Father's night

More practice in modern English usage: by Ann Knapp

Readers of Hunter Davies's regular feature `Father's Day' in the humorous weekly Punch are well acquainted with his many trials and tribulations as a parent. In this extract Davies's plaintive account of his teenage daughter's nocturnal habits derives much of its comic effect from his spontaneous and allusive style, with its interplay of ironic understatement and overstatement.

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We only have two teenagers, and they have not been teenagers all that long, but it seems to me that for the last 100 years I have lain in this bed either listening to their rotten noises of waiting for them to come home and start making their rotten noises…

Where is that Caitlin. She promised she wouldn't be late. About six o'clock this evening she said she was going out to Jane's for an hour. That was four hours ago. It seems like every night for the last 200 years that I've been lying here, waiting for her key in the door.

Our nocturnal curves coincided for about half an hour something like five years ago when she was 12 years old. For one brief moment in time, we all went to bed at 10 o'clock. Oh, bliss it was and to be asleep was very heaven. Now she's shot past us into the stratosphere, still going strong. Goodness knows when or where she'll land. Our metabolisms are just so different. She thinks 12 o'clock is an early night.

Several times recently, Jake has locked the front door when he's come in, not knowing Caitlin was still out. Naturally, she has to ring when she gets back. More hysterics.

I now have a new system when they're both out. I leave a special notice on the hall stairs which tells them ti Tick Name When You Come In. So, whoever is last in, locks up for the night. The trouble is, I don't trust my own system. I feel it will all go wrong and I lie fretting that I'll still be wakened up.

Very often, I have fallen asleep, somehow, then wakened with a start, wondering what the time is and whether Caitlin is home yet. How awful if the police ring and we don't even know where she is. So I get up and check that the front door has been locked. Then I know she's in. Or do I? Has Jake locked it by mistake?

I could go up to her bedroom, and see if she's asleep, but her bedroom is such a mess, with cushions and blankets all over the floor. There might be dozens of them asleep there, none of them Caitlin.

The other night she came home in agony as a car had run over her foot. It wasn't as bad as it sounded, though bad enough. She now has boyfriends who have cars, just six formers from the local boys' school, where do they get the money from, how their parents allow it. This night they were going to a party and they ran out of petrol so Caitlin got out to help push the car. Someone decided to push it the other way, and it ran over her foot. Nothing was broken. Except my sleep.

When I'm listening to house noises, which I have done for 300 years, I can cope much better. Walls collapsing, pipes bursting, the roof falling off. I've heard all these things for years, but I just turn over and think, well, it's an old house, you've got to expect such night-time noises. I'll investigate in the morning. The night the ceiling in Caitlin's room did fall down was such a surprise. Especially for Caitlin. She was in bed early for once. It was a dreadful warning for her. She knew from then on that no good can come from early nights…

There goes the front door. Yes, and I can hear it being locked. Our oldest and dearest is at last home for the night. All's right with our little bit of the world. It can't be more than 11 o'clock. I'll just give it a few more minutes. I have known Caitlin come home and have a bath, put on her pyjamas, then the phone rings, and she's out again in a flash.

That sounds like the phone being dialled. Our three phones are all on the blink. It's like a burglar alarm going off whenever anyone dials. She's probably ringing Jane, having seen her all of one minute ago. She'll be on for hours. I often come down in the morning and find the phone on the floor, the cushions in a hip with three empty tea-cups beside them and steam still coming off the reciever.'

Dinner party

Read the passage below. Then fill in the diagram to show where Joanna's guests were sitting.

Joanna looked around the table from her vantage point at its head. Well, no one could describe the evening as a dazzling success if the conversation at dinner was to be the criterion. `Perhaps they are all enjoying the food too much to make the effort to talk,' Joanna consoled herself.

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Summer pudding

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Talking about food

Readers of Hunter Davies's regular feature `Father's Day' in the humorous weekly Punch are well acquainted with

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The English table

Readers of Hunter Davies's regular feature `Father's Day' in the humorous weekly Punch are well acquainted with

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Contents A__#2__1983_#86

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A__#2__1983_#86

seems like every night colloquial style, but ungrammatical

Our nocturnal curves coincided meaning their biorhythms of `body-clocks' were the same

bliss it was … very heaven parodying Wordsworth's famous lines on the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”

shot past us into the stratosphere… where she'll land the image implies that Caitlin is now in a world beyond that of her parents, in terms of habits and outlook

six formers 17- or 18-year-olds in their last years at school

300 notice the mounting exaggeration in this passage: 100.. 200.. 300

on the blink about to go wrong

Door

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