rise of the killer AU pair, The

Spectator, The, Feb 20, 1999 by Mather, Victoria

Sarah Stacey, beauty editor at the Express, says, 'I told my mother that I loved nanny more than her and, to her eternal credit, she said, "That's fine." With nanny you always came first; she was always on your side and she always understood. She was called Alice Maud Mary Bullard, she came from Beccles, and on her 80th birthday all her babies - some of them were aged 57 - gave a party for her with a cake in the shape of an N.' Anyone from Beccles probably now wants to be a supermodel.

I know only one working mother who has managed to keep a nanny through all four of her children. Elodie Stanley, a hard-working solicitor and the greatgranddaughter of Hilaire Belloc, engaged Frances Delaney when she was expecting her first daughter, Louise. Thereafter came Georgina, Venetia and Edward, and Nanny Frances was there throughout - in a uniform, no tight-lipped whingeing about extra maternity nurses - the bedrock of a happy family with high standards, moral and educational, absolutely not the type who will turn to you in club class on the trip to Disneyland and say;,`Well, the seats aren't as comfy as I thought they'd be.'

Elodie Stanley says, 'I was a professional, and I let Frances get on with her job as a professional, and I allowed myself to be bossed around mercilessly. I let her do the job, but there is no question that complete and utter trust were established immediately. And I feel incredibly lucky because I think that she was the last of the old-fashioned nannies, and she was as much of a nanny to me as she was to my children.'

I know how she feels. I only ever wanted to have children so that I could have a nanny, revert to the womb of `There now, ducky, it's all right' because nanny was there. Now it seems it's all wrong because modern nanny doesn't like babies ('I don't do new-born, only toddlers'), she has to be your pal, come to your dinner-parties and you're licking the floor in front of her in order for Claire, Jeannie or Michelle just to step through the front door of your house to condescend to work for you for her sad little pittance and the sheer grind of hols in the Bahamas. Of course she has to have lots of afternoons off to have her highlights done, oblivious of the old-fashioned nanny dictum, `Don't think yourself so pretty. Even if a man on a galloping horse did carry you off one dark night, he'd drop you at the first lighted lamp-post.'

My nanny, and my husband's nanny, and old-fashioned nannies everywhere were endlessly tolerant of the repeated whys of childhood, `Because I say so', and the `But, nanny?' `But me no buts.' Many of us still undo our coats in order `to feel the benefit' when we leave a warm restaurant, and long, as Virginia Graham did, for the `nanny-talk that invokes for me the firmness of a loving hand with a hairbrush"a face flannel and buttons'. I'd give 1,000' a week to regain Joyce Grenfell's `small, safe nanny world in which we were given the time and the quiet to develop and grow sturdy'. I wish - although of course `if wishes were horses, beggars would ride' for a return to comforting and cherishing, to ample bosoms to cry against, and childminders who speak English - what on earth is the point of au pairs bussed in from Budapest without the faintest idea of where Madame Vacani's is? - and I want a nanny for me. I fear it's a pipe-dream, as elusive as 'I want doesn't get'. Without a proper, old-fashioned nanny I don't know anything any more, except that it is probably injudicious to engage a child-minder named Louise.