Eaten up by privilege
In the brilliant, provocative, honest Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich takes a deep dive into the world of low-paid work in America. The story she has to tell is in some ways predictable. She can't make ends meet on the kind of money the lowest-paid make. No shit, Sherlock.
What saves her account from turning those low-paid people into victims, and turns them instead into the victimised — people thrown under the wheels of a systemic problem: Capitalism — is that she never tries to hide the fact that she is privileged, well-educated and cushioned. Her honesty in admitting and claiming this (she makes no bones about the fact that she would never willingly choose to take a low-paid job) means that her work exists in a realistic framework. She is in no sense romanticising the 'poor who are always with us'. And she is not justifying herself. No one can accuse you of what you claim as your own. How I love that her name means 'rich in honour' in German. Mine means 'waxing moon'. Make of that what you will.
Reading Nickel and Dimed made me realise that I have long been tormented — all my life, in fact — by question marks over my own status, both financial and professional. Bringing up the question of money helps me to feel a stark relief. I'm not proud of my story, but I am no longer ashamed of it either.
I was well supported as a child, because my father, much older than most of my friends' fathers, retired aged 55, in 1974, with an excellent pension from Royal Dutch Shell. I grew up in Norfolk, with neither of my parents needing to work any more, because Mum had put her savings from teaching into buying a house, and then traded up. We had no mortgage, and school fees were not prohibitive at that time. We must have been well-off by most people's standards, but both my parents were anxious about money, something that came from their wartime backgrounds, and my father's first marriage and divorce, which wiped him out. I can remember how he kept track of petty cash on notepads in the kitchen. I grew up thinking we were poor.
I can also remember that I stole money from my mother's purse, and hid it in my wardrobe. One day I discovered some of the money in a tiny plastic purse in the shape of a green kitten's head, with stuck-on fur, during lunch break at primary school. Horrified, I threw it in the bin. When they discovered what I was doing, my parents took me to a psychologist. He told them that I was angry with my father. They didn't go back.
Being sent to — and loving — my private girls' school, in my safe, parochial home city, Norwich, set me up for lifelong guilt: I felt strongly, even as a child, that I owed my parents and British society something, because I had gone to a private school through my parents' means, and that means was a derivative of oil money. I knew I was not entitled to my privilege.
I won a Shell scholarship to Cambridge: I was eligible as my father's daughter. I was probably unique in the history of Shell because my half-brother, from my father's first family, also won a Shell scholarship, and it was unheard-of for siblings to be awarded them.
I didn't get into debt as an undergraduate at Cambridge, in part because of Shell, but also my parents taking out a covenant to cover my maintenance. Tuition fees were, of course, free in the late 1980s.
When I got into drama school in 1992, the year after leaving Cambridge, I decided not to go, because I knew I did not have the determination to seek out the necessary funding, and I knew my parents disapproved.
I wanted to prove to them that I had fully 'left home' and was financially independent of them, even at the cost of doing what I most wanted to do: act. They had supported me for eighteen years, and I did not want to owe them anything more. I left home as soon as I could, in the summer of the year I turned eighteen, for paid work, at Cambridge University Press, on an amazing pre-university placement scheme called Index.
Whenever I got into trouble, some problem or other at work, or as I found my feet living away, my father used to say, "Give it up and come home".
I couldn't think of anything worse. His lack of belief in me drove me to find my own solutions, and I always did. It made no difference: he never recognized my achievements as achievements anyway. Instead I think he simply saw me as a 'worry', highly-strung, difficult, with my eating disorder as an undergraduate, and my bouts of depression.
I felt ashamed when my parents sought to help me financially after I left home. During my languages year abroad at a freezing Lycée Technique in the Vosges, they bought me a small secondhand car. I felt ashamed — but I also made the most of it. I used the car to travel all over Western Europe that year. I drove to Avignon through the mountains, to Grenoble in the snow, to Berlin along Hitler's motorways, picking up a scrap of the Berlin Wall a couple of months after it came down. I paid for the little car's running from my earnings as an Assistante in the lycée. I felt ashamed, but so grateful for it.
I left the assistante job, after a boy from the Technical Lycée deliberately attacked that car, putting a bottle through its back windscreen at a nightclub, simply because he knew it was mine. I resigned, packed my bags and drove to Paris to look for work. That little car helped me save myself. I learnt never to look gift horsepower in the mouth. Vroom-vroom.
After deciding not to go to drama school, I turned to my second-best career choice: writing. I could not, though, see how to fund it. And I felt an obligation from 'getting a First' to be worthy of that First. After all, I'd spent most of my undergraduate degree drunk and on stage, not always in that order. I wasn't quite sure how I'd pulled it off, and certainly didn't think I'd 'earnt' it. Fleabag, c'est moi.
I decided that I would do a doctorate if, and only if, I could win British Academy funding for it, and go straight from BA to a DPhil at Oxford, supervised by the best writer on Proust in the country, if not the world, without having to stop and do an MA. I wanted to sort out my career track, take control, and stop wasting time. I was a woman on a mission. It won't surprise you to hear that my chosen subject was… self-justification.
I also felt that setting parameters as hard as possible for myself was a justifiable bargain to make with my determination to be a writer, a professional choice I knew full well to be fraught with the risk of utter failure. I did not want to depend on anyone, and I wanted to demonstrate 'career progression', after all the time and effort of getting into Cambridge.
At least I would have a qualification at the end of 'being an eternal student'.
I desperately needed life to Add Up.
My parents gave me a very small supplement during my doctorate, because they could see I didn't have two pennies to rub together, which I was, naturally, ashamed of. I worked and earnt throughout the four years it took me to kill that doctorate, including a lovely job selling bedlinen in a frou-frou shop; a prestigious Lectrice post at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (how French is that: 'normal' and yet 'superior' at the same time); and a teaching post at Wadham College.
Before the end of the doctorate, I won not one but two much-prized post-doctoral awards, one at St Anne’s College (poorly funded, ex-Ladies College…), the second a coveted British Academy post-doc, which attracted a lecturer’s salary. Which is when I moved to London.
I found dirty, aggressive, unequal London hideous, after my idyllic years cycling round verdant, elitist Cambridge and Oxford, and playing at being breathless in Paris. Within a year I admitted to myself that what I really longed to do was buy a flat, to have somewhere of my own to hide in. I was deeply ashamed when my mother lent me a sum of money for a down payment. The fact of the matter was that I could never have bought property without her. That privilege was naked. I became a woman of property, as well as a doctor, but only one of those titles was earnt through my labour.
I was unhappy in academic life in London, and when two lectureship jobs came up in Cambridge, I decided to apply. If I got one, I told myself I would give academic life one last shot. Almost because of my ambivalence, I did land one – and almost simultaneously met a beautiful, kind Australian with a deep voice, who made me laugh. I fell in love with him and felt utterly torn.
The first thing I did was earn £1000, seeking out a commission to write a book called Proust for Beginners. I happily tapped it out in six weeks. It gave me huge pleasure, because it had cartoons in it – I really wanted to combine cartoons and writing.
The second thing I did was not return my contract to Cambridge for several months. I felt deeply ambivalent about taking up the post. I had been offered the less senior role of the two going, despite my research track record, with a verbal promise that I would be promoted quickly, but it became clear almost immediately that the post was a poverty trap. I was pegged at the very top of the pay scale, and couldn't progress.
And then the Head of Department changed.
When I tentatively went to her, to ask if I could apply for promotion because of the salary issue, she immediately began to bully me.
At this point my father developed vascular dementia, and went mad. I applied for compassionate leave from my college to support my mother, while carrying on with my departmental duties. In response, the Head of Department told me I couldn't leave Cambridge, even at weekends, without her permission.
And then… I got pregnant. While on maternity leave, I sold my London flat, and made a significant profit. My parents wouldn’t take their loan back. I felt guilty and ashamed – but I kept the money. It was my safety net.
After trying to return to work, I was quickly manoeuvred into a position where I had no alternative but to resign, caught between the bullying HoD, a mother herself, who wouldn't grant me flexible working, and my partner, struggling with redundancy and his mother’s breast cancer, and unable to cope with our baby on his own while I was keeping term in Cambridge.
It seemed to make sense, when looked at in money terms. He earnt more than I did, or could, although I was doing well, on a good salary, plus college perks, plus renting out my flat, before I sold it.
And so it came to pass that I signed away everything I had ever worked for, in order to marry, be a stay-at-home mother and a writer.
The first thing we did was move to Sydney. While we lived in Australia, I earnt a nominal amount through writing book reviews: childcare was well subsidised by the state, and I could cover the cost of it simply through review work and a bit of teaching for Sydney Uni. I had three days a week childcare. It was bliss. I had time to write and think, and published several things in that time.
Then, in 2005, my father died, and I received some inheritance. Inheritance money is always strange, and I was only 37.
I got pregnant again, had our son, and flew back alone to England when he was three months and our daughter was three. When my husband also returned to the UK, a few months later, he didn’t have a job. I found we were starting to dip into my inheritance to survive, and couldn’t bear to squander it on Sainsbury’s. That guilt was enough to drive me to stop writing. I was lucky enough to land work as a management consultant.
Again, I felt that I had to pay for all the childcare out of just my income — I don’t know why (although that's a leading question, since it's so obviously internalised misogyny) – and gave my whole salary to our nanny every month. The state dragged its heels approving her status, which deprived us of salary sacrifice help for months. It was hard to make ends meet.
I was working harder than I ever had before, with small children, for no income, not writing, trying desperately to get a mortgage and move out of our tiny flat. It was two years of hell. I liked the consulting work, but it was almost impossible to keep going.
And, to my astonishment, I was being bullied a second time. There were no other mothers at the consultancy, not working at my level, anyway. This time it was by my line manager, who was my age and envious because I had children and she didn’t (she now does, and is much happier). She made my life miserable, henpecking and putting me and my work down. I did stand up to her one day, which gave her the shock of her life, and she stopped for a while, but it was never comfortable.
I lasted two years. After leaving, I earnt very little for a bit, then took a research job at an education information organisation (always a mouthful), thinking that, although I was over-qualified, it would leave me time to write. Wrong. Again, I funded a nanny wholly through my salary. My husband was not earning, because he was at home that year, trying to set up a business, a quidproquo for my years writing in Australia, but, like my novel, it sadly never came to anything.
I loathed the education information organisation, not just for its cumbersome mission, but for its pompous management, and quickly made myself persona non grata. I had gone from being Golden Girl, with the British Academy post-doc and the bright future at Cambridge, to Office Bitch, always up in arms about something.
To cap it all I was being bullied a third time. This time it was by a twenty-five-year old female martinet, promoted over me, who had no experience of what's it's like being a working mother, so felt she had to crush me to get the most out of me. I was back in hell. (The martinet has since had children, and, last I heard, was being manoeuvred out of her job. I did not feel Schadenfreude, for the record, I felt blind fury – will this cycle of bullying mothers never be broken?)
The end of my education researcher career came when I reduced my martinet to tears one day, by patiently taking her through my contract, line by line, explaining in words of one syllable how it was physically impossible for me to do the job they wanted from me within its terms.
I could not sink lower. I was bullying my own bully.
Once my husband was back on his feet with a contract, I resigned, and told him I pointblank refused to go back into an office job, no matter what financial situation we were in. I said that I would set up as an education consultant and work from home. No more childcare costs met out of my salary, and freedom from the vagaries of his employment in the rock 'n' rollercoaster world of TV development.
I have never looked back, although at points things have, indeed, been financially difficult. The worst came when a contract my husband was counting on evaporated, exactly as our daughter started at a private school. We had to stop paying the mortgage, and borrow, not only from my mother, but also a friend. The shame was excruciating. We stopped seeing any friends and just withdrew. I worked hard, but couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet on my own. My partner was flipping burgers in a gastropub when he finally landed a great job at CNN, after nine interviews. He was my hero. I was wrecked.
That summer, I re-met an old university acquaintance, who invited me to be a writer in residence at her law firm.
At exactly the same time, in early 2016, I found a lump in my breast.
You can't make this shit up.
I will always love and admire Ayesha Vardag, as well as the NHS, because when I told her I would need cancer treatment, instead of forcing me to resign, as my Head of Department in Cambridge had done, she simply said "Do what you can, invoice us, and keep going".
Ayesha's faith in me meant that I worked and earnt all through my (free) surgery and radiation treatment. And was published in Vogue online.
About the same time that writing residency came to an end, my mother started to go downhill. By early 2017 it was clear she was dying. I didn’t hesitate. I stopped most of my paid work and went to be with her in Norwich.
My husband held the fort. This time round, with older children, they could all manage without me. It wasn't nice, but it was feasible. Without an income, though, I struggled for food and petrol, and arranged with my brother that I would use our mother's money so that one of us could be with her while she was dying – his work meant he couldn't often make the Cardiff-Norwich journey.
I can report that it is a not a good feeling, aged 49, to access your mother's bank account, and take money out of it. But I didn’t want to get involved with applying for carers’ allowance, it was too protracted and painful – and in any case, our mother still had an income: her Shell widows’ pension. We had no way of knowing how long she had left to live. I wasn’t going to waste time I could be spending with her, justifying myself to try and beg for state funding.
Thank goodness, just thank goodness, there was enough in the kitty to pay care home fees for mum and keep me with her, without the heavy intrusive arm of the state trying to prove I didn’t deserve any support.
Thank god for dirty Shell oil money.
After our mother's death, six months later, my brother and I were her executors. We went straight to her lawyer to handle probate, which was expensive, but saved us both so much difficulty. I dealt with mum’s possessions; my brother with the lawyer. Eventually it was all sorted out, after a year.
Now I am able, for the first time since Australia, to be at home, writing, without needing to earn alongside it to keep the family going. My husband is doing fine. I have a cushion.
I don’t have the pension I would have had if I’d been able to remain in my university post. I haven't made it to professor. I am not a successful writer. My work as an education consultant does not change the world (let's hope it makes things a little easier for a handful of young people). I am aware that I live with an intra-marital pension inequality, which ties my fate to my husband's. Let's hope we can both live with that.
But. I took out life insurance, following a friend’s death, before I had the cancer scare. And I do have a small SIPP. I have downsized my expectations, and my financial reality, enormously from where I was before having children.
Yet I am ok with it. Those six months spent with my mother before her death, with the woman I loved most in the world, were crucial to recovering from my shame about privilege.
And I don’t feel that I owe anyone anything anymore — not my parents, not society. I am finally free of a debt I never, in fact, owed.
Yes, I was privileged to have the education I did. I also did the work to be worthy of it.
Yes, I have ended up a 'kept woman' in some – but not in all – ways, and despite my best intentions.
Yes, because of inheritance, I am currently financially independent, not for life, but for long enough to mean I can really go for it as a writer for a while. No more doing it with one hand tied behind my back.
I am a composite of 'kept' and 'selfmade' woman. I am lucky, and you can see my scars.
My money story is a long, painful one about trying to leave home financially, prove I was independent, justify my privilege, and create a level playing field as a privileged white woman, many years before it became fashionable to be told this was something to be ashamed of. I've always been a pioneer.
The story failed, because it was always based on an ideological lie: that a woman needs to justify her very existence, and does not have the right to live or fail as she chooses.
The truth is that I was privileged to come from a family that cared deeply about education, and believed in it. I'm happy they bought into that belief. I buy into it too.
The lie was that I needed to justify myself.
When I was in my twenties, my father told me, as we were driving down a narrow road, that he had not wanted more children, but had had them to please my mother. I was not wanted but tolerated.
That is one part of my emotional legacy: I was unwanted by my father. Did he love me? I will never know for sure. Yes, I think so. 'In his own way' is hard to square with my memories.
But… I will always know that I was longed for, cherished, loved, to the very end of her life by my mother.
And that is more than enough. That is infinite riches, more than many can ever have.
Now, as I turn 51 tomorrow, I am finally... free to write — not financially, but emotionally.
I'd better get cracking: I'm as old as Proust was when he died.
What saves her account from turning those low-paid people into victims, and turns them instead into the victimised — people thrown under the wheels of a systemic problem: Capitalism — is that she never tries to hide the fact that she is privileged, well-educated and cushioned. Her honesty in admitting and claiming this (she makes no bones about the fact that she would never willingly choose to take a low-paid job) means that her work exists in a realistic framework. She is in no sense romanticising the 'poor who are always with us'. And she is not justifying herself. No one can accuse you of what you claim as your own. How I love that her name means 'rich in honour' in German. Mine means 'waxing moon'. Make of that what you will.
Reading Nickel and Dimed made me realise that I have long been tormented — all my life, in fact — by question marks over my own status, both financial and professional. Bringing up the question of money helps me to feel a stark relief. I'm not proud of my story, but I am no longer ashamed of it either.
I was well supported as a child, because my father, much older than most of my friends' fathers, retired aged 55, in 1974, with an excellent pension from Royal Dutch Shell. I grew up in Norfolk, with neither of my parents needing to work any more, because Mum had put her savings from teaching into buying a house, and then traded up. We had no mortgage, and school fees were not prohibitive at that time. We must have been well-off by most people's standards, but both my parents were anxious about money, something that came from their wartime backgrounds, and my father's first marriage and divorce, which wiped him out. I can remember how he kept track of petty cash on notepads in the kitchen. I grew up thinking we were poor.
I can also remember that I stole money from my mother's purse, and hid it in my wardrobe. One day I discovered some of the money in a tiny plastic purse in the shape of a green kitten's head, with stuck-on fur, during lunch break at primary school. Horrified, I threw it in the bin. When they discovered what I was doing, my parents took me to a psychologist. He told them that I was angry with my father. They didn't go back.
Being sent to — and loving — my private girls' school, in my safe, parochial home city, Norwich, set me up for lifelong guilt: I felt strongly, even as a child, that I owed my parents and British society something, because I had gone to a private school through my parents' means, and that means was a derivative of oil money. I knew I was not entitled to my privilege.
I won a Shell scholarship to Cambridge: I was eligible as my father's daughter. I was probably unique in the history of Shell because my half-brother, from my father's first family, also won a Shell scholarship, and it was unheard-of for siblings to be awarded them.
I didn't get into debt as an undergraduate at Cambridge, in part because of Shell, but also my parents taking out a covenant to cover my maintenance. Tuition fees were, of course, free in the late 1980s.
When I got into drama school in 1992, the year after leaving Cambridge, I decided not to go, because I knew I did not have the determination to seek out the necessary funding, and I knew my parents disapproved.
I wanted to prove to them that I had fully 'left home' and was financially independent of them, even at the cost of doing what I most wanted to do: act. They had supported me for eighteen years, and I did not want to owe them anything more. I left home as soon as I could, in the summer of the year I turned eighteen, for paid work, at Cambridge University Press, on an amazing pre-university placement scheme called Index.
Whenever I got into trouble, some problem or other at work, or as I found my feet living away, my father used to say, "Give it up and come home".
I couldn't think of anything worse. His lack of belief in me drove me to find my own solutions, and I always did. It made no difference: he never recognized my achievements as achievements anyway. Instead I think he simply saw me as a 'worry', highly-strung, difficult, with my eating disorder as an undergraduate, and my bouts of depression.
I felt ashamed when my parents sought to help me financially after I left home. During my languages year abroad at a freezing Lycée Technique in the Vosges, they bought me a small secondhand car. I felt ashamed — but I also made the most of it. I used the car to travel all over Western Europe that year. I drove to Avignon through the mountains, to Grenoble in the snow, to Berlin along Hitler's motorways, picking up a scrap of the Berlin Wall a couple of months after it came down. I paid for the little car's running from my earnings as an Assistante in the lycée. I felt ashamed, but so grateful for it.
I left the assistante job, after a boy from the Technical Lycée deliberately attacked that car, putting a bottle through its back windscreen at a nightclub, simply because he knew it was mine. I resigned, packed my bags and drove to Paris to look for work. That little car helped me save myself. I learnt never to look gift horsepower in the mouth. Vroom-vroom.
After deciding not to go to drama school, I turned to my second-best career choice: writing. I could not, though, see how to fund it. And I felt an obligation from 'getting a First' to be worthy of that First. After all, I'd spent most of my undergraduate degree drunk and on stage, not always in that order. I wasn't quite sure how I'd pulled it off, and certainly didn't think I'd 'earnt' it. Fleabag, c'est moi.
I decided that I would do a doctorate if, and only if, I could win British Academy funding for it, and go straight from BA to a DPhil at Oxford, supervised by the best writer on Proust in the country, if not the world, without having to stop and do an MA. I wanted to sort out my career track, take control, and stop wasting time. I was a woman on a mission. It won't surprise you to hear that my chosen subject was… self-justification.
I also felt that setting parameters as hard as possible for myself was a justifiable bargain to make with my determination to be a writer, a professional choice I knew full well to be fraught with the risk of utter failure. I did not want to depend on anyone, and I wanted to demonstrate 'career progression', after all the time and effort of getting into Cambridge.
At least I would have a qualification at the end of 'being an eternal student'.
I desperately needed life to Add Up.
My parents gave me a very small supplement during my doctorate, because they could see I didn't have two pennies to rub together, which I was, naturally, ashamed of. I worked and earnt throughout the four years it took me to kill that doctorate, including a lovely job selling bedlinen in a frou-frou shop; a prestigious Lectrice post at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (how French is that: 'normal' and yet 'superior' at the same time); and a teaching post at Wadham College.
Before the end of the doctorate, I won not one but two much-prized post-doctoral awards, one at St Anne’s College (poorly funded, ex-Ladies College…), the second a coveted British Academy post-doc, which attracted a lecturer’s salary. Which is when I moved to London.
I found dirty, aggressive, unequal London hideous, after my idyllic years cycling round verdant, elitist Cambridge and Oxford, and playing at being breathless in Paris. Within a year I admitted to myself that what I really longed to do was buy a flat, to have somewhere of my own to hide in. I was deeply ashamed when my mother lent me a sum of money for a down payment. The fact of the matter was that I could never have bought property without her. That privilege was naked. I became a woman of property, as well as a doctor, but only one of those titles was earnt through my labour.
I was unhappy in academic life in London, and when two lectureship jobs came up in Cambridge, I decided to apply. If I got one, I told myself I would give academic life one last shot. Almost because of my ambivalence, I did land one – and almost simultaneously met a beautiful, kind Australian with a deep voice, who made me laugh. I fell in love with him and felt utterly torn.
The first thing I did was earn £1000, seeking out a commission to write a book called Proust for Beginners. I happily tapped it out in six weeks. It gave me huge pleasure, because it had cartoons in it – I really wanted to combine cartoons and writing.
The second thing I did was not return my contract to Cambridge for several months. I felt deeply ambivalent about taking up the post. I had been offered the less senior role of the two going, despite my research track record, with a verbal promise that I would be promoted quickly, but it became clear almost immediately that the post was a poverty trap. I was pegged at the very top of the pay scale, and couldn't progress.
And then the Head of Department changed.
When I tentatively went to her, to ask if I could apply for promotion because of the salary issue, she immediately began to bully me.
At this point my father developed vascular dementia, and went mad. I applied for compassionate leave from my college to support my mother, while carrying on with my departmental duties. In response, the Head of Department told me I couldn't leave Cambridge, even at weekends, without her permission.
And then… I got pregnant. While on maternity leave, I sold my London flat, and made a significant profit. My parents wouldn’t take their loan back. I felt guilty and ashamed – but I kept the money. It was my safety net.
After trying to return to work, I was quickly manoeuvred into a position where I had no alternative but to resign, caught between the bullying HoD, a mother herself, who wouldn't grant me flexible working, and my partner, struggling with redundancy and his mother’s breast cancer, and unable to cope with our baby on his own while I was keeping term in Cambridge.
It seemed to make sense, when looked at in money terms. He earnt more than I did, or could, although I was doing well, on a good salary, plus college perks, plus renting out my flat, before I sold it.
And so it came to pass that I signed away everything I had ever worked for, in order to marry, be a stay-at-home mother and a writer.
The first thing we did was move to Sydney. While we lived in Australia, I earnt a nominal amount through writing book reviews: childcare was well subsidised by the state, and I could cover the cost of it simply through review work and a bit of teaching for Sydney Uni. I had three days a week childcare. It was bliss. I had time to write and think, and published several things in that time.
Then, in 2005, my father died, and I received some inheritance. Inheritance money is always strange, and I was only 37.
I got pregnant again, had our son, and flew back alone to England when he was three months and our daughter was three. When my husband also returned to the UK, a few months later, he didn’t have a job. I found we were starting to dip into my inheritance to survive, and couldn’t bear to squander it on Sainsbury’s. That guilt was enough to drive me to stop writing. I was lucky enough to land work as a management consultant.
Again, I felt that I had to pay for all the childcare out of just my income — I don’t know why (although that's a leading question, since it's so obviously internalised misogyny) – and gave my whole salary to our nanny every month. The state dragged its heels approving her status, which deprived us of salary sacrifice help for months. It was hard to make ends meet.
I was working harder than I ever had before, with small children, for no income, not writing, trying desperately to get a mortgage and move out of our tiny flat. It was two years of hell. I liked the consulting work, but it was almost impossible to keep going.
And, to my astonishment, I was being bullied a second time. There were no other mothers at the consultancy, not working at my level, anyway. This time it was by my line manager, who was my age and envious because I had children and she didn’t (she now does, and is much happier). She made my life miserable, henpecking and putting me and my work down. I did stand up to her one day, which gave her the shock of her life, and she stopped for a while, but it was never comfortable.
I lasted two years. After leaving, I earnt very little for a bit, then took a research job at an education information organisation (always a mouthful), thinking that, although I was over-qualified, it would leave me time to write. Wrong. Again, I funded a nanny wholly through my salary. My husband was not earning, because he was at home that year, trying to set up a business, a quidproquo for my years writing in Australia, but, like my novel, it sadly never came to anything.
I loathed the education information organisation, not just for its cumbersome mission, but for its pompous management, and quickly made myself persona non grata. I had gone from being Golden Girl, with the British Academy post-doc and the bright future at Cambridge, to Office Bitch, always up in arms about something.
To cap it all I was being bullied a third time. This time it was by a twenty-five-year old female martinet, promoted over me, who had no experience of what's it's like being a working mother, so felt she had to crush me to get the most out of me. I was back in hell. (The martinet has since had children, and, last I heard, was being manoeuvred out of her job. I did not feel Schadenfreude, for the record, I felt blind fury – will this cycle of bullying mothers never be broken?)
The end of my education researcher career came when I reduced my martinet to tears one day, by patiently taking her through my contract, line by line, explaining in words of one syllable how it was physically impossible for me to do the job they wanted from me within its terms.
I could not sink lower. I was bullying my own bully.
Once my husband was back on his feet with a contract, I resigned, and told him I pointblank refused to go back into an office job, no matter what financial situation we were in. I said that I would set up as an education consultant and work from home. No more childcare costs met out of my salary, and freedom from the vagaries of his employment in the rock 'n' rollercoaster world of TV development.
I have never looked back, although at points things have, indeed, been financially difficult. The worst came when a contract my husband was counting on evaporated, exactly as our daughter started at a private school. We had to stop paying the mortgage, and borrow, not only from my mother, but also a friend. The shame was excruciating. We stopped seeing any friends and just withdrew. I worked hard, but couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet on my own. My partner was flipping burgers in a gastropub when he finally landed a great job at CNN, after nine interviews. He was my hero. I was wrecked.
That summer, I re-met an old university acquaintance, who invited me to be a writer in residence at her law firm.
At exactly the same time, in early 2016, I found a lump in my breast.
You can't make this shit up.
I will always love and admire Ayesha Vardag, as well as the NHS, because when I told her I would need cancer treatment, instead of forcing me to resign, as my Head of Department in Cambridge had done, she simply said "Do what you can, invoice us, and keep going".
Ayesha's faith in me meant that I worked and earnt all through my (free) surgery and radiation treatment. And was published in Vogue online.
About the same time that writing residency came to an end, my mother started to go downhill. By early 2017 it was clear she was dying. I didn’t hesitate. I stopped most of my paid work and went to be with her in Norwich.
My husband held the fort. This time round, with older children, they could all manage without me. It wasn't nice, but it was feasible. Without an income, though, I struggled for food and petrol, and arranged with my brother that I would use our mother's money so that one of us could be with her while she was dying – his work meant he couldn't often make the Cardiff-Norwich journey.
I can report that it is a not a good feeling, aged 49, to access your mother's bank account, and take money out of it. But I didn’t want to get involved with applying for carers’ allowance, it was too protracted and painful – and in any case, our mother still had an income: her Shell widows’ pension. We had no way of knowing how long she had left to live. I wasn’t going to waste time I could be spending with her, justifying myself to try and beg for state funding.
Thank goodness, just thank goodness, there was enough in the kitty to pay care home fees for mum and keep me with her, without the heavy intrusive arm of the state trying to prove I didn’t deserve any support.
Thank god for dirty Shell oil money.
After our mother's death, six months later, my brother and I were her executors. We went straight to her lawyer to handle probate, which was expensive, but saved us both so much difficulty. I dealt with mum’s possessions; my brother with the lawyer. Eventually it was all sorted out, after a year.
Now I am able, for the first time since Australia, to be at home, writing, without needing to earn alongside it to keep the family going. My husband is doing fine. I have a cushion.
I don’t have the pension I would have had if I’d been able to remain in my university post. I haven't made it to professor. I am not a successful writer. My work as an education consultant does not change the world (let's hope it makes things a little easier for a handful of young people). I am aware that I live with an intra-marital pension inequality, which ties my fate to my husband's. Let's hope we can both live with that.
But. I took out life insurance, following a friend’s death, before I had the cancer scare. And I do have a small SIPP. I have downsized my expectations, and my financial reality, enormously from where I was before having children.
Yet I am ok with it. Those six months spent with my mother before her death, with the woman I loved most in the world, were crucial to recovering from my shame about privilege.
And I don’t feel that I owe anyone anything anymore — not my parents, not society. I am finally free of a debt I never, in fact, owed.
Yes, I was privileged to have the education I did. I also did the work to be worthy of it.
Yes, I have ended up a 'kept woman' in some – but not in all – ways, and despite my best intentions.
Yes, because of inheritance, I am currently financially independent, not for life, but for long enough to mean I can really go for it as a writer for a while. No more doing it with one hand tied behind my back.
I am a composite of 'kept' and 'selfmade' woman. I am lucky, and you can see my scars.
My money story is a long, painful one about trying to leave home financially, prove I was independent, justify my privilege, and create a level playing field as a privileged white woman, many years before it became fashionable to be told this was something to be ashamed of. I've always been a pioneer.
The story failed, because it was always based on an ideological lie: that a woman needs to justify her very existence, and does not have the right to live or fail as she chooses.
The truth is that I was privileged to come from a family that cared deeply about education, and believed in it. I'm happy they bought into that belief. I buy into it too.
The lie was that I needed to justify myself.
When I was in my twenties, my father told me, as we were driving down a narrow road, that he had not wanted more children, but had had them to please my mother. I was not wanted but tolerated.
That is one part of my emotional legacy: I was unwanted by my father. Did he love me? I will never know for sure. Yes, I think so. 'In his own way' is hard to square with my memories.
But… I will always know that I was longed for, cherished, loved, to the very end of her life by my mother.
And that is more than enough. That is infinite riches, more than many can ever have.
Now, as I turn 51 tomorrow, I am finally... free to write — not financially, but emotionally.
I'd better get cracking: I'm as old as Proust was when he died.
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