Practising Parenthood at Madame Tussauds
In 10 years as a couple, I had only agreed to my wife’s suggestions to have a baby vaguely, in the way I might to see a friend’s band: soon, yes, for sure. Over dinner at home one evening, she brought it up once again. “Am I ready?” I asked. “I don’t understand children. I’ve hardly met any.”
Charlotte reminded me that I had a niece and nephew. I liked Albert (10) and Vivienne (12), but I had my life in London and they had theirs in... Tring? I wasn’t sure. We were more like friends of friends, I said, overlapping at functions but yet to cross the line into a one-on-one drink. Charlotte said I should remedy this, as I would need to understand children very soon.
I texted my sister to arrange a rare get-together with her and the kids. They wanted to meet at Madame Tussauds. I arrived early, so I could circle its green dome in the hope this enduring site of parenthood might unlock a general truth or two about children. The original Madame Tussaud’s (with the apostrophe) was founded by the French artist Marie Tussaud in London in 1835. Her first wax sculpture was of Voltaire; the latest is of Timothée Chalamet, an index perhaps of the decline of Western civilisation. In the following 190 years, Madame Tussauds may have lost an apostrophe and been sold a couple of times — first to Dubai International Capital, then to the Blackstone Group, which merged it with Merlin Entertainments (with Dubai International retaining a 20 per cent stake in the combined company) — but its family values remain firmly intact.
Dozens of families were lining up outside, a surprise given I had read that children now browsed TikTok to the exclusion of virtually all other activities. Yet, there they stood, beneath an advert for a waxwork of Harry Styles. One boy, aged five-ish, was screaming with excitement, taking only micro-breaks for breath: “ahhhhhhh”— inhale — “ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.” At this stage, he hadn’t seen anything. I wondered: had the erosion of their offline world amplified the impact of anything “real” to the extent that even a mundane activity such as queuing was now a visceral thrill? Were they this easy to please?
The only fatherly quality I had developed prior to arriving was my monk-like devotion to value. Here, there were several opportunities to demonstrate it, beginning in the queue. Even with two free press tickets, I’d resented spending £74 on two more for the kids, who — when I told them the cost — appeared not to understand. I searched for ways to make the figure less abstract, so they’d appreciate the sacrifice I had made — the equivalent of my last dinner and drinks at Le Beaujolais, two seats at a Pavement reunion show — but soon recognised the lack of overlap in our respective frames of reference.
Inside, the frenzy with which every child greeted Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson painfully underlined this. A red-carpeted corridor led us to what Madame Tussauds calls the Awards Party zone. A voiceover made a series of heavy-handed diversity proclamations. Ignoring these, Vivienne thrust her handbag and iPhone at me and said to photograph her next to Dwayne.
After that, she and Albert ran between the statues for half an hour, treating every moment as a fleeting photo opportunity we needed to seize now or never, when each one was a static statue. As I watched Vivienne photographing Dwayne from new angles, I saw that already I understood children better. They hadn’t left TikTok — the statues represented a physical TikTok, one in which they could not only see Dwayne Johnson, but they could feel Dwayne Johnson.
Nicole Kidman was a nobody. Barack Obama was a nobody. The Beatles were nobodies but will.i.am wasn’t. The Culture Capital zone, which promised a “face to face with the game changers, trailblazers and intellectuals who have helped shape modern British culture”, featured Meghan Markle and Emmeline Pankhurst. But for the children, these were more nobodies. A staggering percentage of their photos — they shot all the nobodies — were just blurs of colour and light. But afterwards, I looked down at these photos, which had apparently been so important to take in the moment, and saw in their impressionistic swirls not a total waste of time but a document of raw life — life through the eyes of a child.
I grew inspired by the children’s desire to gorge on life. The Impossible Festival zone soon followed, resurrecting victims of drug overdoses, deadly diseases and assassinations as the line-up of a corporate rock festival, where inert simulations of Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury and John Lennon grin forever.
As poor as the waxworks often were, while twirling around to search for the disappearing children in the chaos of other disappearing children and panicked parents, I regularly mistook them for real people, possibly because the real people adopted stances identical to those of the statues when posing for photographs. There was probably a comment on the modern day in this, but the phenomenon interested me more in how perfectly it captured the children’s perception of adulthood. It was clear how scantly Vivienne and Albert distinguished between the statues and myself. They liked Madame Tussauds because of their fascination with adults; they saw the plane of existence that the statues live on as a window into my own — into adulthood in general, which to children is more or less a lot of men standing around, trying to hold a smile.
Next, the Chamber of Horrors zone, confined mostly to narrow halls with low red lighting, presented statues of British serial killers. John Haigh, who dissolved his victims in sulphuric acid, stood behind a bathtub in a gas mask, by a trail of blood on the floor. It was the first time since Nicole Kidman that I’d been mildly interested in a statue. Albert, though, was visibly terrified. My sister explained we’d need to leave, instructing me to hold onto Vivienne’s hand while she took Albert’s. I had never held a child’s hand before and approached it with the stiffness, aptly, of one of the statues. We fled the zone, merging each sterile tableau into one rapid-cut visual assault of prisons, blood and dry ice, ironically making it more frightening than it ever would have been taken at a stroll.
I was grateful for this new insight into the psychological limits of children, whose fascination with adulthood apparently stopped at its realer perils, those not quite captured by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. That excitement and the initial intensity of the opening zones was enough to carry me through the Kong and James Bond activations, but by the soulless Marvel one, I was beginning to weaken. After that came Star Wars, and with it images of the next 10 years surrendered to an endless treadmill of Batman activations and Harry Potter activations and Stranger Things activations. I went my entire childhood without ever experiencing one brand activation. I hoped, as I watched other adults ably navigating each, that I, like they, might learn to care.
Despite the hours of gleeful shrieking and unending photography, the prevailing mood at Franco Manca during our debrief was one of dissatisfaction and muted critique. It turned out the children hadn’t cared either. “I didn’t really know any of the statues,” Vivienne said. “I don’t understand,” I replied. “Why were you taking so many photos?”
She laughed this question away. I asked them who should have been included. “Bill Gates,” Albert said. “Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk.” He carried on like that, listing billionaires between bites of his pizza. “Logan Paul.” (He believed Logan Paul was also a billionaire.) After Albert finished his list by asking me, “Who’s Hillary Clinton?” it was revealed he’d been reading from different lists on his iPhone, supplied by Google searches for “rich people” and “famous people”.
The only knowledge of children I would leave with was that it was impossible to know anything about them, a paradox that in itself might also be incorrect. We ended by discussing whether they wanted to use pseudonyms or their real names for this article, with Albert flirting between Albert, the fun and casual Albie or the cool AJ; Vivienne flirted between Vivienne, Vivi and the name of a Stranger Things character.
Yoel Noorali is a writer who is currently at work on his first novel. This piece appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire. Subscribe here.
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