Shropshire Magazine

What’s in the past is best left in the past, maintains Vanessa Lloyd-Thomas

Vanessa Lloyd Thomas.

“How old were you the first time you got drunk?” queried middle son – and rather more loudly that strictly necessary, I thought. 

The question was undoubtedly a little harsh given that I wasn’t singing in the street, dancing the Cha Cha Cha on the table with Craig Revel Horwood or even spilling out of a taxi onto the driveway giggling. 

No, my crime was simply to order a teeny glass of Pinot Grigio to accompany my pasta during an evening out at a local restaurant to celebrate number-one son’s 17th birthday.

The joy of family dining on large round tables is that even the smallest nuclear family such as ours is so adequately spaced that one can usually avoid controversial conversation – and having to take tiddler on his 25 visits to the loo – by feigning not to hear.

Unfortunately, ‘usually’ does not equal ‘always’, and my contrived concentration on the pepper mill only caused the question to be repeated even more loudly. 

“Ladies don’t get drunk, they get mildly squiffy, and I have never, ever overindulged,” I ventured, fingers and toes firmly crossed under the table, to an accompaniment of coughing and spluttering from my husband. 

Ever the gentleman, he gallantly came to my rescue by regaling the boys with tales of his teenage derring-do involving Guinness and barley wine, popular apparently during his teenage years along, no doubt, with mead and furmity!

There was more than a touch of William Hague and his 14-pints-a-session claim about his anecdotes of youthful drinking prowess, but as they did cause a useful diversion and he didn’t take it as far as sipping cocktails from a coconut while sporting a Hawaiian shirt, I felt it would have been churlish to draw attention to the similarity.

However, it did get me thinking about whether honesty is necessarily the best policy when it comes to parenting? 

Would I have been cooler to ‘fess up’ to my younger self’s misdemeanours and attempt to be a mate rather than an authority figure? Or is it safer to maintain the veneer of parental perfection and keep your feet of clay firmly pressed into your stilettos? 

As a child, I questioned my grandmothers about the past. Unlike my irreverent teen, I didn’t insinuate early-onset alcoholism but asked more generally about their teenage years in the ‘olden days’.

Cuttings

Somerset Gran showed me press cuttings from when she was crowned Milkmaid of the Year at a national agricultural show, while London Nan recalled putting lippy on under a street light – to avoid antagonising a strict father – and taking tea at a Lyon’s Cornerhouse. 

Secrets from your youth are best kept just that: secret.

They were charming and innocent tales and I was satisfied. Would I have been more impressed if they had admitted a life of hedonism and excess in what, after all, was the Roaring Twenties? Nope, but it would have made a cracking excuse for any adolescent excesses of my own. Just following in grandmothers’ footsteps after all . . .

Middle son had a confession of his own to make – four years into his secondary education he had received his first detention. “Yeah, so now I’m a rebel,” he muttered, aiming at bravado. 

I did my best to look stern, which was a tad difficult as I painfully got to the bottom of his side of the story on why he was sentenced to missing a morning break because he refused to read a passage of Shakespeare in class.

“It was all full of that dumb love stuff and rubbish. I offered to read another bit,” he recalled. 

“How many times did you have detention at school?” 

Detention? No need of it in my day – we were all far too well behaved, weren’t we?