It was a summer afternoon in 2020 at our in-laws’ house, just after lunch. I was sitting in an armchair reading the Sunday papers and eating a flat peach while our daughter Alexandra toddled around. She was just shy of her 2nd birthday. I let her have a little nibble on the peach and she liked it very much. Engrossed in whatever I was reading, I let her take the fruit for another nibble. Then I heard the noise – a spluttering gasp.
She’d swallowed the entire thing and the stone had lodged fast in her windpipe.
Her expression – confused. Scared. Tiny fists scrabbling at her throat. I cannot properly describe the level of terror that ignites through you in a situation like this. And ‘ignite’ is correct: it was like a jet of flame shot up my spine and I grabbed her and started pounding on her back as hard as I dared, trying to get her to cough it up. This went on for maybe fifteen seconds as my panic escalated, as I wondered what to do. Call an ambulance? Get in the car? Perform an emergency tracheotomy?
Fifteen seconds that felt like an eternity.
And then - with an almost audible ‘GULP!’ – she swallowed the whole thing down.
My wife and I took her to A&E where they confirmed there was no damage. She was fine. I went into the bathroom and broke down in tears, trembling. I nearly killed my own child. Sometimes, when you are a novelist, an experience smashes through you so powerfully that you know you will eventually have to write about it. It usually takes a few years to distil down through you to the point where you can use it in your fiction.
And so it proved with Alexandra and the peach, the incident that inspired the central event of my new novel The Fathers.
When you become a father, the instinct to protect and to nurture is profound, hardwired, primeval. The idea that you might have caused the opposite of protection is nightmarish. Writers are ‘what if?’ machines and the ‘what if?’ of the situation wouldn’t leave me alone. What if this had all gone very differently? One incident does not a novel make of course and the book turned out to be about two fathers, Dan and Jada, two guys from very different sides of the tracks, who meet through that Great British Leveller the NHS, on the morning that they both become fathers...
For middle-class Dan it’s his first child after several rounds of IVF. The baby could not be more longed for. For Jada it’s his fifth or sixth kid (he’s not quite sure) with five (or six) different women. Dan does everything right. Jada makes no attempt to do anything. Yet the fates do not care about any of this and after tragedy befalls Dan and his wife Grace, Jada and Dan are drawn into each other’s lives in unexpected ways.
The novel also came to be about fatherhood in a much broader sense. During the period between the peach incident and sitting down to write the book, my fourth child was born, our son Morty. Raising a tiny baby for what you know will be the last time is a powerful, bittersweet experience. You often find yourself thinking, this is the last time I will ever do this. You learn to savour the smallest things and I wanted to commemorate those feelings, those moments of profound love and affection babies inspire and that men do not often discuss. Dan on the sofa with his infant son Tom...
‘They were looking right into each other’s eyes...the incredible clarity of the whites, the detailing of the irises, the vastness of the pupils. The boy’s expression simply said ‘trust.’ I trust you. Then Tom reached out and touched Dan’s face, gently tracing his stubble, and said again, but softly and very seriously this time, ‘Dada.’ Dan felt his heart jemmying its way out of his chest and climbing up into his throat.’
Or Jada, on the floor by the cot with his baby boy...
‘He could feel the wee rabbit heart against his, slowing down now, the breathing deepening as Jayden swam into the current of sleep once again...for a moment it felt like their twinned pumps were flexing softly and precisely together, that their blood was traversing their bodies at the exact same rate. It felt like the boy was inside him. Like Nicola must have felt...’
These moments that became even more precious after a terrifying glimpse of just how fragile they are.
John Niven is the author of books including Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, and The Second Coming.