My sister, devotee of a tres chic London gym, commented the other day that the yummy mummies there never talk any more about nannies any more. Is it something to be ashamed of now, the idea of paying somebody else to look after your children - particularly if you're not working? But she's right. Read any interview with a celebrity or high profile mother, and they all refer to 'my lovely lady' or 'my super Latvian/Philippina girl' or even 'my housekeeper'.
Well, I reckon that nannies of various shapes and sizes should be on the NHS. The preventative benefits, particularly against post natal depression, would save the health service billions.
After E was born I was exhausted. He didn't sleep through until he was five. My eldest, G, had slept through from 6 weeks. Nothing with E worked, and the lack of sleep came as a sledgehammer blow. So my mother offered to help pay for help when we had our third baby. No, strike that. Not 'help'. I'm proud to call her a nanny. A Night Nanny.
So this is how it went.
There are no medals for coping, Mum observes, a month or so before her fifth grandchild is due. She’s flattening gingerbread beneath a rolling pin. A family like ours, she declares, riddled as it is with neuroses, can’t afford to wait with folded hands until the house of cards comes crashing down.
E is hobbling about like the crooked man, poking his light saver at my weed-choked flower beds.
My mother should know. She’s mopped up enough neuroses in her time. To her the notion that help, paid or unpaid, is a luxury for the spoilt or a crutch for the useless is bollocks. Not that my mother uses that word. But because I’m older, finally listening, finally admitting she’s frequently right, I know it’s not only wiser but safer to seek help before my knees buckle.
Where are the new roses? E is doubtful. His tour of inspection is complete and unsuccessful, because he’s found not one healthy plant hereabouts. I look at him blankly. You said this family was riddled with new roses, he expands. His saver growls menacingly at our parched lawn.
And who’s going to thank you, Mum resumes, handing me another cheque before taking her grandson off for a day’s trampolining, when the yummy façade crumbles and you’re discovered foaming at the mouth in the baby food aisle of Tesco because there’s no more cauliflower puree?
I watch them gunning away in the topless green sports car she calls Kermit. My mother says that if you open the Bible at any page, on any day, you will find a quote that make perfect sense. As I reach for the phone to call Night Nannies, my newspaper falls open at a startling survey carried out by Net Mums revealing that three times more mothers now suffer from post-natal depression than their own mothers did. I’m not remotely surprised. I’ve suffered from enough depression and new roses to know how they can come at you out of the blue no matter how much support you have.
The survey doesn’t give cogent reasons, but they’re obvious enough to someone as opinionated as me. In a supposedly sophisticated western world supposedly liberated women are suffering not from their hormones and depleted serotinin levels but from the fracturing of traditional family support, the weight of their own unreal expectations, and the woeful lack of follow up care from midwives and health visitors who used to be round with their weighing scales if you so much as whimpered but now leave you to drag yourself off to some distant clinic if there’s anything you need to know.
I believe modern life has eroded our instincts. Why else is parenting such hard work? I’m lucky enough to have my mother ready with her ancestral hand-knitted shawl to wrap and swaddle my babies, but how many young mothers are taught even this basic custom? Not many, judging by the babies with the little flailing, grasping, loose, insecure limbs you see in buggies who just want to be tight and safe.
If it was all a matter of simply ‘tuning in’ and ‘knowing your own baby’, why are we floundering?
My instincts are reasonably sharp but my mother is worried that if I don’t get enough sleep with this new baby I’ll get depressed again, in that low grade kind of way that you yourself don’t notice but which by God everyone around you does.
At first I automatically demur, as any daughter does, however forty she might be, before a well meaning mother’s suggestion. But then I accept that she’s not suggesting a vastly expensive, wimple-wearing, 24/7 maternity nurse. (Though R visibly perks up at the idea).
No. Night Nannies offers a perfect compromise. Trained nannies come for three or so nights a week, take over the care of the baby while the household sleeps, and leave again in the morning. Eventually they train the baby to sleep through. Now, many of my friends are shocked that I did this. How could I hand my newborn baby over to someone else at night? Watch me, is all I have to say. He was only down the hall, for goodness sake, being fed with my expressed milk while I got a blessed eight hours. What's not to like?
I also wonder if my friends will think that as well as being cold hearted and unmaternal, I'm a lazy cow with more money than sense?
Again I say bollocks. Here’s some perspective. The Angel they send me, Miss Flower as E calls her, mis-spelling her name in one of many
billets doux, costs me the equivalent of six months’ worth of Silk Cut. She costs me the same as a three nights’ break for two in Barcelona. Or a top of the range flat screen TV. Her hourly rate is less than most cleaners and a darn sight less than most mechanics or plumbers. Not too difficult to rearrange one’s priorities, then. And what I get is bliss incarnate that is a night nanny and a relaxed happy family who can get on with the business of enjoying our new baby.
When D is born, he initially astounds everyone by sleeping for five hours at a stretch. But on the third night, when I’m still in hospital after the caesarean and before Miss F has galloped to the rescue and my milk is meant to be coming in and R has gone home and the baby is crying in his Perspex fish tank, I’m sobbing into my kimono. It’s one o’clock or thereabouts, the dark dozy time of night when everything happens in a hospital. Door buzzers, panic buttons, telephones, yacking nurses, flatlining -
I stumble about in the corridor outside my side room. The swing doors are pinching up snatches of real life behind departing visitors. I could just slip through. How long before anyone would notice? How far would I dare go? Would I be warm enough out there and what would I do for money? What about D ? His little arms and legs flailing as the swaddling came undone. Tongue tight and quivering like a cat's. If I got far enough outside the hospital, down the road, I wouldn’t hear him any more.
Someone else would come to stop the crying. She would lift him and rock him, glance round for his mother. Maybe she’d snip the tag off his wrists and ankles so he wouldn’t bleep at the exit like stolen shopping. She’d tuck him under her overcoat, a dead give-away in this heat, the police would later say, like a suicide bomber. She’d scuttle under the CCTV cameras, maybe even bump into me as I lumbered back inside.
But he’d be gone anyway. Only a tiny dent in the mattress where his head had lain.
A thin, blonde care assistant comes softly in to my room. I’ve pressed the button for a midwife, but this woman comes instead. She has a badge which says Carol or Cate or something. After trying to make sense of what I’m saying, she pads away and comes back with a carton of some magic potion which turns out to be 4oz of formula. Heresy! I weakly remember the mantra that thou shalt never give a bottle to a baby who is breastfeeding as she lifts D up for a robust cuddle. But I’ve been attached for hours like some dairy cow to the standard issue mechanised breast pump which whirs and roars as if it’s generating power for the whole of North Hampshire, and still only a teaspoon drips out. It’s my age. I’m dry as an old stick.
And talking of cows, it’s now a bottle of delicious Cow & Gate which the lovely care assistant is rubbing sensuously across D’s lower lip. And he devours the lot. Then he sleeps. And so do I. And the spooky thing is that when I ask about her, nobody has heard of a thin blonde care assistant called Carol or Cate .
But there are more angels, because the night we come home from the hospital D refuses to settle. Weariness mixed with panic sets in as the mew rises to a yell and we can’t do anything to stop it.
We’re pacing uselessly about, wondering like first timers what on earth to do. Time was when my hand would have reached for the Contented Little Baby Book, but somehow the recently bleached hair and litigious bent of its author has stripped it of its homely appeal. No matter. Suddenly this Renault 5 rockets through the balmy May evening, up to the house and out leaps Miss Flower, a vision in skin-tight jeans and lip gloss.
Slim as a whippet, she bounces through the front door ready to party. She’s young enough to be my daughter but there’s not a second’s hesitation as I hand the baby over. She scoops D into her arms, quite properly exclaiming at his gorgeousness, introduces herself to my other two sons, agog with admiration (‘she’s fit’ mutters my fourteen year old as G was then), asks where the fridge is with the expressed milk, and informs us exactly how she plans to operate.
And operate is the word. Precision is also the word. Regime. Flexibility. Also routine. All from the get go. I’m excused of being a bristle-lipped sergeant major at the age of 42 as I was then, but this 22 year old girl? She’s not only agreeing with me, she’s insisting on all of the above. She may have been born at the dawn of the Eighties when I was a fresher propping up the college bar but she shares my Sixties-bred notions of discipline and order.
That first night she orders me up to bed. I don’t need telling twice. Bed is the temptress that constantly calls to me, but I never spend enough time there. Bliss. I trudge up the stairs. Some mothers insist on the night nanny waking them so they can feed the baby, but what on earth is the point of that? There are four other nights when you can totter about in the dark breastfeeding for hours. Why do it when your nanny’s here?
The bedroom shuts behind Flower and my bemused baby. Her reign of mercy has begun.
I’d be worried the children will end up loving her more than they’d love me, remarks one friend who patently disapproves of my extravagance in introducing a nanny into my weary life.
Who could blame them? I reply, studying my night nanny's list of do’s and don’t’s for the night she’s off. She’s miles nicer than me. My friend is looking askance.
Look, however gorgeous the nanny is, I'm their mother, warts and all. I glance about because the playroom of mummies has gone deathly quiet. They’ll always love you best, whether you deserve it or not. But what’s wrong with sharing the care?
They're not convinced. Alright, I try again. What’s wrong with admitting defeat? They put their coffee cups down carefully, and sit up. It’s always good to hear someone else isn’t coping.
Am I a less caring mother because I hand D over three nights a week to a lovely, loving girl who knows exactly what she’s doing? My friend shakes her head. So what’s not to like?
She shrugs, tucking a limp strand of hair behind her ear which hasn’t been washed since her baby was born four weeks ago. Your upper lip can be as stiff as you like, I continue, warming to my theme. And I add meaningfully, as my friend hoists her own baby out of his Apache sling for another feed, it’s not a competition, you know.
I don’t seem to be able to sell the idea to my friends, but then they’re younger than me. More robust. More stubborn. More foreign to the idea of 'help'. Whatever. For seven weeks we have the luxury of Miss Flower's cheerful arrival every other night or so, when she takes over and I sleep. In the mornings she gets our three year old up as well - as E was then - teaches him to dress himself and to chant the days of the week, makes him pieces of toast sculpted into MG BGTs, and brings me a clean, dry baby along with a cup of coffee before disappearing in a flurry of Chanel and a jangle of bangles.
What about sleep training? I ask her, when the time approaches. Isn’t it cruel?
There is no cruelty here, she says. You can have eye contact with or cuddle a baby or child too much, except maybe when it's twelve and you're embarrassing it in front of its mates.
Don't listen to the people who think it's cruel to put a child out to air, either. Putting children out in the garden in all weathers, incidentally, was a practice employed through rain and shine, war and peace, by generations of my own great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and me, with resulting legions of frankly larger than life grandparents, uncles, cousins and siblings to show for it. In fact, so securely was I strapped in and so soundly did I sleep outside that when aged a month or so I didn't stir inside my little harness even when my Silver Cross pram hurtled across the lawn one particularly breezy day and tipped upside down in a rose bush.
Shame I never slept at night until I was about two, what with all the projectile vomiting, but that's another story – one which my mother still shudders to recall...
Anyway, back to Miss Flowerwho has not, despite her vigorous views, sprouted a snaggle tooth like Nanny McPhee. Or some of those stiff, stubborn hairs which have no business jutting out of a smooth young chin. In short, not the aforementioned harridan. She's still as young and pretty as ever. So she plants her hand on her hip, the hip that doesn’t have D balanced on it. Anastasia, she says, shaking her head. How can it be cruel to let him cry for a little while, comforting but not stimulating him, letting him know you love him but that night time is not for play?
How do you comfort him, I ask, watching her cutting E's toast into mini Mercedes.
Hold his feet. Works best for tiny babies. She hands my baby back to me. Getting the chassis and the Mercedes logo is proving quite difficult on this piece of toasted wholemeal. If you hold their feet they quieten down. They can’t see you in the dark, but they know you’re there.
Hmmm, I say. People say they should sleep with you in your bed. Never be left to cry. Be fed when they want -
She gives the plate to E and turns to me. Do you want your home to become Liberty Hall? she queries in the kind of kindly but stern voice my Maths teacher used when she knew full well I didn’t know the answer. Since when did the little darlings know best? Do you want the lunatics to run the asylum?
She’s preaching to the converted, but I’ve got to have a battery of arguments to relay to my papoose-toting friends. What about putting the baby in a dark room on its own?
She is getting ready to go, that dreaded moment when she will zoom away down the road. She slides her feet into her sparkly flip flops. What do babies get used to in the womb? she tests me. Flashing lights and noisy mates? They need privacy, just like you and I. Then the cuddles under the duvet in the mornings are that much more of a treat.
Sleep training starts when D is five weeks old. He’s not a fragile five days’ old newborn, and the process takes precisely a week, with never more than twenty minutes of full-on crying and that only lasting two nights. He can keep going on a good big feed taken at 7pm, whether by breast or more frequently by bottle. Hardly boot camp.
A clockwork household. That’s what you want, says Flower on her last day. I’m leaning against the door, wondering if I can let her tyres down or take her spark plugs out to stop her leaving, because it’s her last morning. Think of it like a Swiss railway timetable, she says, packing hairbrushes, lipstick and baby wipes into her minute sparkly handbag which I swear is like the carpet bag in which Mary Poppins fits things like zoos and lamp posts.
You know, she says, pushing me gently aside. When things happen at the same time every day. Everything else may be going wrong, but if you stick to what I’ve told you everyone will be happy. That goes for a fretful baby (D’s eyes soften as he gazes at her) as well as a fretful mother.
Miss Flower says I’ve got to walk round the house lashing my whip, I tell R later, when I’ve recovered from the shock of her leaving. My husband beams.
