Free Class by Jilly Cooper Page A

upper-class house, taking on the surname of the family and often staying with them until she died, when an announcement would appear in The Times expressing the family’s gratitude and giving her length of service. When her charges grew up, there were always grandchildren. Sometimes she regained her ascendancy when the master became senile and needed looking after, or when Miss Caroline became an alcoholic. One friend of mine spends £6000 a year keeping a large house in Sussex going simply as a base for his old nanny and her dog. Another nanny, when her children grew up, took over the care of the three family dogs, keeping them in baskets upstairs and giving them the same nursery routine of brushing, walks, mealtimes and early beds. While another old nanny keeps an eye on visiting dogs. When a friend’s golden retriever had been cavorting in the loch for an hour, she sidled up and said, ‘I think Porridge has been in for long enough.’
    Today, alas, the old-fashioned nanny whose life was her children, who welcomed the role of surrogate mother, imposed on her by her employers, delighting in the challenge of coping with everything, never taking a holiday, is virtually an extinct breed.
    ‘You’ll be lucky if you get a girl to stay six months,’ said Nannies of Kensington. ‘They just don’t want to get involved for too long.’ A few years ago Mrs Walters of Knightsbridge Nannies, who provided ‘treasures’ for half the crowned heads of Europe, said her telephone was permanently jammed with cries of ‘Help me, Help me’ from harassed society women left in the lurch by their nannies and faced with the appalling prospect of having to forego a game of bridge or a trip to Fortnums. It also suits the agencies to foster this myth of unavailability. The more often a nanny moves around, the more often they get their rake off.
    By the end of the ’seventies, however, the position had changed slightly. The rocketing cost of living has made the nanny’s job much more attractive. If she lives in, she gets all her bills paid: rent, telephone, rates, electricity, gas and food, and £25 – 35 tax-free pocket money on top of that, which makes her far better off than a secretary on £5,500 a year. The only way you distinguish the nannies from the mothers picking children up from school is that the nannies are younger and better dressed.

     
    ‘Well I make it that you’ll have to get a rise of £15,000 just to pay for Nanny.’
     
    On the other hand the more women go out to work, the more they are dependent on others to look after their children. If the nanny is working for a divorced or separated woman, or even in a household where the woman is the chief breadwinner, her power is absolute. If she walks out, her employer will have to jeopardize her job staying at home and looking after the children, or fork out for a temporary at £50 a week.
    Before the war, the upper and middle classes tended to be undomesticated (my grandmother once went into the kitchen, saw a dishcloth and fled, never to return) and were therefore neurotically dependent on servants. Today any career woman or working mother who has to rely on a recalcitrant daily woman (someone once said they were called ‘dailys’ because they leave after one day) or a capricious nanny in order to go out to work will understand this neurosis.
    One sees this absolute power developing so often. A plump little lower-middle-class girl arrives from the country with rosy cheeks and a Yorkshire accent. She starts off doing absolutely everything for £10 a week, but gradually she makes herself indispensable. She also starts aping the mannerisms of her employers and goes to a West End hairdresser, her accent disappears as do the inches off her hips. Next she meets a boyfriend and, terrified of losing her because she’s become such a treasure, her employers let the boyfriend move in. Soon there’s a broad-shouldered denim-jacketed back watching television every time the