David Hill: Hit by splash from the gene pool

COMMENT

It happened in the last days of the year. I was out in the backyard, baby-sitting 3-year-old Owen as he squatted on the concrete path, knees up by his shoulders, watching a line of ants. He turned to tell me about it and, suddenly, my mother's face looked out of my grandson's.

There was the shape of forehead, lift of chin, above all the expression in the eyes. It lasted half a second, then he was a boy again.

It's a jolt to realise what you've passed on to your kids and grandkids; to wonder how much of it they'll pass on in their turn.

I wonder if Owen and his big bro Patrick will feel that shock, half a century from now, when a small child turns or moves and they glimpse genes ribboning down the years.

Those genes mattered to my Mum. "You've got the Marshall nose," she would tell me. "You've got the McLeod stubbornness."

Actually, I'd far sooner have had a neat, anonymous nose. And I knew that the so-called McLeod stubbornness was just me making a perfectly logical teenage stand against parental demands to sluice out my room.

As well as the nose-forehead-stubbornness that my mother passed on to and through me, what did she want to pass on? What did she hope or assume would carry down our family line forever?

And which of her beliefs and ways and habits did Beth and I deliberately not pass on to our kids?

Some differences are obvious. My parents poured sulphur and treacle into me to cleanse my outer surfaces, and castor oil to scour my inner surfaces.

They filled me with great doses of meat, butter and sugar. Trim milk? Low-fat cheese? Futurist fantasies. Everyone knew that cream, egg-yolks and fatty chops put healthy flesh on a lad.

My mother and father also smoked around me and in front of me. They didn't know any better. (There - the phrase we all apply to our parents).

By contrast, Beth and I were young parents as tobacco's poisonous truths emerged, and swore we would never use the stuff.

We don't claim any credit for this. We just happened to be the right age at the right time. And I know that if my Mum and Dad had understood the second-hand carcinogenics they were passing on, they'd have chucked away every filter-tip in the house.

Another difference was that my parents never mentioned sex. Bodily parts - and it was a while before they admitted I had any - were referred to by euphemisms only.

They'd have been appalled to hear us explaining the Facts of Life to our kids. Or maybe they'd just have been relieved and a bit wistful.

They seldom praised me, either. They'd been shaped by war and Depression to plug on; never to expect accolades; above all, never to be a show-off. Plus there was the New Zealand tradition of lopping down even medium-height poppies

So Beth and I decided early on that we'd tell our children when they did well.

We agreed we wouldn't push our kids too hard, either, or compare them unfavourably with others. My parents wanted me to be top of the class. It mattered hugely to them. They believed it would great for me.

I felt it as a pressure, and swore I'd never put that pressure on my children. Sometimes now I worry that I never gave them enough impetus to find what they could do.

And we decided we'd try not to argue in front of our son and daughter. My parents had rows which I hated and shrank from.

I wasn't going to inflict that on my kids. So when ours grew up, they told us that they wished we had cleared the air sometimes.

I know that my mother and father did things which seemed different and dubious to their parents. When I was 10, they paid for me to bypass the school dental clinic, go to a non-treadle-drill-using dentist, and have a difficult tooth repaired.

Later, I heard my grandmother tut-tutting to an aunt about it.

"He should have them all out early if they're going to give him trouble. Get it over and done with. It never did his uncles any harm."

(That helped me later to decide that I also wouldn't toll the words "never did me any harm" at my kids.)

I know, too, that my parents wanted the same things for me that Beth and I wanted for our children. They would have sacrificed anything to keep me safe and well. (Physical health was what preoccupied them; mental health was like sex and wasn't mentioned.)

They and we both strove to offer chances we never had. Then they and we felt aggrieved when such chances weren't received with gratitude.

They died before our children were born, so they didn't know the delight of seeing things echoed two generations later - or the disbelief of seeing what they/we believed ignored by the generation in between.

Our son and daughter will have to face that delight and disbelief sometime. I hope our grandkids treat them gently when it comes.

I said before that my parents seldom praised me. But that moment with Owen on the path brought back another moment as well.

It was a school prizegiving and I'd won something. As I came back to my seat with the spectacularly dull book they had given me, I saw my mother in the parents' rows.

On her face was an expression that I knew straightaway meant she was proud of me, she loved me, and I meant almost everything to her.

I'll be pretty happy if, when my grandson looked at me, my face passed some of that on to him, too.