60 The Times MagazineIt is the only way. After a lunch of green
vegetables and oily fish, it’s wellies on, coats on,
hats on – yes, hats! No arguing! – and up to the
heath for a joyless march through the mud. Yes,
I know it’s boring! I know it’s hateful! I know
none of us ever wants to see Kenwood stupid
blasted House again as long as we live – but the
sky is falling on our heads and we are British
and, by God, we will have our daily exercise!
It’s 6.03 and the heirs to my dominion/ Are
scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed/ And
so I’ll pat them on the head and send them off
to bed.
Then dinner with my wife, seated, three
courses, quiet conversation. Reading by the fire.
Followed by a full dusting of the downstairs
surfaces, from the skirting boards to the tops of
the pictures, and breakfast laid for the morning.
Just because life as we know it draws to a close,
it doesn’t mean standards can be lowered.
Indeed, it is the very fact that the precipice
is so close that means they must be raised.
A British bank is run with precision/ A British
home requires nothing less!/ Tradition, discipline
and rules must be the tools...
IN MY DREAMS!
Esther’s first great coup of the new term
was to realise that by pulling a school jumper
over Sam’s pyjama top before the Zoom lessons
began, they’d never know he wasn’t dressed.
And I don’t think either child has put proper
clothes on since. There hasn’t been a bath since
Boxing Day. “Meals” are eaten while standing
in front of the television, the wrappers tossed
on the floor over what I recall was once quite
a nice carpet, if it’s still under there.
For a while, I did manage to enforce a
bit of a no-screens thing until after supper,
engaging the kids in board games, reading
to them, trying to involve them in chores
of a kind (I had Sam cataloguing my comic
collection for one glorious week and almost,
almost being useful), but in the end I do have
to crawl off and work or go into town for
something and when it’s left to Esther, she
just doesn’t seem to care. So it’s NintendosGiles
I’ve noticed that nobody asks each other how
they are any more. Because we know. Until
about the end of January, when you bumped
into neighbours in the street, there was a
glum nod, a half-smile and a quiet, “You doing
okay?” And they would reply, “Well, we’re
doing better than some, I suppose. Better than
people in tiny flats with no money and no food,
but, you know, compared with the life I had
hoped to be leading...”
But since the turn of February, nobody
bothers to ask. It’s a nod of greeting, a puffed
cheek and an eyebrow raise that says, “Yeah,
I know,” and on you go. There is no point
discussing it. Or talking about when this all
might end. It’s like in a war: once you’ve done
a whole year of it, you begin to accept that it
may never end at all.
So the crucial thing now is to keep up
appearances. Like English PoWs observing
teatime and the laws of cricket in Colditz. Like
the band on the deck of the Titanic playing
on, as the icy water lapped at their patent
leather dress shoes. Like Roy Castle and Sid
James in Carry On up the Khyber, dining in
black tie despite the attack of the Khasi of
Kalabar, unblinking as the bombs explode
and plaster falls from the ceiling...
So the Corens are up and dressed by seven,
breakfast together at the table, kippers and
porridge, children washed and scrubbed
and at their laptops for assembly on the
dot of 8.45am. Ideally in uniforms. Although
Kitty’s school doesn’t have a uniform, so
at least a hair clip and a straight back. No
slouching or farting, no nose-picking, giggling,
yawning or mid-lesson snacks. In catastrophe,
it is all about maintaining decorum and the
appearance of order. It is all about Mr Banks.
I run my home precisely on schedule/
At 6.01, I march through my door/ My slippers,
sherry and pipe are due at 6.02/ Consistent is
the life I lead.It’s important to keep up appearances.
But try telling Esther that
STAYING IN WITH THE CORENS
GILES & ESTHER’S LOCKDOWN 3 LIFE
à go-go and crisps in bed and dirty hair and
cats on the table and comedy belching and,
“Homework is for losers!”
And I try, I really try, to explain that this is
the sort of decadence that lost us the Empire.
But she can’t hear, because they’ve all got
their headphones on and are doing a silent
disco with choc ices in each hand, which are
melting all over the sofas and, oh my God, if
I don’t get over and draw the curtains, what
on earth will the neighbours think of us?Esther
Standards are all relative, though, aren’t they?
I think Giles forgets that. My mother grew up
on a farm in Wales so basic that the floor in
their home was just earth. She could barely
believe that we had floorboards, let alone
more than one telephone. The telly blew her
mind. My father, an academic, was too busy
thinking about Goethe to notice anything as
prosaic as dirt.
This would have been fine if we had lived
in some scatty university town, but we lived
in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the capital of
bourgeois north London. Almost everyone was
a doctor, a lawyer or a dentist and they all had
shiny cars, groomed dogs and spotless houses
that smelled like washing powder. The mums
had big diamond rings and white teeth and
said, “Ciao.” If there was going to be a cultural
revolution in this country, the guillotine would
have been installed right there.
Our house didn’t smell like laundry powder.
It smelt persistently, though not unpleasantly,
of soup; our cats were lawless and pushed their
faces into your Weetabix if you didn’t make a
fortress of cereal boxes around your bowl.
My mother wore neither diamonds nor
make-up and was a cheerful skip-diver,
occasionally returning from a walk bearing a
“perfectly good” chair. She would spend the
next two weeks upcycling it, briefly drowning
TOM JACKSON out the soup smell with turpentine. When