• Home
• /
• Opinion

Wistfulness for a passing age

Who wants a vivid preview of the future awaiting women who become mothers for the first time at 50 or 60, once the birth bit is done? Who, for that matter, wants to imagine earlier, happier mornings in the McCartney home as Sir Paul, almost 64, hears baby wailing? This, for us, is a plunge down a memory hole 35 years deep.

The alarm clock roars at 6.50am. Rupert the Bear begins its TV blare. Which cereal? The Krispies or the Special K? With or without sprinkled cocoa powder? And toast —the nightmarish Spanish sliced loaf called Bimbo that arrives with crusts already stripped —with Marmite or honey or olive oil? Put margarine on for Georgie and scrape it away when she objects. Where the hell is the bloody soft cheese in the bottom of the fridge? No, of course you can’t have a lollipop.

Who’s wearing what? It’s gym kit today for Beatrice and Georgina. That means green socks, not white socks; or possibly the reverse. Why hasn’t Leonardo even started his cereal? If you don’t eat I’ll turn the telly off right now! Then on again, as a spoonful drops: the smack of firm irresolution. Georgie’s socks are ‘too tight’ and Beatrice’s are falling down. Swap them, stupid. And their tunics, similarly confused in this comedy of terrors. Why are they laughing at me? Why does it take 45 minutes to get to the school gate? Why is Leonardo still playing with his GameBoy in the middle of the road? Why am I a sweating, nervous wreck? And why —the question that matters —are weekends like this the highlights of our year?

There was a moment, barely a decade ago, when we had four children with no grandchild in sight. Today there are eight of them: two next door, two in Manchester, one currently being pushed along the Croisette in Cannes in search of her first film role, plus the Catalan three. And for us, as for so many people I know, old friends, it’s transforming. You can be useful again. You can also see —across generations —what comes next. That’s joy: but it is also a particular, wistful sadness. For the odds are that you won’t be there when what comes next actually happens: no longer around for the big exams, the career choices, the loves and the losses. You’ve started, but you won’t be allowed to finish. And when you say that, you also begin to say something broader.

The new way of writing about birth (minus marriage and death) can be vehement, going on virulent. Why shouldn’t a 63-year-old choose to have her baby? Why should old men (like Macca and Rupert Murdoch) be excused boots on the procreation front? Forget all that: wistful isn’t angry, sad merely one emotion among many.

But society changes continually, just pause to look. On the one hand the old live longer, need more care and more cash, inflict greater strain on the young who must work. On the other hand, we can be more helpful if we have the chance. Such chances fade, though. Last week the UK National Statistics Office showed the average age of starting a family rising again, to within a few months of 30. And the direction is all one way, so 30 to 35 has become the most common range for beginning motherhood. How long before that’s 35 to 40? Helen Fielding (of Bridget Jones) is just expecting her second at 48. ‘Britons prefer work and fun to babies,’ says a mordant headline.

Wheel forward a generation and what have you got? Babies conceived at 40-plus growing up to conceive again in their own 40s. Which means, in turn, that the sort of grandparents we can be today are a shrinking species. We will be 85 when the phone call comes, maybe heading for 90. We will barely be there, never mind around for what comes next.

Birth rates are cruel arithmetical masters. The latest issue of Commentary magazine reckons, on present trends, that 60 per cent of Italians won’t know, from personal experience, a brother, sister, aunt, uncle or cousin. So much for family life. I don’t feel that as I hunt for Beatrice’s soft cheese in the fridge. I just feel there’s something we can share across 63 years, something of value that perhaps she won’t be able to feel for herself. And then I am sad.

Peter Preston is a Guardian columnist