Clare Shaw - The Mother And Daughter Diaries

CLARE SHAWtrained and worked as a speech and language therapist before discovering that she preferred writing to talking. So she became a freelance writer, contributing to parents’ magazines and writing five books offering advice to parents, including Prepare Your Child for School and Help Your Child Be Confident . Clare then produced two daughters so that she could put her own advice into practice. This proved impossible, so she returned to speech therapy and started to talk to people again. But the call of the word processor was loud, and The Mother and Daughter Diaries is the result.

Behind every woman writer is a man bringing her cups of tea, and John boils her kettle at their home in Essex, with help from their two daughters, Emma and Jessica.

Further information can be found at

www.mirabooks.co.uk/clareshawor www.clareshaw.com.

Clare Shaw

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Abigail

My thanks to the families of Essex and Suffolk, who shared their stories of daughters and food with me. Thanks to agent extraordinaire, Judith Murdoch, and to Catherine Burke and everyone at MIRA for their hard work and enthusiasm. Also to Robyn Karney for her precision editing. Special thanks to John, Emma and Jessica for their endless support and encouragement. And to Mike Harwood for kickstarting me into this strange world of fiction.

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

Copyright

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MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Questions for your reading group

Inspiration

Sources of help and information

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author biography

Q&A on writing

A writer’s life

Top ten books

A day in the life

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Clare Shaw’s future projects

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SOMETIMES I look back and try and work out when I first started to worry about Jo, as if that’s when it all started to go wrong. But that’s a bit like asking yourself when you first fell in love or when you first grew up. These things tend to creep up on you slowly and one day you just notice them, notice something that has always been hovering there, waiting to be recognised. Perhaps I’ve always been worried about Jo—after all, I’m a mother and anxiety is on the job description. It all starts before your child is born, worrying in case he—or in my case she—comes out with three heads or twenty fingers. Then you worry about the contents of her nappies, whether she’ll make friends at playgroup, whether that marble she shoved up her nose will cause permanent damage and whether the teacher will know that you helped her to colour in her picture. But this is all just gentle preparation for the teenage years when suddenly the world seems to be flooded with alcohol, drugs and piercings in places you never knew could be pierced.

The worry may have always been there, but was there a day when it struck me that there was something I really did need to worry about? Something more than the usual adolescent anxieties? I can’t remember, but I’m always drawn back to the day of my niece’s wedding. Perhaps, underneath my camouflage of denial and pretence, I knew then.

At times I blame myself that Jo hit those difficult teenage years just as I was learning to play out my new role as a single mother, still raw and bleeding from the pain and confusion of divorce. Yet if only Jo had accepted the separation as easily as her younger sister had, then maybe we could all have held hands and taken the journey together, as a family, as one. Now I understand that we each had our own journey to take and that sometimes our paths would run parallel, sometimes converge and sometimes divert onto very different courses. And when Jo’s path led her off into what I believed was completely the wrong direction, I tried to pull her back onto mine. And yet that direction was wrong too. For her.

So perhaps the story really started with me. With me being plucked out of my comfortable existence, relabelled and thrown back into something unknown, frightening even. And as I struggled to make sense of my new life, I soon realised that my old life had been fraught with difficulty as well: that I had been hiding behind a veneer of perfect wife and mother, hoping that if I pretended long enough it would all come true. But it hadn’t really been a life after all.

As a sixteen-year-old teenager teetering from childhood to the brink of womanhood, Jo had every reason to be finding herself, breaking away to discover who she was and where she was going. But what on earth was I doing, in my forties, suddenly questioning what I, Lizzie Trounce, was all about? For somewhere along the way I had left myself behind and had carried on living with no real identity, just a few useful labels so that people would understand what I did—mother, sandwich maker, wife (now ex-wife), friend, neighbour, occasional beer drinker, part-time film buff.

I remember working at the sandwich bar alongside Trish the day before the wedding. Even then, I was trying to change direction, perhaps even hoping to find myself by looking somewhere different. But you can only change direction when you know exactly where you are in the first place and, unknowingly, I was lost.

‘The first rush is over—time for our own sustenance,’Trish said, pouring out a couple of coffees.

‘You know, this place would be better if we had room for more tables and chairs. It would make it more of a café than just a takeaway sandwich bar.’

‘There’s five stools.’ Trish nodded towards the long bar with the stools for any customers who might want to eat or drink on the premises. ‘And they’re usually empty.’

‘That’s because they’re not comfortable and the room is so narrow you have to drink while being pushed and shoved by the queue. The chances of getting an umbrella in the ear and being slapped around the bottom with a briefcase are extremely high. If only we had bigger premises.’

‘Yeah, great. So we have to serve tables as well. Twice the work for the same money,’ Trish pointed out. She was only ten years older than me but was content to float easily towards retirement.

‘But if we owned the café…’

Suddenly I saw myself as a businesswoman with a chain of restaurants to oversee, bank managers grovelling at my feet, power suit, shoes clicking authoritatively across the restaurant floor.

‘If only I’d done that business course Roger suggested,’ I sighed.

Trish laughed. ‘I really can’t see you on a business course. It’s not exactly you, is it?’

But what exactly was me? I’d been bright at school with three good A levels to my name, but then I took a gap year, before gap years even existed, and that turned into a gap five years as I happily drifted from job to job, travelling the world in between, until I met Roger. The next thing I knew, I’d given up my flat with the giant sunflowers in the window box and was trimming the privet hedge in a neat, four-bedroomed cube in a convenient location on the edge of town, with favourable commuter services into London. Desirable, quiet, sought after, practical. And dull.