On being a slut; or, not scrubbing doorsteps (2)

It's been good here the last few days. The true Calima never materialised, the wind went round to the west, turned gentler and cooler; the sun has been out almost all the time. Summer is here for the moment; with any luck will stay here during Beloved Daughter's visit; she's due on Sunday. Good.

Downside - there always a downside - is that the flies are back. And that the drudge of watering the garden is about to restart. Granny watered her citrus trees last night - still not well-established they were beginning to look sorry for themselves - but are beginning to produce flowers. Lemons this year? With luck, provided the wind doesn't blow them (flowers or small fruit) off at sensitive stage. This happened last year. Really they need more protection - successful citrus trees here either have walls all round or are grown right down in dips. But we do are best,

Granny also planted 3 cabbages; though she appreciates what Montaigne says - that in the middle of planting cabbages would be a good way to die - she's happy to say she survived the exercise. They will need watering tonight too.

Gentle domesticity; something she appreciates more than she did when young. Hard probably to imagine now how little other than domesticity was imagined for females like her then,in her youth. 'When you are grown up and married and have children of your own' - was the only suggestion for a future ever made by either of her parents. (The unwished for alternative of course was to be a splendid - and viriginal - spinster keeping the WI going; all all that. Our parents did not wish that for us; as for life as a far from virginal not to say happy spinster, playing the field. OH NO NO NO.)

In retrospect this belief in Granny's domestic future was particularly strange coming from Granny's mother who had domesticity thrust upon her by the war, LOATHED it, and also understood better than most that granny was a loner, not so easily caged. Presumably being a bit like that and having survived she imagined Granny could too; the answer is granny didn't, well not entirely; at any rate only after making a bargain with herself that domestic minimalism - ie virtual slutdom - was the way to retain something of herself. Oh and by writing, which was luck. (If she'd needed to work outside of the house it would have been harder. All the Oxford Careers Office could say to females approaching graduation was: well Miss X - how about taking a secretarial course? Or - 'you might make a good teacher.' Meanwhile inundating males with invitations to make their fortunes in Unilever, or Shell or Cadbury's. Well actually, thanks no too, but at least they were ASKED.)

So; if the floor needed scrubbing, windows washing, her knickers needed washing and she had a chapter to write; guess which won?

Children of course, could not be so neglected - there was a period in Granny's life with two children under two and a half when she seriously thought her life was over. THIS WAS WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT. You procreated and then you died; just like mayflies. Which didn't mean to say she didn't love her children; she adored them. But that's not quite the point. One sad friend alas took the feeling all too literally - when her youngest child was eight she decided her children didn't need her any more and hung herself. This is a story that haunts Granny forever; not least because of her own battles with depression around the same issues. But she survived. By being a slut, up to a point and no further (she can't quite bear a dirty stove; she scrubs it.) All around her had she but known it were other females, working or non-working, with children and without who did the same -we started younger then, had fewer support networks, only discovered the others by accident. All this despite the residual guilt when we picked up our children's reading-books - there was Mum in frilly apron, polishing things. Not to mention all the ads, all the articles in women's magazines telling us how to polish our skirting-boards, put on our makeup for hubby, paint our nails, keep our stockings from wrinkling; so on and so forth. The collective letting out of breath when Katherine Whitehorn wrote her pieces from all the large numbers of middleclass Observer readers could have a blown a bus down the M4. (Had it existed then; it didn't.) Oh the relief. THE RELIEF. Never did a Stanley feel more grateful for his Livingstone than we were for this. Not hundred, not thousands, millions of them.

Why was Katherine Whitehorn not made a dame?

Granny is left with a few residual guilts; out of sheer shame she cleans up for the cleaner always. 'What an earth for?' asks Beloved. 'Because I want her to do real cleaning not clear up after me,' says Granny. Which is partly true; but it is also because still, though a slut at heart, she is not entirely happy to be seen as one. This is one legacy her mother left her. Even if she has never felt obliged like her mother to scrub her doorstep. A dirty doorstep? Who cares about a dirty doorstep? Imagine it!