Free Class by Jilly Cooper Page B

parents come in from an evening out, which is soon followed by additional aggro because he’s having fry-ups in the morning, drinking the house Carafino and using the bath.
    The employers are by now frightened of using the car in case the nanny is intending to take it home for the weekend, and start fighting as to which one of them is going to ask her to baby-sit, if they occasionally want to go out, standing outside her door, saying, ‘No, you do it. No, you do it.’
    By now the boyfriend starts shop-stewarding around, telling the nanny she oughtn’t to be working those hours: ‘Girls in our office only do nine to five, and you never get a lunch hour.’ More and more concessions are made, anything to avoid the hassle of working in a new girl.
    Usually a row blows up about once a month, whereupon the nanny sits in the kitchen muttering to next door’s nanny and ringing ads in the Evening Standard , or The Times . While her employer doesn’t feel up to going to work and sits nervously writing an ad for The Lady , or ringing up agencies on the upstairs telephone: ‘Tell anyone who might be interested to ring my husband at the office, or she can ring here at weekends.’ Usually she and the nanny get bored of rowing by the evening, and make it up over a litre bottle of Pedrotti. By the time the husband comes home all wound up to read the riot act, wife and nanny are plastered but fondly tearful over an empty bottle.
    A few years ago middle-class husbands used traditionally to knock off the au pair. Today, far more often you find husbands getting jealous of the mutually sycophantic, love-hate relationship that exists between the wife and the nanny, particularly since the advent of the permissive society, when nanny often covers up for the wife’s sexual peccadilloes and therefore has even more power over her.
    Samantha Upward only works part-time and doesn’t feel this justifies a nanny so she gets au pairs to help Zacharias with his French and says, ‘Go and do your devoir , darling,’ when he gets home from school. Gideon hopes every time for someone like Brigitte Bardot, but Samantha has so much middle-class guilt about employing anyone, and spends so much time scurrying round doing all the work, that the various Claudines and Marie Joses soon become au pear-shaped.
    No such scruples overcome Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who, as a first-generation employer, is determined to get several pounds of flesh off the nannies. She expects them to work six days a week for only £12, to wear uniform, to keep the children upstairs and to address her as ‘Mrs Nouveau-Richards’. One nanny told us that her newly rich employer allowed her to call her by her Christian name only if they went out together in the evening, never during the day. She also allowed the nanny to use the front stairs, but the other servants had to use the back stairs.
    One of nanny’s least enviable tasks is helping with the playgroup. The rich send their children to nursery schools, where trained nannies take them over for three hours a day and teach them the rudiments of reading, writing and making castles out of lavatory paper rolls. The less rich have to make do with playgroups, where different mothers take it in turns to supervise the children. Here the lower-middle Jen Teales are far more bossy than the upper-middle mums and if a working mother sends her nanny or her au pair instead of going herself, the Jen Teales, probably feeling themselves perilously close to the status of the nanny, refuse to talk to her, except for telling her to do all the dirty work. When my own nanny used to do it she was the only adult who wasn’t offered a cup of coffee.
    Many people who didn’t have nannies themselves regard them as a status symbol. One nouveau riche family who employed a nanny, insisted she wear a uniform but gave her a nervous breakdown by never allowing her near the baby.
    Esther Rantzen devoted a whole column in the Evening News to her daughter’s