It turns out that there had been a spider in the bath. But, as the two battled desperately for sanctuary space on my lap, I was made to understand - NO ordinary spider had he been. He had, apparently, been a spider of "the very worst sort, Mummy", a spider who used our skiing break last week to go on exercise in our bathtub, with the sole intention of the perfect attack. How it had lurked, sniggering, behind the shower head and waited until they were both engrossed with their rubber shark game and how it had dropped, "cackling a witch laugh" into the water where it had "torpedoed, Mummy,torpedoed along the bottom of the bath", - yes, there's more - "with jaws snapping and fangs gnashing and arms waving like a wild beasty thing" (this was all coming from the 5 year old - the 3 year old merely hiccuped and sobbed and nodded insistently along, with saucer-eyes of doom). It had then leapt with a roar onto to knee of the older one, "dug in its nails to heave itself out of the water to chomp them in THEIR THROATS..."
I stopped it here, and went to rescue the poor little creature. And while it wriggled resignedly and drew its final spider breath in the shampoo cap lifeboat that had arrived too late, I explained that, here, in England, we don't have to be scared of spiders. That, I told them, is for people like J and B, in Australia. Here, spiders are Our Friends.
The dog sighed at me. She always thinks she knows better in these situations.
"But Mummy, " came the response "it WASN'T an English spider. It must have been SENT, Mummy, by the Taliban, or North Korea or Germany."
It's an interesting point. How on earth does my 5 year old know enough about this big bad world to have registered the Taliban and the North Koreans as a vague threat to his safety, and why, WHY, lob them in with the poor Germans?
I asked him, casually, what he thought the Taliban, and North Korea were. North Korea, he told me, is a horrible place where you can't get away and it has a (hushed voice) SECRET police. Pretty spot on, and probably my fault. (Blog Critic has already accused me of an "unhealthy interest" in the DPRK and I may well have talked about it in the range of small twitching ears, especially with the delicious arrival of my new Barbara Demick book on the same, just this morning, but more on that later). The Taliban, he said after a while, are baddies from...he wasn't sure.
France, insisted the 3 year old, the Taliban are from France and France has some good people like her nursery teacher but the rest are Taliban. They sing a song about it at nursery; that's how she knows.*
*NB I probably won't follow this up. She told me once she'd learnt an"Engleesh pig dogs" song from nursery school, but it turned out, thankfully, to be the influence of Horrible Histories instead)
The 5 year old scoffed. The Taliban do not live in France, he was sure of that - they live in Talibanistan and they are bad because they want to steal all the flowers.
Hmm. Poppy fields? I don't know. But I was worried. They surely shouldn't be fretting about such things at their age - at THEIR age, they should be stressing about ghouls behind the bedroom door, and monsters under the bed.
Stupidly, I said as much. They stared.
"There are m-m-m-m-monsters? Under my BED?!" the eldest wailed before dissolving again. "And GHOSTS-behind my DOOR?" the youngest followed suit and clung to the dog, who gave me a Look to say she would not have been so daft herself.
It took a long time to settle them tonight. And I had to crawl under both beds, twice, with the French policeman's truncheon that we have lying around, for precisely these monster-hunting moments, it now seems.
And HECK, there's a lot of dust under those beds. So today, I have once again failed gloriously on all fronts, it seems: motherhood, housekeeping and spider rescue.
And I didn't even get to ask them about Germany.
AFTERTHOUGHT
I have also been a bit of a fraud. Because as I insisted, somewhat impatiently, that to be scared of spiders was actually rather silly, and that they would just have to learn to deal with it, (I know, I know, but they had swung the lead way past their bedtime and my serenity had expired along with the faceful of dust) I had to remember how, only yesterday, I had practically sumo-wrestled a valium tablet from A on the tarmac at Innsbruck airport. If anyone had told me then that my fear was a bit "silly" and I should just learn to deal with it, I probably would have punched them.Oh well, they may know about the Taliban but it'll be a long time till they'll understand the word hypocrite. One hopes.
