Darby and Joan
23rd September 2006
If I hear the words ‘Darby and Joan’ one more time I will scream.
Since Marjan peremptorily left home three weeks ago Sylvia and I have entered, if only for six months, a tremulous state of life-after-children. For these three weeks I’ve been peppered with ‘Darby and Joan’. It’s like buckshot in the backside.
“Oh, you’ll be clattering about like Darby and Joan,” exclaim our acquaintances.
This is usually accompanied by a simpering smile – half sympathetic, half conspiratorial – and a small delighted shake of the head and shoulders. I’ve seen these smiles and shakes before. They are normally reserved for aging and dotty relatives.
I was genuinely puzzled by this. Of all the expectations I had of life after Marjan’s departure this was the least anticipated. It never occurred to me to respond to the numerous enquiries about coping with life after children with, “oh, we’re going to turn into Darby and Joan.” Why would it? I’ve no idea who they are.
And neither, it seems, does anybody else. My enquiries as to what was meant by the comparison drew the same little smile and another little shrug, only this time slightly more patronising, as if to say, “oh yes, he’s losing the plot already. It’ll be Rosebank next week and then, phut!”
One frank soul eventually conceded she had no idea who Darby and Joan were, but did so in a way that conveyed I had spoiled the joke by asking.
To avoid further offence I did what all reasonable people would. I Googled.
Google came up with 1,980,000 responses to ‘Darby and Joan’. After reading the first entry I’d seen enough.
Darby and Joan (you may wish to turn to the sports page at this point if you are somebody who suffers ‘Darby and Joan’-isms) refers to "the type of loving, old-fashioned, virtuous couples.”
Darby and Joan were not simply old-fashioned. They were just plain old. John Darby died in 1730, for goodness sake. He and Joan were outed in a poem written by somebody called Henry Woodfall and published in 1735.
From this point the descriptions become simply creepy. If Darby was a fusty old geezer his wife was a nightmare – “as chaste as a picture cut in alabaster. You might sooner move a Scythian rock than shoot fire into her bosom.”
I don’t understand half of this. I know Alabaster had something to do with Otago cricket in my boyhood, and my dad used to cut long grass with a scythe, but those references are too subtle for me. Never mind, I get the drift of Joan’s character from that one dreadful word – ‘chastity’.
‘Chastity’ really hits the spot with my generation. It resounds with the knell of ‘spinster’, ‘duty’ and ‘honour’. Although I’m young enough only to have been a child in rather than of the 60s I nevertheless grew up determined, like all my peers, to rid myself as soon as possible of chastity in both word and deed.
Am I now to be told by all (and sundry) that my future – this ‘Darby and Joan’ future wished upon me – is a state of chastity? It’ll be bedsocks and chamomile tea next – (dear God, we have started drinking chamomile tea recently!).
I can state publicly that my plans for life after the children left home did not include chastity. But do my erstwhile well-wishers know something I don’t? Is Darby and Joanism inevitable? Have twenty years of parenting reduced my capacities to a game of Scrabble in the evening and an occasional wayward fumble?
If so, I plead with my daughters to return home. I repent the times I encouraged you to grow up and depart, taking the last autumn leaves of my youth with you.
But, to hell with it! I won’t be consigned to my dotage so easily. After all, I belong to the ‘me’ generation. If we can vanquish egalitarianism and invent botox it should be simple to eradicate Darby and Joan.
I say scrap these 300 year old role models and find a swinging 21st century equivalent. Recently de-childrened parents should be greeted with an affirming “oh, you’ll be just like”…who?
Hmm, let’s see… I know. What about, “oh, you’ll be just like Peter and Helen.” No? A bit too risqué? (she’s a termagent and he hugs men. Well, so do I, and I intend to continue even into my Darby and Joan years).
Alright, what about “oh, you’ll be clattering around like Don and Je Lan.” Perhaps not. We get the impression ‘the Don’ and his wife aren’t doing a lot of clattering. Could we say Don and whatshername - the night of the Roundtable? Are they a suitably fiery-bosomed model for today’s mature couple?
Or maybe we go with the French equivalent of Darby and Joan - c'est St. Roch et son chien.
I can hear our friends’ exclamations. “So your children have left home. You’ll be clattering about like Saint Rock and his dog.”
Sylvia will love that.