Woman's Hour - Keeping in touch with grandchildren, Rihanna's durag Vogue cover

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

With most families self-isolating how should we explain the sudden absence of close family members to very young children? Listener Glynis is 73 and self-isolating alone. She used to see her 26 month old granddaughter regularly but has now completely disappeared from her life. Will her granddaughter be feeling abandoned and confused? Is she too young to really notice? Lynne Hipkin is a Clinical Psychologist who works with children and families and will be explaining how everyone can accommodate these recent changes to our lives.Durags, black culture and high fashion. This week, Rihanna made history – and a statement – by wearing a durag for her photoshoot on the front cover of British Vogue. Is this a turning point for how the scarf is perceived in both popular culture and high fashion? Kenya Hunt is a Fashion Director at Grazia UK. Funmi Fetto is a Contributing Editor at British Vogue and the Beauty Director at the Observer Magazine.Young workers and women have been hardest hit by the shutdown of large sectors of the economy, according to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. We hear from the Deputy Director Robert Joyce. The American podcast Criminal has over 5.5 million downloads each month, and 133 episodes to date. Each episode tells a different real life story, ranging from Jolly Jane the notorious woman poisoner, to the tale behind the phrase Stockholm syndrome. Phoebe Judge, host and co-creator, joins Jane to talk podcasting, women criminals, and why people find true crime so fascinating?Novelist Sarah Vaughan on her new book, Little Disasters - a psychological thriller about the impossibility of understanding what’s going on in the mind of another. It explores the judgement of mothers, the loneliness some women feel and the need to reach out even when someone appears to be coping just fine.Presented by Jane Garvey Produced by Jane ThurlowInterviewed guest: Lynne Hipkin Interviewed guest: Robert Joyce Interviewed guest: Funmi Fetto Interviewed guest: Kenya Hunt Interviewed guest: Phoebe Judge Interviewed guest: Sarah Vaughan

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey. And if you're wondering, and we're all wondering a bit, it is actually Monday, it's the 6th of April, 2020. Hope your weekend was, well, about as good as it can be at the moment. You're still there, we're still here, and we love to keep in touch with you. So keep your emails coming and on Instagram and Twitter, you can make contact with us.

It's at BBC Women's Hour. We are going to talk about the coronavirus and its impact, obviously, today and indeed throughout the week. But there'll also always be a varied diet of other stuff as well, because I know you do need something else in your lives. I get that completely. You'll hear this morning from the brilliant podcast maker Phoebe Judge. She can talk about her podcast Criminal, which if you haven't investigated, you certainly should. And we've got a good book as well on the programme today, Little Disasters. Its author, Sarah Vaughan, will talk to me a little bit later. First of all, though, a listener contacted the programme last week because she was worried that she

might be disappearing from her grandchildren's life. Her name is Glynis, she's 73 and she wrote to us, I've got a 26-month-old granddaughter, she lives just a couple of stops away from me on the tube and her parents work four days a week and I'm really close to her having at one point looked after her for those four days and more recently for one long day and two half days. I now, of course, miss her a lot, but my main worry is that she'll think I have suddenly abandoned her. Apparently, she often asks for me when she wakes up. So Glynis asked us to do more about this and ask some questions about it. And we have Lynne Hipkin joining us now, clinical psychologist who works with children and families.

Lynne, good morning to you. Morning. So many grandparents will be feeling this right now, granddads and grandmas, people who played such a key role in looking after small children. What reassurance can you offer them that the children of whatever age will not forget them? Well, I think first of all the important thing to remember about very small children is that they're very much in their own sort of very, very small world and they take their cues from the adults around them and kind of rely on adults to interpret and comment on their

experiences so they're not aware of the of the kind of bigger picture and also their brains are are very flexible and adaptable and whilst some of them may initially notice changes in routines and the predictability of daily life they're going to um they're going to um possibly you know have a have a reaction um to that so so they might be initially irritable or upset or clingy um because that um regular attachment figure is missing but actually they will recover quite quickly um especially once new routines are in place and they won't be won't be sad for too long so it's really how the adults who are around them now and who help them to to manage those feelings that maybe they can't understand and name for themselves it's those adults who are going to be important to them to help them through.

Sure. So if you have a child of, say, 26 months, in the case of Glynis's granddaughter, what should her parents be telling this little girl to reassure her that her grandmother hasn't forgotten her and she'll see her again soon? I think it's how you keep that relationship alive on a sort of day-to-day basis. And I think obviously very little children will not really understand the bigger picture, so they won't really understand all of the information about the situation. So, you know, very, very simple explanations. You know, even saying something like, you know, Grandma's busy, words like that will mean something to the child

but also might lead to other conversations and activities which will link the child back to the grandmother. So what do you think Grandma's doing? And it might be then guessing, and then maybe next time they hear grandma's voice on the telephone or on FaceTime or something like that, they have a question to ask grandma, or grandma can get into that conversation with them,

and they might be able to role-play chores grandma might be doing and all sorts of things. So there's all sorts of ways that they can keep that relationship alive. We all know the technology exists. Some of us can use it or we've learned to use it over the last couple of weeks perhaps. But young children don't have the attention span to sustain a conversation with a relative, however much they care for them. I guess that can be quite hurtful if you're on the other end of that, can't it? You've got to be realistic about all this.

You have, yes, because obviously very little children do have short attention spans. They're not going to sit on mum or dad's knee for long and concentrate on a screen. But if you make those times short and sweet, an activity that's fun, you know, grandma might be able to play peekaboo, might be able to sing an nursery rhyme, might be able to read part of a favorite story. If it's something that's going to grab that child's concentration

and focus for that brief period of time and allow them to have fun and enjoy themselves, then they're going to be able to connect with that and enjoy that. I just want to bring in the listeners. Margaret has emailed to say, I have just learnt how to make a collage of flowers in my garden to send to our grandchildren after a five-year-old sent us one. I've also used FaceTime for stories, but any other ideas, welcome.

Well, thank you for that, Margaret. You seem to be onto something yourself, actually. Effie says, I had this fear when my son and his family moved out to Australia three years ago. I was so worried that I'd lost those wonderful grandchildren and that they wouldn't know who I was. I was lucky in that I could go out twice a year, but in between visits, I've always kept in touch through video calls, which are obviously as important to them as they are to me.

I also send them cards, knowing they love to get post. My six-year-old granddaughter can now read, so I write weekly letters, which she reads to my four-year-old grandson. But the post from the UK to Australia has now stopped, so I attach them for my son to print out. That's one way of doing it actually, the old-fashioned letter. What about that, Lynne? Yes, absolutely. So all sorts of things. So that lovely idea of keeping the idea of grandma's garden alive.

You can send photographs and then parents can sit and look at those with children and say, where is children and say where is that and you know who's in that garden and um you know those those kinds of things are really important and the you know the daily exercise walk might go past the post box where the child can you know learn about posting letters and and doing that for themselves um so so those kinds of activities are going to really keep that relationship alive. And it's finding ways that keep that idea alive for the child whilst not, you know, stirring up too many feelings about them not being able to be with them. Those tend to be our adult fears about, you know, children don't have a concept really at that stage of abandonment, but they do have memories that they can keep

of things that might be sent to them or shown to them and stories and conversations that they have with their parents. And what young children will never forget, well, I hope you can reassure me that this is true, that if somebody has made them feel safe and secure and loved, they will not let that go. They won't be able to let that feeling go. Absolutely.

And those things are the most important things to children. So, you know, having that love, comfort, reassurance, stimulation, playfulness, making things fun, engaging their attention and keeping them, you know, using those social skills so that when they go back into those daily situations, they have a really good idea of who that person is and their surroundings and their environment. And I'm sure Glynis' granddaughter will go back and will recognise those things and will we'll immediately you know want lots of hugs so just a general question from me to you lynn you are a clinical psychologist what would you say

this is all doing to people who felt anxious and low before it started is it am i over simplifying it horribly by saying that perhaps the rest of us are now getting a taste of what they've always gone through? I think certainly, certainly, I mean, I've noticed myself, you know, in the first couple of days of the restrictions, you know, that sense of that sort of brain fog and not being able to concentrate on things very well. And I know one particular little girl said to me, it's like lots of bees buzzing around in my head. And I think we all can feel that unease. And that's really what anxiety is.

It's unease and uncertainty. And I think, yes, we've definitely all had a bit of a dose of that. And hopefully it will make us all a little bit more understanding of people who have been managing these things for a long time and things a little bit differently. But for other children who are very active, who've been very sporty or, you know, have wanted to take their exams and those sorts of things, they're going to have very, very different reactions to all of this. So I think it's very different for all of us and we need to listen to each other and help each other through it. Thank you very much, Lynne.

I very much welcome your expertise this morning. Lynne Hipkin, who is a clinical psychologist. It is interesting, isn't it, that none of us are having a great time at the moment and there's a little bit of a debate going on as to whether it's harder to be doing this on your own or whether it might actually be significantly harder if you're trying to do it with other people. I think if we can all just agree that it's tough, whoever you are, wherever you are, that might be a help. There's also a colossal financial impact, we know, and an impact on the working lives of millions. And a report today suggests the incomes of the youngest and lowest paid workers and women are most at risk from the shutdown of huge chunks of the economy.

Robert Joyce is the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Robert, good morning to you. Good morning. So we know that women are about a third more likely to work in a sector that's been shut down than men. This is having quite an impact on women's working lives, isn't it? That's right. Now, of course, not every woman in that position will have lost their job. There is a government furlough scheme which is desperately trying to prevent firms permanently severing ties with their employees when there is no productive work to do, which is the case currently in a number of sectors,

of course, like hospitality and accommodation. And the government is subsidising about 80% of wages in order to try to prevent those links being severed. But first of all, in many cases, that will still be a hit to income. In many cases, firms are likely to be going under, which means that those workers will still be laid off. And we know from the data that we've had recently on the number of new claims to benefits, that clearly huge numbers of people are seeing big falls in their income. We've seen about a million new claims to benefits recently, which is just way, way higher than the normal rate. So that raises the question, who are these people that are seeing these

hits to their income? And it's clearly going to be most likely to be the people who are working in those sectors where there is simply no productive work going on right now. And as you say, as we've shown here, that is disproportionately likely to be women, as well as very, very disproportionately likely to be younger workers as well. So what about those women and younger workers getting back into the workforce? The truth is, because we can't put an end to all this, the truth is terrible truth. We don't know, do we? We don't know. We don't know when prospects will improve. I mean, one of the key issues here for the longer term is trying to prevent, because this is in the end a temporary state of affairs, even though it may well not be very, very short term, it is going to be temporary,

it will disappear eventually. One of the key challenges here is trying to keep businesses and workers ready to bounce back to business as usual as soon as possible and as smoothly as possible once things are over and that means for example not having permanent ties between employers and employees severed so that when things can't come back to normal people can simply return to their previous employment can simply return to the firm that they might have spent quite a long time trying to find. And that's obviously difficult, given the amount of financial stress that people are under. We do know that when people suffer disruption to their careers or periods out of work, it can have long lasting effects on their careers. We see that particularly for younger workers. So

that is right. One of the long-term challenges here is trying to minimise the disruption that can cause people's lives going forward. Can you explain why there is that impact? Is it that your skill set isn't refreshed, isn't the one that might be required when it all gets back to normal, or is it that your mental health suffers because you're out of work and you feel desperate? There's a number of factors that have been shown to be at play. One of them is, as

you say, that people, of course, when they're not working, they're simply not accumulating the skills and expertise and knowledge that they would be when they are working, and so they then fall behind. Another, and this is particularly relevant for people towards the beginning of their careers, is that in normal times, they're spending time climbing the career ladder, moving from firm to firm a little bit, moving from sector to sector a little bit to find the thing that matches best

with their skill set and their preferences. And so if you disrupt that process for a time during that critical period of their careers, then again, people aren't able to climb the ladder in the way that they would be normally. So I know it's impossible really for you to give a generalised bit of advice here but if you are at home and you want to maximise your chances of being employed when this is over and you're right of course it will be what do you suggest women

and the young do? Well I mean one point worth making of course is that this is unusual for a recession and that there are actually some sectors of the economy that are on big recruitment drives. So supermarkets. Exactly. Things like supermarkets. And that's unusual during a recession. So there will be some scope for some workers, for those for whom it's safe to do so, to actually find employment or perhaps temporary re-employment elsewhere. So that is one part of it. You can't do that if you're furloughed, though, can you? Well, you actually can, which is actually not widely appreciated.

If you're furloughed, so you have no productive work with your current firm and your firm is getting the government subsidy in order to not sever ties with you permanently, you can actually take up temporary re-employment elsewhere and get additional income from that. So that is an option, although it's not, I think, perhaps widely appreciated. Now, of course, for many people, they won't be able to find temporary re-employment for various reasons.

Then it's very difficult. I mean, of course, there are some productive things one can do with one's time, like investing in education or training. There are probably going to be increasing numbers of those kinds of things made available online, given the circumstances. But yes, it's very, very difficult, of course, to really replace the experience you would be getting from normal working life. Robert, thank you very much.

That's Robert Joyce, the Deputy Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is an independent organisation. Tomorrow on the programme, Mary Berry is going to be here along with the dietician Priya Choo. Now they'll be talking about food shopping and cooking in the lockdown. I couldn't, I could not get eggs yesterday. That was my struggle. And then suddenly flour was absent. Now flour's back, at least it is near me. But let me know how you're getting on. Somebody actually emailed the programme last week to say they couldn't get hold of yeast because there's been a bread making thing going on, hasn't there? A lot of those sourdough things that people are sticking out on the Insta.

No more of those, thanks. Do let us know if you have any questions about how to cook in the lockdown, particularly if you're interested in stuff that you can get out of your so-called store cupboard, if you're fortunate enough to have one. Mary Berry and Priya Choo will be on the programme tomorrow. You can ping us a question via email or on Instagram or Twitter at BBC Women's Hour. Now, Rhianna made quite a statement last week

by wearing a do-rag on the cover of Vogue. It is a scarf, but it isn't just a scarf. Typically used to protect and maintain dreadlocks and braids, some people have associated the do-rag with so-called gang culture. Let's talk to Kenya Hunt, who's a fashion director at Grazia UK, and Fumi Feto is a contributing editor at British Vogue, a beauty director at The Observer, and the author of a book we've discussed on this programme, Palette, the beauty Bible for women of colour. Welcome to you both. Good morning

to you. Good morning. Thank you for having us. It's good to have you both. It really is. I can't see you, but I feel you're with me in spirit. Kenya, let's talk first of all, if you can, just about, can you define the do-rag forest and why it's such a contentious, it's only a piece of cloth, but it's pretty contentious, isn't it? I think it's pretty contentious in the way that black hair has always been pretty contentious. The do-rag is essentially, it's a cloth that we wear around our hair. Thunby wrote about it brilliantly for British Vogue. I mean, its origins date back to slavery,

when you would see men and women in the fields wearing head wrappings to keep the sweat off their face and protect their scalps from the sun. And then it was popularized in the 1970s, when you would see a lot of black men wearing it as a part of their just their personal maintenance and hair care because it would keep your waves nice and crisp and frizz free so I mean that's what I associated with I just associated with my uncles and my uncle's friends wearing do-rags around their houses before they went out so that their hair you know their waves could look really sort of glossy and crisp and fresh. So when you found out that Rihanna was going to do this and wear this,

were you, well, tell me how you felt about it, Kenya. Well, I found out about it with the rest of the world. I saw it on Instagram and I just screamed and gagged because I just, you know, I associated it with like a completely different context. So for me to see like my childhood and then my teen years, because, you know, there's a hip hop connotations and I had so many memories of the do rack. So to see it on the cover of Vogue

and then also to see that like my dear, dear friend Fumi had written about it. And I mean, it was just and all the people I loved, Rihanna. I'm a Rihanna stan. Like all my favorite things were converging on one cover. So I just squealed with delight. Oh, there we are. For me, that's that's the reaction you intended, presumably. I mean, it was an exciting moment for all of us, absolutely every single one of us, because, you know, the durag has always been, you know, as as Kenya quite rightly said, you know, for a long time, it had actually been criminalized. It's been, you know, linked to gang culture and so on and so forth. And this

cloth that, you know, is so steeped in black culture, and essentially, it is something that is a practical cloth in many ways, you know, to keep our hairstyles in a certain way. It's a protective hair accessories in many ways. And to have this completely stigmatized and so on. And then now we see it on the cover of Vogue, you know, the most influential fashion magazine in the world being worn by one of the most influential women, black women in the world. I mean, it's quite a significant moment. I mean, it was a real celebration. I mean, even now I'm talking about it, I can't take the smile off my face. Yeah, it's really a moment. It's incredible.

She has worn one in public before, hasn't she? Yes, she's worn them a number of times. And this is what is so wonderful about what Rihanna has done to kind of rewrite the story about the durag, because she has worn it in spaces that you know you would never expect it to be worn so she wore it at an award ceremony to pick up a fashion award from Anna Wintour she's worn it to perform at the MTV awards she's you know had her models wear it on the catwalk and so on so So these are spaces that in normal circumstances, you wouldn't see the durag. It wouldn't have been seen as acceptable. It wouldn't have been seen as polite

to wear it there. It would have been seen as too ghetto, too black. Right. I'm really intrigued by that. It wouldn't have been seen as polite. Yes. Because this is a piece that, as Kenya said, you know, it's normally worn around the house. You know, you wear it to protect your hair. You wear it to, you know, lay down the edges of your hair and keep your hairstyles in a certain way. And you wear it to bed a lot of times. And because of the way it's been demonized for so long, you know, it's been associated with gun culture, it's been associated with hip hop, which has, you know, it has that stereotype of a black man being an aggressive, an aggressive

expression of blackness. And because it's been linked to all of those things, and all those stereotypes, it hasn't had, it just hasn't had sort of a great reputation. And so to see it in those spaces whereby that kind of thing would never be acceptable, you know, it's pretty powerful. It makes quite a powerful statement. Okay. So is it now utterly, I don't know, is mainstream the right word for this now, Kenya? What would you say? Well, I wouldn't say that it's mainstream. I would say that it's an example of how we are seeing a broader view of representation in fashion, because, you know, there's a cumulative effect happening right now. So, you know, we see the do-rag on the cover of Vogue and that's making headlines. I remember when we saw Lenece Montero make her debut on the Prada runway with an Afro

and that made headlines and sparked similar conversations. And then that paved the way to Arsene Kornrose in magazine fashion shoots and on runways and then box braids and now do-rags. And so I think what we're seeing is that this allowing for in the celebration of the full spectrum of what blackness is and how blackness looks. And again, you know, with Rihanna, she's consistently celebrated the culture, but also she's really women like Rihanna, Solange Knowles, women who are using their platform to celebrate aspects of blackness that have historically been decriminalised, or criminalised, rather. D-rags, for instance, they've been banned by the NBA,

the NFL, schools. So again, there's a real power in seeing it represented in this way and celebrated. Thank you both very much. Really appreciate it. Kenya Hunt and Fumi Feto. Now, Criminal is a podcast that's had over five and a half million downloads. It's American. Each episode tells a different real life story about people who've done wrong or been wronged or just been caught up somewhere in the middle. I talked to its co-host and co-creator, Phoebe Judge, and asked her first about a British woman, Helen Duncan, and what she got up to during the Second World War.

Helen Duncan was a World War II figure and she was known for being kind of a scam artist. She was a medium and she would tell people, she would get these groups of people together and then perform these out-of-body acts. She was most famous for producing what she called ectoplasm, which was really cheesecloth that she would kind of regurgitate out of her mouth and hold people completely wrapped in front of her while she would go into these other worlds to speak to people and really prey on people's worst and weakest moments, wanting to speak to maybe their sons who had been killed in the war. She would say, come, give me money, and I will then speak to them for you.

And so she was quite a character. Yeah, and did she make money? Was she notorious at the time? Well, she was notorious at the time, and she did make money. But I think that, you know, one of the interesting things was she was convicted under something called the Witchcraft Act. There was actually an act that tried to stop people from doing these and preying on people at their weakest moments. And she was sentenced to prison. There was one of your episodes I listened to that I, well, I was going to say I enjoyed, but of course, that's like, seems like an odd term in the circumstances. But the notorious female

poisoner, Jolly Jane. Now, I know she wasn't British, but tell us about her. Well, Jane Toppin was a nurse in Massachusetts in the 1900s, and she would, she would poison her patients. And some said that this gave her a thrill to kind of put her patients on the edge of death and then bring them back. She would use morphine and atrophine to do this. She also then moved away from just poisoning her patients and started poisoning members of families

that she was trying to prey upon and take their money. So she at one time killed almost every member of one family, four or five people in the same family, and no-one ever expected that a woman could be doing this because she was just, as the nickname said, the jolliest person around. Yeah, I mean, what intrigued me was the woman kept getting hired. She was never out of work.

That's the thing. And you wonder if that's people's naivete or just her great ability to make people feel good because she was always in such a good mood. Phoebe, obviously some of the podcasts you've done a lot, I appreciate, have resonated more than others. And cruising is something that has been in the headlines because of the coronavirus. What do you remember about Paulette Cooper, have resonated more than others. And cruising is something that has been in the headlines because

of the coronavirus. What do you remember about Paulette Cooper, the woman who stowed away on a cruise? Well, I love Paulette Cooper's story. Paulette Cooper was in New York City. She was young. She was in her 20s. She was trying to break into a writing career. And she thought, kind of at one night, a challenge, thought, what if I could stow away on a cruise ship and make it the whole way without being found out? And so that's what she did. She packed a little case and walked onto a cruise ship in New York City and basically survived the whole entire journey by pretending, by eating cocktail garnishes, which she would steal from the bar, lemons and limes. And then at night, she would pretend she was drunk and passed out on couches, so no one would really ask her

why she wasn't in a room, because they'd figure, well, this woman had too much to drink and she's just fallen asleep on the couch. So she made it the whole way without really being caught. Also, even getting on and off the boat. So this was a kind of a very popular episode of ours by just kind of, this could never happen today, which is the interesting thing,

seeing what was just a few decades ago, because it's kind of unimaginable to think that you could be put on a ball gown and sit at the bar and cruise across the Atlantic without no one ever suspecting anything. No, you're right. It wouldn't happen now. In fact, there are no cruises happening anywhere right now, let's be honest. Is there a subject that you have considered and then decided not to do? And can you tell me why you made the decision not to do it?

There's no topic that we won't take on or won't touch. We certainly have no interest in doing stories that are gratuitously violent. We'll tackle the story, but it's not our business or our game to over-sensationalize or dramatize violence. And, of course, in many of these stories, that is a factor. And so we shy away sometimes from stories that just seem too gruesome because we wonder, we always ask ourselves, why are we telling the story? What are we hoping the listener will take away from it? And there are those stories where, you know, you just don't know. You actually just don't know, except that it's a horrible tragedy. And so we might shy away from that. We also have decided long ago that we don't force people into telling us their stories. If someone

isn't ready to tell us their story, it's not going to make a good episode. And we also, I'm not into the bullying game. And so there are many stories that we may have wanted to tell and we reach out to the person because for our show, we need to have some personal connection kind of to every story. And the person just says no. And we accept that and we step back and we hope maybe someday they do decide they want to tell their story. But if they're not ready yet, we aren't going to push them into it. And what insight do you now have that you didn't have before you did all this? Well, I think I'm more confused now than I was when I started. I mean, I really, people ask that, you know, what have you learned about the criminal justice system, or good or bad or right or wrong? And I don't, I do think what I've learned is that people are so much more resilient

than I think I believed before, that the things that people can overcome and survive and move on from and learn from is really quite shocking to me. But also, I think my notion, and it was one that I thought when the show started, that evil really doesn't exist. I don't believe that. I believe people get themselves in terrible circumstances, and I believe that people can be really sick. But I don't think that it's because of evil or something, or good or bad.

I think it's humans, and they're put on a path and things happen and terrible things occur because of it. But you don't you don't start out inherently bad. Well, as I speak to you, it is it's Friday, the 3rd of April 2020. I'm in London. You're in North Carolina. How are things? Because we're in the very centre of the West End of London here at the BBC's headquarters. And it is more or less a post-apocalyptic out there. There will be no people on the streets. It's deathly quiet. It's a very, very strange time to be around, frankly. What is it like for you?

Well, it's very strange here in the United States. I'm not in one of these epicenters like New York City or San Francisco or Seattle. I'm in a little city. I'm in North Carolina where there have been a thousand cases or more than that. And it's coming. And we know that it's coming. And so we're at a stay-at-home order. And there's few people on the streets. And they've closed the parks down. And there's a line in front of the grocery store, one person in at a time. It's absolutely surreal. I'm very lucky in the sense that I can still record. And so we've thrown ourselves into work. That's the only thing that I think we were trying to think about how we might be helpful. And so I've started reading a mystery novel every day, one chapter at a time and putting

it out on the podcast. And that has been helpful to me. But I keep thinking to myself, I can't I've never seen anything like this. This is a this is a very wild time, as you say, surreal. And the interesting thing is that we don't know what's going to happen next. You know, that's that's there are few news events that occur over such a long period of time. Usually something happens and then it's over and we recover. But here it seems to just keep going. Yes. And I wonder what will happen in terms of crime rates. What's your what's your sense of that? From what I hear, crime rates are down. I think that I've read some reports that crime rates are down. I mean, I think there's just less there's less people on their streets. There's less opportunity. There are more people at home. It's hard to have a lot of

break-ins when everybody's in their house all day. So I think that what we'll see is probably people focusing a little bit more on their health. But I also think, of course, what we're seeing here is a complete economic destruction in this country. Six million jobless, you know, unemployment claims yesterday. So I think what you're going to find is a lot of people really struggling to make ends meet. And what we know is that when people struggle to feed their families or to pay their rent, well, then people oftentimes revert to any means necessary. So I think right now, while things might be quiet, I think that it's going to be a very, very hard couple of months when we come out the backside of this.

Well, that's Phoebe Judge. It is a brilliant podcast, that one, Criminal. And one of the best things about it, not just the fact that it's so well-crafted, is that there are, I think, over 100 of them. So you can completely immerse yourself in that world. Criminal is the name of that pod. Now, here's a good book to recommend as well.

It's a psychological thriller by Sarah Vaughan. It is called Little Disasters. Sarah, good morning to you. Good morning to you. Now, Little Disasters, it's about mothers and it's about motherhood and the judgment that we all make about other people's mothering and parenting and also about how we don't really know people even when we think we do is that a fair up some yeah i think so i think it's about the darkest reaches of motherhood about judgment as you say

and actually about a woman who has to make a professional judgment and um also about friendship about the need to check up that everybody's okay so it's quite a relatable read for the for the time yeah now what made you want to write it because you do poke in as you say into some of the the darker recesses particularly of parenting or more specifically mothering in the early years it's pretty tough for a lot of women yes i mean i i wasn't when we started thinking about publicity for this i didn't want to admit to this, but I think it's pretty obvious that it draws a bit on my own experience, although one of the mothers in it has a far more extreme version of what I had. I was never diagnosed with maternal OCD, which is a feature of this book, but I did have postnatal anxiety after I had my second child.

I had a perfect storm of circumstances that meant my reasoning became a bit distorted. And I'd also been a journalist who'd covered a lot of paedophile cases, unfortunately, things like the Stowa murders and the murder of Sarah Payne and the subsequent trial and the trial of DJ Jonathan King for his first sexual assault trial. And so I had a really distorted sense of risk. So when I found myself

geographically removed from my home in London because I'd moved away from my husband's job unable to walk because I had a pelvic problem and I'd given up my job on the Guardian because it was just impossible to commute and have two small children with a back problem my thinking became very catastrophizing and so it didn't take a very big imaginative leap to write from the point of view of a woman who would be experiencing postnatal anxiety and maternal OCD. Right a maternal OCD I hadn't heard of how common is that? I don't know that it is that I should have a distinction I don't know how how prevalent it is really it's really. I think it's a bit like a more extreme version of, it's not about lining up things, it's about intrusive thoughts,

and that's what this character experiences. But I think we know that postnatal depression affects one in ten women. I think that's probably a conservative estimate, you know, and postnatal anxiety is the sort of flip side of that. I think it's probably quite prevalent. And for my character um it's apparently quite common that if you've been quite high achieving and then you have a traumatic birth in which you feel very out of control as we all know some births can be um that can prompt

something like this so jess my character has always been perfectly in control this is her third baby um and then you know she has a birth that's that, something goes wrong, baby's fine, but it triggers this sense of distorted thinking. Reading your book and obviously in the current climate was making me, I suppose, revisit my own experience of the early days and months of motherhood and it made me think as well how extraordinarily difficult it must be for women, particularly now.

Imagine bringing a child home from the maternity hospital at the moment. It must be horrendous. I mean, I keep thinking about giving birth in a hospital, how scary that must be with people wearing masks and just being very anxious. You know how anxious you are in those early days about sterilizing everything or trying to protect your baby. I think I saw on Twitter somebody saying that they'd planned to have a home birth and were going to have to go into hospital, and that felt completely counterintuitive. You know, why would you give birth to this child who's been in a sterile environment

in an environment that wouldn't be? And I think I had something on the radio yesterday about people saying, oh, well, you can still be in touch with, you know, postnatal groups online and through Zoom chats. But we all know that touch is so important and human interaction is so important, isn't it? I think it must be absolutely terrifying. You know, all sorts of, to anybody who's in the hospital at the moment, but particularly women who are giving birth, I guess. Yeah and then also just the the weeks and months where you certainly feature colic in your book and there is no cry like the cry of a colicky baby at about what is it about half past five at night they start cranking up don't they? I think I had it from week three to week 16 it happened and it was my first baby and it was such a shock to the system because you know I'd had my first baby at 32 and everything had gone quite well. You know, I'd been in this career. I'd had this job in The Guardian. I'd been political correspondent.

You know, the day before I gave birth to her, the midwife pointed out it might actually hurt because I just don't think I was prepared at all for the anarchy of a child that you can't soothe, you know. And so that's where the novel starts, yes. So, yes, I think hopefully when I was experiencing this as my second child, actually, it was over 10 years ago, and I think actually programs like Women's Hour have made it so much more easy to talk about these issues. In my novel there's also a subplot in the 1980s

where a mother experiences something similar and I wanted to sort of flag up that I think our understanding of maternal mental health and the claustrophobia and isolation and anxiety that can come about after having a baby I think our knowledge of that is so much better you know even in the last two or three years than it was a decade ago. Yeah well I just hope we've all become a little bit more compassionate and understanding about these things. We should also say that your partner, your husband is a hospital doctor, isn't he? So I can't imagine that's helping with anxiety levels in your house at the moment either. Yeah, well, it's interesting. So I wrote this, finished this book a year ago, and obviously nobody chooses to publish a book um called little disasters partly set in the hospital um during a pandemic and high for pandemic um but actually the more

i thought about it the more the book seems quite um relevant and relatable because it is precisely about isolation and claustrophobia and anxiety as your um psychologist was saying earlier you know which is which is quite heightened at the moment. And certainly when, before lockdown happened really a month ago, I was getting very, very anxious about COVID-19 and the fact that I had a partner working in a hospital. And the things that we've done to try and minimise the anxiety, because I've got two children as well of 15 and 12, and the 15-year-old certainly is very conscious of this,

is to try and think of really practical measures of minimizing the risk of him getting it and then him giving it to us because the reality is um you know if he contracts it we're probably all going to contract it because symptoms you know although we've got to be careful sarah most of us who get it and many of us will of course will have the milder end of the symptom spectrum. And we will, of course, get over it. But heaven knows it is. It's a difficult time. Sarah, thank you so much. Enjoyed talking to you and I enjoyed the book as well. That was the author Sarah Vaughan and her book is called Little Disasters.

And as she pointed out in the interview, no, of course, she wouldn't have chosen to publish a book called that right now. But you never know what's around the corner, as it turned out. Thank you very much for interacting with us today. I should say that Women's Hour is still coming from Broadcasting House. So I'd like to thank my colleagues for making that possible. There were four of us, three of us, four of us, I'm looking, how many were in the building? We've got John on the decks, another Jane, and we've got Diane Caitlin. Yeah, so there's one, two, how many is that? Five. Five of us who've made this programme possible today. And then other colleagues, of course, WFH. But we are keeping going. And it's not without its challenges. And obviously, some things have changed, as you'll have noticed if you're a regular listener. But we will keep going.

And thank you to all of you for keeping us going with the things you tell us about your lives. This is interesting from Ailsa. I look after three grandchildren aged two, four and six most weekdays for between 20 and 30 hours a week. My weekly routine is suddenly so very different. So to keep in touch, we FaceTime, which is a new way for us of interacting. We don't have a regular time for this, but we're trying to maintain the comfortable ease and spontaneity of being physically together. So we wait until there's something to communicate, perhaps a drawing or a painting or a plate of cakes to share, so-called of course.

The kids are curious as to how I spend my day, so I try to think up interesting stories about creatures in the garden or old objects which are suddenly coming to light from forgotten drawers. They've encouraged me to paint a rainbow and to put a teddy bear in my window and our photos of these are quickly shared. We do catch up most days and I hope that they will find a way of communicating that isn't a bore or a chore. Well, I know it sounds like you're doing really well, Elsie,

and all of us have had to learn new stuff. I spent some of yesterday afternoon Zooming with my sister, our cousins, in South Africa, so it wouldn't be something we'd normally do on a Sunday afternoon, but actually, when we got into it, it was brilliant. And we just had a really good, I think it must have been close to an hour of what you could loosely call conversation. It was good. Now, I did something unforgivable. I was rude about sourdough on Radio 4 this morning, and I will pay the price for that, not least because I associated it with the remark about yeast. And so many of you have made the point that, of course, people are not, as Judy-Ann says, Jane, people are not buying up yeast for making sourdough.

Sourdough does not require bought yeast because it is the starter that has a naturally occurring yeast that makes it rise. If I've learned anything from this pandemic, it's that you are not dismissive on national radio of sourdough starters. More on keeping in touch with your grandchildren. Anna, my mum now reads my six and eight year old their bedtime stories via FaceTime every night. They each get their own bit of one to one time with granny and she feels in touch with them. That's brilliant, isn't it? From Maria, living in Australia with young children in the 1990s, pre-FaceTime and Skype and everything else,

my mum left her perfume and her hand cream behind. It was M&S Magnolia when she left after a visit. And my children would regularly use these for a smell of granny when they missed her. And we all know how powerful scent can be in evoking memories. Just a suggestion, says Maria. I think that's a really good suggestion, because you're right, powerful, powerful things, scents, aren't they?

And they really do. You all associate, we all associate a smell with a particular, often with a particular female relative when we think of them. Harriet says, I decided I would write a special letter each week to my granddaughters during this time of lockdown. We do video calling, but getting a paper letter addressed to them has been exciting. I hope they might also keep them as an archive

of a very peculiar time, which they may or may not remember when they look back. Each letter starts with something topical. Today's is spring and Easter and it will include a story or a poem and finally an idea of something for them to do connected with the theme. So far I'm told they've been much appreciated although apparently I've made my daughters, their mothers, both cry. One of my daughter's two children was only adopted a couple of months ago. So keeping up our grandparent relationship is incredibly important.

I'm sure it is. And I hope you continue to be able to do that. Now this, another listener, I think it's Giller. I hope I've got that right, Giller. Or Jiller. Excuse me. I've had a virtual teddy bears hide and seek game around my house with my twin two and a half year old granddaughters via video call.

We finished with a story when they found them all. It keeps grandma, her dogs and house familiar and gives my daughter a break, too. I love it. With two and a half year old twins. I bet your granddaughter needs a break because I was going back earlier. I am so thankful that my children are older at the moment and that we can sort of we can keep going during this period of time, because what I'd have been like if they were, for example, six and three, I have absolutely no idea. And an anonymous email. What about those of us who are unable to interact in any way with our children, except through the say so of a social worker? I am being denied my contact time. This is now done through video link. I have no way of being personal with my children, and I am desperate to

keep the relationship we had alive. This is now being made virtually impossible. I heard that children in split families are able to visit each parent. Well, where is anonymous emailer, I very much hope that isn't the case. But thank you for drawing our attention to yet another issue that I guess many of us have not thought about or haven't had to think about, if we're honest. Thank you very much again for continuing to listen to us. We really do appreciate it. We're back tomorrow and we will, of course, have, well, Mary Berry, the Mary Berry has been activated and will be part of us tomorrow. She's going to cook or tell us how to cook a lockdown birthday cake. Join us then if you can. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year,

I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.