Low life
When we were very young
Jeffrey Bernard
Irecently heard somewhere that preg- nant women who are addicted to a soap opera such as Neighbours produce babies that will stop crying when they hear the signature tune of the said soap. I would like to be able to claim that my own daughter stopped crying when she heard the Ring cycle some years ago but her mother and I were never very much into Wagner. It is true that her screams were turned into gurgles by the sound of a Mozart piano concerto and that her gri- maces changed to cherubic smiles on hear- ing the opening bars of a Schubert im- promptu but the Ring never. That would have meant that she would have cried for about three days before all those notes sank in.
Of course the easiest way to stop a baby crying is to put something in its mouth. This method can go on working for 60 years. But I knew a baby once (he is now 28 and still a baby) who stopped crying when he heard the noise of ice tinkling in a glass. It spoke volumes for his mother and she is still spoiling whisky with ice. I can't remember being a baby myself but it must have been awful. Uncomfortable anyway if the time I peed myself at Royal Ascot is anything to go by. How do they live with it day after day? Anyway, what I can remem- ber is the first piece of music I ever heard. Whether it stopped me or started me crying I don't know but I do know it was the Rienzi Overture. I used to conduct it standing up in my play-pen.
But if being a baby were pleasant then surely one would remember the experi- ence. As it is I can only remember two incidents before I was seven. There have also been subsequent lapses. What does amaze me though on reflection is that I was once told that I was a jolly baby and laughed quite a lot. Well, considering the fact that I haven't even smiled since Teenoso won the Derby I doubt it. Mind you, I had a tremendously nice nanny. A proper one equipped with hoops, kites and boats to sail in the Round Pond in Kensing- ton Gardens or wherever and not one of these disgusting present-day big-tits-from- Sweden jobs. I don't know what she played to make me stop crying but I know who made me start to cry and that was my mother. Do you know she had me evacu- ated with indecent haste in 1936, not even waiting for Hitler to invade Poland? In- credible. Was she giving me a hint?
It was also just before the war that she farmed me out for a few weeks to a school in Oxshott run by a woman called Mrs Haines. I remember her distinctly because I spent a lot of time attempting to look up her skirt. Now, although I wasn't quite a baby at the time, I was about six, what strange instinct is it that could have con- vinced a six-year-old that there might be anything of the slightest interest whatsoev- er up a lady's skirt? It might, I suppose, have been the result of listening to too much Wagner in the cot and perhaps babies should be left to cry their little hearts out. At least it keeps the burglars away.
But, oh dear, isn't it bliss not to be a baby any more and to be getting older and older by the minute? One doesn't have quite the same sense of urgency as a baby has. This morning it took me half an hour to get my trousers on. I didn't mind, I didn't cry, I've got all day. And where there was once nappy rash there is now indifference. But it isn't just being a baby that must be awful. Look at what they do to women. They drive them out of their minds. They must. If you spent day after day saying nothing but, 'Who's a pretty boy then?' to a baby without getting much in the way of a response then you would be bound to go mad after a while. A bit like being a parrot really.
And, of course, bringing up baby blinds a woman to her children's faults. I know women who have yobs and yobettes for sons and daughters but they can't for the life of them see it. There is a chap who comes into the pub whose nappies I used to change some 30 years ago. My God he was a mess. How it was that my shaking hands never stuck the safety-pin into his stomach was a miracle but he still stops crying when I give him a drink. I think of those steaming nappy changes now whenever I see him trying to chat up a girl and ask myself, so what else is new? He's just a bit bigger now, that's all.
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