My intro to Twitter has had me wandering up and down all sorts of highways and byways, in and out of people's life experiences, and in particular one today has struck me, about the challenges of being a single mother which takes me right back to the days when I was a single mother with an adorable little boy who didn't meet his father till he was seven. How that came to pass will wait another day, because it's one hell of a story.
This is about thinking that although he was born in Hampshire I felt my real home was London. So when he was nearly 7 we moved back there, back to the place where I had been footloose, fancy free, and indeed where I got pregnant in the first place. I assumed my lonely single life would magically change just by being in the big city. In Hampshire all my friends were married - although 20 years on they are all, without exception, divorced.
My little fourth floor attic (87 steps) was in Earls Court. £80,000 odd in 1995. My God, last time I looked it was selling for £400,000 or so. Tiny, studio, two bedrooms carved out of it, a floor bowed in the middle, leaking roof whenever it rained. Worse leaks for the neighbours beneath whenever I used the washing machine. I hoped it might become a kind of atelier love nest, perched as it was above the District Line, rattled as it was by the vibrations of the Piccadilly Line deep below the ground. And located as it was right in the middle of Earl's Court , then an affordable slice of South Kensington full of rangy South Africans, but probably now tarted up out of anyone who isn't an oligarch.
But actually life as a single mother was not as I'd envisaged when I returned to the haunts of my carefree youth. Because it meant finding not only good local schools for my son G but also childminders to fetch him after school, as I was working full time. I cringe to remember two of those childminders, total strangers, one an Italian grandmother living in a weird kind of garlic-flavoured shrine off Redcliffe Gardens where you had to push through endless tinkling curtains to get to the hunched figure of your son doing his homework at a vast mahogany table large enough to lay out your grandmother. Another was the single mother of a vast child who lived at the top of a council block on North End Road, and that's where G got his first taste of computer games. Eventually I found a nursery called Pippa Poppins in Fulham Road which was a kind of oasis of trad calm and efficiency. Amongst other amazing services such as providing hotel accommodation soley geared towards kids, it picked up your child from school, took it back to the yellow painted house near Fulham Broadway, gave him tea and supervised his homework. A lifesaver until I got a job opposite our flat and was able to walk to the school to pick him up.
If you're a single mother in London you can't just nip on impulse to the City to have champagne with your exceedingly rich, unmarried, childless mates from university, because you must first get a babysitter. You can't just mooch down the Kings Road shopping because you don't have any money. You can't bring a man back to the flat because he's likely to be accosted by a little ruffle haired boy waving toast at him and demanding, 'Are you going to marry my Mummy?'
This is about thinking that although he was born in Hampshire I felt my real home was London. So when he was nearly 7 we moved back there, back to the place where I had been footloose, fancy free, and indeed where I got pregnant in the first place. I assumed my lonely single life would magically change just by being in the big city. In Hampshire all my friends were married - although 20 years on they are all, without exception, divorced.
My little fourth floor attic (87 steps) was in Earls Court. £80,000 odd in 1995. My God, last time I looked it was selling for £400,000 or so. Tiny, studio, two bedrooms carved out of it, a floor bowed in the middle, leaking roof whenever it rained. Worse leaks for the neighbours beneath whenever I used the washing machine. I hoped it might become a kind of atelier love nest, perched as it was above the District Line, rattled as it was by the vibrations of the Piccadilly Line deep below the ground. And located as it was right in the middle of Earl's Court , then an affordable slice of South Kensington full of rangy South Africans, but probably now tarted up out of anyone who isn't an oligarch.
But actually life as a single mother was not as I'd envisaged when I returned to the haunts of my carefree youth. Because it meant finding not only good local schools for my son G but also childminders to fetch him after school, as I was working full time. I cringe to remember two of those childminders, total strangers, one an Italian grandmother living in a weird kind of garlic-flavoured shrine off Redcliffe Gardens where you had to push through endless tinkling curtains to get to the hunched figure of your son doing his homework at a vast mahogany table large enough to lay out your grandmother. Another was the single mother of a vast child who lived at the top of a council block on North End Road, and that's where G got his first taste of computer games. Eventually I found a nursery called Pippa Poppins in Fulham Road which was a kind of oasis of trad calm and efficiency. Amongst other amazing services such as providing hotel accommodation soley geared towards kids, it picked up your child from school, took it back to the yellow painted house near Fulham Broadway, gave him tea and supervised his homework. A lifesaver until I got a job opposite our flat and was able to walk to the school to pick him up.
If you're a single mother in London you can't just nip on impulse to the City to have champagne with your exceedingly rich, unmarried, childless mates from university, because you must first get a babysitter. You can't just mooch down the Kings Road shopping because you don't have any money. You can't bring a man back to the flat because he's likely to be accosted by a little ruffle haired boy waving toast at him and demanding, 'Are you going to marry my Mummy?'
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