SHOPPING AND DAD'S CHILDCARE SKILLS

Mum was always very protective of us when we were children. She was still very protective of us when we were grown up and could look after ourselves. I suppose that from the outside it must have looked like an improbable situation comedy from early 1970s television. You can imagine the scene;

"Be careful crossing the road, make sure that you wrap up warm and come straight home afterwards.”

“Mother!”

“What?”

“I’m forty-six years old.”

It’s so familiar that you might believe that you have actually seen it, but mum’s fear for our safety was probably due to what she had found out about our frequent weekend trips to Manchester with dad.

You have to understand mum’s attitude to Manchester. Mum had a vision of what a city should be, in her eyes a city was somewhere that was dark and dirty, a place that was crowded with unsavoury ‘city people’ who would cut your throat for a farthing.

For mum the big city was something to be avoided and its boundaries started somewhere just beyond the next village. So when dad wanted to go on a shopping trip to Manchester mum went with him, once. The effect of venturing into the city had a traumatic effect on mum which was so great that she never went there again. After that dad’s trips to Manchester were either on his own or with one or more of us kids in tow.

I think that it may help if I explain my parent’s attitude to shopping. I suppose that you could say that it defied the stereotype, in fact it reversed it. I’m sure that you are already well ahead of me by now, but for clarity’s sake I’ll explain it.

Mum hated shopping, she didn’t like shops and she found ‘traipsing’ from one shop to another and looking around inside shops a complete bore. Dad, on the other hand, loved shops and shopping. Even when he had no more than the train fare to Manchester and back he would go out early in the morning and come back late at night having spent the entire day wandering around the shops looking at what was on offer. He would return home with tales of the ‘bargains’ that he had seen, bargains that he would have taken advantage of “if only he’d had the money.”

Dad had so much practice at window shopping that he became an expert at it. When he had money to spend it meant that he knew where all the potential bargains were, he didn’t just browse in the high street shops, nor was he limited to the shady back street shops, dad knew where every warehouse was, even the dodgy ones where things seemed to land when they fall off the back of passing lorries. So if you wanted a bargain, that’s to say a real bargain, he knew where to find it.

Dad’s love of shopping was not exactly shared by me, or any of my sisters for that matter. We would be taken to walk for miles around the back streets of Manchester in search of dad’s bargains. The problem was that everything had to be a bargain, you couldn’t just have a meal, or even a cup of tea or a glass of pop, we had to go through a lengthy process of finding the cheapest place to eat. What this meant was that after walking around town for hours we had to start on another trek around every café in Manchester with dad examining the prices on the bill of fare that was posted outside. What usually happened was that we would eventually arrive back at the place he had evaluated first and he would lead us in and we would gather around a table in anticipation of a good meal.

I’m sure that it never occurred to dad that all this walking around provided us all with good exercise and an even healthier appetite than we would have had if we had been fed sooner.

One thing that I always remember was dad’s assertion to every waitress that there were “no child’s portions in our family” and we all got an adult sized meal. My youngest sister Kathryn wasn’t even old enough to have started school at the time and she had to kneel on the chair to reach the table, but dad insisted that she got an adult size meal.

There was a method in this. Dad had the idea that he could eat anything that we left, in truth he would eat it before we had left it, if he could he would load his plate from each of ours as soon as they hit the table. To combat this I started to shield my dinner by strategically surrounding my plate with one arm and putting my face as close to my food as possible. For the most part it worked; I developed a reinforcing technique of stabbing dad in the hand with my fork if his came near my plate. I contrived to get most of my meal in peace, but dad’s fork still managed to make its way around the rest of the plates on the table, in one swift motion he could get a sausage off of each of my sister’s plates, until they learned to guard their food as well.

That isn’t the part about dad’s childcare skills, but this is; Dad used to get very engrossed in his bargain hunting, so much that he would frequently forget that he had taken us with him. He would be walking along with all of us following behind in a ‘crocodile’ formation, with me, being the oldest, at the front and my sisters behind holding on to one another so as not to get lost, but we usually did get lost. We never lost one-another, but dad would loose us at least a couple of times during the day.

What happened was that dad would be looking in a shop window and he would suddenly remember that there was a warehouse full of ceramic tiles, cutlery, old rags, or whatever else he could go rummaging in, and he would disappear up a back alley while we were looking at the well fed puppies that were sleeping in the window of a pet shop, and he would be gone for an hour or so. Our crocodile would wander around the block with Kathryn moving from the back to the middle then up behind me and she would hang onto the sleeve of my coat in fear of her life.

After what seemed like days dad would reappear in a sweat and almost drop dead from the relief of having found us all again. The admonition that we were not to tell mum about getting lost was what hid dad’s childcare skills from her for many years.