Ironing Man

I was listening to Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 yesterday. The subject was housework and the gender divide and how this causes much friction between partners. Even now, in families where both men and women work full-time, the woman tends to do the bulk of the housekeeping, particularly the laundry. There are of course men who do their fair share. I will admit I am rather slapdash with a duster but my husband is a phenomenal ironer. We have distributed the work between us over the last 25 years. I do the loos. He does the oven. We both do the washing and take out the bins. He changes the sheets, I hoover (occasionally).

When we lived in London and I was teaching full-time we got a cleaner called Marcia who was a Brazilian marvel. As I gave up teaching to look after our three small kids, we didn’t have the money anymore and our house was always a tip. It still has its moments with three teenagers who leave cups and glasses everywhere and a trail of discarded clothes. They do help sometimes. If directed. And nagged. Or paid. And it helps greatly that my mother loves cleaning and will zoom around our house with a mop and a dustpan and brush.

But I do hanker after my own space sometimes. It would be clean and uncluttered with no piles of papers strewn across the table. There would be no slag heaps of shoes heaped by the back door. Or in the hall. Or at the top of the stairs lying in wait to break someone’s neck. There would be no odd socks, no brim-full bins, no sticky Coke cans lurking on dusty windowsills. It would be a place where I could write without feeling guilty about neglecting the washing machine or unpacking the dishwasher.

I know this is a dream. Life is messy. We all have to pull our weight and share our gifts. Vicky, the heroine of my new novel This Holey Life, is a cleaning fanatic. She does it in order to get some control over her life but it makes her bossy and irritated and unsatisfied as she can never achieve the perfection she hankers after.

Before you get married you should be sent on a course that teaches both men and women how to unblock a sink and how to polish a shoe. There should be a contract that stipulates who does what. And then of course you would have to trust each other to stick to this.

Hmmm….

Dear Lupin

I’ve just finished reading Dear Lupin having heard extracts read out on BBC Radio 4.  I loved the reference to Pooter from the classic Diary of a Nobody and had to get hold of my own copy. I consumed it quickly, drawn into the claustrophobic world of Roger Mortimer and touched to the core by his love, forgiveness and constancy for his wayward, hapless son, Charlie.

This is a world of the British upper class (definitely not the middle class as both Charlie and his father insist). Names are dropped that you wonder about: is that the famous Hislops? The circles that the Mortimers move in are full of gin-drinking, hunting, antique-dealing, banking, posh toff divorcees and Brigadiers and heiresses. Theirs is a closed world of public school, Oxbridge, the Turf Club and drink driving.

And yet.

This is a story, a real life account, of a father-son relationship. The book is made up of a series of letters written by Roger Mortimer (a POW after capture at Dunkirk and racing correspondent for the Sunday Times) to his son Charlie, whose addiction to booze, drugs and shifty living continually exasperates him.

Mortimer comes from the generation of stiff-upper lip that this class of Brits is renowned for, a man who should not be able to express his emotions for his son, to his son. A son who has endured Eton and a brief stint in the army. A son who is decidedly anti-establishment, lurching from one odd-job to another, from one stint in hospital to another. But these letters, written regularly and persistently over thirty odd years, demonstrate this father’s steadfast love for his son with wit, self-deprecation and a gritty determination. To have all this recorded in print is precious. And, looking back at these letters that miraculously survived across continents and London boroughs, Charlie knows it. This book is a testament to that.