Old dads with a new outlook

I am not sure that there was a Father's Day when I was a boy; at any rate, Hallmark Card events were not a major thing in our house.

It did occur to me once when I was about nine to come down early and join my father, who liked to make his own breakfast at some dawn-like hour. As I stepped into the kitchen, he looked up and said: "Christ, it'll be family prayers next."

I put down the Shreddies and went back to bed, and have never since got up until late unless I have to (In my view, the early worm gets f***ed up by the bird).

I didn't resent this lack of morning joviality on Daddy's part. He had been brought up in a stern Baptist household which actually did feature family prayers, and had joined the Royal Navy, I think, partly to escape it.

These days, my own children know they are wasting their time if they try to talk to me before I have peered at the papers and taken some caffeine (I inhale). Whereas in my younger brother's home, I gather, there actually are family prayers. So it goes.

I am the proud father of a teenage son and two younger daughters of 12 and eight, the first two from a previous marriage. It would probably come as a surprise to the first two if they knew, even though we are no longer under the same roof, that they have seen much more of me than I ever saw of my father.

Comparing notes with my peers, most of them also divorced, I have found the same thing. Our fathers tended to be remote, and busy. On matters of the emotions, they also tended to be embarrassed and reticent.

When it came to time for a few words on the unavoidable early teenage subject, my mother did a superb job and told me that my father just couldn't face it (my impression is that this ritual is now falling into disuse, with all of us candidly astonished at how much our offspring know about how they got here, and much else besides).

Anyway, I can remember Commander Hitchens rescuing a little girl from drowning in a swimming pool and gruffly refusing any thanks, and I can remember having tea with him at a golf club and feeling close, and that's very nearly it.

The first wave of marriages in my set (I was born in 1949) typically involved some sort of post-feminist understanding among men that, when children arrived, you could not just push off to your den, let alone your club or pub. I do not think I was stellar in this respect, because the writing life is private and children play hell with it as all authors of both sexes have testified.

However, I did at least work at home and was thus a familiar figure; familiar enough in fact to breed contempt. I did a certain amount of nappy-changing, pushchairwielding and bedtime-story reading (even recording a good chunk of a Roald Dahl book that could be played in my absence) but the thing I couldn't do at all was the night shift.

In my view, the kid isn't born that yells for its Daddy in the dark. And I was, and always have been, the sole breadwinner and daily toiler. So I needed my slumber, didn't I?

But I didn't mind waking up with a bambino in the bed. In fact, some of my best bonding memories are of that. Just as well, since the boy didn't sleep through the night for some years. And his appetite ... I did learn to make formula bottles in a sort of trance, though I had blotted out the memory until recently.

My first wife could cook, which my second wife either cannot or will not, and so the biggest change I noticed in secondtime fatherhood was the amount of time I spent in the kitchen.

Far from finding it a chore, I learned to like it and realised that feeding and, if you insist, "nurturing", are a satisfaction all of their own. I also learned to cook for my own palate, so there. The older children like this, too, though they prefer their mother's cuisine and have already been to many more restaurants than I had seen before I went to university (Now I suddenly remember a day when my father was left alone with us and had to produce lunch for two small boys. How we felt for him, even as we made his life hard).

The astounding thing about women - in this context, I mean - is their inventiveness and patience in playing with the very small: the thought of plastic horses and dinosaurs on the floor on a rainy day can still make me wince and cringe. I did manage to teach elementary chess at an early age and have now been thrashed by all my offspring.

Like many men, I suspect, I get slightly better as the children get older and can understand the jokes that I shamelessly recycle. I also no longer hear myself uttering things that I promised myself when young I would never say ("Because I say so," for example).

This is also the first generation of men who watched their children being born. I still wonder why women want husbands to be present for the throes of delivery. But I'm glad they do, because I think it may help supply the difference between us and our fathers. The elemental drama and tenderness leave a lifelong impression.

My firstborn showed up after a long and trying battle which ended with the forceps: he looked like a pizza with about eight toppings and an erection but his vigour and determination were splendid. My latest one made a most serene and ladylike appearance.

In each case I felt something that seemed weird and paradoxical without being alarming: a sudden and greater nearness to my own death. But fatherhood precisely insists that you will be outlived, or that it's your duty to ensure that you are. Without premeditation, you realise that you are ready to die for someone as well as live for them. Rossetti gets it in four lines:

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood

How that face shall watch his when cold it lies

Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes

Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

The title of this was "Inclusiveness", which may seem rather sickly but which makes the point, all right.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

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