Brits and Kids and Queues

In case you're wondering, that's me in the picture, back in 1986, about 6 or 7 months pregnant. We were filming my TV drama, Shadow of the Stone, on the Clyde, and you can see my 'bump'. You can still watch the serial as well, but that's a story for another day.

I was reminded of this when I recently followed a thread on Mumsnet. Some unfortunate mum had been queueing to check in for a flight, with a three month old baby, and mistakenly thought she could jump the queue. Not only did she get dog's abuse from other people, but the vast majority of mumsnetters agreed with the abusers, vociferously.

Following some of the thread (not much - I couldn't stand the holier-than-thou tone of it), I found myself thinking 'Brits and kids and queues. Nothing changes.'

When our son was born in November of that same year, my husband was still working as a yacht skipper, first on a beautiful catamaran called Simba and then on a couple of other big yachts: Clyde boats, mostly based in the Canaries. The baby, all grown up now, loves Spain, working in Barcelona for several years and revisiting it as often as he can. He speaks fairly fluent Spanish too. It's quite uncanny.

I had a harrowing time during his birth in Scotland, and felt ill for a long time afterwards. My chief memory of that time is pain and fatigue, combined with the joy of the new baby. And breastfeeding, successfully, but also being told that if I wanted to 'do that', maybe I would like to do it in the Ladies. Would you like to have your lunch in the loo? 

When our son was six weeks old, we flew south to Los Cristianos on Tenerife. We borrowed an apartment from friends, Alan was intermittently skippering charter yachts, and both my parents and Alan's mum flew down to spend time with me, and help out with the baby. All in all, it was a blissfully happy time. 

On board Simba

One of the main reasons why it was so blissfully happy was the genuine affection that the Canarians had for babies and children. On our first night, we took the baby in his pram down to a local restaurant It was a warm night - by Scottish standards, anyway - so we took an outside table and sat down. The proprietor came rushing out - 'no, no - you can't keep the bebe out here in the cold!' Inside, she rushed about moving tables so that we could enjoy our meal with the baby contentedly slumbering beside us. 

Over the months that followed, we realised just how relaxing it can be to have a child in a child-friendly country. Babies were welcome everywhere. I fed him everywhere too. You could leave the pram outside a supermercado while you did some shopping and come out to find a small group of teenage boys, intent on amusing the little nino. My parents decided that we needed a baby bath, and described how a kindly man in the hardware store had insisted on practically emptying his loft to get exactly the right bath (in his opinion) for them. Everyone from young, handsome waiters to elderly ladies in black played with the baby, distracted him if he seemed fractious, and generally made everything so much easier than it might have been. 

A few years later, back in the UK, a young Catalan friend came to stay with us to improve his English, and was incandescent with rage at a sign outside a restaurant saying 'children welcome'! 'But are children not welcome everywhere?' he demanded. 'Why not?'

I thought the UK might have changed for the better over the years. In this one respect anyway, because everything else seems to have got so much worse. And it's true that - for example - in Scotland, it is an offence to try to stop a mother from breastfeeding in public. 

But oh, those Mumsnet comments! 

God help you if you're in the UK and you try to jump the queue with a baby. 

Alan, his mum, and the baby at Candelaria

            

Just a Little Ukrainian Boy, Weeping.

 

It was a few days ago. I was scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, I can't even remember which, before going to bed. Thinking that I must stop, because the more I see and read about Ukraine the less I sleep. 

The feeling of helplessness in the face of monstrous events is dreadful. Yesterday, an elderly lady in our local Co-op stopped me just to express her horror and indignation. Not anyone I knew. She just had to speak to someone about it. We stood amid the cereals and packets of tea, trying to comfort each other.

But it was the short video of the little boy that made me cry.

There he was, walking along a road - towards Poland? Another country? He couldn't have been more than ten years old. He had a good warm jacket on - a jacket that looked nice and new. Bought for winter, probably. He had his little backpack, the kind kids take to school. He was carrying something in his hand - a phone? Passport? He was trudging along with dogged persistence, an exhausted little boy who knew that he had to keep going because there were monsters behind him. 

And he was crying his eyes out. Real, terrible, anguished tears.

Questions flooded my mind. As, I'm sure, they did for any other human being who saw him. Was he really alone? Where was his mother? Had he lost his family? Were they just ahead or behind him? Who was filming? Who comforted him, hugged him, tried to make it a little bit better? What happened to him? Where is he now?

It has haunted me ever since. I keep thinking of all the children who had just had Christmas. Who were going to school, playing games, enjoying the ordinary pursuits of childhood in ordinary homes, looking forward to spring. 

For the past three years or so, I've been researching a new book, about my family's own sad history in Eastern Europe. And there too were so many stories of displacement, unspeakable cruelties inflicted on the innocent at the behest of evil men. The fact that most such evil men face a terrible reckoning  - as they almost always do - is no comfort at present. 

All I can think about is that little lad, trudging along, crying his eyes out.