the grandfathers is perfectly recreated in OO scale. The trolley buses. Posters outside the old cinema. People leaving work. A dark swell on the surface of the water in the harbour.

The families of the grandfathers, everything they own packed in suitcases, waiting at the station.

And the grandfathers themselves, as boys, searching desperately through the streets for their own silent, unknowable fathers.

We tell our sons not to touch anything, even as they grab for a small model dog and accidentally sideswipe an entire bus queue with their sleeve. The youngest knocks over a crane and causes a minor disaster down at the docks. The older boys attempt to engineer horrific train crashes.

The grandfathers set about them, us, with their belts. Chase us, yelling, from the loft.

‘We forgive you!’ we scream, as the grandfathers pursue us down the street.

Women

We’re teaching our sons about women.

What they mean. Where they come from. Where they’re headed, as individuals and as a gender.

We remind our sons that their mothers are women, that their cousins are women, that their aunts are women, that their grandmothers are women. The mothers of our sons confirm their status. They’re intrigued to know where we’re going with this.

We take our sons to art galleries and museums where they can look at women as they have been depicted for hundreds of years.

In the art galleries the security guards eye us warily, watch to make sure our sons don’t go too near the valuable paintings and sculptures. There is a security guard in every room, sitting in a chair, keeping an eye on the art. The security guards are all different ages and sizes and shapes. At least half of them are women. There are arty young women and middle-aged women with glasses and older women with severe, asymmetrical haircuts.

Our sons stand in front of the works of art, under the watchful eyes of the security guards. In the works of art young women in various states of undress alternately have mostly unwanted sexual experiences or recline on and/or against things. They recline on and/or against sofas and mantelpieces and beds and picnic blankets and tombs and marble steps and piles of furs and ornamental pillars and horses and cattle. Some of the women are giant-sized. They sprawl across entire rooms in the museum. Their naked breasts and hips loom over our sons like thunder clouds.

‘Is that what all women look like with no clothes on?’ our sons ask us, nervously.

‘Some of them,’ we say, nodding, relying on our extensive experience. ‘Not all.’

Our sons gaze up at the giant women, awed. They sneak glances at the women security guards, try to make sense of it all.

‘What do women want?’ our sons ask.

We notice the women security guards looking at us with interest. We consider our words carefully.

‘Maybe the same as the rest of us?’ we say.

The women security guards are still staring at us.

‘Somewhere to live,’ we add. ‘A sense of purpose. Food. Dignity, most likely.’

‘What about adventure?’ our sons ask. ‘What about fast cars? What about romance?’

We look over at the women security guards, hoping for a sign.

We’re not getting out of this one that easily.

Money

We’re teaching our sons about money.

We’re teaching them that money is the most important thing there is. We’re teaching them that they can never have enough money, that their enemies can never have too little. We’re teaching them that money has an intrinsic worth beyond the things that it can buy, that money is a measure of their worth as men.

Alternatively, we’re teaching our sons that money is an illusion. That it doesn’t matter at all. That, most of the time, it doesn’t even exist.

‘Look at the financial industry,’ we tell them. ‘Look at derivatives. Look at credit default swaps. Look at infinite rehypothecation.’

Our sons nod at us, blankly. They’re not old enough for any of this. What were we thinking?

Together with our sons we go on the run, hiding out in a series of anonymous motels. The receptionists accept our false names without asking any questions. At three in the morning we peer out through the blinds or the heavy curtains, look for the lights of police cars out in the rain while our sons sleep.

‘Who’s out there?’ our sons ask in their sleep. ‘What do they want?’

We can’t remember the last time we slept in our own beds, cooked a meal in our own kitchens. The mothers of our sons have indulged this nonsense for far too long.

Most importantly, we’re teaching our sons how to make money. We’re putting them to work as paper boys, as child actors, as tiny bodyguards. We’re turning them into musical prodigies, poets and prize-winning authors. We’re getting them to write memoirs of their troubled upbringings. We’re using them to make false insurance claims. We’re training them to throw themselves in front of cars and fake serious injuries.