The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife. Daisy Waugh
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in the warmth of our outdoor heaters, watching the stars in the big, open sky and then maybe…God, I dunno. Perhaps Johnny produces a couple of grams of—
Dora, Ripley and I are going to bake cakes together, and pick apples together, and speak to each other in French. We’re going to build bonfires and learn the names of wild flowers, and plant a Christmas tree so we can use the same one every year. We’re going to learn to ride, and I might get some geese and a little Jersey cow, and every day after school we’re going to climb up into the fields and the woods behind the house, and—yes—go kite flying. And we’ll have picnics together, and read old-fashioned novels out loud to one another: Swallows and Amazons, for example. Black Beauty. Treasure Island. Little Women. Maybe, when they’re older, even a bit of Dickens…
I’ve not been a perfect mother up until now. I’ve been chaotic and impatient and always in a hurry and usually hung-over and constantly preoccupied, if not by my work then by chatting to my friends on the blower. I hate cooking. I hate making angel get-ups out of cardboard. I never remember whose friend is coming to tea on what day, or when the term starts. I love it when the children watch DVDs. And I always forget to go to parents’ evenings. Mea culpa. That’s enough of that. They know I love them, I suppose.
In any case all that’s going to change from now on. It is.
For example, I’ve ordered the sew-on nametags. There’s something special about sew-on nametags, of course. They’re a sort of ‘From a good home’ branding mark; possibly a ‘My mother doesn’t work’ branding mark, too (but I mustn’t be bitter). Either way, they shout of stable upbringings, balanced diets, selfless parenting and time management at its best. So I’ve ordered the nametags and if it kills me, I am going to sew them on. It will be the first step in what I fully intend to be a long and glorious transition from hassled, incompetent and very slightly selfish urban working mother to laid-back earth-mother-style Domestic Goddess. That’s right.
I will still work, of course. But I’ll do it when the children are asleep or at school. Or something. And after school the children will be free to play in the fields, and I won’t sit on the sidelines muttering to myself over the newspapers. In fact I may even give up reading newspapers altogether. And the time that I save not reading them I shall now spend playing with the children because from now on—and this is a promise—
I am going to be a completely different human being.
On the ferry home at last. Lots of fat, bored, hideous teenagers wandering around eating crisps and shouting. Is it possible that Ripley and Dora might one day turn into flabby, oral-fixated morons just like these? And if so, do I really want to be stranded with them, day after day, deep in the English countryside, while my husband travels up and down to Soho? Possibly not.
Ripley and Dora have gone to explore, by which they mean find the sweet shop. Fin’s reading a film script. He has another one resting beneath it, ready for him to read after that. And it occurs to me I’m feeling more than a little bit irritable. Not surprisingly, perhaps. We’re due to exchange and complete on the new house the day after tomorrow, and we’ve neither of us set eyes on it since May.
Thousands of people do what we’re doing. Families move out of London every day, and they all claim to be very happy about it. They can’t all be lying. Can they? It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be better than wonderful.
I wonder if Johnny Depp plays tennis?
Filthy weather. Bloody England.
The estate agent made it clear he didn’t want us to visit the house this morning. He tried hard to sound too busy to fit us in, but it was obvious he had nothing else to do. I got the distinct impression he was suppressing a yawn for the entire conversation.
So we left the children with Finley’s parents and drove over. Looking at the map, we thought it would take only about forty-five minutes but—fresh to this bucolic existence as we are—we hadn’t fully taken into our calculations the tractor factor.
In any case the journey took over two hours, just as Finley’s father had always warned us it would. He says the journey could never really take less than two hours because if there aren’t tractors blocking the way there’ll be a couple of oldies, killing a little of their excess time by driving somewhere unnecessary as slowly as mechanically possible, specifically to annoy the younger people who are running late in the long line of cars behind them. Well, no, he didn’t say that exactly. In fact he didn’t say it at all. He just said people drove slower in the country, and to be careful of speed cameras.
Goodness, though, there do seem to be an awful lot of elderly persons in this corner of the countryside. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course. Of course, of course. Oldies have to live somewhere, don’t they? And so on.
The last time we saw the Dream House was on a beautiful sunny day back in May. The grass had been freshly cut and there was honeysuckle growing in vast, sweet-smelling clumps all over the terrace balustrade. It was breathtakingly pretty. It was beautiful.
This morning the honeysuckle was long gone. The sky was low and black, and it was raining. Not only that, the garden clearly hadn’t been touched since the day we last came to see it, nearly four months ago.
We found Richard the estate agent waiting for us, yawning and stretching, managing to look simultaneously self-righteous and half asleep. We trampled up the path towards him, apologising for the tractors and the old people and the resulting need to reschedule (we had called to postpone the meeting). It all seemed to be going down OK—in fact he almost cracked a smile—but then, just as Fin and I climbed the final step to the front porch, I accidentally trod on a slug.
It was the size of a small serving spoon, I think; possibly even larger. And I screamed. I couldn’t help it. I was only wearing thin canvas trainers, and so my foot had clearly experienced each stage of the slug’s final moment: the pathetic, rubbery resistance, the deathly squelch…It was not good. So I screamed. And the other thing I did, unfortunately, was I shouted ‘Fuck!’ Once again, I couldn’t help it. Sometimes these words have to come out.
Richard the estate agent looked at me as if I’d just brought out a machete and threatened to cut off his cock. Wish I had, actually. Might have livened him up a bit. In any case I apologised profusely, of course. But some people just won’t accept apologies, will they? He could hardly bring himself to look at me after that. Sulkily, he turned back to the front door, slid the key into the lock—and then paused.
‘The office just called, by the way,’ he said. He had to shout over the sound of rain gushing from the broken gutter above our heads. ‘You’ll be delighted to hear we’re ahead of schedule. You and the vendors exchanged and completed contracts about half an hour ago.’
‘Ooh sugar!’ I chortled (trying to suck up, obviously, after the swearing débâcle. Richard the estate agent would be getting no more fucks from me). ‘Don’t suppose we can sidle out of it now, then, can we?’
‘Not easily, no,’ he said drearily, looking only at Fin.
Fin said ‘Fantastic!’ or something similarly delightful. I could see Richard’s sullen shoulders slowly relaxing. Once again he very nearly smiled.
Fantastic Fin—always says the right thing in the right way to the right person, and wherever he goes he always leaves a trail of slowly relaxing shoulders behind him. But sometimes (I happen to know) he’s being Fantastic on autopilot. He’s actually not paying the slightest bit of attention to all the Fantastic words which are bubbling so agreeably out of his cakehole. Sometimes, for example, he’s exchanging text messages with a