LITMIR.BIZ

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kept under a flowerpot. And then I’d follow him inside, my nostrils suddenly accosted by the chlorophyll funk of tomato plants. I could just about manage one of the smaller watering cans, so he could make that one of my ‘jobs’.

      Outside, John is banging in those wooden posts. He’ll use them to stretch a taut string down the line of carrots and then tie on the ‘bird scarers’. These are rectangles of coloured foil that flutter in the wind as if we are growing a patch of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets.

      There’s not much ‘helping’ I can do here, so John takes a hoe and – a little optimistically – tries to show me how to break up the soil in a nearby bit of the garden. He hands me the massive wooden pole with a slab of rusting iron on the end and gets back to his work. I wield the hoe with the panache of Fred Astaire dancing with his cane. Except in this case, Fred’s lost his cane and his friend Mike, who is a professional pole-vaulter, has lent Fred his vaulting pole and Fred is trying to twirl and spring around with that instead. On his return, John watches my efforts for an amused moment and then says, ‘Yeh, y’getting in your own way, mate.’ He takes the hoe as if it’s made of polystyrene and expertly turns the soil, slashing weeds and flicking unwanted stones onto the gravel path with all the untroubled grace of Zorro using a bullwhip to extinguish a candle at twenty paces.

      He’s a kindly grandparent, my Dada, but not exactly a born teacher. I watch the display of manly competence and feel my infant pride being gently compressed into a pancake.

      Back in the kitchen, Nan lets me run a finger around the bowl of the delicious scone mix that she’s just made, and Auntie Trudy supplies me with a ham sandwich the way I like it – quartered diagonally with the crusts cut off. I take the sandwich, hoping that John won’t notice the absent crusts. He is a strong advocate of what seems to be the male consensus that the crusts on sandwiches are ‘the best bit’, as is the fat on ham, the rind on bacon, the runny surface of a fried egg, the stalk of any vegetable and the skins on sausages. All of this is ‘the best bit’, a view which I think insane but I’m clearly in the minority.

      Tru: Were you helping Dada?

      Me: (Nods)

      John: Ooh, he was ’elping all right! He was ’elping me like mad! (Winks at me)

      Tru: I bet he was!

      John: Every time I turned round, there was Rob, ’elping his head off!

      Nan: Course he was, a big strong lad like him!

      John checks his watch and moves to the oven, taking one of the vast beef joints out and setting it on the table. The meat crackles in its juices at my eye level. He takes his bone-handled carving knife in one hand and a sharpening steel in the other, and flashes the blade against the steel with scarcely credible speed and power. I eat my sandwich, watching.

      Outside, I play on my own whenever I can, which is almost always. Mark and Andrew are so much older and they do their own thing. To me, this seems to consist mainly of going to Jubilee Park with their friends in order to fall out of trees. I can hardly picture my brothers from those days without one of them with his arm in plaster.

      I take a more cautious approach to the outdoor life and I don’t do it with other children. Unless, of course, you count the Guy-Buys. The Guy-Buys are my imaginary gang of friends. I am the Captain of the Guy-Buys, obviously, and they are my twelve – yes, twelve, like the apostles – men.

      One day, my wife will put this together with what she knows of my sexual history and come up with one of her favourite ways of taking the piss.

      ‘What were they called again, your imaginary friends? The Gay Boys?’

      ‘The Guy-Buys.’

      ‘The Gaybo’s?’

      ‘The Guy-Buys.’

      ‘Not the Bi Guys.’

      ‘No, dear. Not the Bi Guys, the Guy-Buys.’

      Let me tell you, there is nothing gay about the Guy-Buys. If there were girls in the Guy-Buys, that would be different and, indeed, gay. If I understand two things about masculinity at the age of seven, it is a) the Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia, and b) the Paramount Objective of Despising Girls. Nobody wants to be a gay and only gays play with girls – this much has been made clear. As I hold the door open for the Guy-Buys and count them into the kitchen, I remind them that to play with girls would be lunacy.

      Generally, we go around on our bikes, fighting crime. Actually, I go around on my toy tractor with pedals or, for a while, on an apple box which I’ve tried Sellotaping to Andrew’s skateboard. But basically, we range around the whole of the Golf Club, acting out scenarios from TV shows. Sometimes I’m Zorro, sometimes one of the wisecracking traffic cops from CHiPs, and always heavily armed with a selection of my favourite plastic swords and guns.

      Of course, like Steve Austin and Buck Rogers, I am also an expert in karate. I get used to the quizzical looks on the faces of golfers as they walk by observing the seven-year-old kicking and chopping the teeth out of some invisible villain. Occasionally a golfer will mime a quick-draw and say something inscrutable about ‘Buffalo Bill’ and chuckle to himself. I just stare back, waiting for him to go away.

      *

      Spend any amount of time with middle-class, liberal parents (and, speaking as a middle-class, liberal parent, I find these cunts impossible to avoid) and sooner or later you’ll find yourself talking about gendered play. You’ll hear a version of the following . . .

      ‘I mean, we gave India a Star Destroyer for her birthday but she just dressed it in a nightie and put it to bed,’ or ‘I mean, we tried to get Huckleberry to play with a couple of dolls but he just tied them together with string and turned them into Nunchucks.’

      Some people can’t get enough of stories like these. Imagine trying to get a girl to play with a spaceship! A-hahahahaha! See how fashionable liberal attitudes get slammed face-first into a wall of timeless biological reality! It’s PC gone mad! A-hahahaha!

Actually, it’s timeless biological reality gone mad. In children, it’s about as easy to find conclusive evidence of a ‘male brain’ or ‘female brain’ as it is to find conclusive evidence of an immortal soul. As imaging technology improves, it becomes clearer not only that every brain is unique, but that they simply do not neatly divide into two groups based on sex.² I’m only citing one study here – and in general you’re not going to find this book very ‘citey’. Other people have covered this ground much better than I could – what with being scientists – and so this would be a good moment to recommend Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. But the point stands: if Huckleberry doesn’t like the colour pink, he wasn’t born with that idea in his head – somebody put it there.³

      In the above-mentioned Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine cites a study from 2000 in which . . .

Mothers were shown an adjustable sloping walkway, and asked to estimate the steepness of the slope their crawling eleven-month-old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither their crawling ability nor risk-taking when it came to testing them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and overestimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts.⁴

      I’m sure that most of those mothers would be horrified to hear that their gender assumptions had leaked into their behaviour like that – but, to put it mildly, there’s a lot of it about. Other studies have shown that when parents place birth announcements in newspapers, they are more likely to express ‘pride’ if it’s a boy and ‘happiness’ if it’s a girl. Indeed, if it’s a girl, they are marginally less likely to make the announcement at all. Going even further back along the timeline of a child, research has found that parents look forward to having their baby for gendered reasons

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