Crappily Ever After Read online

  ‘You know for an extra £20 you can upgrade to First Class,’ fellow Scot ventured. ‘How about we go find out, crack open a bottle of wine and make our journey less traumatic?’

  We make our way towards First Class with our upgrades. Annoyingly, it was practically empty. All these people standing in the corridors, yet all these seats sitting vacant. Mike, I now knew his name, provided the bottle of wine – at a staggering £17.50 – and we exchanged life stories. Mike was an Advertising Consultant for a Victoria-based company. He had been in west London, living just off Chiswick High Road, for six years and was originally from Aberdeen. He lived with his fiancée of two years, a beauty therapist, who had gone off to Hampshire to spend time with her own family. For no apparent reason, they hated Mike with a passion.

  ‘Sam would sort those eyebrows right out for you,’ Mike offered generously.

  I told Mike about my job in Highbury Fields as a nanny for three children, aged two, five and fourteen-years- old.

  ‘I‘m so over nannying!’ I moan. ‘Look up dysfunctional in the dictionary and you would find their family portrait.’

  I explained how the two-year-old boy, Georgie, threw the most spectacular tantrums you have ever seen and regularly called me ‘Mama’. This seemed to mainly coincide with the exact moment that the cutest guy I had seen that day walked by.

  ‘No. Not Mama. Lucy,’ I’d say every time, with great deliberation. Throwing a ‘he’s not mine, please ask me out’ kind of look in the direction of aforementioned man.

  I continued with how the five-year-old girl hadn’t been able to stand me since the second day of my employment. Once, on the walk to school – and in an attempt to break the ice and bond – I had spotted a patch of oil mixed with rain on the road. In mock horror I had turned to her and wailed:

  ‘Oh no! A dead rainbow! It must have fallen from the sky and…’

  Cue fifteen minutes of tears and a shamefaced new nanny explaining to Miss Smith that, ‘Katie tripped on the way in and…’

  ‘No… she… she said,’ sobbed a hyperventilating Katie.

  That’s the problem with five-year-olds. They have far too much damn vocabulary.

  I have since discovered that the no-go areas – and their potential demises – with five-year-old girls include: ponies, kittens, puppies, fairies, butterflies and, of course, rainbows.

  The safe list includes: snails, slugs, spiders, boys! (I nodded a bit too agreeably at that one) and Daddy when he’s grumpy – and Daddy is not grumpy when?

  ‘My third child and problem,’ I complain, ‘is fourteen-year-old Henry. Who also hates me. Well, most of the time. After a particularly virulent week of acne, I enquired if he was attempting to grow another head – or perhaps it was an undeveloped conjoined twin seeking revenge? Jeez! Fourteen-year-olds really have no concept of humour. I actually would prefer it if he hated me full-time. It would keep him out of my way. Let’s face it, he doesn’t need a nanny apart from to make his meals and wash his clothes (I don’t even want to know what those stains are). What can he possibly need? The downside is that he goes through these phases of fancying the pants off me. Snapping away on his crap excuse for a camera phone whenever I load the dishwasher and finding any excuse to brush past or touch me in some way.’

  ‘It’s like looking after the reincarnation of Benny Hill,’ I observe with a frown.

  ‘Hmm,’ muses Mike, in a ‘get the hell away from children, Social Worker-type manner.’ ‘So quit then. What’s your real love?’

  ‘To go back to college, train to be a chef and eventually open my own restaurant,’ I reply. ‘However, my financial situation won’t allow it; until I find a rich husband, I’ll just have to carry on wiping arses, noses and tending to the needs of those spoilt brats.’

  I tell Mike about the previous week at work and how I am becoming increasingly frustrated with my job. Funny how an entire week of my input and good work can be undone in just two days of the children being with their parents. Gone is ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and in their place is ‘I want!’ and an angry snatch whenever they receive something. All in the space of a weekend.

  Things reached boiling point two Friday mornings ago. Georgie threw the most horrendous tantrum in Sainsbury’s over a toy he wanted, but I wouldn’t buy. I had struggled to get him back in the buggy, but the harness is broken and, despite many requests by me, it hasn’t been replaced. I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re so used to going everywhere by jeep.

  Wait a minute, now I think of it. Can someone please explain to me why so many London families feel it necessary to have 4 x 4s? I mean, just how much off-roading do they expect to be doing in Notting Hill or Putney? Of course, this means they also have to have the standard uniform of Barbour jacket and wellies combo for the school run. Certain things I will never get about London. Another of them being: you find the perfect partner to either marry or cohabit with. Great! So far, so normal. Then, certain rules seem to apply:

  Buy a house: get a cleaner.

  Have a kid: get a nanny.

  Adopt a dog: get a dog walker.

  I mean, when did people become so lazy that they could no longer take a dog out for a pee? What grates so much on every nanny that I know is that dog walkers and cleaners get the same hourly rate as us. Can you believe it? I mean, put it in the perspective of responsibility:

  Cleaners:

  Aim: To not break anything.

  Objective: To leave the home shining like a new pin.

  Main responsibilities: To not mix cleaning solutions together (can cause chlorine fumes which can kill). Do not use the same cloth you used for the toilet on the kitchen surfaces.

  Dog walkers:

  Aim: To not lose anything.

  Objective: To leave the dog exercised and having done it’s business.

  Main responsibilities: Clean up said business accordingly. Return animal intact and without having mauled the leg of a toddler.

  Nannies:

  Aim: To not kill or allow anything to do permanent damage to itself.

  Objective: To cater to all physical, intellectual, emotional and social needs. Organise activities and outings with the skill and expertise of Sir Edmund Hillary embarking on a climb up Everest (and with a similar amount of equipment). Educate within the constraints of the National Curriculum. Possess the ability to change a nappy, tackle a pile of ironing containing miniature items, put on a load of washing, discipline, tackle homework that you didn’t understand first time around, provide fun activities without the use of television, praise, reward, sort out fights, arrange play dates for the next week, make up bottles, put a plaster on a knee, take phone messages for employer and collect dry cleaning. All while making an organic pot roast.

  Main responsibilities: Spend ten hours a day averting danger from the combination of small people and trains, buses, cars, swings, climbing frames, plug sockets, kettles, cookers and each other. Ensure that they are fed, watered, sweet smelling, pyjama’d and in a good mood for when mummy and daddy return, crack open a bottle of Chablis and tell you how crap their day has been. While you slobber like one of Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of a cork popping.

  Do you see what I mean? It’s not that I begrudge cleaners and dog walkers the money they get. Just like us, they provide a necessary service to the middle and upper classes. Nor do I think they should get less money for what they do. It’s just that nannies should get more. People think it’s a design flaw that so many career nannies remain childless and/or single. It’s not. Equate it to a frustrated housewife who has spent 20 years raising a family and putting up with the mood swings of a husband who thinks you are beneath him because you don‘t have a ‘proper job’. Then, imagine the liberation when the kids all leave home and you boot out said husband. Who would want to recreate that 24/7 scenario? Nobody.

  It’s nanny burnout. Spend too long raising other people’s families and you don’t want to do it for yourself. You lack the energy, incentive and motivation. Men resisting co
mmitment should get themselves a nanny girlfriend; there are so many of us just as happy to avoid the marriage/baby route as you are. Preferring, instead, to commit to Caribbean holidays, a nice apartment in the city, spa treatments and spending all the money we’ve earned over the years and been too busy and knackered to spend.

  But anyway, back to Mike, the train and last Friday‘s story.

  Katie came out of school wailing that she hadn’t been invited to the latest birthday party of a class member.

  ‘You don’t even like Sasha,’ I protested. ‘Last week she was a poo poo head I seem to remember. How can you expect her to invite you?’

  ‘That’s not the point!’ shouted Katie. ‘This week I gave her a lolly.’

  ‘Only because you knew the invites were going out on Thursday.’ I raised my eyebrows at her. I had her on that one. I watched as her young mind tried to think of a suitable retort. She failed, and resorted to scuffing the toes of her shoes all the way home.

  We returned to find a sulky Henry watching the Hard Rock channel on cable.

  ‘How was your day, Henry?’ I tried to arrange my features into something resembling an interested smile – and ended up with a half grimace, half escaped mental patient look.

  ‘Hmmph.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I soothed.

  Later, a traumatic teatime was finally over. Georgie had tipped his bowl upside down onto his head and smiled at the other two through spaghetti hair. Hysterical laughter alerted me while I was loading the tumble drier. Katie’s laughter, that is. I’m not sure Henry snorting and grunting through five octaves counts. I cleaned up without a word and spoon-fed Georgie the second batch of Spaghetti Bolognese.

  ‘Eat up please, Katie.’

  ‘Don’t like sgetti.’

  ‘You said last week it was your favourite. I made it with meatballs.’

  ‘Actually, I think you’ll find that I don’t like Bolognese.’

  ‘You obviously don’t like ice cream either, then. Since you’re not having any unless you have at least three more spoonfuls.’

  Katie reluctantly licked her fork and continued, holding her nose dramatically.

  Bath time at last. One hour until the official start of the weekend.

  ‘I’m not having a bath with that,’ Katie informed me disdainfully, head held high and indicating at a food-covered Georgie.

  ‘Katie, it’s fine. It’s only food. He doesn’t mind that he’s running the risk of nits, worms and other school child afflictions.’

  ‘Would you like to have a bath with a doubly incontinent, slobbering mess?’ Henry asked me, pointedly. I chewed my lip and thought frantically of a suitable response. An image of my Great Aunt in her rest home sprang to mind. He had a point.

  Two separate baths later and I heard the tinkling tones of Sylvia, my female boss.

  ‘How are my babies?’

  ‘Mummy!’ screamed the two youngest, thundering down the hallway.

  Two hugs and one ‘don’t touch me’ later, Sylvia opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a large glass.

  ‘What a day, Lucy,’ she sighed. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are being here all day. Oh, you do remember you’re babysitting tonight, don’t you?’

  I looked up sharply. Never! There is no way I’d agree to a Friday night’s babysitting – or any night for that matter – unless I was really, and I mean really, broke.

  ‘Oh, Lucy,’ she said exasperatedly. ‘We arranged it weeks ago. It’s on the calendar.’ She waggled a finger knowingly at me.

  I walked to the calendar. “Friday 16th of December. Lucy babysitting”. I felt smugness emanate from behind me and I turned to look at her.

  ‘See?’ she smiled, triumphantly.

  I ran my finger over “Lucy babysitting”. It smudged.

  ‘Oh my God! You just wrote that.’ I swung round in disbelief.

  ‘Oh Lucy, please,’ Sylvia pleaded. ‘I totally forgot we have a dinner party with Simon’s boss and he’ll kill me if I’ve forgotten to book a babysitter.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help. I have plans for this evening.’ I put on my coat without looking at her, shouted goodbye to the kids, and left.

  By now, Mike is desperate to get me off the subject of my job. He confesses that he’s always wanted to work overseas in his own bar. Preferably Greece or Spain. I emphatically agree and we decide that once I have done a cookery course we will open a place together: Mike on the bar, me in the kitchen, Sam giving massages on the beach – and with my rich husband-to-be funding the whole thing. We continue chatting away amicably for the duration of the journey and swap numbers at the stop before mine for a New Year catch-up – and so that Sam can fix my Denis Healey’s, as my eyebrows are now referred to. I do the obligatory call home, so Mum can have a glass of wine poured and tea in the microwave. I wish Mike a happy and relatively painless time at home and brace myself for the biting North Sea air.

  Chapter Two

  I battle with my case and backpack up one flight of stairs and down the second set at Arbroath station. I spot my sister leaning against her car, smoking a roll-up and observing my struggle with an amused expression. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that all hell has been let loose in the back seat of her car, as her young daughter and son scream at each other over a packet of sweets.

  ‘Hi sis, are they all right in there?’ I envelope her in a nicotine-clouded hug, plucking the roll-up from her fingers, and inhaling several lungfuls before she snatches it back.

  ‘Good to see you, doll. Don’t worry about them. We’ve been at Mum’s all day, wrapping and hiding your presents,’ she accuses. ‘They’re on a Haribo high, it should pass in an hour or so. I’m dropping them at home to their Dad now, so we can party.’

  Mary is one year younger than me, but has always been the more mature one. She always seemed to know where she was going in life while I, in comparison, seemed to be the only one with no direction and no clue. We are also a complete contrast to each other; physically, Mary takes after our Mum’s side of the family, while I take after Dad’s. She has gorgeous red curls that everyone admires, but she hates them. God invented hair straighteners just for her, she claims. Mary had married young. Too young, she now says. Bill had been her first love and they were completely smitten with each other. Walking round High School holding hands and not caring who laughed. Neither had any aspirations to go to Uni. Bill started an apprenticeship as an electrician for the same company his Dad worked for; Mary took a job in our town’s one and only department store, later changing to a different in-store shop when she got bored. They married two years later.

  ‘I wish I’d held off ‘til I had a bit of dress sense – and until they invented straighteners,’ she later told me, putting down her wedding picture with a wistful sigh. A mass of red curls and a huge puffball dress was not, in her opinion, such a good look. We suggested she get married again in a blessing ceremony when the kids were born, with her new updated look.

  ‘Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to marry him twice?’ was her incredulous reply.

  They did, however, hold off having kids until they were both thirty. Before they decided to start a family they took off for a late gap year around Australia and Asia; Mary came back already pregnant and, shocked beyond belief, tearfully asking me what the hell you do for nine months with no fags and booze? It was beyond me. She’s the only person I know who had pre-natal depression.

  It wasn’t until Mary had Josh and Jess that things really started to sour with Bill. He did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, unless you count the fact that he gambled, drank too much and ignored her requests that he smoke outside away from her babies.

  Mary decided to discuss it with her mother-in-law, Joan.

  ‘He’s just like his bloody father,’ snapped Joan, bitterly. ‘If I haven’t been able to do anything with Bill senior in 35 years, then I don’t rate your chances with Bill junior.’ They gripped their coffee cups with clenched fists and stared into space. Identic
al pained expressions on their faces.

  We drop off the now sleeping children with their very reluctant father.

  ‘Unbelievable that just fifteen minutes before they were screaming like banshees,’ I observe.

  Mary had informed me that she might have to stay at home as it could be a two-man job. So, we had driven around for an extra twenty minutes to send them off to sleep. We each struggle up the garden path, which was littered with roller skates, bikes and a football, under the heavy weight of a soundly sleeping child. Bill watches us mutely from the door with a can of lager in one hand and a fag in the other, looking as unattractive as ever in greying socks and boxer shorts. A fetching curry stain on his once white T-shirt. Mary informs Bill that he can stop looking at her with that combination of shock and disgust. She couldn’t drink for the best part of two years while she carried Josh and Jess; one night of sobriety and being the responsible adult was not going to kill him. That said, we head down to Mum’s. On arrival, Mum gives me a big hug and tells me I’m getting far too skinny, as she does every time I see her, despite my almost eleven-stone bulk. She places a huge plateful of sausage, mash and gravy in front of me – heart disease is one of the main hazards of having a Scottish mother.

  ‘I know it’s a lot, but it’s the Taurean need-to-feed. It’s out of my control,’ she explains.

  We have a lovely evening of festive TV. Normally, we would never dream of watching a church service but, as ex-choir girls, Mum and I love it. Despite thinking she could give Celine Dion a run for her money, Mary’s singing – bless her – conjures up images involving a bag of cats, bricks and a river. There is something warm and comforting about a carol concert. We screech out hymns as if we still had fresh, non-nicotine addicted lungs.

  Within hours, the evening spirals downward into debauchery with a hilarious game of Cataroo. Think of the childhood game, Buckaroo, but on a live, sleeping cat. Mary goes first with a carefully placed gift tag. Poopsy, so named due to her aversion for the litter tray, snoozes on oblivious. I go next with a candy stick plucked off the tree. Mum tuts and fusses, declaring the game cruel and unnecessary, then wanders over with a bauble, also from the tree. By this stage we are all convulsed with silent laughter, apart from the odd snort or whimper. Two minutes later Poopsy has the addition of a Twiglet, a pickled onion, a mobile phone, one of my nephew’s Power Rangers and then, the piece de resistance from Mary, a remote control is heading Poopsy’s way.