Fashionable as it may be to wear one's working class origins draped around one's neck like costume jewellery, sometimes you discover you are wearing the wrong accessories: I spent one of the most uncomfortable nights of my life eating dinner with a woman whose grandfather had owned the colliery where some of my own ancestors had worked. Add to this that he was also the architect of the Balfour Declaration, and that I am married to a Palestinian, and you have a perfect recipe for indigestion.
You might expect this to have united my husband and I in a dyspeptic bond of solidarity. But it didn't. The trouble is that while my family worked as wage slaves for the local nabob, his were the local nabob, albeit in a faraway land. My grandmother and aunts were all domestic servants, and I married into the kind of family who employed them.
I remember sitting on a bus in Oxford, years before marriage became a possibility, arguing bitterly that it was morally wrong to expect another human being to serve you. I felt it was degrading and was deeply offended by his willingness to pay someone else to do his dirty work for him. How is it not demeaning to expect another person to pick up your mess, clean your toilets, launder your underwear?
He was protesting that it was job creation for an unskilled labour force, providing for people who would otherwise have no means of earning a living. "Where is the dignity in starving," he argued. "Get off your privileged backside and do it yourself," I said. "Then I'd be depriving someone of a job that they badly need," he said. "Self-serving rubbish," I said. "Hard economic fact," he said. I swore then that I would never expect anyone to work for me in a menial capacity. I would look after my own babies and clean my own floors, thank you.
Twenty years and four children later, I don't only eat my words, I choke on them. I wash them down with a harsh draught of my own hypocritical double standards. Now that I have too much to do, too many children and not enough time to do anything, I have climbed down from the moral high ground, settled myself in my armchair and compromised my principles.
It would be nice to say that while embracing domestic help with all the fervour of a born-again Christian I have been doing something much more important than alphabetising the herbal tea bags and swabbing down the stripped pine. However, freed from household drudgery, I have merely exchanged one kind of menial work for another. Despite being a serial employer of nannies, au pairs, gardeners, cleaners, handymen, caterers, and even a visiting masseuse, I have found myself taking numerous jobs which, after tax, barely paid for the substitute me, busy doing all the stuff in the kitchen that I hate.
Once, while the nanny stayed with the baby, I worked as a secretary for a woman married to a peer. I spent my time not typing, but running around doing little errands such as ringing up Peter Jones and ordering her shopping. This was made worse by continually having to tug my forelock and call her Lady Pillock (not her real name-unfortunately). Finally, as I was writing out her Christmas cards, she told me snippily that I should be more careful-I had made a mistake with Lady Twitt who was, actually, "The" Lady Twitt.
"Is there a difference?" I asked.
"Oh yes, Marilyn," she said, handing me a copy of Burke's Peerage and telling me to mug up on the social etiquette required when addressing the aristocracy. I replied by saying that while we were on the subject of proper forms of address, I thought it might be nice if, after several months in her employment, she remembered my name was Marion not Marilyn. I then added that she could kiss my arse and lick her own envelopes from now on.
So the facts don't change. There still isn't much dignity to be found working in a subservient position, whatever it might be. Our local launderette has a poster in the window showing a smiling woman and bearing the slogan: "Happy to Help." The real employee, a Moroccan refugee who shuffles through the cigarette ends and crumpled coke cans in her incongruous embroidered slippers, is not happy to help at all. She does not choose to work for below the minimum wage, washing other people's dingy laundry, simply for the pleasure of inhaling the fabric conditioner.
But perhaps we are all born to delegate. I have recently fired the thrice-weekly cleaner, the nanny and the man who washes the windows, and have hired instead a breezy, excessively cheerful middle-aged woman who has revolutio-nised my life. Every night she brings me a cup of tea as I stagger through the door, and then gives me my orders. I listen meekly, because although she might be my employee-we both know who the real boss is here. n
Marion McGilvary
