Revealed: My Guilty Secret

A dreadful thing happened yesterday. My guilty secret was almost discovered.

My husband was idly opening a letter - having failed to notice that it was addressed to me. Why on earth had I left it lying on the kitchen table?

Eek! I said, hastily whipping it out of his fingers. I think that’s mine!

Husband looked puzzled. All the more so as he had already seen the tell-tale headed notepaper: Halifax Building Society.

“Why are the Halifax writing to you?” he wondered. I shrugged oh-so-carelessly. “Oh, they’re probably just trying to sell me a credit card,” I mumbled, stuffing the evidence into my mountain of vital papers. Husband gave me a suspicious look, then ambled off.

Horrors! I thought. For my husband had been about to discover that I have a stash of secret savings. So far as he is aware, all our money has been joint money for almost 20 years now. For both of us, shared money has always been symbolic: shared money means shared lives. We are in this together.

But that hasn’t stopped me from keeping a little nest egg. And the only thing that makes me feel slightly less guilty about it is that I’m not the only one. According to a poll by insurance firm Prudential, fifteen per cent of couples over 40 have a secret savings pot worth £1,037 on average. Women are more likely than men to be secret money-hoarders, with 18 per cent admitting to hiding savings averaging £1,002.

Hannah Close, a barrister friend of mine, is another member of the secret savers’ club. She has a proportion of her monthly earnings paid into a separate bank account so that she can buy things that her husband considers frivolous. “He is the type who actually checks bank statements. If he sees I’ve spent £200 on a pair of shoes, he’ll grump about it. It’s easier just to buy things behind his back. If he actually notices I’m wearing new shoes, he’s so clueless that he’ll believe that they only cost £19.99.”

This logic makes good sense to me. I would dearly love a ludicrously expensive waterproof coat and a cello. Not that I can play the cello.

More worryingly, though, 23 per cent of secret savers are keeping their own stash of cash in case they split up from their partner (which must mean that women are either less optimistic or more realistic than men when it comes to relationships). Another friend, Sian, has adopted precisely this approach. “My parents split up, and my mother was left virtually penniless. I have no intention of leaving my partner, but I think it’s sensible to plan for all possible scenarios.”

Oh dear. Is that what I’m secretly planning?

In that case, my husband will be relieved to know that my secret stash amounts to ... £67.29. Which might just about pay for a day trip to Huddersfield and back.

Hands off my Roles

A small headline caught my eye recently. “Fathers must do chores too,” it announced. Mmm, yes, I like the idea of my husband in Marigolds, I thought.

Then I read on. According to recent research, half of all relationships suffer following the birth of a baby. Nothing new there, then. But there was more. If fathers carry on being traditional breadwinners and leave all the domestic duties to new mothers, divorce beckons. The solution? For parents to share caring and earning roles.

Hang on a moment. Share caring and earning roles? If anything is the recipe for divorce, it surely has to be shared roles.

When I became pregnant with our first child, I had a very good, well paid job which was, astonishingly, flexible enough to accommodate a baby. My husband was working part-time from home, so we had Fisher’s ideal set-up: both able to work and also both able to look after the baby and vacuum the stairs.

Fast forward. That baby is now nine, and his sister is seven. I wash, iron, make packed lunches, remember birthdays, supervise homework and piano, make supper, and don’t vacuum the stair carpet (after all that homework, there’s no time for stairs). I gave up my job seven years ago because the confusion of shared roles was more than we could all bear. My husband has turned himself into a full-time property developer, though I think he’d have turned himself into a full-time bin-man in order to escape from the chaos and detritus of the children.

And we love it that way.

For us, shared roles meant that all consistency went out of the window. Being consistent with yourself is hard enough (what exactly was the sanction for hanging Barbies out of an upstairs window?); being consistent with someone else is well-nigh impossible. Even if you agree on the big things (no to murdering one another, yes to family meals), every day with children throws up several trillion tiny-but-really-quite-significant dilemmas. Do matching socks really matter? (Husband says yes, I say no). Can a little girl climb trees in a Disney princess dress? (I say yes, husband says no). Can your son really walk to school in his underpants if he doesn’t get his uniform on now? (Oh, actually that’s the one thing we did agree on - to our son’s horror).

Shared roles also lead to two possible domestic outcomes. Either nothing gets done at all (because nobody knows whose job it is), or - worse - two people do the same jobs, meaning that one floor is spotless and the others untouched. And few things are more likely to lead to divorce than a husband putting his wife’s only decent jumper in a boil wash - except a wife tidying up the heap of scrap paper that was obviously a year’s worth of invoices filed on the floor.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all women should be corralled into the domestic sphere. It could equally be the woman who leaves for work at 6.30am while the stay-at-home father washes up, makes the beds and sorts out sibling squabbles over the blue felt-tip. If both parents work full-time, it could be the nanny who plays this role. What matters isn’t that roles be divided according to gender: it’s for them never to overlap at all.

That way we and the children all know exactly where we are. In our family, it’s very straightforward. Spiders in the bath? Daddy’s job. Vomit, dead animals, drains, and bins? Daddy’s job. Party invitations, snacks, homework, family presents? Mummy’s job. Stair cleaning? Um, nobody’s job.

Having clearly defined roles has turned out to be as important for our relationship as me shovelling the children off to bed early so we can drink Baileys and watch Match of the Day. Now that’s the one shared role that really does work.

Holes in the ground, holes in the ground...

Well, I never imagined that I’d get excited by a Portaloo – but excited is precisely what I was when I went to Nostell Priory today (or Nostril Priory, as my four-year-old daughter thought it was called). Oh yes: not only was there a seat on the loo, but there was also a hand basin with soap and – oh, miracle of miracles – water.

I have never been a great fan of loos in fields, but our recent holiday in France has finally taught me to count my toiletary blessings. Persuaded by my husband and his even more persuasive French-dwelling friend to venture out of Yorkshire and into the French Pyrenees for a week, I had been full of reservations (would we all die in an air crash? Even worse: would the children die in an air-crash that we survived? Would we have to eat frogs’ legs and wear onions round our necks?) Some of my anxieties had been quelled by the large box of Yorkshire Tea and jar of Marmite which almost cost me a fortune in excess baggage – but nothing had prepared me for the really big problem.

I was lulled into a false sense of security at Perpignan airport, where the loos were really quite civilised (i.e. similar to ones at home), give or take a few thousand resident flies. This generally positive effect continued at our friends’ house, where the main oddity was a malfunctioning pull-flush. And so I was not in the slightest bit concerned when my daughter declared “I need a poo” as we made our way through a cathedral cloister: I had already noticed the handy “WC” at the entrance to the garden. But what a sight met our eyes: right behind the door was a noxious porcelain tray-thing with a hole in the middle. Daughter looked as horrified as I felt. “I don’t really need a poo,” she declared, as we tumbled out backwards.

“It’s a hole in the ground!” I told my husband once I’d regained my breath (which I had been holding, lest the stink knock me unconscious). “Ah yes,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you about French toilets?”

“I still don’t need a poo,” said Daughter, hopping around and clutching herself madly. “I don’t need a wee either.”

Meanwhile, our six-year-old son had pricked up his revolting ears. A hole in the ground? Now that really was of interest to a boy. “I need a poo,” he declared gleefully.

“No you don’t,” I replied.

“No you don’t,” my husband replied.

“I’m bursting for a poo,” he countered.

Grrrrrr.

Well, even if you don’t believe them, it never pays to ignore children’s purported lavatorial urges, and so back we went to the dreaded hole in the ground. Mission accomplished, to his delight (not least because he had proved me wrong about his needs), we faced the next challenge: flushing the pesky thing. Yes, there was a flush – but where exactly did the water go? Were we in for an unexpected shower? We pressed the flush – and ran, fast. No need to worry about hand-washing, as there was no wash-basin. Thank goodness for my Wilko antibacterial hand-wipes.

Sadly, this was not a one-off experience. The following day at the beach offered civilisation in the form of a loo-pan and a hand-basin – but the water supply didn’t seem to stretch to either of them (and my thigh-muscles don’t stretch to prolonged crouching). I soon worked out that the easiest option was not to drink all day, in the hope that severe dehydration would reduce the need to encounter les WCs francaises. All I can think is that French women do not have periods.

Why, when the French can do so many things so well (peaches, tomatoes, sunny weather), do they fail so spectacularly to provide usable toilets? I strongly suspect there is some secret parallel toiletary universe which only the French know about, where they sit on their de-luxe loos and giggle at the thought of the English tourists weeing on their Crocs.

What I do know for a fact is that I will never, ever complain about an English toilet again. Mr. Portaloo, I salute you.