James Runcie always faced a hard task in living up to his parents' expectations - his father was Archbishop of Canterbury after all. But then he realised he was imposing a worse burden on his own children Sins of the father (and mother)
You are always a child to your parents. No matter how old or successful you might have become, part of you is still that small boy who was always losing things, that young girl who flew into terrible rages, that watchful sister, competitive brother or child with a burning sense of injustice. It doesn't matter that you now have a house, a job, or children of your own; the memories of childhood are so strong that many parents refuse to accept their son or daughter has ever truly grown up. In fact, it's often argued that we not only have a biological age but a permanent age at which our emotional development has been arrested; that although, biologically, we may be 50 with a successful career both behind and ahead of us, emotionally we are still only five.
No matter how we like to appear to the world, in reality we are still stuck at a time of terrible toddlerdom, excitable youth or in our sullen teenage years.
When I go home I don't feel like a novelist who is pushing 50. Instead I feel like a child. Parents do this to you. No matter how old, or how successful you might like to think you are, your parents still see you as the boy who always ate his ice-cream too fast or who once tried to blame a particularly venomous fart on his sister.
Before he died, my father liked to remind me of the stand-out stories from my childhood. My mother still does. Take, for example, the first time I was given sherry. I was seven years old and my father, Robert, was a promising clergyman who was running a theological college just outside Oxford. Sherry was what you drank after church on a Sunday morning and some of the students decided that it would be fun to ask if I'd like to try some. I did. And I liked it. In fact I liked it so much that I had seven glasses, one for each year of my life. The result was predictable but ever since my parents have made the same joke whenever and wherever sherry is produced. "Watch out - it's seven sherries Runcie."
My sister Rebecca suffers the same fate. When we moved from Oxford to Hertfordshire and she found it difficult to adjust to her new school, preferring to look out of the window rather than concentrate on her lessons, her teachers reported that she had a "tendency to dream". Ever since then, whenever her concentration is not devoted to the task in hand, she is said to be having "one of her dreamy moments".
Perhaps this is enforced nostalgia - a reminder of a time when we were as our parents wanted us to be, when they had control and all was well in the world.
This was the time before adolescence, awkwardness, and argument; before jobs and sexual partners, and family stories had to be repeated to reinforce the idyll of childhood. But what happened next, after the parental loss of control and the letting go, was salutary. If your mother or father is a high achiever, and mine was - I suppose Archbishop of Canterbury is a bit of a "Beat that!" job - then they will want you to be successful "in your own right".
My parents certainly had high hopes. They wanted me to be "successful"; ideally a lawyer or a doctor, or a university professor. They certainly didn't want me to become a television producer or a writer.
But no matter what job I did, my father could never take it seriously. I was a "mad theatre director", a "typical BBC producer" and then someone who was "writing a novel like all his friends". All these statements were, of course, true, but after my first novel had been published in Britain and America and translated into nine languages my father simply said "I don't believe it. You?" Perhaps he couldn't accept that his son could be published as he had been; that we both might have books in the same library or that mine might sell a few more copies than his treatise on the upcoming crisis in the Anglican communion.
Similarly, when he made a bit of an error in telling his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, a few juicy anecdotes about Princess Diana and the royal family as "background" but hadn't mentioned the crucial words "off the record", I told him that he shouldn't have been so naive and indiscreet. He should talk to my sister in order to see what might be done to head off any bad publicity.
"Rebecca? Why would I talk about it to her?"
"Because she works for a really top PR company."
"Rebecca?"
"Yes, Dad. She'd be great."
He looked at me as if I was mad. "It's all right. I've got a very good man in the Church of England press office ..."
My father couldn't believe that his daughter could help. He couldn't accept that she was no longer the little girl that used to look out of windows and dream but a professional who would have been the best person in the world to give him advice.
This refusal to see either my sister or myself as adults continues to amaze me. When once, mistakenly, I did stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh Festival and started to swear in the middle of the act, my mother heckled from the audience:
"Any more of that and I'll stop your pocket money."
Even when I was appointed artistic director of the Bath Festival of Literature at the age of 49, my mother's first question was: "Are they paying you any money?"
It seemed impossible to my parents that I might actually be able to hold down a proper job. And so, when I had children of my own, I was determined to be different. I would treat them as adult independent human beings, particularly when it came to the vexed problem of getting work. My wife and I have always believed that the key thing was to give your children all the support they need and then let them get on with it. We are proud of them, and this, we believed, was the secret of parenting. Tell your children you are proud; love them through difficulty.
But I have only just realised that I have been doing the same things my parents did to me. I have created mini-narratives about the past, reminding my daughters of the times when they were sick on the ferry to France or the day when, aged just five, my younger daughter Charlotte flashed with anger when I suggested her head teacher might not know everything.
"YOU ARE NOT MR ESSEREY!"
Ever since then, every time Charlotte has lost her temper, the other members of the family look at each other and mouth: "You are not Mr Esserey." This makes her quite cross.
Furthermore, no matter how "relaxed" I have tried to be about my daughters I have now realised that my supposedly supportive hands-off approach to their careers hasn't been helpful at all. Instead of expecting them to achieve great things, and develop successful careers in an age where there is no job security at all, I have been placing an even more unfair burden of expectation upon them - and this is, I am afraid, the burden of happiness.
It has taken me a long time to realise that to tell your child: "We don't mind what you do as long as you are happy," is not a helpful sentence. Expecting your child with an uncertain future to be happy and grateful for all the support and encouragement you have given is quite a controlling thing to say. It only accentuates their feelings of failure when they cannot live up to your unfair level of expectation. How are they supposed to be happy? Define happiness.
After trying to do everything to give your children sufficient confidence to go out into the world and be of good courage, you then make the fatal error of expecting the reward of their contentment. This is impossible. There is no closure, no completeness, no happy ever after. For just as you cannot control the fact that your children change, grow older and develop into separate, independent human beings, so you can't continually nurture them, protect them, or control their levels of happiness. I have learned that you have to let go - and that means no longer treating your children as extensions of yourself, but treating them as adults, as equals, as your friends and, crucially, as people with their own levels of expectation and disappointment rather than yours.
James Runcie's novel, East Fortune, is published by Bloomsbury on April 4.