Month: April 2022

Jobs For The Girls

~ Paula Harmon ~ 3 Comments

Aged five, I was asked to draw what I wanted to be when I grew up. I drew a woman in a headscarf wielding a broom and smiling. A happy housewife.

What was I thinking? I never wanted to be a housewife.

I actually wanted to be a secretary, but couldn’t draw one because I didn’t actually know what a secretary did except something to do with writing (which I liked) and typewriters which fascinated me (and still do).

So I drew a housewife, which is what my mum was at the time, even though I didn’t actually want to be one and she probably didn’t want to be one either. I didn’t know what secretaries did, but I knew what housewives did and because I was a very lucky little girl with a very lovely mum, this was it: they help their children read and write and do crafts and make scones and bake fresh bread to eat after school and they’re always smiling and pretty. 

It didn’t occur to me that housewives were supposed to keep things tidy and dust. That sort of nonsense didn’t happen in our house when there were paintings to paint and scones to cook. And I don’t recall Mum ever wearing a headscarf, certainly not while sweeping the floor and grinning like a loon, but that’s what I drew anyway.

A couple of years later, Mum went back to part-time work starting as a nursing assistant and ending up as a civil servant. This was at the time a little embarrassing as no one else’s mum worked, but nevertheless reinforced the idea that it was more interesting to have a job than do housework, so I started to think about possible careers. 

Being a nurse briefly appealed, but that was because I liked the uniform and cute little hat. (Many years later, my sister, who did become a nurse, had a very different view of the ‘cute little hat’, which had to be folded into exactly the right shape every day. She was regularly tempted to crush it into a ‘cute little missile’ and throw it at Matron.) 

Other children said I ought to be a teacher (helpful or bossy?), but by the time I was seven I’d already decided that both nursing and teaching would be unbearably noisy and involve too much blood, mud, snot, tears and whining (and that would just be me).

By the time I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer, but knew it probably wouldn’t pay the bills. The urge to be a secretary had faded but the possibility of teaching lurked. Beyond that, I had no ideas whatsoever, except I didn’t want to be a civil servant. By then my mother could quote more form numbers and their function than anyone surely ever needed to know. I never wanted to be in a job where I had to know form numbers.

So there I was in the fifth form, trying to make sensible decisions about my future, going for an appointment with the school careers adviser.

When I was sixteen, Computer Studies was still a new and weird O level option which involved a small group of students (even geekier than I was) huddling round some a box in a cupboard which was linked somehow to the County Council’s mainframe and spewed code. To me, Computer Studies were niche and unacademic and of doubtful use.

This is why I didn’t know what a data entry form was when the careers adviser handed me a brown form with a lot of squares marked next to a range of questions and explained that all I had to do was put blobs in the right places and a computer would analyse my responses and produce the perfect career just for me.

With great excitement at this interesting promise, I scored my enthusiasm levels in terms of interests, skills and school subjects from one to ten and handed the form back. A week later, I was given the result. Apparently my ideal career was:

A forestry worker working in forests for the Forestry Commission. 

You couldn’t get much more indoorsy than I am. So, deciding the whole thing was nonsense, I went off to do A levels in English, French and Latin, realising a little too late when I emerged from university with an English degree slap bang into a recession a few years later, that Computer Studies might have been niche and unacademic … but could have given me a better chance of getting a well paid job. Or indeed any sort of job.

Nevertheless, battling my way through the situations vacant pages for about a year, I continued to ignore the advice of the careers computer.

I did various things after university, including abandoning a post graduate teacher training course when I realised I’d make a terrible teacher and that the average eleven year old was taller than me. But none of my jobs have involved trees other than in the form of desks and paper, and I’m proud to state that I’ve followed my mother’s lead in not worrying unduly about the more boring aspects of housework by prioritising to cooking and creating. (Nor have I often worn a headscarf.)

Eventually, I did join the Civil Service (one of the more interesting branches) ‘until something better turns up’ but it didn’t and here I am still working for the same organisation, towards the end of a career involving various roles in various places, splinters from career ladder rungs deep in my fingertips. Now, despite my lack of a Computer Studies O Level, I’m working on the IT development side. Yet after twenty-two years, I’m still able to quote form numbers and their uses despite not having needed to do so since 2005.

I often wonder whether what went wrong with that prototype careers analysis I tried at sixteen. 

Was it the programme? The data entry form? The data enterer? Was it my answers? Or was it something else?

What would have happened if it had come up with a career choice that really appealed? Would I have had the courage to go for it? If so, where could I be now?

Or … what if I got someone else’s results and they got mine? 

Maybe somewhere out there is a born lumberjack who was told to be whatever I should be been rather than working with trees in a forest. If so, I wonder whether they went with their instincts or the computer’s suggestion? 

And if I got their results, what was my perfect career? It certainly wasn’t housewife.

What do you reckon?

Words copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission. Image https://pixabay.com/vectors/cleaning-silhouette-maid-duster-5196528/

Bones, Stones and Long, Long Roots

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

Today, my husband and I dug up two old bones.

One was definitely some sort of leg joint, the other, which had snapped, was harder to distinguish. ‘I assume they’re not human,’ I said, dubiously.

For the record, we weren’t on an archaeological dig, but clearing a part of the garden which was once thought of as a bit of No Man’s land between us and the house behind, until the house behind wanted to do some building work and everyone looked at their deeds and realised the No Man’s land was actually ours. 

Equally for the record, I’m not talking massive country estates or old manor houses here. Our house is an average sort of house and the oldest bits of it are from the 1950s, prior to which acres and acres of land around us, now covered in houses, was farmland. But the boundaries for our house are so inexplicably and unnecessarily complicated, the solicitor spent two hours explaining them to us when we bought the house.

No one in their right mind would call me a natural, enthusiastic or good (or even adequate) gardener but there’s something about doing battle with hidden roots, identifying what to keep and what to dig up, and nurturing the new things I’ve planted, that helps my mind do much the same to any plot problem. What do I need to remove that’s killing the thing I need to live? What needs more care? What looks like a weed but is in fact something useful and precious? Or vice versa. So I’ve been enjoying putting my back into something different over the last couple of weeks, to help straighten things out creatively in my subconscious.

I’ve found working on the current ‘work in progress’ hard, because it’s part of a series set in the run up to World War I and naturally, right now, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels between the tensions in the 1910s and what’s happening in 2022. I consequently decided a while ago, to change to a slightly different tack – removing most of the international sabre-rattling and worse that were the background to a plot set in 1913 because it felt far too much like what is going on just now. 

But of course this put me back and meant removing perhaps thirty thousand hard-written words. It also meant I needed to review the backdrop to my story, which is now what on the surface appears to be a slightly calmer 1912. 

Maybe this was unnecessary (and the excised work won’t be wasted) but it feels right to me.

But it’s not all bad. Whatever the era, for most people, most of the time, while the things to worry about range widely from impending international crises to what to have for dinner, for most people, most of the time, the latter is higher up the list of importance, largely because it’s easier to control. Otherwise, at the point when the crisis directly impacts on us, we would not have the mental or physical resources to handle it.

I’m reminded of the letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during WWII which I ‘inherited’. He was in his forties and working in a reserved occupation in central London during the day and a Home Guard at night. My grandfather stayed in the family home in London, while my grandmother took my father (then about two) to live with relations in the countryside. (My mother’s family did something similar, but that’s another story.) My grandfather wrote to my grandmother about all sorts of things. He rarely mentioned the war at all. This stops me from trying and cram every significant historical event into a book, because at any given time, people don’t always realise which events are significant and often give many of them more than a passing thought or moment of interest.

In the period covered by the book I’m working on, the enquiry into the sinking of the Titanic has just begun and over five hundred households in Southampton are mourning a family member due to the disaster. The latest in a series of major strikes across the country is one by East End garment workers. Meanwhile, the Royal Flying Corps has started up as a branch of the armed forces and warplanes are being constructed. Suffragettes are stepping up the militancy of their campaign for the vote. So far, so gloomy.

On the plus side the National Insurance Act is about to be passed, which will ultimately put an end to the need for workhouses. And on the ‘moving forward if nothing else’ side, the Home Rule Bill has been passed in the Commons as a stepping stone towards Ireland’s long-awaited independence.

On the plus plus side, the Stockholm Olympics are on, and Britain wins ten golds, fifteen silver and sixteen bronze. British female athletes win medals in tennis, diving and swimming. 

And on the plain ridiculous front, one of the Olympiad events is Tug-of-War, in which only two teams competed. A team of Stockholm police from the host nation Sweden are up against a British team comprising London police (five from the City of London Police and six from ‘K’ (Stepney) division of the Metropolitan Police). The game ends when the British team succumb to exhaustion and sit down, thereby conceding defeat.

In the book, my characters are ordinary people whose lives are trundling along peacefully (with the possible exception of Fox’s life) until something happens to derail them. 

Some of them – Margaret Demeray and Fox in particular of course – are more informed than others. Some characters are more reliable and honest than others. Many read about current things in the paper and then largely forget them. Others don’t read about them at all. People get up, go about their daily duties, go to bed. Some lose someone or something. Some grieve. Some fight. Some heal. Some commit crime. Others solve crime. They fall in love, they bring up families, they laugh and play. They all wonder what’s for dinner. 

(Not all the same people are doing all those things at once of course. That would be very exhausting.)

While most of the ‘events of 1912’ above will have a mention in the book, only a few will have a personal significance to any of the characters. The key thing will be that someone, somewhere is dead before their time and Margaret and Fox need to find out why and do something about it.

I’m sometimes asked why I enjoy writing and reading murder-mysteries when I’m naturally a peaceful sort of person. The answer is that I think there is something in the psyche of most of us that enjoys reading something where we can face our fears in a fictional format and see justice to some extent being done. To me, that perhaps explains murder-mysteries’ popularity and certainly explains why I like reading and writing them. Why historical murder mysteries? That’s a whole other subject.

So it was helpful to root through these thoughts as I dug up weeds and brambles and endured the stings of nettles on my hands and arms. (No, I didn’t save any nettles to make soup and yes my arms are still tingling.)

But none of the thinking got No Man’s land cleared. 

I threw another long, unidentified and unwanted root into the composting bag, while my husband contemplated the bones.  

‘I don’t think these are human,’ he said, scanning me from head to foot and clearly doing a mental comparison of what might have be a femur in his hand and my (rather short) leg. ‘But I gather there was a piggery here once, and pigs will eat anything. Who knows? Mwhahahaha!’

‘It’s no good offering that to me as a plot suggestion,’ I said. ‘It’s been done.’

‘Meh,’ said my husband, chucking what was hopefully nothing more sinister than someone’s dog’s long lost treasure on the pile of non compostable stuff.

‘Why can’t we find something useful that might earn us some money?’ I complained. ‘Like an Anglo-Saxon hoard of gold coins? Or a Roman mosaic?’

‘I don’t fancy digging that deep,’ he muttered. ‘And you never will, you slacker. Come on – get back to nettle-pulling or there’s no wine for you later.’

So I did.

Words copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission. Image from Pixabay. (No, it’s not my garden!)