R, R & M
There’s an old Oxfordshire saying quoted in Flora Thompson’s rural masterpiece, Lark Rise to Candleford, relating to the practical help you might get from boys at harvest time. A character observes that “one boy’s a boy, two boys is half a boy & three boys is no boy at all”.
The same principle of diminution in proportion to increase applies to the burgeoning family. Two children are manageable nearly all of the time. When illness, tantrum or disappearance in the crowded supermarket occur, one parent responds to the crisis while the other looks after the remaining child.
However, the arrival of a third child throws the symmetry & logic into complete disarray. However compliant the baby might be (& Maisie is, pretty much), the incursion of one might as well be an incursion of thirty. In fact, at 2.00 AM this morning, with Maisie & Rosie both in full cry & Reuben rising ever closer to the surface of his dead-log slumber, it occurred to me that we might as well have named dear Maisie Legion for she is indeed many!
The labour is ceaseless. We’ve burnt out one spin dryer already in Maisie’s brief 5 months & the washing machine is clearly working up towards some sort of intestinal crisis. There is no such phenomenon as a flat surface anywhere in any room on the ground floor. The stairs & landing are clogged with refugee-size bags full of washed clothing & all cupboards & wardrobes have long since closed doors against the arrival of more. In Reuben & Rosie’s room a serpentine wooden railway carries Thomas the Tank Engine & his friends up the mountainsides of permanently unmade beds, through ravines of chewed & fretted books & into a pair of Wellington boot engine sheds. Suggestions that it might be time to rationalise the rail system are met with the kind of moral outrage that might greet the proposal to flood a three-village valley for a new reservoir.
But, just as despair begins to bite, a child will climb onto a lap & fall asleep in a thumb-sucking coil, or some long-entertained anxiety about his or her appropriate development will be dispelled in a brief moment of sudden evolution. And it has grudgingly to be admitted that the Readers’ Digest is not wrong & kids do indeed say the cutest things. Rosie draped herself across Emma's knees last week & said in the small, desolate voice that she uses for moments of personal distress, “I’ve had three tummy-aches in my toes today”. A little later it was time for bed & I asked Reuben to fetch his pyjamas so I could get him ready. “I’m not Reuben”, he said haughtily. “I’m a mad sausage”. All attempts to discover the provenance of the two utterances were confounded & after a while we happily lodged them in the dreamtime world of the child emerging into language & prepared for more.
