28/05/2020

From the South Downs

Stephanie, Midhurst

​

The Dominic Cummings’ story isn’t funny, if you’ve stayed away from family conscientiously during lockdown especially in tragic circumstances, and yet I couldn’t help admiring the wits who put fake reviews of Barnards Castle on Trip Advisor signed by D. Cummings or the designer who put the letters from ‘Durham to Barnards Castle’ arranged as an eyesight test on a t-shirt, examples of British creativity of which our Churchillian leader should approve, given the sensitive thoughtful humour of his Spectator articles, which exhibited such understanding towards the integrity of single mothers and those of religious faiths. Naturally, as a father who didn’t even want to recognise one of his children, he feels compassion for Dominic’s child-care problems. Let’s hope Mary Wakefield finds these responses as ‘almost comical’ as she did lockdown London, with its lack of PPE, multiple deaths and people forced out of jobs by the situation. But having said that, I hate the feeling of self-righteous ranting that this story induces in me. What a waste of energy and morally wrong. I was brought up with the following sayings, ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ and something about not critiquing the mote in another’s eye when there is a plank in your own. As a child, I visualised huge planks sticking out of eyes, and heard ‘mote’ as ‘moat’, another surreal image of eyes with moats in them or moats with eyes in them, and perhaps a swan floating by over the eye, with a castle in the background. Those castles get everywhere. And one’s own planks increase in size.

When we first had our two children, child-care and money were a constant worry. There were no child-care vouchers then. We operated by both working part-time with a timetable of hours on the kitchen wall. We called on friends, asked my mother to stay sometimes, swapped child-care and paid for some child-care at home. I was always desperately tired. Mondays when I first had my second child involved looking after a neighbour’s child in the morning, while pushing the pram and walking my toddler a mile to a playgroup which lasted one and three quarter hours so by the time I got home with the neighbour’s toddler and the baby, it was time to change nappies, give a snack, and then set out again for the playgroup. After dawdling home at toddler pace, I gave them all lunch. I swapped the childcare with the neighbour and headed off to teach for the afternoon. Home for tea. My husband returned from Bath with the car and then I drove to Bath (people who’ve done the Bath to Bristol run in rush-hours will know the problem) to teach for the evening. I’d get home at about ten pm and then I was teaching Tuesday morning. In between these kinds of arrangements, I prepared the classes. We just about scraped by. The final straw was me crying on the pavement opposite my neighbour’s house saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore’. She had no idea that I was teaching so many hours in that day - she was nice about it, but it was hard for her too. I also had good friends, two of whom kindly shared the coverage of an hour we couldn’t cover when they could only cover half-an-hour each because of their jobs. Once, a friend nobly gave up a rare morning she’d put aside for her research by organising her child-care to come along and cover my child-care because our child-minder didn’t show. Child-care is difficult enough without coronavirus creating a situation where you can’t ask anyone for help, but it seems that the unprivileged mothers whom the PM despised in his Spectator article may have more of a handle on it than those for whom castles are essential.

I’ve been supervising a PhD thesis by a talented poet on poetry and motherhood. She has taught me that it’s a political act to be open about child-care issues, whereas in those days I would never mention child-care issues at work, and even hid my second pregnancy as long as possible, as I couldn’t afford to miss out on part-time teaching. Even when I gained a full-time properly paid post (few arts lecturers are actually paid salaries or full salaries - another hidden issue), I didn’t refuse last minute out-of-hours meetings. Parenthood was not regarded as a reason for refusing unreasonable requests, but I could only comply because my thoughtful husband shared the load, taking time away from his work. The PM’s special adviser answering questions about childcare in the Rose Garden of Downing Street should be a positive result of this debacle, making visible the tensions for working families.