How Not To Be a Boy - Robert Webb

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woman who’s certainly clever, but not clever enough to avoid getting knocked up before finishing her A levels, bless her. For Austen’s heroines to sign on to the dole was impossible; for Pat, socially unthinkable. She has always had a part-time job – as a school secretary, a hotel secretary, a bar-worker – but she’s just as likely to ‘retrain’ or ‘get a BTEC from Loughborough’ as Elizabeth Bennet is to split the atom. Lizzie can’t rely on the support of her parents because they are genteel but broke. Pat can’t expect long-term help from Nan and Dada because their gentility runs to an aspiring regard for the Daily Mail, but not to having any spare cash whatsoever. And Austen’s ladies won’t receive maintenance payments from their errant husbands to provide for their children. And neither will Pat. At least, not for a long time.

      Dad treats maintenance payments with the same baffled incredulity that his generation will soon adopt when told that wearing car seat belts is now the law. It’s as if he can’t believe the dumb literalism of it: what, every month? The full amount? On time? Seriously? He has to be threatened with a court appearance before he starts supporting his family with anything like the same rigour with which he previously buggered it up.

      So yes, we’ve come a long way: Mum concludes that she needs another husband. I’m not saying that’s the decision every woman in her position would have made, but it’s the one she made and I respect it.

      Anyway, she doesn’t have to find Mr Darcy. She just has to avoid another bloody Heathcliff.

      She’s down to her last two cards: her diffident charm and (it’s only an opinion but what son could say less?) considerable beauty. It’ll be enough.

      The helpless target is Derek Limb.

      They meet at a village ball at the Golf Hotel. He is not the only man offering to buy her a drink that evening, but he’s the one who looks sufficiently grateful and claims to own a racehorse, which is a start. Derek is not exactly Sacha Distel: eight years older than Mum, he has a colourless wart on his top lip and a paunch which presages a future rendezvous with Fat. Fat is coming for Derek, Fat will have its day. There again, Mum is on the pull and not wearing her glasses.

      More to the point, Derek is teetotal and mild. Winningly, there is nothing in his demeanour to suggest an interest in screwing other women or hitting children. For Mum, this makes him a veritable prince amongst men.

      It’s not so much a courtship as an Anschluss. She marches peacefully into Derek’s heart and plants a flag. Not the Nazi flag, you understand. I don’t know what Mum’s flag would be, but I imagine it would feature the singer Elkie Brooks holding a bottle of Gordon’s gin and looking whimsical. In any case, they marry.

      We all move into ‘the new house’, which is a three-bedroom bungalow in Coningsby, a village about ten minutes down the road from Woodhall but less leafy. On return from their honeymoon in the Lake District (the first time Derek has left Lincolnshire), we begin to learn more of Derek’s fascinating habits.

      He smokes forty Consulate menthol cigarettes a day and his (according to Derek, totally unrelated) ‘cough’ is treated by his ‘cough medicine’. The medicine comes in an endless series of large brown bottles from the chemist on a repeat prescription that Derek’s GP wrote shortly before he died. Derek self-medicates by up-ending the bottle into his mouth and counting to twenty.

      Once a week he buys himself half a pound of aniseed balls which he keeps loose in his trouser pockets, along with his small change and the keys to his glamorous ‘Pacer X’ American car which he can’t afford to drive very often because ‘it drinks petrol’. When he gets to the seed of an aniseed ball, he’s in the habit of taking it out and leaving it on any convenient surface. The only time he gets cross is if my brothers or I talk over the racing results when he’s trying to listen to them on the radio with the 5-mm aniseed nucleus stuck to the top of the Radio 2 knob. It’s fascinating to watch the speed and efficiency with which he can fill in those results on the racing page of the Daily Mirror.

      Derek has inherited an agricultural spare parts business from his late father. Essentially, he buys tractors and takes them to pieces. This would be a good business for someone who was there to do it but Derek is mainly not there. Derek is at the bookies’. He has a low-level gambling addiction which means that when ‘customers’ turn up, we know what number to call. I know the bookies’ phone number off by heart before I’m eight years old. A quarter of an hour later, the Pacer X makes its stately return: sometimes the customer is still there, sometimes he isn’t.

      In short, Mum has married another prize turkey. She’s swapped Darth Vader for Jabba the Hutt. That is, if you can imagine Jabba not so much as a dangerous gangster but more as a silly bugger picking his nose and watching Bullseye.

      The search for a likeable father figure goes on: a man who is gentle without being docile, dynamic without acting like a psychopath. I wonder to myself if such a man really exists.

      Well, there’s always Dada (pronounced ‘dar-dar’). This is Mum’s dad, John. He and Grace (Nana and Dada) are the steward and stewardess of the kitchen at Woodhall Spa Golf Club. Grace’s sister Trudy (Auntie Tru) works in the kitchen too. The three of them live in a little house which you get to from the kitchen by running across a field, although for some reason they prefer to walk (what is it with grown-ups and all this ‘walking’?).

      I stay with them every weekend and for about half of any school holiday. One day in the distant future, Derek will express disappointment that people in the village tell him my Wikipedia page says that I grew up in Woodhall Spa, when in fact I lived with him and Mum in Coningsby for fourteen years. I tell him truthfully that I don’t have anything to do with that page. What I don’t say is that this impression has certainly come from the answers I’ve given in interviews.

      ‘Where did you grow up?’

      ‘Woodhall Spa.’

      Dada is hammering a wooden stake into the earth and I blink with every strike. I’m going to use his name, John, from now on because ‘Dada’ is annoyingly close to ‘Dad’ and we can do without the confusion. John’s a big man in his early sixties, with grey hair kept neatly in check with a steel comb. His moustache is grey too, more bristly but somehow friendlier-looking than Dad’s. He has some extra weight these days, but carries it with the upright economy of a soldier, which is of course what he was. They all were. Trudy and Grace were in the ATS and the Wrens respectively (the women’s branches of the Army and Navy). The kitchen crosstalk is peppered with wartime idioms like ‘Ooh, stand by y’beds!’ or ‘Do we think it’s time for a NAAFI break?’

      I’m here because I’ve been encouraged by Nan and Tru to ‘go and help Dada with the greenhouses’. Since I’m not much taller than your average tomato plant or stronger than one of its stems, it’s not so much a matter of ‘helping’ as of ‘watching’. But I quite enjoy these trips to the greenhouses with John. On the way we have ‘slow bike races’ down the back lane, seeing who can go slowest on his bike without falling off. He never seems to be in much of a hurry and that’s the main thing I like about him – no sudden moves. Currently, I tend to win the slow bike race because my little red Raleigh still has stabilisers, although I’m perfectly capable of overbalancing and falling off anyway.

      As well as the kitchen steward, John is also one of the club gardeners. In my memory, the greenhouse itself is this vast glass menagerie of flowers and shrubs, roughly

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