My middle child’s thirtieth birthday was celebrated in a leisure complex in Vienna, attended by some two hundred and fifty guests. During the evening leading up to the midnight toast his first solo CD was launched, with Aidan singing numbers from it on a stage in the centre of the swimming pool, alone save for the band behind him, two television cameramen recording his every move, and two backing singers, one of them his sister. It all seemed an unlikely answer to the question, ‘What do you get if you cross a research chemist with an English teacher?’
I did not defy Mr Noël Coward’s advice so blatantly as my epigraph suggests. My elder son sat before computers, while my daughter worked front of house in the theatre world, the hither side of the footlights. Nor did I positively PUT my younger son on the stage: rather he seemed perforce to assume his destined place there. But his choice of career made much impact on my own more conventional life as a teacher, then indexer and editor working from home, in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. I think it time that the maternal perspective of life upon the wicked stage should be detailed, if only pour encourager les autres.

As the mother of an actor/singer/producer/entrepreneur, would I endorse Mr Coward’s cautious, contra-indicatory advice? Read on . . .