Tears, fancy-dress tyranny and tedious discourse: it can only be World Book Day
I was going to do green eggs and ham. That would be a cool costume, the competitive mother that sometimes lives inside me thought. Thankfully I silenced her, as I always do, not wanting to spend hours after returning from a trip to the theatre constructing said eggs and ham out of felt. My son is only two, but this year will be his second World Book Day costume. Last year I was even more half-arsed: he went to nursery as Peekaboo Moon. In other words, he wore a jumper with a moon on it.
The tedious online discourse about World Book Day costumes rears its head every year, but to a relatively new parent the whole thing is a bit baffling. Make a costume or don’t, buy a costume or don’t … who cares, as long as the child is happy? Except what I’m learning is that the World Book Day costume is, to some people, symbolic of what sort of parent you are, and the whole thing carries quite a lot of class baggage. with literature degrees have the time to rustle up an intricate Artful Dodger costume on the sewing machine!” the mums who are low-paid nurses doing night shifts might complain. “Of course the busy working mums just bung a nylon Frozen costume in their Asda basket,” the stay-at-home mums might snipe. “It isn’t even a book!” The timepoor mums resent being expected to add to their load through crafting; the cash-poor mums find the cost of materials prohibitive. The time-poor, cashpoor mums – which seems to be most of us, in this economy – wish the whole occasion would go away. And some schools this year have listened, reasoning that the cost of living crisis means parents are being put under unreasonable pressure costume-wise. As for the dads, no one asks them, because even though it’s 2024 the whole fancy dress burden still seems to fall on women’s shoulders. (Dads who conceived and constructed their offspring’s
World Book Day costumes, please get in touch via the letters desk.)
Growing up, World Book Day wasn’t a thing. My mother had little money but enough time to help make costumes for other occasions. She was also a skilled dressmaker, which helped. I consider our beautifully stocked fancydress box a great childhood privilege, but it’s unlikely my son will be as fortunate. One of the things about motherhood that has shocked me most – despite everyone trying to prepare you, it doesn’t really hit you until you’re living it – is just how difficult it is to juggle childcare even with part-time work. Managing to do anything beyond that feels like such a miraculous bonus that you end up congratulating yourself for achieving even the most rudimentary of practical tasks. Emptying the washing machine within 24 hours of a wash cycle finishing, for instance (the rinse button has had a rather gruelling and environmentally unfriendly workout these past two years). So forgive me if I don’t have time to make a pair of Victorian knickerbockers. Yet my mum also often worked part-time, and somehow always did. So now I feel bad.
Anyway, my small boy loves Winnie-the-Pooh, and so Christopher Robin it is. We have everything required already in the house, so all I need to do is blow up a red balloon and write a note that says: “Gon out, bisy, backson, C.R.” Unfortunately, while everyone else was down a “is the Duchess of Cambridge being held prisoner having been replaced by a clone?” rabbit hole, I went down a “Christopher Robin” one, which is how I ended up crying on the sofa on Sunday morning about how AA Milne had PTSD and the real-life Christopher Robin was bullied at school for his starring role in his father’s creation. “I think you’re just crying about the idea of a child being sent to boarding school,” my husband said (I had also had one too many Manhattans the night before, though it’s true that since having a son I find the very thought of boarding school unbearably sad). He pointed out that by the end of his life Christopher
Robin Milne had come to a place of acceptance regarding Winnie-the-Pooh, and had used the Disney money to set up a charity for his severely disabled daughter, Clare, which helps disabled people in the West Country to this day.
So consider my son’s costume a tribute, but also, as I drop him off at nursery looking adorable and clutching his Pooh bear, a sign of World Book Days to come. Whatever he’s into, I will try, within reason, to facilitate, because all that matters is that he is happy. In other words, parents, it’s not about us. Although as with many things, we seem quite gifted at making it so.
What’s working
Picard frozen organic creamed spinach. The bairn loves it, and it microwaves in minutes. It’s not cheap, but it does go a really long way and makes a really quick pasta sauce.
What’s not
Whole grapes. On recent trips to the Young V&A and Tate Modern, I was perturbed to find that the fruit cups sold for children contained whole grapes – a major choking hazard, as a paediatrician in this newspaper has pointed out. I wondered if I was being OTT, but after polling other parents I felt encouraged to complain. Both museums took me seriously, with Tate Modern saying they never should have gone out uncut and Young V&A taking them off sale until they could rectify the situation.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
Union, which once led her to share a platform with the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, who led 200,000 people in a chant of “Get a new president!” The memory is still clear: “I remember one of my secret service agents giving me this look – like, ‘You’d better get out of here right now.’”
Forty years on, her views on some of the most questionable aspects of Reagan’s political career are nuanced and complicated: as a matter of instinct, she wants to defend the father she loved, whatever their differences. But at the same time, she knows why some things he did – or failed to do – attracted such opprobrium.
When we talk about Reagan’s record on racism, she mentions clear memories from her childhood (people, he told her, “come in different colours … they are all God’s children”), and an episode in his first presidential term, when he and Nancy publicly stood alongside a black family in Maryland who had been targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. But she also acknowledges a taped conversation between her father and Richard Nixon made public in 2019, in which he used a vile racial epithet about African delegates to the United Nations. “I do believe that if my father had been confronted with that tape, then he would have apologised, and he would have felt awful,” she says. “That doesn’t excuse it, by the way. But that’s not the man I knew. That’s not the man who raised me.”
And then there is the mess of questions that swirls around how woefully late her father was to act on the Aids crisis. In many respects, she says, he and Nancy were less conservative than their reputation has subsequently suggested – in private, at least. “I grew up around gay people,” she says.
“There was a lesbian couple, Aunt Glesca and Aunt Emily. This was the time when all the parents’ friends were called aunt and uncle, you know … When my parents went on a vacation to Hawaii, they stayed at our house. They slept in my parents’ bed. I mean, to me, they were a married couple. So it was like nothing to me, and there were other gay people around. I wanted to give that perspective – that my father was not homophobic. My father was not insensitive to gay people.
“There were people in his administration who were very homophobic, who did believe that Aids was God’s wrath on gay people. And one of my father’s character flaws was that he delegated things to other people and didn’t really follow up. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re handling this …’ He just trusted that they would do whatever they were supposed to be doing.”
To that, there is an obvious rejoinder: the Aids crisis quickly became so clear that it was surely deeply remiss of him to delay action.
“Absolutely. I’m not excusing anything. For a man whose timing was usually pretty impeccable, his timing was wrong, every step of the way. I can’t sugarcoat that, nor would I ever try to. I simply wanted to explain that if anybody judges it as, ‘Oh, Ronald Reagan didn’t care about gay people’ – I don’t want you to think that. It was a whole mess of mistakes and failures.”
When I ask her about the looming US election, she refuses to engage with one subject in particular: “I’m not going to talk about the large orange man because I’m just so tired of it all,” she says. But she talks in mournful terms about her father’s respectful dealings with Democratic politicians, and an optimistic style of politics that she thinks has now gone. “I have no idea what my father would do about some of the issues that are facing us now. But I know how he would feel about the sort of demoralised weariness of this country. I feel like there’s something collectively broken in us … We’re seeing things being splintered away. And we hear very knowledgeable people talking about how fragile our democracy is and how easily it can fall apart and go away. And if it goes away, it’s not going to come back any time. Not in our lifetimes.”
***
In March 1981, Davis’s father was shot in Washington DC. The security services thought his family might also be assassination targets, and she was soon transported from California to the US capital by the military. “I remember being in this cavernous plane and we had headphones on because it was so noisy. I remember thinking, ‘If this is it, I’m never going to get to know my father.’ You have to remember: when we landed at two in the morning, all of us were just getting the news reports that everybody else was getting, that my father was still alive. But that’s all I knew. And then he got some kind of infection. So it was way more serious than people were told at the time.”
It was during this horrific episode that she once again caught a glimpse of ther mother’s emotional, vulnerable side. “I remember going into her room really early in the morning, like at dawn. And she was lying in their bed, clutching a shirt of his to her face, breathing in his scent.”
The longer we talk, the more I get the sense that these small, very moving recollections – capped by her father’s last 10 years, when he had Alzheimer’s disease – are what has finally allowed Patti Davis to make some sense of her past. “There was something my father told me from the time I was a child,” she says. “He said: ‘God put all of us here for a reason.’ And that has tugged at me my whole life.”
She pauses. “I don’t know why any of us were born to the families we’re born to,” she tells me. “I don’t know why any of us have the fate that some of us have. But I do know that we’re supposed to grow. And learn.”
•Dear Mom and Dad by Patti Davisis published by Liverightin the UKon 19 March (£16.99).To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
For a man whose timing was usually pretty impeccable, his timing on Aids was wrong, every step of the way