THE RISE OF THE BIG BUCKS NANNY
Nicholas Coleridge analyses a new social
phenomenon — the nanny who is better off than her employer
The manner, however, reminded me of thrust- ing young business exec- utives: confident and purposeful, and talking about the job of nannies as a career rather than a vocation. And then it struck me that, in terms of the package most of them are receiving from their employers, these new-school nannies are actually far better off than the majority of Young business executives. It wasn't simply 11 boisterous child-minders that were eat- ing my biscuits in my kitchen, it was a quar- ter-of-a-million-pounds' worth of aggregate salary and perks.
What the average modern nanny earns is, of course, one of those questions, like the median salary of barristers or journal- ists, that's impossible to gauge definitively. Market forces prevail. You can find a Por- tuguese au pair for £30 a week or a cap- tain-of-industry-style nanny who commands £350 (and I have been told of a nanny who was offered performance-related bonuses, too, if the baby learned to talk and read by a particular date).
In our part of West London most nan- nies seem to get £160-200 a week (let's say £10,000 a year) after tax. If there is another profession where your salary is reviewed in net figures, as if there were no tax to pay, then I've not heard of it. Ask anyone else what they earn and, if they tell you, they give you their gross salary, but not nannies. So the employer (and this is another perk exclusive to the nannying profession) is liable for her tax, as well as national insur- ance (both parts: the employer's bit and the employee's bit), which totals about another £2,500 a year. Your nanny in addition lives free in your house (value, say, £80 a week) with free food and drink (£40 a week) and lighting, heating, telephone, community charge, use of car, laundry (£50 a week), making a grand total of £21,340. The employers must themselves earn about £30,000 a year before tax merely to cover all this.
At the same time, the very concept of nannying has altered (anyway in the minds of nannies themselves) and it is this remorseless upgrading of the job that caus- es confusion. In the past it was Simple. An unmarried woman who loved children became a nanny and devoted her life to looking after other people's. That at least was the theory. With luck she worked for two or three families at most, and one of them eventually adopted her, giving her when she retired a cottage on the estate for life or a flat in a neighbouring village. English literature is full of these loyal old retainers who seldom took any time off because they had nowhere better to go.
For the modern nanny, nannying is usu- ally a short-term career. This is not to sug- gest that they love the children less, or look after them less well. It is simply that nanny- ing is a means to another end. Eventually, at some unspecified future date, they want to do something else, be their own boss — start a nursery school, open a shop, an aer- obics studio — and it is to fund this project that you are handing over the £175 a week. Since nannies live free, all of this money is salted away. A friend of burs chanced upon their nanny's deposit account statement tucked between cereal packets, and almost died of envy, since her five-figure credit exactly matched his mighty overdraft.
With nannying as a career have come not just certificates and training but rules, some as fierce and rigid as old union prac- tices: maximum number of nights baby-sit- ting, statutory rights on Bank Holiday time off, weekends, double time. For a while we had a very prim Norland nanny (until she left us for a pornographer, lured by £300 a week and the black BMW convertible placed at her disposal) who began most sentences, 'At Norland's they suggest. . . which generally opened the way to some unforeseen perk. Almost no modern nan- nies work weekends, which means they dis- appear off-duty precisely when you most need them, leaving their stressed-out employers to extend a five-day working week into a seven-day one.
For the employers, this latter-day union- ism can be rather irritating. If your nanny regards herself as a career executive rather than an intrinsic part of the family, then it follows that the family holiday isn't really her holiday. My old childhood nanny looked forward to the family's summer hol- iday. 'We're going to France this year on our holidays,' she would tell everyone. The modern nanny says, 'They're going to Italy for two weeks in August. They want me to come along, and then I'm going away on my own holiday to Corfu in September.' So the family holiday is no longer seen as a holiday at all, it's a business trip with 14 consecutive days of work. These on-duty days are meticulously counted and caught up later. The modern nanny sees nothing odd in stating, after three weeks of being paid for watching the children from the side of the swimming pool in Umbria, and piling her plate high with prosciutto and melon, 'I'm owed five extra days off because I worked right through in Italy.'
One can, of course, see their point. If you examine the hundreds of classified advertisements for nannies in the Lady magazine, with their sometimes uninten- tionally revealing job descriptions, you realise many advertisers aren't really look- ing for a nanny at all, they're seeking a slave. Last week's issue dangled a job in 'a busy happy home. Duties include children's care, cooking, chauffeuring, laundry, dog walking, shopping.' And why stop there? Why not turning down beds, emptying and refilling dishwashers (sole charge), lawn mowing, pool sweeping, word processing? In a society that operates, except in the very grandest houses, without other staff aside from cleaning ladies, where do the duties of the modern nanny begin and end? Until the middle of this century the nanny occupied a precise position in the hierarchy of the household, superior to the other ser- vants (evidenced by her eating Sunday lunch with the family) and required to do very little apart from care for the children. As the other staff evaporated, the nanny was left vulnerable, as the sole hired pair of hands, to every domestic chore. This fur- ther is exacerbated by the expense. The employer who has just handed over a cou- ple of hundred quid, most of it in cash, can be forgiven for feeling that the ferrying of some empty wine cases out to the dustbin could hardly be his affair. And yet for the nanny, the expensively trained (£24,000 of her own money for three years at Norland's) summa cum laude nanny, the removal of old wine boxes exceeds her brief. Part of the problem is that, for most middle-class families, the nanny is the only full-time employee they pay themselves. Even if you happened to run a company employing hundreds of people, it is improbable that you would be dishing out your own cash, and there would, in any case, be a personnel department to adjudi- cate on job demarcations.
One of the great mysteries is why it is, when so many girls seek nannying posts, that there are so few good ones. Friends who have experimented with budget nan- nies (i.e., £90 a week) have invariably had cause to regret it. There is a species of British girl, generally originating in the Midlands, that gravitates to a nannying job in London specifically for the nightlife. One rather gave the game away at her interview by producing a long list of night- clubs — the Hippodrome, Stringfellows etc. — and asking her future employer exactly how long the travelling time would be from their house in Wandsworth. Another nanny moonlighted, on her many evenings off, at a topless club in Beak Street (a fact which only emerged when she began giving out her 'nanny line' telephone number to favoured punters). Others are bolters. A couple we know took a new teenage nanny with them to Scotland, to a rented lodge 30 miles north of Ullapool. She rapidly found the set-up too remote for her taste, so summoned a taxi to Inver- ness station in the middle of the night, and escaped on her return ticket. She left a 'Dear John' letter pinned to the baby's cot. When we ourselves advertised in the Lady and the Australian freesheet TNT, we drew 90 responses in two days, but nine-tenths sounded educationally subnormal or depressive. To coax a top-flight nanny, your advertisement must be as alluringly worded as a restaurant menu, full of evocative details like 'large, sunny house'. Many peo- ple offer bribes — 'Annual European ski- ing holiday' is on offer in the Lady this week — which will, I suppose, deter those nannies who prefer to ski in Aspen. A pop- ular device is to word the advertisement as though it has been written by the baby; for example, 'I am looking for a caring nanny to be kind to me. I am ten months old and a girl. Own room with colour TV, own bathroom, use of car.' It is the notion of the baby offering the colour TV to her nanny that strikes me as particularly sick- making.
Our own high-powered nanny, a bright Australian, is so widely admired that we live in constant fear she will be headhunt- ed, like Aunt Dahlia's chef Anatole in the Wodehouse stories. We consequently feel rather protective towards her and try, not infallibly, to be considerate. This is most difficult to achieve when she accompanies us to stay with friends for the weekend. It is a peculiarly English failing to treat visiting nannies like Indian drivers, allocating them tiny linoleum-covered bedrooms and then leaving them to sink or swim with the other staff. Or Else she is given inferior food to the guests, or marooned at meals in the dining-room, the only adult at a subsidiary 'children's table', expected to supervise all the offspring of the party on her own. This is indicative of the curiously ambivalent social attitude we now have to nannies: one moment you hear them described as 'my best friend', the next they're expected to melt deferentially into the background.
Almost in the same breath you hear peo- ple state that they 'couldn't survive' without their nanny, and that she is grossly over- paid 'for what she does'. This last, widespread criticism is fuelled by the fact that nannying is the least technological of skills. When a plumber demands £150 for two-and-a-half hours' work fixing the boil- er, you pay gratefully, because you couldn't fix it yourself. But the stock-in-trade of a nanny is largely common sense and patience, and so easier to resent financially.
Anybody can do a nanny's job. That is what I tell myself before those weekends when we look after the children ourselves. By Sunday evening the house is a shambles of toys, clothes and goblets of rusk strewn Up and down the stairs, fractious children and a terrible pall of exhaustion hanging over us. But when I return home on week- day evenings after work, I can see exactly what I'm bankrupting myself for: two chil- dren sitting in their nanny's comfortable lap, in ironed pyjamas and hair sweetly smelling of Johnson's baby shampoo, hap- pily engrossed in Orlando the Marmalade Cat.
Nicholas Coleridge is managing director of Conde Nast.
Previous page
