Abbey Clancy likes to joke that she and her husband, ex-England striker Peter Crouch, have “the footballer’s four” when it comes to children, “like Beckham and Rooney”. They have two girls, Sophia, 12, and Liberty, nine, and two boys, Johnny, five, and Jack, four. She jokes, too, of her scouse father’s horror that the children were born at the Portland hospital and so have Westminster on their birth certificates, as opposed to Liverpool, which would give them lifelong authentication of their roots. She would have more babies if “Crouchy” would allow it. But “Pete’s had the snip, so there’s only a one in 4,000 chance that we could”. Birth is a miracle she will never get over. When school mums and dads are round at their Surrey mansion, she’ll give them wine and crisps, and flash up the home videos of each child’s entry into the world on the wall-sized projection screen in the cinema room. “I’m proud of it,” she says. “All the women are crying and saying, ‘This is amazing.’ I don’t think they notice the vagina. They just look at the baby.”
Crouch doesn’t join in because, he says – in Robbie Williams’s famous words – it’s like watching your favourite pub burn down. He observes other dads wandering into the house to see where their wives have got to, then bursting out, white-faced, spluttering, “Fuckin’ hell.” He mimes a man silently screaming with his hands on his face in the throes of visual napalm. Clancy tuts and rolls her eyes to me as if to say, look at this philistine. “Well, I love it,” she says. “I’ve shown the kids it. Johnny was horrified. But it’s natural; it’s a natural thing.”
