Best Behaviour

I have known for two years, maybe three, that there is no such thing as the Easter Hare, as with Father Christmas.

I am now old enough to see through the story, but I don’t let on. To do so might interfere with the supply of chocolate.

There are four of us running through the garden looking for the small eggs wrapped in brightly coloured silver paper and hidden among the flowers in beds we are not allowed to step into. My sole aim at this stage is to find more eggs than my sister and our two cousins. I have forgotten that when the search is over, we will share them out, and so having the most is a temporary affair.

I know by now that the egg-hiding technique is similar each year. The rose garden at the end of the lawn, both sides of the big border. Don’t bother to look elsewhere.

I am wearing my best clothes and on my best behaviour because we are at my grandparents’ house. We have been here for about an hour, during which time I have been thinking about little else but chocolate. I think we have needed to wait so that someone, possibly my mother, will go round the garden tucking eggs under the primroses and into the cracks in the crazy paving.

We are told that we have to wait inside because the Easter Hare has not been yet. I don’t know if my younger cousin still believes in this nonsense, so I don’t even whisper that I know none of this is true. Actually I can see the signs that we are being distracted so that ‘someone’ can hide the eggs.

I slip into the kitchen and talk to Edith, the cook, who is already preparing lunch even though it is only 11. This is a much more natural conversation because I don’t have to pretend any more. When I am with my parents and grandparents, I have to give the answers I know they want to hear.

“Do you like school?”
“Yes, thank you. I love it.” (No one I know likes school – we are there because we have to be).
“What is your favourite subject?”
“Sums and spellings.” (Making a mess and playing during the breaks).

In the kitchen there are large pots of this and that and I don’t have to pretend to be the model grandson ‘destined for great things’…

“There you are”, my mother says as she winkles me out. “Let Edith get on with her work.” She is wearing her new earrings and is being gracious. I like her when she is like this but I know it may not last, because I will be naughty sooner or later, and she will be irritated and upset.

Then there is the announcement: “The Hare has been.” Out we go running through the garden with our little collector’s baskets, trying not to look too greedy.

As usual I have not got the most eggs. We trundle back to the house, for an adult to supervise the sharing and to tell us that we can eat just one now “because lunch will be ready soon”. (I know I will manage to eat more than one before they are taken away and “kept up here until later.”)

”You’ll be sick if you eat more”, I am told. That is another of those Easter Bunny/Father Christmas yarns. I have never met anyone who has been sick because he or she ate too much chocolate. I could live on chocolate and not feel the least bit queasy but I don’t let on because I am still on my best behaviour. More pretending to be a good boy.

My grandfather takes me into his study to give me some foreign stamps he has saved in an old envelope. Then he shows me how he works his complicated machine which can do sums on its own.
5 + 2 = 7.
I am not sure why he needs a machine for that. I do those in my head but I don’t tell him. Maybe he just likes the noise it makes. He tears off the little slip of paper with the numbers printed on it and gives it to me. Perhaps he hopes I will remember the answer. He clearly doesn’t know that I am already quite able to do divisions, multiplications and fractions.

“Thank you very much,” I say.

I am eight-years-old but I already know that ‘best behaviour’ means telling a different type of lie.

Perhaps that’s why grown-ups pretend there’s an Easter Hare hiding eggs in primroses. Maybe they are on their best behaviour, too.

Author Notes: Semi-autobiographical with a good dose of artistic licence...

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