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A brutal lesson in humility

At 57, Lucy gave up her marriage, her home and six-figure salary as a media star to teach maths in an inner-city comp. Her gripping and cautionary new book reveals the pain (and, yes, the pleasure) of mid-life reinvention

By Lucy Kellaway

THE date is Wednesday, August 30, 2017. It is my first day in my new job, and I’m lost. I am 58. I’ve just become a teacher. And I have never felt so out of my depth. In the empty school corridor, I spot someone and ask the way to the auditorium. Follow me, she says. She breaks into a run, which I later learn is to avoid being shamed for lateness in front of the entire teaching body. This is quite a departure from my old life, in which being on time for a meeting suggested you weren’t busy or important enough.

Then again, in my old life I once paid £680 for a Paul Smith dress. That seems vaguely justifiable, in that I wore it to every corporate do and for every speech I gave for three years.

Now I look back at such expenditure with mild disapproval. Not only does it seem morally dubious to spend so much money on a scrap of wool, polyester and Spandex, but it’s more than half my take-home pay.

Another big change is lunch, which now comes in a Tupperware box that I’ve packed at 6.25am — well before I used to wake up.

Six weeks into my new life, I’ll get an email from an old contact. ‘Hi Lucy! Hope you’re well. Are you enjoying teaching? Which day is best for you to catch up over coffee or lunch?’

I’ll look at this and feel the size of the gap between my current world and my old one. The answer to the second question is easy. No day is good for a coffee or lunch.

Teachers work all day, five days a week, so lunch and coffees no longer exist. The weekend is no good either. I’m simply too tired.

The answer to the first is even easier. No, I’m not enjoying teaching.

It is not enjoyable to be out of control — to find you’ve come to the classroom without exercise books, so the whole class has to do their work on pieces of paper — and then your head of department comes in to ask what you’re doing.

‘Enjoy’ is altogether the wrong word. A better word might be ‘obsessed’. Never have I been this engaged with anything in my professional life.

I will think about nothing else from the moment I wake up predawn. My students will visit me in my sleep and are with me as I get up, wired, at 5.30am. My head will be filled with the same ragged, euphoric sensation I last had when I was in love. all down. House, marriage, job, considerable income — I dispatched the lot of them.

IF THERE was one self-inflicted change that tipped me into ending my 32-year relationship with my employer, it was not the act of separating from my husband — it was moving into a modern house. Possibly I would be a teacher if I still lived in our old house in Highbury, though I doubt it. Its roots were deep.

If I were still living there, I think I would still be stuck in a life that no longer suited me.

In August 2015, I left my husband David for a 20ft strip of bright orange Corian. Not only did spending all my life savings on this coloured polymer — and the modern house that encased it — make me happier; it also helped my relationship with David, who is still technically my husband, as neither of us can see the point in divorcing.

More unexpectedly, the freedom that came from leaving the vertical Victorian houses I’d lived in all my life and moving to a horizontal modern space did something I can’t quite understand, even now. It released me from the force of habit that had defined my life until then.

During our 15 years in a big, solid family house, David and I had started to fall apart. I don’t know why a marriage ever ends but the two of us, through years of overwork, distraction and mutual neglect, had somehow lost the thread that had once tied us to each other so securely.

The house was oblivious to our distress and doggedly continued in its role as family headquarters. It was big enough to accommodate any dysfunction we threw at it; after our nanny moved out, David moved into the basement flat, sometimes coming up for family suppers to join his grumpy wife, his grumpy teenage children and his frail father-in-law.

The resentment that had been a growing feature of my marriage receded a little.

It gave each of us space from the other while at the same time allowing us to act as if we were still more or less a normal family. Then one day I went to view an intriguing modern house — ‘ just for fun,’ I told my daughter Maud.

It was a wooden triangle. Inside there was a big open space, with glass walls onto the garden and a long strip of orange Corian worktop running down the middle.

I stepped over the threshold and had an earth-moving coup de foudre that I’d never experienced before and haven’t since, either with bricks and mortar or with flesh and blood.

It was a yearning so powerful, I must have had an inkling that buying this house would change more than my address. The story seemed to be this: I was going to leave my husband and the edifice of our family life, not for another man but for a glorified garden shed that cost an astounding amount of money. Yet when I moved in, on a hot day in the middle of August 2015, my spirits were soaring.

LOOKING back, it was always on the cards that I’d end up a teacher. My mother was one and my eldest daughter rose is one and these things tend to run in

families. But it took me a long time to realise that.

Mum taught English at Camden School for Girls, the famously liberal establishment that I went to in the 1970s. I admired her but I never wanted to be like her.

I looked at the piles of books she sat marking until midnight. I watched her run herself ragged putting on a school play, getting so frazzled that at home she would bang saucepan lids and snap at us.

I also could not believe how little she earned. I wanted my work life to be as unlike Mum’s as possible.

When I left university, I got a job at J.P. Morgan. My starting salary, as a know-nothing 21-year- old, was slightly more than what Mum got as surely one of the best teachers in the borough.

Banking turned out to be grim: a lethal combination of stress and boredom. By the age of 25 I had wangled a job at the Financial Times — and there I stayed for the next 32 years.

Twenty years into this accidental career, I had interviewed all sorts of interesting people. The column I’d been writing for a decade had become a fixture in the paper.

Then one morning in January 2006, Mum woke up early, went upstairs in her nightdress to make herself a cup of tea, had an aneurysm and died.

As I tried to march on through the torrent of shock and grief that followed, I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. If my brilliant, vibrant mother was no longer there, I needed to try to continue the work she had started.

The feeling didn’t last. I was then 47, which I decided was too old to do something so radical. More important, I still wanted to be someone. It hadn’t occurred to me that a teacher, with the notable exception of Mum herself, was anyone at all.

For the next decade, I forgot about teaching. I went on, mainly happily, doing what I had always done. What sustained me, as always, was a personality flaw: I was both insecure and a show-off. I wanted the limelight but also suffered from impostor syndrome.

But mostly the fear of being rubbish was manageable. The other thing that kept me writing was equally unattractive: I was profoundly impressed by the sight of my own name in a newspaper. I enjoyed the way strangers’ faces would rearrange themselves when I announced that I worked for the FT.

Status really mattered to me. I wanted to be seen to be successful. I thought I wouldn’t be invited to things and people wouldn’t be interested in talking to me if I didn’t have the badge of an FT columnist.

BUT sometime after my 50th birthday, my job started to pall on me. I no longer felt sick every time I’d finished writing something. Instead I would file a column and shrug, usually thinking: not great but it’ll probably do.

At the same time as losing my fear, something else was unravelling: my preoccupation with status. I was no longer impressed that I worked at the FT and didn’t expect anyone else to be. The doors my job opened to me were ones I no longer wanted to pass through.

The penny had taken almost two decades to drop, but I’d worked out that those parties I needed an FT badge to get invited to were ones I’d never enjoyed going to.

Despite all this, I kept going. The freedom suited me, as it always had. Being a columnist in charge of your own time was a gift

Belmooney

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2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

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