Juliets Ashes - A New Year Special - Leaving Leigh!

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone.

Just as Charley, Jettie, Cici and I are leaving Leigh after two weeks in our little cosy nook beside the sea, Henry arrives. Henry is the boy who lives round the corner in the cove and has not been sighted all holiday, despite the little girls going to visit his house every day.

We are a bit pressed for time, as Charley is the host on Mai FM this afternoon, but we tell them they can have 15 minutes and show Jettie what her new watch will look like when 15 minutes is up. Just as they are running off, a seagull with a broken wing arrives at the door.

This seagull has been hanging around all holiday, even though Teddy the Springer Spaniel chased him out to sea while Frankie screamed at me to stop him, saying if Teddy caught the bird her daughter Olive would be traumatised.

Charley looks at the bird and the disappearing children and says only I could cause such drama. He then asks ChatGPT what to do with a seagull with a broken wing, while I feed the little wounded one a can of tuna, which he seems very grateful for.

Charley and I are very surprised to learn that orange-billed seagulls have the status of protected wildlife and that it is our civic duty to catch him and take him to a vet who is obliged to do all that is necessary to ensure the highest standard of care for such an important patient.

The girls return and are overjoyed to see the bird eating his tuna, as they have been pestering me all holiday to help him. They christen him Little Wing and then try unsuccessfully to catch him with a yellow towel.

Unbelievably, it is Charley who catches Little Wing, and I see him triumphantly walking up from the beach with a yellow towel in his arms, from which a little head is poking—beady, lashless eyes that look like the doors of sea-snail houses watching, watching.

I am so delightfully surprised by Charley’s skill at bird-catching that I forgive him for the last two weeks of his mastering the act of being a fun dad. For two weeks he has insisted the girls call him King Daddy Potter, as he claims he went to Hogwarts and the Harry Potter movies are based off his childhood. If he ever for a moment supports my tuition attempts, the little girls become angry at him.

They say, “I hate you, Dad,” and he replies, “Who’s Brad?” They say, “You,” and he says, “Who’s Hugh?” This goes on and on until they become quite hysterical, as they are, of course, incapable of understanding the concept that an adult can also be a child.

The clincher, though, came when Charley was doing some seven-year-old maths with Jettie and was completely floored by two-column subtraction, which he assured me, in his jolly fashion, he has never been required to use in his life. He then passed the maths book to me as if I were Archimedes.

I look up an old Wellington College report when I get home, as I remember it being memorable. His Form 3 science teacher writes: Charley approaches life with refreshing irreverence and a sense of good-natured fun. If he were able to settle down a little, it would be a relief to all his teachers.

His form teacher, Mr Thorpe, writes: Charley is obsessed with making people laugh, and while he can be very funny, he is more often than not a distraction. He needs to adopt a more mature approach to classwork and to avoid viewing every class discussion as an opportunity to advance his comedic reputation.

I think how ChatGPT could never write comments like this that catch the essence of who Charley is, and somehow by understanding him his teachers accept and forgive him. I do the same twenty years later in Leigh, where two little girls have replaced Charley’s classmates as his audience.

We drop Little Wing at the Warkworth vet, and when we ring later that night to see how he’s doing, they tell us that he is under observation for the night. Cici asks, “Does that mean he doesn’t die?” and I think of how she brought a feather from the beach to fix Little Wing, and how wonderful it is to believe life is that simple—which I think Charley does, unbelievably.