“In Olden Times”

Sometimes I find it hard to get past my own prejudices enough to be truly “inside” a story and get all the potential benefits of the suspension of disbelief that entails. This happened in my reading of Penelope Lively’s story “In Olden Times,” in which a working mother of two has a day where everything goes wrong.

Marion is a registered nurse who works nights, spending only precious minutes daily with her accountant husband. Their two small daughters keep her running around nearly all day—after finishing work in the morning, she must bring them to school, get in a quick nap, then do the day’s chores before picking them up, taking care of them, and handling supper. It’s hard to see how she sleeps more than four hours a day, but I suppose she makes up a more reasonable amount napping.

One of Marion’s regular patients spends a lot of time lecturing her on how much better things were “in olden times,” when women could stay at home and take care of the children and people didn’t rush around so much. In olden times people were more easily satisfied, and lived simpler, happier lives. Of course, Marion’s family struggles to make ends meet with two incomes, and someone of her socioeconomic level would have had excruciatingly difficult work and an even harder life—as her daughters, who are studying the Victorian era, put it, “If you’d been born then you might have worked down a coalmine, Mum, pulling a cart like horses did.” In any case she wouldn’t have had the convenience of a washer and dryer or electric sewing machine, three devices she is quite dependent on.

Unfortunately, instead of sympathizing with Marion, or simply enjoying the contrast of her patient’s strictures against the backdrop of real working life, I was stuck thinking the whole time: why on earth does this woman have two children? Clearly Marion and her husband can’t afford a family of this size; she is worked to exhaustion to care for them and they seem to bring only pain, never pleasure. Their every appearance in the story only annoyed me, I wanted to strike them from the page and ease Marion’s life, which seemed so pointlessly difficult on their account. I’m sure I should be coming at the thing from some entirely different angle, but I just couldn’t see past it. I had a similar problem reading When We Were Romans, I suppose, and of course ages ago when I read Atonement I wanted to strangle Briony. Maybe I should stay away from fiction involving children.