I asked my friend Clyde.
“No she is not,”
is how Clyde replied.
“She’s got flippers and whiskers
and eats fish all day.
I do not think llamas
act quite in that way.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’m beginning to feel
that your mama must
really be a…”
[Reader pauses here to let young children give the correct answer.]
Daniel shouts out excitedly:…”phoque”.
Truly, this linguistic regime creates difficulties for the unwary.
This is what the children shout when they travel alone in the lift in our building. Why is that?
The boys also say “big stop” while chasing each other round the house with a magic wand (Daniel) and a piece of the supporting architecture of the Fisher Price garage (Michael). They appear to be holding these items as though they were guns. Obviously, they haven’t got toy guns. Are we or are we not fully paid up members of the middle classes? Though I have fond memories of my own toy gun with caps for extra loud bangs. I digress.
In the creche they told me that Michael made a little girl cry by trying to knife her in the back (with a plastic knife) saying “je vais te tuer”. Wouldn’t you cry? “Je vais te tuer” is a very popular expression with the boys at the moment. Where did they get it? I know that the knifing in the back comes from Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, they are very taken with that and constantly re-enact it with one of them chasing the other round the house with whatever implement comes to hand. I keep telling them that Gaston is a baddy but they don’t seem to care. Sigh.
They are, however, all talk and no action as can be seen from their interaction with a dangerous cat earlier today (well, given that it was dark in there you might not be able to see the cat’s utter indifference but you can certainly hear the boys’ terror when it turns its head to see what the noise is).
The other day, I was wearing what I thought was a perfectly respectable top to go to work. Daniel stuck his hand down the front of it and, poking at a breast, said, “what’s that?†“It’s my breast,†I said. “This is Daniel breast†he said hoisting up his pyjama top.
I suppose Angela Merkel must have felt the same way after her recent trip to Norway where she stunned the world by wearing this. I am indebted to the Irish Times for the information that Ms. Merkel was “surprised but not unflattered that, considering important themes like energy, security aand the Afghanistan mission, the world had nothin better to report on than the ‘new arrangement of the Chancellor’s inventory'”.
Language
The boys are talking a lot. Daniel will say “Mama say ‘mountain’, Daddy say ‘montagne’. Michael is not as able at distinguishing languages. They both, however, mix up English and French and, as yet, show no real ability to unmix them. Although, funnily enough, in the creche which is entirely francophone, I am told that they only speak French. Over the past couple of weeks I have been collecting some linguistic infelicities:
Bicycle like Michael aussi;
Petit boy;
Moi, je comb the hair;
Moi, je geddit;
Belle, reading son book;
Mange avec spoon et fork;
C’est my!
Help you me;
Where un autre spoon?
[Describing those chasing the little gingerbread man] mechant fox, vache, horsey;
Moi, je puttai it;
un, deux, trois, jump;
moi, je go a la creche;
Moi, j’ai not stuck;
La baguette est broken;
Can I have ça ?
Moi, je goé à la supermarket;
Turnez OFF the light!
C’est MY de l’eau!
Poor Daniel is not enjoying the creche at the moment and, every time we sit into the car he says “pas creche” or, in English “creche, no thank you” (see, my efforts on please and thank you are not wasted). He also likes to point out everyone who is wearing glasses: “glasses, like me” he says.
Eating
Michael appears to be ambidextrous. He can take a spoon in each hand and eat perfectly competently from each in turn. He doesn’t often choose to do this as, in his quest to drive his father over the edge, he has, largely, abandoned eating solid food. We are told that, at the creche they go to eat separately and, when they return, each looks for the other to give a quick kiss before going about his business.
Odd little habits
They both totter when they first wake up. I love to see them walking jerkily but determinedly along the corridor to see what excitement is available at the breakfast table.
Daniel yells as loudly as his mother; that’s pretty loud.
They are both extremely keen that we should all sit in the same chairs when we sit at the table and woe betide any parent or child who sits in the wrong chair.
It’s harder than you might think to string this information together coherently. Did you notice?
The other morning, Michael had a nosebleed. I’m not sure why though I can imagine several explanations. He wiped blood all over his face and clothes. While I had my back turned Daniel fell or was pushed and cut his lip and bled freely over his chin and onto his t-shirt. Then the child minder arrived; it’s hard not to be defensive in these circumstances.
Since Daniel acquired glasses, we have been spending a lot of time and money in the opticians. I’m glad it’s a nice one near home. Mostly we are served by the owner’s daughter, an efficient pleasant woman about my age. The other night, I went in to get Daniel’s glasses repaired (he and Michael had tugged them apart at the creche, it’s nice to think of them having fun) and her father was there. He was dealing with some other people and I settled down to wait, conscious all the same that Mr. Waffle was at home with three cranky children who needed dinner and bed. Finally, it was my turn.
Me: Hello, I wonder could you fix these glasses, I think you have a file on us.
Him: That’s not a Belgian accent.
Me: Er, no, it’s not, I’m from Ireland.
Him (heavily accented): Ireland, Ireland, then we can speak English.
Me (proferring deformed glasses): Mmm. Yes, if you like.
Him: Do you know Hertfordshire?
Me: Um, no, never been, I’m afraid.
Him: My father was in England during the war.
Me: The first world war?
Him (misunderstanding, I think): How old do you think I am?
Me: Um, the second world war?
Him (at cross-purposes): He died in the war.
Me: I’m sorry to hear that. In England?
Him (baffled): No, he was in England in the first world war; when he was 13.
Me (not wanting to be unsympathetic but feeling we are getting nowhere and also conscious of my loving husband and children, home alone): I see, well, I wonder, have you got a file on us?
Him (not to be deterred): He learnt to be an optician and then set up in Dendermonde when he came back.
Me: Oh Dendermonde.
Him: No, in England.
Me: Yes, I see.
Him: He died in the second world war.
Me: I’m very sorry to hear it.
Him: Yes, I was only 10.
Me (mind reprehensibly fixed on the glasses): That must have been very difficult for you.
Him: Yes, he was betrayed.
Me (surprised): By whom?
Him: He joined the résistance straight away immediately and he was betrayed by [not clear, some local perhaps]. They ask me why I do not live in Dendermonde but I know they are traitors and I can smell corruption and racism. Though, his daughter [I think the daughter of the man who betrayed his father] is a very nice woman.
Me (genuinely interested and having put the glasses to the back of my mind): How did your father die?
Him (producing formal black bordered mortuary card showing a handsome midddle-aged man): My father was taken away by the Germans and died of typhus in the camps in March 1945. I went to see him once in prison in Ghent before he was taken away. It was a hard time, the English were very good to us, an English Major and his daughter, she is an old woman now, June, but she is godmother to my daughter.
Pause.
Him: I think we’ll have to send those glasses away to be fixed.
I forget how much these things are just below the surface in Belgium where two world wars were fought. Coming from a country that was neutral in the second world war and where (aside from Northern Ireland which is a long way from Cork and, after all, another country), the last major conflict occurred over 80 years ago, I have never, in living memory, lost a relative except to illness, accident or old age. Sometimes I forget how very fortunate that makes me.