Tucked up by Mum and Dad

Producer's Note

In this edition of Words and Music, parents and children mete out joy and misery to each other.

In ‘This be the Verse’ Philip Larkin squarely lays the blame for being messed-up at the feet of mum and dad. But as a writer, Alan Bennett pointed out that being messed-up by your parents is ‘fine because then you’ve got something to write about’.

Edmund Gosse certainly proved the point in his autobiographical ‘Father and Son’. At once worrying and entertaining, it describes his Victorian upbringing at the hands of his religious fundamentalist father. Oedipus could reasonably claim to have been more messed up than most by his parents but he certainly paid it back to them in spades. It’s all very neatly summed-up here by XJ Kennedy and Tom Lehrer. Another case of bad parenting is the Old Testament’s Abraham who is willing to sacrifice his son, if God tells him to. Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Stevie Smith both need to escape their oppressive parents.

The impact of children on their parents is seen in several of the texts. A pregnant Anna Laetitia Barbauld can’t wait for the joy and love she thinks her child will bring; Coleridge’s newborn son provokes a similar ecstatic response. But the realities of coping with young children take Sylvia Plath and Rachel Cusk beyond the brink of sanity. The Land of Dreams is ‘better far’ than the real world for the little boy in Blake’s poem – a pitiful exchange between a recently widowed father and his motherless son.

Kahil Gibran’s ‘On Children’ exhorts parents to let go of their offspring and to acknowledge their separateness and individuality; Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘To Any Reader’ is also about parental letting go. Forced to let go is Michael Rosen, broken by grief after the death from meningitis of his teenage son.

Elderly parents and their adult offspring feature in two texts: Elizabeth Jennings’ mother leaves her with pent up tears of frustration, and Alan Bennett is witness to a poignant exchange.

There are happy parents and children here, too! In a brilliant parody of Larkin, the parents in Adrian Mitchell’s ‘This be the Worst’ ‘tuck you up’ and give endless love and security. And in his ‘Essays’ Montaigne has nothing but praise for his father’s educational methods and his way of waking him up in the morning, both equally painless.

Anyone who has had children will be aware of the countless books there are on how to bring them up. One of the first, from 1430, was Erasmus’s bestselling ‘On the Education of Children’. This section deals with that perennial parental headache: table manners. Dr Benjamin Spock’s 1946 ‘Baby & Childcare’ begins the programme. With its exhortation to parents to trust their instincts and common sense it, too, became a bestseller (at over forty-five million copies, and still counting). Many of you, I suspect, will have experienced it in one way or the other!

I have chosen music which seems to fit the feeling of the texts, rather than for any more overt significance to the programme’s theme. (Although as father to twenty children, Bach surely merits inclusion on that score alone and Jonathan Harvey’s great electroacoustic ‘mortuos plango, vivos voco’ features the recorded voice of his son, Dominic.)

David Papp (producer)