Spectator Competition: Family matters

Spectator

23-07-2025

For Competition 3409 you were invited to submit parental advice courtesy of famous writers. Kurt Vonnegut's father's advice to his son gave me the idea for this challenge: 'Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.'
Your entries were witty and imaginative and there were many more potential winners than we have space for. Congratulations all round, and a special mention to George Simmers's Georges Perec, Joe Houlihan's Truman Capote, David Silverman's Shakespeare and Max Ross's Wordsworth. The following take the £25 John Lewis vouchers.
We assume today that an adult's duty is to keep children entertained. This assumption can only lead to disappointment in adulthood and a disinclination to grow up at all. Children need to experience the banality of real life; the way potatoes, if allowed to boil dry, blacken and become bitter; the not-quite-matching of amateur wallpapering; the taste of a penny, licked on a long, boring Sunday afternoon. Bracing northern weather. Streets of houses whose only individuality is in their front doors.
As for books, the terse precision of The Very Hungry Caterpillar shames me. Deprecate the florid whimsy of The Wind in the Willows, but cherish its hay-scented nostalgia. Do not expose your children to Milne or Barrie. Forbid Dahl, so that they can read him illicitly.
Ensure that their clothing is a little dowdy and they will learn to secure approval through merit. Above all, be comically glum.
Frank Upton/Alan Bennett
I was never a child, chum. (Pause) But I can handle them. It's largely a matter of the equitable distribution of mint humbugs. (Pause) The sparing. Equitable. Distribution. They'll require repeated instruction. The youth of today possess little knowledge about the correct operation of a dumb waiter, the location of Sidcup or how to fashion an anecdote that goes very precisely nowhere. They'll take none of it in, hence the necessity and futility of repetition. Culture is wasted on them. They prefer pantomime to the tragedies of John Webster. (Pause) Oh yes they do. Sport is the thing to break them in. If they can play impassively a properly umpired game of cricket your work is done. Start on the small and work up, that's my motto. Should you fail, they'll become merely childish. Succeed and, in due time, you'll be eye to eye with something truly catastrophic: yourself.
Adrian Fry/Harold Pinter
Too much guff gets talked about fatherhood, most of it by childless sociologists. All a chap needs to make a decent fist of fathering is a wife who wants kids about three times as much as he does, a booklined study off-limits to the rest of the brood (decent single malt in top right-hand bureau drawer) and a repertoire of amusing faces – Monocled Headmaster Suffering Aneurism, Savonarola in Soho– to buck things up during meals you can't spend out at the Garrick. Children are drawn to the parent they see least, a win-win. You can go drinking with pals most days and still expect to pop up in as many memoirs or romans à clef as you have offspring. Your brood want bedtime stories? Dick Francis is bloody good and will simultaneously grip you and set them snoring like piglets before the end of the first furlong.
Russell Clifton/Kingsley Amis
A word of good advice while I still can –
If you have based your life on solid virtue
And been the best of Ideal English Man;
If sticks and stones and words have never hurt you
You may by now be just one half a man.
Though 'If' has long inspired your moral core
And helped defeat the blandishments of sin
I'll say now, as I meant to warn before,
You might have had some problems fitting in
With friends who think you're now a priggish bore.
So try to loosen up a bit, my son.
Of all the Deadly Sins there must be one
Which, tried discreetly just for one-off fun,
Might win you street-cred as a proper man –
And, what is more, an English man, my son.
Martin Parker/Rudyard Kipling
Along the muddy lanes of Hampstead Heath,
Safe in a world of trams and buttered toast,
The children, dry in hoods and sturdy boots,
Return for tea – and tales of playground spats.
Then give them Scott's Emulsion, rusks and malt,
And fortify with scones and Ovaltine.
Preparing them for School ma'am's iron rule,
Ask, 'Now, how many pennies in a pound?'
Then bath-time with the goddess Soap in hand,
And off to Dreamland, tucked in eiderdown.
But if young John should dare to disobey
Be hard of heart – it's character they need.
'All right, bend over.' Three resounding thwacks
From Father's gym-shoe bring a gulp. Then pause –
A pat upon the head, a thoughtful smile:
'I liked the way you took that beating, John.'
Ralph Goldswain/John Betjeman
I have assembled you here, in this venerable library on this stormy night, to offer counsel.
Your lives have run hitherto on well-worn rails – the cashiered major, the faded adventuress, the Bohemian aspiring artist, still aspiring, the bankrupt man of business – and your assorted branch lines now run through the wilderness. You have ignored my advice and let the priceless alignment of motive, method and opportunity evade you. Or so I thought – for I now recognise the early symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Was it the Turkish Delight? The brace of woodcock? The Circassian liqueur or the amusingly edible Romany cigarette holder? I have ignored my second rule and my scornful Hubris is now followed by Nemesis.
I offer two bequests: My large fortune to my murderer, whichever one of you that might be. And secondly, the recommendation that you think very hard indeed before applying for probate.
Nick Syrett/Agatha Christie
No. 3412: Hard lines
You are invited to submit a poem about the struggle of writing a poem (16 lines maximum).Please email entries to [e-mail] by midday on 6 August.