How Hard Can It Be?

3.15 pm: Fighting the urge to go upstairs and sleep. Can hardly put ‘afternoon napping’ down as part of my skillset on application form, although it’s the one thing I excel at these days. Probably Perry’s fault. With my CV immensely improved (although I’m not sure I’d dare show it to my Women Returners group) I brace myself for a call to Wrothly Social Services. Sadly, it’s too early for alcohol.

‘Your call may be assessed for training purposes.’

Here we go. You know when you’ve pressed five for one department and then you’ve pressed one from the Following Range of Options, although you think you may have misheard, and that maybe you needed three? And then you’ve pressed seven for Any Other Queries, and your hopes are getting up that you might be about to interact with an actual human being, when a recorded voice says, ‘Sorry. We are experiencing a high volume of calls. Your call is important to us, please hold the line’? And the phone rings and rings and rings and you picture a cobwebby office with a skeleton sitting in a chair at a desk and the phone on the desk it rings and rings and rings? Well, that’s what it feels like to be calling Wrothly Social Services.

By now, surely everyone has figured out that these multiple options are not designed to be helpful; they are supposed to act as a deterrent whilst giving the illusion of progress and choice. Even ‘your call may be used for training purposes’ is basically a threat, telling you to behave yourself or else. A mere twenty minutes elapse until I get through to someone in the right department, who then asks if he can put me on hold while he speaks to a colleague, who may or may not have access to Barbara’s case notes. I am almost tearfully grateful for this basic courtesy.

‘Hello? Can I help you?’

The voice does not sound at all helpful. In fact, she sounds as though she may recently have graduated from a bespoke Unhelpfulness training course – the one they send American border security staff on.

I know, let’s baffle her with politeness and friendliness.

‘Good afternoon, thank you so much. It’s great to talk to an actual person.’

No response.

‘So, I’m ringing on behalf of my mother-in-law, she has a burns injury …’

‘Barbara Shattock?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Great. Thank you so much. I spoke to my father-in-law earlier and he says that, unfortunately, there was a misunderstanding between Barbara and Erna, the carer you so kindly sent to help them.’

‘I’m afraid that your mother-in-law has been reported in connection with a possible hate crime,’ says the voice.

‘What? No. That can’t be right.’

‘Mrs Shattock racially abused one of our carers.’

‘Sorry? No. You’ve got that wrong. You don’t understand. Barbara, she’s eighty-five. She’s very confused. She’s not herself.’

‘Mrs Shattock accused her carer of not being able to speak English. At Wrothly, we take hate crime very seriously.’

‘Hang on. What hate crime? Erna is Lithuanian, isn’t she? She’s not a different race to Barbara. Do you even know what racism is?’

‘I’m not trained to answer that question,’ the voice says flatly.

‘But you’re making a very serious allegation.’

There is an icy silence into which I burble and plead: ‘I’m really sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding, but it’s simply not in Barbara’s nature to upset someone like that.’

That is a blatant lie. As long as I’ve known her, more than twenty years now, Barbara has been the princess of passive aggression, the empress of undermining. The world is full, as far as Barbara is concerned, of people who are Simply Not Up To It. The list of Simply Not Up To Its is long and ever-expanding. It includes news anchors with sloppy diction, women who ‘let themselves go’, tradesmen with dirty boots who don’t show sufficient respect to Axminster carpets, pregnant weathergirls, politicians who are ‘basically Communists’, and the fool responsible for a misprint in the Daily Telegraph crossword. A mistake in her favourite crossword and Barbara will act out the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, calling for the head of the idiot who introduced an error into Twenty-Two Across.

As the lesser of her two daughters-in-law, it was established early on that I was Simply Not Up To It. I was hardly the girl Richard’s mother hoped her son would marry and she did very little to conceal her disappointment. Every time we visited, Barbara would ask without fail, ‘Where did you get that dress/blouse/coat, Kate?’ and not in a way which indicated she wished to go out and purchase one for herself.

One Christmas, I was in the pantry looking for tinned chestnuts when I heard Barbara say to Cheryl, the preferred daughter-in-law, ‘Kate’s problem is she has no background.’

It stung, not just the snobbery, but because Barbara was right. Compared to the comfortable, well-established Shattocks, my own family had a hasty, provisional feel. We were the Beverly Hillbillies, the supermarket’s basic range, and I know Barbara sensed it from the moment Rich first took me home. Luckily, he was so in love he didn’t notice her dig at my unmanicured hands. (I’d been decorating a junk-shop chest of drawers and the residue of grey-green paint looked like dirt beneath my fingernails.) I could put up with having my family patronised, my cooking dismissed and my choice of clothes derided, but the one thing I could never forgive Barbara for is that she has always made me feel like a bad mother. And I’m not.

Yet, here I am defending Barbara to the woman from social services because Barbara is no longer in any fit state to tell this woman that she is Simply Not Up To It. Which she clearly isn’t.

‘Has it occurred to you that it might be quite upsetting if you’re an elderly lady and the person washing you is a bit rough and she can’t understand what you’re saying? Are we allowed to say that? Oh, I see, we’re not allowed to say that. Pardon me.’

Uch. When did we become this nation of hateful automatons, unable to deviate from the official script to respond to genuine need and upset? All friendliness gone now, I channel my steeliest professional self and suggest that the voice gets another carer around to help Barbara and Donald asap.

‘Otherwise, Mrs Shattock might seriously hurt herself at which point Wrothly Social Services will be obliged to comment. On the evening news.’

‘I am not trained to answer that,’ I hear the voice say, followed by the dialling tone.

Well, that went well.

To: Candy Stratton

From: Kate Reddy

Subject: Headhunter Humiliation

Hi hon, thanks for the pep talk. I did a new CV as you suggested. Might enter it for Pulitzer Prize as piece of groundbreaking, experimental fiction. It’s not really lying if you know you can do all the things you haven’t done, is it?

I’ve been going to these Women Returners meetings. Don’t laugh. They’re really sweet and it’s making me realise how much luckier I am than those who quit when they had their first baby. Desperately trying to lose weight and get myself into shape, but I’m just so damn tired and wrung out the whole time. Hard not to raid the biscuit tin when you’re knackered! Not sleeping cos of night sweats. I have hog’s bristles sprouting out of my chinny chin chin. I’m so blind I can’t read the calories on any foodstuffs, which I’m not supposed to be eating anyway as I need to get into my Thin Clothes because I gave my Fat Clothes to the charity shop the last time I lost weight and swore I would never be fat again. Plus, I need to take a nap every afternoon. I have the energy of a heavily sedated sloth.

Missed my gym session today with Conan the Barbarian because I was talking to Richard’s dad about Richard’s mum, who clearly has Alzheimer’s, but no one can face having that conversation so we are all pretending it’s fine until she burns the house down. Oh, and the council is accusing Barbara of a HATE CRIME because she didn’t like the surly, non-English-speaking ‘carer’ they sent to bathe her. Excuse me, she’s eighty fucking five! If you can’t be a difficult old bitch then, when can you be?

I never know when my period’s coming these days and I’m scared the deluge will happen when I’m out. Just like I was scared when I was 13 and my period started in the middle of a chemistry test. So I prefer to stay in and watch property-porn shows and fantasise about life in a neglected French chateau being renovated for me by Gérard Depardieu (circa Green Card, not since he got bigger than an actual chateau) with his large, capable yet tender hands, TOTALLY FREE OF CHARGE.

Be honest. Does this sound like the kind of mature, together person anyone in their right mind would want to employ?

Your (VERY) old friend,

Kxx

4

GHOSTS

Women Returners. They sound like the ghosts in some horror movie, don’t they? You can practically see the trailer with that grave, apocalyptic, male Hollywood voice booming, ‘Women Returners! They’re back! Rising from the dead and rejoining the workplace! If only they can escape the Mummy’s Curse and rely on someone else to take the lasagne out of the freezer and give Grandma her statins!’

I don’t know about ghosts, but some of the women in our Returners group definitely have a haunted look about them. Haunted by the careers they gave up – in some cases so many years ago that they might as well be a different person altogether. Haunted by all those Might Have Beens. Sally, sitting on my right today, used to work for a big Spanish bank in Fenchurch Street. A small, sunken person in an outsize cable-knit cardigan, Sally only has to say Santander or Banco de España in a perfect Spanish accent and you glimpse the spirited, flirtatious person that she must have been twenty years ago, when she was running her own department with a squad of Juans and Julios doing her bidding. Sally’s nostalgia for those days is so acute that sometimes I can’t bear to watch the dormouse-bright eyes in that lined face. During the group’s first few meetings, Sally was shy, almost painfully reticent, swathed in an unseasonally warm fleece when the rest of us were still in linen trousers and summer dresses.

Kaylie, the group leader – a large, expansive Californian with a wardrobe built exclusively around turquoise and orange (to be fair, it probably worked better in San Diego than it does in East Anglia) – did her best to draw Sally out. By Week Four, Sally volunteered that once her two sons and a daughter had flown the nest (Antonia graduated two years ago; Spanish and History at Royal Holloway), she did think it would be ‘good to get back out there’. Sally said she got a part-time job, which she still has, working as a cashier at Lloyds Bank in the scuzziest street in the pretty, prosperous market town where we meet.

‘You know the one, it’s all charity shops and doner kebabs,’ Sally said. We nodded politely, but we didn’t know it.

Over time, the branch manager began to notice that Sally was unusually competent. (She played down her years in London on her application because she was worried it might look boastful or intimidating and they wouldn’t employ her.) The manager gave her more responsibility: totting up at the end of the day, handling foreign currency. They get a lot of Turkish lira conversions because of the kebab shops.

‘I suppose it is a bit beneath me,’ she told the group, sounding not in the least bit convinced that anything was beneath her, except possibly the ground, ‘but I like my colleagues. We have a laugh. It gets me out of the house. And now that Mike is retired …’

‘You’d like to be at home more?’ Kaylie beamed her best facilitator smile.

‘Oh, no,’ said Sally quickly, ‘now that Mike is retired I want to be at home less. Drives me potty having him in my kitchen.’

‘I know how you feel,’ said Andrea. ‘I sometimes think I’ll go mad if I don’t get out of the house.’ Andrea Griffin joined the graduate training scheme of one of the UK’s big four accountancy firms straight from university. By the time she was thirty-seven, she’d made partner. Not long after, her husband John had his accident; a lorry smashed into his car on a fogbound M11. Luckily the helicopter was available – it’s the same one Prince William pilots now – and they flew him straight to the head injuries unit at St George’s. Took John a year to learn to talk again.

‘The first words that came back to him were the filthiest swear words you can imagine,’ Andrea said. Her freckly chest flushed a little at the thought of her husband, a decent sort who used to say ‘Blimey’ and ‘Well I never!’ at moments of great surprise, reduced to a scowling wreck who told his mother-in-law to go fuck herself. The insurance company finally paid up in January, after a ten-year legal battle, and now that they can afford 24/7 care for John, Andrea can relinquish some of her responsibilities. ‘Started to think it might be nice to use my brain again,’ she said when Kaylie asked us to share what we hoped to get out of the Returners workshop. ‘If I’ve still got a brain,’ Andrea laughed. ‘The jury’s still out on that one. It’s all a bit daunting, to be honest.’

The room we meet in is in the modern annexe of the old town library. What it lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in strenuous attempts to remove actual books from what one poster depressingly calls ‘The Reading Experience’. Why is everything in here on a screen? I remember how Emily and Ben adored their bedtime stories, then gulped down Harry Potter, even making us queue up at midnight outside the local bookshop to buy the latest instalment. Now they are practically soldered to their keyboards. Emily might still pick up a novel from time to time and breeze through seventy pages before something more compelling intervenes – usually a make-up tutorial on YouTube by Zooella or Cruella or someone. She’s obsessed with make-up. Ben is wary of anything too long to be read on the screen of a phone.

The decor in here is that folksy Scandinavian look which seems to have taken over all British public spaces. There is a noisy pale-wood floor and uncomfortable, sloping bony chairs with leaf-print cushions and matching pale-wood arms. The coffee from the machine by the entrance is disgusting, so people pick one up from Caffè Nero next door. Sally brings a flask and so does Elaine Reynolds (mum of belfie-tracker Josh). We’ve been meeting here every Wednesday afternoon for five weeks now. There were fifteen of us to begin with, but two women swiftly decided it wasn’t for them and then, a fortnight ago, a third dropped out because her daughter was hospitalised with anorexia after failing to meet her weekly outpatients’ target of 0.5 kg weight gain.

‘Of course, it doesn’t rule out Sophia going to Oxford,’ Sadie said, as though there might actually be someone among us who urgently needed reassurance on that score. Sophia was already garlanded with 10 A*s at GCSE, as we’d been told several times, and her mother clearly saw the girl’s stint in an eating disorders unit as a minor bump on the road to academic glory, rather than a possible hint that it was precisely that route which had brought about her recent crash.

‘They can still sit their exams in there,’ Sadie continued. ‘There’s no problem with that. I’m making sure Soph gets her AS coursework in on time. Compare Atonement with The Go-Between. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, is it? I’m reading both novels, of course, so I can help the poor darling as much as I can.’

Everything about Sadie, from her figure to her dark bobbed hair, from her matching taupe bag and loafers to her South African accent, was clipped, with no unnecessary waste. The person she most reminded me of was Wallis Simpson – immaculate without being in any way appealing. Or human. I found myself wondering what it must be like to have such a controlled and controlling creature as a mother. Looking across the circle, I could see that Sally was having exactly the same thought. She rolled her lips back and forth as if she were setting lipstick on an invisible tissue, and her eyes glistened with what might easily be mistaken for concern, but was actually closer to disdain.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure about joining the Returners. I mean, I’ve never cared for the lazy assumption that women have shared preoccupations and views, like we’re some kind of endangered minority group. There are good, decent and feeling women, sure, millions of them, but there are also Sadies who would leave your child for dead by the side of the road if it meant getting an advantage for her kids. Why do we insist on pretending otherwise? Just because she has ovaries and a vagina (probably steam cleaned), doesn’t make Sadie my ‘sister’, thanks very much.

Like so many of the all-female events that I’ve attended, there is something mildly apologetic about Women Returners. With no men in the room, we are free to be ourselves, but maybe we are so out of practice that we tend to overshoot and end up giggling like nine-year-olds or, inevitably, talking about the kids we actually have. Women get so easily bogged down in anecdote; instinctive novelists, we make sense of our lives through stories and characters. It’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t make us any good at single-mindedness, at shutting out the day-to-day stuff and going for what we want. Imagine a group of men ending up talking about their wife’s mother’s heart bypass. Never happen, would it?

Today will be different, however, because a man, a well-known employment consultant called Matthew Exley, is here to talk to us about how best to market our skills. ‘Call me Matt’ is clearly enjoying being the only ram in a flock of ewes. He begins with some research. Studies show, Matt says, that if ten criteria are listed for an advertised job and a man has seven of them, the man would be willing to ‘have a go’. By contrast, if a woman has eight, she will say, ‘No, I can’t possibly apply for the job because I don’t meet two of the criteria.’

‘Now, ladies, what do we think this is telling us?’ Matt beams encouragingly at his flock. ‘Yes, Karen?’

‘I’m Sharon,’ says Sharon. ‘It’s telling us that women tend to undersell themselves. We underrate our capabilities.’

‘Spot on, Sharon, thank you,’ says Matt. ‘And what else can we deduce? Yes, the blonde lady over there?’

‘That men generally assume they’ll be good at things they’re rubbish at because their experience of the workplace proves that mediocre men are consistently given positions beyond their capabilities, while highly able women have to be twice as good as a man to have any chance of being given a senior position for which they are infinitely better qualified?’

Every so often at Women Returners, I’m sorry to report that a cynical, world-weary and, quite frankly, abrasive voice ruptures the happy bubble of feelgood reinvention and shared sisterhood.

‘Ah.’ Matt looks to Kaylie for support in dealing with this party pooper.

‘C’mon, Katie,’ smiles Kaylie valiantly with her too-white teeth. (You guessed it was me, didn’t you?) ‘I think you’re kinda taking all the negatives onboard. We’ve talked before about how women are tough on themselves. I know how perfectionist you are, Katie. What Matt is trying to say is that we need to give ourselves permission to think that, even if we’re not the perfect candidate for a job, then being a seven or eight instead of a ten may be good enough.’

‘That’s right,’ says Matt with obvious relief. ‘Your CV doesn’t need to be a perfect fit to have a shot at a job.’

‘Sorry, but I think what Kate was trying to say …’ It’s Sally speaking now. The group turns with interest to its shyest and most tongue-tied member. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what Kate was saying is that the reason men have a lot of confidence applying for jobs is because the odds were, and to some extent still are, heavily stacked in their favour. They think they have more chance of succeeding because they actually do. You can’t really blame older women for having low self-confidence when that reflects the opinion the world has of us.’

‘I hear you, Sally,’ says Matt.

(In my experience, ‘I hear you’ is a phrase used only by those who are completely deaf to any sound but their own voice.)

‘But things are much better than they were even five years ago,’ he goes on. ‘Employers are much more aware of the qualities that women returners can bring to the office. You will all have noticed that work–life balance has moved up the political agenda and many firms are beginning to see that a more, shall we say, enlightened approach to taking on older females, who have taken time out from their careers, may not damage their business. Quite the contrary, in fact!’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Sally uncertainly. ‘My friend’s daughter took nine months off work from an investment fund with her second baby and no one batted an eyelid. That would have been unheard of when I was at the bank. Even four months’ maternity leave … Well, your job might still be there when you got back, but someone else would have the title. You might be allowed to assist him. My bank sent me to the Middle East when my boys were very small, to see if I would give up, probably.’

‘When I told my boss I was pregnant with my second,’ Sharon chips in, ‘he went fucking mental. He said, “But, Sharon, sweetheart, you’ve already had a baby.”’

Everyone laughs. The secret, subversive laughter of the servants below-stairs at Downton Abbey discussing their masters’ funny little ways.

‘Listen, guys,’ says Kaylie, ‘I think Katie is being way too pessimistic. Like Matt says, firms are more open than ever to the idea that activities outside of the office can give you transferable skills. Seriously, the Mum CV is now a big thing in recruitment.’

I look around the circle at the women’s eager faces. They nod and smile at Matt, grateful for his assurances that the employment they left during the years of raising children will welcome them back, that the ‘skills’ of nurturing and running a small country called Home are transferable. Maybe that’s true if you’ve been out of the loop three years, five max. Privately, I think the ones who are in the worst position are those who kept no work going at all, who gave up every last bit of personal independence. When the chicks fly the nest, at eighteen, they take with them their mother’s reason for being. And the women turn to look at the men they’ve lived with for the past twenty-four years and they realise the only thing they have in common any more is the kids, who have just left home. The child-rearing years are so busy, so all-consuming it’s easy to ignore the fact your marriage is broken because it’s buried under the Lego and the muddy dungarees and the PE bags. Once the kids are gone there’s no place for your relationship to hide. It’s brutal.

At least my freelance stuff gave me a slender handrail to hold onto in a rapidly changing jobs market. Plus, I’m one of the younger ones here, and even I will have to lie about how old I am to stand a chance of getting back into my industry.

I think of how I felt sitting in Gerald Kerslaw’s office with my own ‘Mum CV’. Watching his eyes flick down my activities outside the office for the past six and a half years. Work for the school, work for the community, for the church, backbone of society, carer for young and old. I felt small. I felt diminished, irrelevant, unregarded. Worst of all, I felt foolish. Maybe ‘Call me Matt’ is right and attitudes are changing, but, in my line of business, a forty-nine-year-old who’s been out of the game for seven years might as well walk through the Square Mile ringing a bell and shouting, ‘Chlamydia!’

Matt asks for one final question and I raise my hand. Bravely, he picks me. ‘As ageism is clearly a major problem in the workplace, whether we like it or not, would you ever recommend that those of us who are in our forties, fifties and sixties should lie on our CV?’