and a fast-food snack as you go! Oh, goodbye, countryside. What rats we are, to leave the sinking ship!
You’re not cut off when you move to the country. Friends will visit.
Well … the friends from the city who came down at first don’t seem to come any more. For a time they overlooked the fact that you’d deserted them, ran out on them, which is what you did, come to think of it. Nobody likes that. looked down your nose at their way of life and left them. So soon the inconvenience gets to them: the overnight bag, the traffic, and the hours that stand between you and them, your strange new friends with straw in their hair wearing long strands of New Age beads, and no proper signal for the mobile, and you’ve been nowhere and seen nothing except the back of the Aga. They settle you in, and their duty done, abandon you. Serves you right.
And the friends who do persist just seem to want a free weekend (well of course they do: what did you expect?) with you cooking and washing up because now you’re in the country that’s the kind of thing you do, isn’t it? Back to nature, back to the sink, and what, no home-made bread? Friends who seemed perfectly civilised for the length of a dinner, reveal over a weekend all kind of gross personal traits. Eat breakfast in their pyjamas, or smoke dope in front of the children, or complain about no dry towels, and quarrel with your neighbours, knowing you’re stuck with them and they can leave.
Let’s compromise. Let’s try a country cottage.
That one used to work, and very well, when husbands had nine-to-five jobs and wives stayed home and looked after the kids. But that’s in the past. Then there was time and energy to work out the logistics of transporting a family, its goods, its bedding, its games and toiletries, to a place some scores of miles away on Friday nights and the reverse process on Sunday evening. Plus guests. And it was lovely, if you were skilled at logistics, that is. Log-fires and cheerful talk and mild drunkenness and happy flirtations and country walks and pink cheeks and a ploughman’s lunch at the pub and no-one worried about drink-and-drive. Oh paradise.
But nine-to-five drifts to eight-to-eight. And Saturday mornings too, and women are working, and the mobile phone and the laptop turns Sundays into Mondays, and the traffic’s worse, and they’ve tarmacked the track and lopped the trees and it’s sensible, but the romance has gone. There’s a strong steel fence where you used to nip under the wire, and the badger set’s been cleared for fear of TB, and what’s that smoke on the horizon – surely not a funeral pyre for the poor dead cows? Or else the Right-to-Roamers have found a footpath through your garden, past your very own back window.
When change comes in the countryside, it’s seldom for the better. And the village store has closed. Okay so you never went in it – if you did they always said, pointedly, ‘Haven’t seen you for a long time’ – so it got embarrassing; but you like it to be there. Say no to the country cottage; it isn’t what it was!
The countryside’s good for the children.
Yes. But you wouldn’t think it to listen to them. They don’t sound all that appreciative. They look at TV a lot. They miss McDonald’s and the corner shop. There’s a strange-looking man lurking in the playing fields, and you see drugs behind every hedge. There’s nothing for the kids to do. Mother turns into a taxi-service, unpaid. They’ve got to see their friends, learn to ride, remedial speech, whatever. Mother’s gloomy and bored. Father’s commuting, now the home-office idea has collapsed, and becomes part of the divorce statistics. He met someone cheerful on the train. Someone who, like him, longs for a loft apartment in Islington – and if both country houses were sold and each took their half, and mother kept the children – well, they are her life – why then the move back to the city could just about be managed. For him. What’s good for the children is not necessarily good for the marriage.
But who’s listening? ‘We’re moving out,’ friends say, thrilled to the gills. ‘It will be different for us.’ And so it may be, and so I hope it will be. Humankind cannot live by reason alone, nor should they try to. And it is the spring, after all. And the mud’s drying out. And the early sun catches the hill-tops, and the wheat field’s sprouting green and strong, and lambs bounce in the fields, and what’s so good about here anyway?
The entrance to the Garden of Eden may no longer be barred by a flaying sword, but Mother has to get back to the baby. No way she can enter.
Not employers, certainly. Mothers demand equal wages but have their minds on things other than their employer’s interests. Sick babies, for example, toddlers with chickenpox, sudden calls to the school, childcare. Mothers can’t be asked to stay late, won’t do overtime, use the phone a lot, won’t relocate, demand maternity leave. And they don’t look so good in the front office either.
ERRATUM: sweatshop employers rather like mothers. Desperation means mothers will put up with anything. No-one else will do the job, anyway.
Fathers, on the other hand are much like anyone else. Sometimes they take an afternoon off for the Christmas play, or for a session with Relate, and insist on having their holidays in August, but otherwise who notices?
ERRATUM: lone fathers of course count as mothers. Same problem. Who needs ’em?
You can’t blame employers. They’re not philanthropists. The rational aim of the individual employer is to make a profit out of the worker’s time and labour. If the employer is a company it must put the profit of the shareholder before the interests of the worker (let alone the customer). If the employer is the State – a shrinking section of the new economy – managers and accountants take the place of the old-fashioned boss. Their object is to save money, not make money. Which puts the employee in exactly the same situation: the pressure is on for longer hours and lower wages.
The working class can kiss my arse,
I’ve got the charge-hand’s job at last.
– as they used to sing in the old Marxist days. Thank you, Mr Blair.
Not that anyone admits to being working class any more. Who wants the Union to fight for their rights? It’s an indignity. Except we all go on working and earning, especially mothers, harder and longer than ever. Forget lone mothers, one average pay-packet is scarcely enough to keep even a family with a father in Pot Noodles, petrol for the car and Nikes for the kids. So out she goes to work, which is fine in one way because being with small children alone in a house can drive you crackers, but not in another because cramming stiff unwilling arms into coat sleeves on a winter’s morning in order to be at the nursery by eight and work by nine is no fun. When you and the child are half asleep.
It’s no use the self-righteous (usually the childless, who can afford to be minimalist) telling you you’re being ‘greedy’ or ‘materialistic’: you should magically do without the extra money. You have to have a new car because the old one breaks down on the way to work, and
