Romeo's Juliet was not yet 14  OK then, how old was Juliet, as in Romeo and? Hats off if you got it: she was not quite 14. And how old was Juliet’s mother when she had her? That’s one for the know-alls, but the answer is, just about the same age. In Renaissance Verona, or rather Elizabethan England, having babies at the age of 14 was no big deal.  It may be because she’s spent several years steeped in this period for work purposes that the Booker winner Hilary Mantel wonders if there’s something to be said for this approach. That, and her own experience of infertility: her ovaries were removed in her late twenties because of illness.  Now she reflects that we may have got things the wrong way round when we think about the right time for reproducing. “There’s this breed of women for whom society’s timetable was completely wrong. I was perfectly capable of setting up a home when I was 14. I might have thought, 'now is the time for having a couple of children and when I am 30 I will go back and I’ll get my PhD’”.  This, of course, is not quite where everyone else is at on this subject. One of the Government’s criteria for measuring its own success is reducing the number of teenage pregnancies. It’s been poor at achieving it, as we saw with the figures published last week, but it’s still trying, chiefly by bombarding adolescents with advice on how to “access” contraceptives. But what if ministers are wrong and Hilary Mantel is right? Granted, she’s overstating it. Having children before the present age of consent would get in the way of GCSEs, but how about at 17 or 18?  Plainly, girls are only half the story. The likelihood of getting the fathers of their children to settle down, get married even, in their late teens and early twenties, is probably slim; but there’s always the possibility that it might inculcate a dim sense of responsibility in brutish young men.  It’s not as if our present situation is entirely satisfactory: children are sexualised early but only the losers get pregnant young. As for middle-class girls, they put reproduction on hold until university, career and mortgage are sorted, a time that may suit everything except their bodies. Last week, it was reported that women of 55 are “queuing” for IVF treatment at London infertility clinics to become pregnant with other women’s gametes. That’s unseemly. Given a toss-up between teenagers having babies and grandmothers having them, I think I’m with Hilary Mantel.  The journalist Christopher Hitchens is on a roll right now, chiefly for his devastating put-down of Anna Ford, after she dissed his friend Martin Amis, but also by virtue of his new memoirs. Of his occasional lapses into homosexuality at Oxford, he recalls that these included “mild and mildly enjoyable” flings with two youths who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Cue for a pause, for the bad-minded among us to work out which Tory ministers were at Oxford with Chris H. But it wouldn’t matter much if we guessed right. Once, being outed as gay would be political death among Tories. Now it’s pretty well a short cut for inclusion in David Cameron’s A-list.  Spare a thought for Christopher Chope MP, who today submits a petition for the reprieve of Bellamy’s Bar in the Palace of Westminster which the House of Commons Commission wants to replace with a nursery/crèche at a cost of £500,000. It was refurbished recently at a cost of £480,000. That makes nearly a million quid, dear reader, of our money. Somehow, the replacement of a congenial drinking joint with a nursery is a dispiriting metaphor for where we’re at.
Hilary Mantel has a point in commending the Romeo and Juliet approach to    starting a family young, argues Melanie McDonagh.