What I tell the kids

By then, the country they are growing up in will look different in ways I cannot predict, and some of what is in here will read as out of date, and some of it will read as exactly the thing they needed to hear, and I will not know in advance which is which. I am writing the book partly for whoever wants to read it now, and partly for them, then.

So this chapter is for them. The rest of you are welcome to listen in.

I have not told you anything yet, kids, because you are too small. You are too small for any of it. The five-year-old, this morning, asked me whether bees had feelings. The three-year-old is currently engaged in the project of identifying every dog she meets by the wrong name. We are not, at the moment, having the conversation about ambient fear. We are having the conversation about whether the green one of those is also a digger.

What I have done, in lieu of conversation, is to try to build the conditions in which the conversation, when it comes, will land properly.

I have tried to make the kitchen a calm place. The kitchen is where most of what matters in your childhood will be decided. You will not remember most of the meals. You will remember the temperature of the room. I have tried to keep the temperature low. I have tried to be a parent who is not, in front of you, performing a daily reaction to whatever the medium has decided you should be reacting to today. I have failed at this often. The morning I described earlier in the book, when I caught myself rehearsing somebody else’s thoughts about the Bank of England, was not the first morning I had done that, and it will not be the last. But I am trying, and you may have noticed, or you may notice eventually, that I take longer than other dads to be irritated by the news.

I have tried to keep the phone out of meals. I have not always managed this either. It is harder than it sounds. The phone is engineered to make itself indispensable. The thing engineered to make itself indispensable is, almost by definition, the thing you should be most careful about. I have, at least, tried to model the care.

I have tried to give you the village. Your great-grandparents in Romania, your grandmother in Germany, the neighbours either side, the parents at the school gate, the man at the post office who knows your names. You have a context. You belong to a place. If everything I have written about ambient fear and atomisation is right, the single most useful thing I can give you is the experience of being known by adults who are not me and your mother. You have that. Defend it when you are old enough to choose.

I have tried, by example, to let you see what work is. Not the corporate version where Daddy disappears into a laptop and reappears at dinner. The other version. The Old Forge version. The version where I am building something I care about with my hands and my head, and where, sometimes, when you are old enough, you sit next to me at the desk while I do it, and you do your own thing on a notebook, and we are both working, in different ways, on different scales. That is the actual inheritance. The skill I want you to have when you are eighteen is not a particular skill. It is the conviction that you can build things. Most of what is wrong with the people I described earlier in this book, the ones with all the borrowed opinions, is that they have lost the conviction that they can build things, and have replaced it with the conviction that they can only have opinions about things other people are building. I would prefer you on the building side of that equation.

If I had to compress the inheritance into one sentence, it would be this: the world is mostly not ending, the people insisting it is are mostly being paid to insist, and your interior life is the one thing of yours that is genuinely yours and worth defending against an environment that has no commercial interest in your defending it. Everything else follows from there.

What follows includes the permission to be wrong. The previous generation lost the permission to be wrong, and replaced it with a culture of accusing other people of having been wrong on the wrong day. That culture is small and ugly and I would like you to have nothing to do with it. Be wrong as often as you need to. Notice when you are. Say so. Move on. Your grandmother was wrong about plenty of things and corrected herself in public and was a better person for it, and so will you be.

What follows includes a basic posture of trust toward the people who actually live near you. The medium will spend most of your adult life trying to persuade you that your neighbours are dangerous. Do not believe the medium. Walk next door and check. In every case I have personally checked, in three countries, the medium has been wrong and the neighbour has been a person.

What follows includes the conviction that strong opinions held on weak evidence are an embarrassing way to spend your one life, and that I do not know enough about this to say is one of the most useful sentences in English. I lost that sentence for a while. I have got it back. Never lose it in the first place if you can help it. There is no shame in changing your mind. There is considerable shame in pretending you have not.

And what follows, finally, includes the standing instruction that you can come home. Wherever you go, the kitchen is still here. The kettle still works. The route is still a route, in both directions.

I will tell you about Romania when you are old enough. Not the Romania of holiday photos. The other one. The cold flat, the radiator pipes, the queues, the things my mother had to do to get us out. And the ice flowers. Our kitchen window was single-glazed, and on cold mornings the frost grew whole white ferns up the inside of the glass, and I would warm a coin in my fist and press it to the ice until it melted a small clear porthole to put my eye to and watch the street. That is the Romania I have kept for myself, the magical one, the one that stopped existing the year we left. Your grandmother kept a different one, with the Securitate in it, interrogations, and spying and when you are older I will hand you both, because two people can live the same years in the same cold flat and carry away two different countries.

I will tell you about Germany, where I learned to be a person in a second language because your grandmother refused, against a headmaster’s sensible advice, to put me in the foreigner school. I will tell you about Birol, my first friend in that school, who taught me what real integration looks like from the inside, which is two small boys at the bottom of the social pile working out that they were better off together than apart.

I will tell you that you have, in your bones, a Romanian’s resilience, a German’s stubbornness about getting things right, and a British capacity to laugh at almost anything. That is a very good set of inheritances. Use them.

I will tell you that the world my grandfather worried about turned out to be the world your grandmother had to live in, and the world your grandmother worried about turned out to be the world I had to live in, and the world I worry about will turn out to be the world you have to live in, and that this is how the chain of worry works, and that you should not be too frightened by it because your grandmothers and your grandfather all turned out, on balance, to have lived useful and good lives within their version of the world, and so will I, and so will you.

I will tell you that being kind to your sister is, on a long enough timeline, the most important thing you will do in your life, because the rest is mostly negotiable, and your sister is not. I will tell her the same about you. Remember, I have one sibling. I know how this works.

I will tell you, eventually, that the route I plan in the mornings goes to Scotland, but that you do not need to take it, unless it is simply to embrace one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. Scotland was a way of saying: there is somewhere else if you need it. You probably will not need it. The somewhere else, the actually useful somewhere else, is inside your own head. I have spent a fair amount of this book trying to describe how to keep that place habitable. The single most useful thing I can leave you is the instructions.

For now you are five and three and busy with bees and diggers. There is no urgency. You are too small for any of this. You will get bigger. The world will arrive in installments. I will be in the kitchen when you need to talk about it.

The kettle is on. There is always tea.

That is the whole instruction. Everything else is footnotes.