The Nanny Read Free Page B

glanced up from her sewing, and her father had nodded before switching over to Wogan.
    Jo didn’t mind her parents’ indifference to her ambitions. Like any teenager, she firmly believed that her parents’ opinions had little relevance to her grand plans. But then, gradually—so gradually she didn’t feel it inching its way into her mind-set—she came to see how ridiculous a dream it was. In both her inner circle of friends and her outer circle of vague acquaintances, she only knew people who had studied vocational subjects. Even Billy Smith, two years ahead of her and a towering genius who’d gone to Oxford, had studied medicine, a subject with an obvious reward. And anyway, everyone knew he had no friends and his parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses. And seven years’ study! Seven years of salary—three hundred sixty-four weeks of paychecks—squandered! While paying for the privilege! It was a mug’s game. Anyway, they’d always thought they were above everyone, the Smiths.
    And so Jo got used to the idea that spending three whole years studying merely for the sake of studying was a self-indulgence. She was a pragmatist and proud of it.
    And pragmatism pointed her in the useful direction of choosing to train as a nanny. She loved children, they seemed to like her, why not use that to earn a decent wage? And so it was that Jo disappointed her teachers, satisfied her parents, and kept her dream safely locked away as a dream by applying to the local college. There she earned herself letters that did not go after her name, but went straight on her CV and got her a good wage within a matter of weeks. After paying her parents a decent rent and helping them with the weekly food budget, the rest was hers. And for the first four years out of college, she thoroughly enjoyed herself.
    It was only recently that certain fundamental questions about nannying were beginning to concern her. Such as, why there was already no prospect of more money. And why she worked long hours, had no career prospects, and was stuck banging her head on a salary glass ceiling so low she could limbo it.
    And why her employers—who had less common sense than she and no emotional intelligence to speak of—worked fewer hours than she yet were able to pay her a fraction of their own salaries?
    Every morning, she would stand at the bus stop in the freezing cold dark, then squeeze onto the heaving bus into town. She’d walk to herboss’s house, who would still be having her breakfast when she arrived. While Jo started clearing away the breakfast things and taking charge of the children, the mother in question would then invariably climb into a people wagon and drive off to a brightly lit, cleaned, and tidied office, leaving Jo’s workspace looking like a war zone. Then, at any time between six and eight in the evening, said mother would return home, tell Jo how exhausting her day had been, then conduct a catch-up meeting with her of everything little Joey or Jack had said, done, and crapped. Only then was Jo allowed the privilege of walking to the bus stop, waiting in the frozen cold dark for her bus, and walking back home.
    Now, how could that be right? How could such obedient realism, taken on at the tender age of sixteen, be so little rewarded? She felt like she’d missed the right turning and ended up in a dead-end street before she’d even taken her driving test. Worse, the job offers were coming from younger and younger mothers, and the thought of being paid a pittance by women only a couple of years older than her made her feel less than whole. On top of all that, she was growing concerned that if she and Shaun didn’t make an announcement soon, her parents would propose to him themselves. She’d never told them that he’d stopped asking two years ago after she’d refused him for the third time with no more reason than the time not feeling right.
    It amazed Jo that if