shoots, on home visits, on our window-cleaning rounds. They’re helping us to study the births and deaths of volcanic islands, to collect unpaid gambling debts, to project-manage billion-pound IT infrastructure transformation programmes.
Other children, we remind our sons, would be excited to see where their fathers work, what they do for a living.
We’re teaching our sons that it’s important to have a vocation. And that even if you don’t have a vocation you still have to turn up every day and pretend you care. We’re teaching our sons about compromise. We’re teaching them how to skive, how to slack off, how to take credit for other people’s work. We’re teaching them how to negotiate pay rises and how to have office affairs.
We tell our sons the stories of our many office affairs, back in the good old, bad old days.
We tell them about our affair with beautiful Stephanie from reception, and the magnificent sunset in Paris, and the helicopter ride, and the horrible accident. We tell them about our affair with Cathy the kickboxing champion, and how it ended with a spectacular roundhouse kick to our head. The gay dads tell the stories of their affairs with Steve and Mark and Sunny and John and David and Disco Clive and the two Andrews. The mothers of our sons, overhearing, start to tell stories of their own wild workplace affairs, their own crazy and dangerous pasts, which makes us all a bit nervous.
We go on for a while, until our sons start to wander off.
They’re convinced they’re going to be film stars and astronauts and famous comic book artists. They’re not interested in all the ways we managed to screw up our stupid lives.
We’re teaching our sons about whales.
Their habits and habitats, their evolutionary history, their cultural and economic relevance, the many stories told about them.
An adult male sperm whale has washed up, dead, on a beach on the Norfolk coast, and we’re following the clean-up effort on TV and the radio and the internet. People are worried that the build-up of gas inside the decomposing whale carcass may cause it to explode. Onlookers have been moved back to a safe distance.
Our sons are gripped by the unfolding drama.
We tell our sons about the long relationship between people and whales – about the whaling industry, and the historical uses of baleen and blubber and ambergris and whalebone. We tell them about the hunting of minke whales and pilot whales and bowhead whales and fin whales and sei whales and humpback whales and grey whales and so on. We tell them the stories of Jonah and the whale, and Moby Dick, and what we can remember of the plot of the film Orca the Killer Whale, and about the whale that got lost and swam up the Thames in 2006.
‘Did you see the whale?’ our sons ask, excitedly.
‘Well no,’ we say, ‘we were out of the country at the time, but –’
‘What happened to the whale?’ our sons ask. ‘Was it rescued?’
We explain to our sons that, despite the best efforts of various organisations to save it, the Thames whale died two days after it was first spotted, from convulsions caused by dehydration and kidney failure. Everyone was very sad, we say. People had taken to calling the whale ‘Diana’. It was one of those moments when the whole nation comes together.
‘Except you, because you were out of the country,’ our sons say.
‘Well that’s true, yes,’ we admit.
On the TV, scientists and whale removal experts and members of the local council are reviewing their options. Dynamite is considered. Or burial. Apparently the smell is becoming unbearable. Luckily it’s winter, so the tourist trade hasn’t been too adversely affected. Nobody knows what caused the whale to wash up here – whether it was illness or a wrong turn or just old age.
‘Maybe he was murdered,’ our sons say. ‘Maybe sharks did it, or other whales. Maybe he had it coming. Maybe he was a bad whale.’
Eventually the experts decide to load the whale onto the back of an eighteen-wheel lorry. It takes two days to lay the temporary metal road across the beach, twelve hours to roll the corpse of the whale onto a cradle, hoist it up onto the trailer, tie it down under yards of tarpaulin and plastic sheeting.
Then, under cover of night, a police escort leads the lorry and its stinking cargo through the dark lanes of East Anglia.
At an undisclosed location, the television reports tell us, tissue samples will be taken and the whale will be cut up and incinerated.
And we will be left to explain to our sons what the whole thing means.
We’re teaching our sons about their grandfathers.
Their silent, phlegmatic grandfathers who have survived wars and fifty-year marriages. Their grandfathers who are spending their retirement building model worlds out of balsa wood, plastic and flock.
We go round to see the grandfathers. We give the secret password. The loft hatch opens and a ladder is lowered. We usher our sons up the ladder, up into the darkness.
The grandfathers have been working up here for the last five years, tunnelling further back into the eaves, back into their own pasts.
At first they managed to maintain their relationships with their wives by coming down for meals and at bedtimes. They still mowed the lawn at weekends. Interacted with neighbours. Read the paper in the evening.
Then they built a system of pulleys that meant they could have their food sent up to them, so they could eat while they worked. The lawn grew wild. Social occasions were missed. Eighteen months ago they started sleeping among the miles of miniature railway track, the half-finished buildings, the replica suspension bridges and goods yards. Waking up to find the trains had been running all night, the endless tiny whirr and clatter rattling through their dreams.
The grandmothers, with their own interesting lives to lead, barely notice their husbands’ absence any more.
Fairy lights run the length of the roof, hanging above the miniature town like stars. Below, a single evening in the lives of the grandfathers is perfectly recreated in OO scale. The trolley buses. Posters outside the old cinema. People leaving work. A dark swell on the surface of the water in the harbour.
The families of the grandfathers, everything they own packed in suitcases, waiting at the station.
And the grandfathers themselves, as boys, searching desperately through the streets for their own silent, unknowable fathers.
We tell our sons not to touch anything, even as they grab for a small model dog and accidentally sideswipe an entire bus queue with their sleeve. The youngest knocks over a crane and causes a minor disaster down at the docks. The older boys attempt to engineer horrific train crashes.
The grandfathers set about them, us, with their belts. Chase us, yelling, from the loft.
‘We
