Naked Threat

Today

On Facebook today my niece said, without much hope: "Maybe one day I'll leave the house on time in the morning". This triggered comments along the lines of "maybe when the kids are all grown up etc.."

In My Day

Even though I had the blessing of Flexi-time when I worked for the Inland Revenue, there was still pressure to leave on time. There were trains to catch, school buses that didn't wait and the start of the school day to consider.

When the girls were very small and therefore portable, this was fairly easy as the only person that had to be organised was me.

Once both girls were at school the whole thing became more complicated. When we lived at Montfort Close, school was only a two-minute walk away, but this compounded the problem along the lines of the fact that it's the people who live closest to a location or event who arrive late.

I tried to get breakfast into the girls while nagging them to get dressed, washed and their hair into some semblance of tidiness. Becky's hair needed plaiting to keep it out of the way. Maybe it was because she was older or because she didn't much like school, but Lizzie was by far the harder to heave out of bed.

After I'd persuaded the more compliant Becky to come down for a slice of toast and hairbrushing, I would still be shrieking up the stairs at Lizzie to get up. At some point and matching me shriek for shriek,  the half-undressed Lizzie would appear for her slice of toast. By this time it would be about ten minutes to school start time. I would point out in no uncertain terms the situation. Sometimes this applied to both girls as Becky became absorbed in playing with her growing collection of My Little Ponies and forgot the time.

I'd become more and more irritated; not only were the girls going to be late again, I was going to miss my train and have to wait half an hour for the next. Even with flexi-time a late start meant a late finish.

On many occasions the last card was played. "If you are not down here, dressed and ready in two minutes," I'd yell "I'm taking you to school as you are, even if you're naked!" The girls respected me as a mother who didn't utter idle threats so they didn't dare test me on this one. They'd scramble downstairs in the nick of time and we scrape to where we had to be.

Someone once asked me if I would've carried out my threat. "I don't know," I replied "I guess I'd have had to"

This conjures up a horrible picture of me dragging two semi-naked, screaming children up Westham High Street in the rush hour and I'm sincerely glad that the girls never pushed me that far!

So keep on trying. Phil, you know now what you have to do!