Lifestyle Choices

Women hate being efficient in the home. Lists and routines simply do not fit into the pink-check-gingham.. and-lace mental picture of the soap opera mother, which so many of us were brought up to be. When you become a working mother with any luck you will get twice as much out of life, but you can’t run your house as if you weren’t working. A working mother has to work faster and more efficiently in the home. She has to be twice as reliable outside it because people expect her not to be.

I have evolved my own system, which I slowly slip away from, but it pulls me back to reality at regular intervals, and heaven knows what I would be like without it.

1. Disregard what you’re supposed to do.
2. Consider what you can’t avoid doing.
3. Consider what you can avoid doing, e.g. daily cleaning, drying up, most of the ironing, and producing two hot meals a day. Remember that evening candlelight or soft lamplight is kind to your face and your standards of housework, but they can’t disguise tinned spaghetti ad nauseam.
4. Everything you dread doing you must do straight away, then things seem immediately much better, so says Lady Dartmouth, who seems to have four children and nine lives.
5. Try to evolve a basic lifestyle which allows for the fact that you can’t get a quart out of a pint pot, own and plan around your capacity and weaknesses.
6. Your lunch-hour is for lunch and relaxation. Try to keep shopping out of it. Try to relax and do nothing but count your blessings for ten minutes around lunchtime. Just to shut your eyes and stop thinking will help a bit. If not at lunchtime, then at some other time during the day. I seem to collapse around 6.30 p.m. daily and I’ve now learned to combine this with a bath and rest. If I stubbornly totter on Iwon’t recover my evening.
7. We are all too often too tired, but try never to let the phrase cross your lips. Try going to bed really early once a week immediately after work. It’s amazing what a treat it feels.

Writer Anne Scott-James once told me that she never took her coat off until she had laid the table and the evening meal was well under way. Otherwise she would have flopped into an armchair with a drink and the meal would have been extremely late, if indeed it appeared at all. A famous architect told me that she never entertained. Never, ever. She sent flowers, notes and gifts to her hostesses, but she never asked them home, and eventually this was accepted by all the friends she had left.

Penelope Perrick, who wrote The Working Wives’ Cookbook, told me: ‘ For me the clue to being successfully organized lay in realizing that my work must be my hobby.’ She believes in a once-a-week preparation time for food and realizes that the best day to do the bulk of the shopping and a good bit of the housework is Saturday. (The only day? For most people, yes.) ‘ Any meals that have to be prepared on Saturday must be fitted in between painting the ceiling and washing the dog. Reserve Sunday morning for fixing casseroles and baking pies and all the other things that result in stacks of washing up. Then tackle this chore in one fell swoop.

A few useful ideas which may also work with you and your family: Never rely on your memory. Nobody has one good enough to retain all the tedious daily clutter that your work involves. Keep a notebook in your handbag and don’t let anybody get at it. Keep a notebook and biro (pencils break) attached to the telephone. Train the family to write in it. Everything they want you to know or do. Look at it as soon as you get in.

In my wardrobe I keep an emergency clean set of clothes for each child, even if it is only cotton underwear, jeans and a T-shirt. Also a spare shirt, set of underwear and cuff links for my husband.

Never return to an unmade bed, it’s so disheartening. Make it fast rather than not at all.

Making more time: The choice: Get up early. Go to bed late.

According to Mary Wilson, she and I are larks, not owls. Owls can’t open their eyes in the morning, but they cheerfully perform amazing feats such as laying breakfast and putting everyone else’s clothes out the night before. If you are not a lark you might have to invest money in getting up: try a costly telephone alarm call or one of those weird tea-making machines. I know a poet housewife (not Mary Wilson) who works from 5-7 a.m. Perhaps only someone with the soul of a poet can do that, but if you can’t summon up enough energy to get up early then you can go to bed later, a regular 2 a.m. owl. If you do neither, then you don’t really want to be a poet or study English or whatever. Bernard Levin told me this and I was furious with him for months, because he was right.

WHAT IF YOU CAN’T COPE?

What should you do if you can’t manage a husband, children and full- time office job? Signs of overwork are nervous tension, irritability, harassment, indigestion, severe headaches. If you reach this point, not only you will be suffering, but your children too. Try to simplify your job or take a part-time one near your home — one, two or three full days, say. This is especially easy if you have secretarial qualifications. An Observer reader once wrote asking me what she should do because at night she was too tired to make love with her husband. A serious question. I trotted round town getting advice from various experts and what it all seemed to boil down to was: chuck the job, cut the luxuries, live on spaghetti and have a nap in the afternoon.

What a working woman needs is a fast and unerring sense of priority.

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