What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth

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and collecting and quantifying things, about putting stuff in order. Classic albums. Sightings of migratory birds. Handmade Italian bicycles. Like our fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.

      All those unknowable, infinitely quantifiable fathers.

      Two of the steam enthusiasts are arguing with a customer who keeps letting his children stand up while the train is moving. Nobody wants to give ground. Eventually the customer leaves the park with his kids. He’s coming back, though, he tells us all. He’s going to sort this out.

      We imagine the stand-off between the gang of ageing steam enthusiasts and the angry posse that the dissatisfied customer has, we assume, gone to recruit. The fist-fights on top of the moving trains. The driver slumping over the accelerator, the train barely speeding up, the terrifyingly slow-motion derailment, the ridiculously minor injuries. The clean-up costs and the story in the local newspaper.

      ‘Can we go home and play video games now?’ our sons ask.

      We wonder, just for a second, how long it would take us to die if we threw ourselves in front of one of the trains. How many times we would need to be run over. How long we’d have to lie on the track. We imagine the confusion as the trains hit us again and again every few minutes, the slow realisation of what was happening, the spreading feeling of horror among the other passengers, the eventual screams.

      We don’t know whether we’d have the force of will, not to mention the patience, to wait it out.

       Sex

      We’re teaching our sons about sex.

      We’d rather not have to teach our sons about sex this soon, all things being equal. Our sons would probably rather not have to learn about sex from us right now. Possibly everyone would be a lot happier if the subject had never come up.

      But we have a responsibility, we tell them, as we follow the tracks together through the fresh morning snow. If they don’t learn it from us, they’re going to learn it from their school friends and all the pornography.

      The pornography is everywhere, waiting to ambush our sons. Possibly it’s already ambushed some of them. We don’t know how we’re supposed to respond to all the pornography. Obviously, we have fairly rudimentary responses to some of it. We’re not saints.

      But the sheer quantity, the scale, makes us feel dizzy.

      And old.

      ‘Well,’ say the dads among us who actually perform in pornographic films, ‘yes, but …’

      ‘Sorry,’ we say, ‘we didn’t mean to –’

      ‘No, no,’ they say, looking hurt, ‘don’t mind us trying to earn a living, trying to provide for our sons. It’s fine.’

      Obviously, it isn’t fine. But, come on, nobody forced them into the business.

      The divorced and separated and widowed dads among us, of course, have their own take on things. They’re back on the market, whether they want to be or not, after years out of circulation. They all have thousand-yard stares, like men who have been under shellfire.

      ‘It’s all different now,’ they tell us.

      We stop by a silver birch tree, its branches heavy with a month’s worth of snowfall.

      ‘Different how?’

      ‘Everyone has more choice than they know what to do with. More choice and more expectations. And less hair. Nobody is expected to have any hair anywhere any more.’

      We know about the hair. Everyone knows about the hair.

      ‘The hair thing has been going on for a while,’ we explain to our sons.

      We don’t know how we feel about the hair thing. These days, we realise, we tend to look at women’s bodies with a combination of nervousness and awe. Particularly the bodies of the mothers of our sons. We’ve seen what those bodies can do, what they can take. We’ve watched them carry and give birth to and nurture children.

      We try not to think of women’s bodies – and, in particular, the bodies of the mothers of our sons – as sexy warzones, sexy former battlefields, because it doesn’t seem all that respectful.

      But there we are.

      We wonder how useful any of this is going to be to the gay sons.

      ‘Oh, you have no idea,’ say the gay dads.

      But the snow has started falling again, muffling our voices, turning the world back to white, and we promised the mothers of our sons that we’d all be back in time for lunch.

       Plane Crashes

      We’re teaching our sons about plane crashes.

      We’re teaching them how plane crashes happen, how to avoid or survive being in one. We’re teaching them that plane crashes are incredibly rare, that the chances of experiencing a plane crash on a commercial airliner are approximately five million to one. We’re teaching our sons that, no matter what they’ve seen on the internet, flying is far safer than driving, than travelling by train, than riding a bicycle.

      Nevertheless, by the time the plane climbs to thirty-five thousand feet, we’ve already taken the emergency codeine we’ve been saving for exactly this sort of situation.

      We’ve seen those plane crash films on the internet. We know all about shoe bombs, and anti-aircraft missiles, and iced-up pitot tubes, and wind shear, and thunderstorms, and botched inspections, and pilot error. We know how easy it is to unzip the thin aluminium tube we’re sitting in; how much time we’d have to think about our fate as we fell through the frozen air, to think about the fate of our sons.

      Our sons aren’t scared of flying. They’re excited about being allowed to do nothing but watch inflight movies for six or seven hours. They point down at the glorious crimson cloud tops, at the ships on the sea, don’t even notice the bumps of random turbulence that cause us to clench our jaws.

      We don’t want to look out of the window.

      We tell our sons about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince, and who mysteriously disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission in an unarmed P-38 during the Second World War. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose father died before young Antoine’s fourth birthday.

      Our sons haven’t read The Little Prince, haven’t even heard of it.

      ‘What are they teaching you these days?’ we ask.

      Our sons put their headphones back on. We know what their teachers are teaching them. They’re teaching them to be better people.

      Come to think of it, we haven’t read The Little Prince either.

      We stay awake all night, listening for slight changes in the tone of the engines, for the sounds of structural failure in the airframe, for sudden announcements of catastrophe. We stare down at the lights of cities, watch for panic on the faces of the cabin crew.

      We keep pressing the call button to get the attention of the cabin crew.

      ‘There was a noise,’ we say.

      The cabin crew just smile, tell us everything is going to be okay, give us more complimentary drinks.

      Our sons, more used to living in the permanent present than we are, alternately sleep or watch cartoons, magnificently unaware of all the disasters that life has planned for them.

      The best we can do, we realise, is to keep their hearts from breaking for as long as possible.

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