Woman's Hour - Mary Robinson, Rose Tremain, Daddy Issues

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Mary Robinson, once President of Ireland and now the Chair of The Elders, has been at COP26 in Glasgow all fortnight. She explains why the climate challenge ahead is so emotional.Rose Tremain's new novel called Lily begins with a baby being abandoned by her mother outside a London park in Victorian London. She’s rescued from prowling wolves by a young police officer and Lily's life as a foundling child begins. It's a story of revenge and, as often with Rose Tremain's work, the setting might be historical but there are contemporary parallels.Daddy Issues. It's an insult now but it started out as a psychological term to explain the importance of father figures. But what exactly are Daddy Issues, how real are they and what do you do if you think you have them? Katherine Angel, author of ‘Daddy Issues’, and Angharad George-Carey, host of the Daddy Issues podcast joins us.And today is Single’s Day in China. It's the world’s biggest shopping spree. It's supposed to honour those who are not in a romantic relationship, and sales tempt people to treat themselves. It brings in more money than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. We talk to Nina Yu of Hylink, China’s largest digital advertising agency, about the scale and origins of the event. We also find out about changing attitudes towards being an unmarried or ‘leftover’ woman in China with Dr Ye Liu, a sociologist from King’s College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Chloe Tilley. Welcome to Woman's Air from BBC Radio 4. Hello and welcome to the programme. Good to have you with us. Now, it's the last day of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. A new draft agreement published in the last few hours weakens government's commitments on fossil fuels, but has stronger language on paying poorer countries to tackle climate change. So where does it leave us? There are growing fears

that the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is unlikely to be met. In the next few minutes, we'll be speaking to Mary Robinson, former Irish president and chair of the Elders, who is at COP and has been very critical of some of the nations she considers a blocking progress. Care home workers who aren't double jabbed against Covid are now forbidden from working in care homes. The rules came in yesterday and there have been numerous emotional accounts of managers having to sack people over the past 24 hours. We'll hear from one of them. Dame Rose Tremaine is going to be with me here in the studio to talk about her latest historical novel, Lily. It's a tale of revenge set in Victorian London. Lily, who was abandoned at birth, sees the very worst and best in human nature. We'll also be talking about so-called

daddy issues, often a slur thrown at women. What does the relationship between men and their daughters tell us? This morning, I want to hear from you about how your relationship with your father has affected you and your relationships. You can text me now on 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. So tell me, do you have daddy issues? Do you know someone who does? Whether you put your father on a pedestal and now you find it really hard to find a partner who matches up to him. Or did your dad leave the family home when you were a child?

What impact did that have on you, your relationships with men, with your children, with your partner? And why is this something that is only thrown at women? Surely men can have daddy issues too. And what about mummy issues? Get in touch via social media. It's at BBC Women's Hour or you can email us through the website. Plus, the world's biggest 24-hour Hour or you can email us through the website. Plus,

the world's biggest 24-hour shopping spree has just come to an end, but you might not have even heard of it. It's called Singles Day in China. It's a kind of anti-Valentine's Day celebration, but for the Chinese government, it does have a serious edge as marriage rates have plummeted over the last decade. But let's begin by speaking about this new draft agreement which has been drawn up at the COP26 climate summit. It has stronger language about helping paying poorer countries to fight climate change but on the flip side it's softened government requirements to reduce fossil fuel and coal use. What it does say is that governments need to urgently tackle climate change. It's been described as a monumental challenge to keep 1.5 alive. That's the view of COP26 President Alok Sharma.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, says the goal was on life support. So we do know COP26 is entering its final day. It's widely thought that governments will not make the commitments needed to ensure temperature rises remain below that 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial temperatures. If so, does that mean that this climate summit has been a failure? Well, one person who's been there throughout and is staying till the bitter end, whether that's tonight, tomorrow, Sunday,

is Mary Robinson, who was president of Ireland in the 1990s, now the chair of the group The Elders. Well, during the week, as it emerged that the targets hoped for are unlikely to be reached, it really got to her in an interview with Sky News. I'm saying to the leaders who are here now, this is on your watch. Sorry.

It's so important. You know, we are literally talking about having a safe future. And, you know, the elders are pressing the leaders. Understand, you can't negotiate with science. You can't talk about a glass being half full. We have to get it down. We have to be on track for 1.5, and it is doable. Well, Mary Robinson joins me now from glasgow good morning good morning tell me i watched that interview that you did on sky

news and you were clearly emotional was that tiredness frustration just tell me what was going through your mind i think what was going through my mind was what a 2.4 degrees heating world means. You know, in this world, if you're younger than 60 years old, it's likely that you'll witness the total destabilization of life as we know it. Crop failures, fracturing economies, hundreds of millions of people fleeing regions because they're made uninhabitable by either extreme heat or flooding or permanent drought and if you're under 30 years old the science tells us that you're all but guaranteed to live through this that's not tolerable i mean how can leaders on their watch justify that and that was what it was a mixture of anger and frustration but also utter you know we cannot

let this happen now um i have to say you know that 2.4 degrees is um celsius of warming is measuring the commitments that governments make their nationally determined contributions as it's called some things that happened here at the cop will help. For example, the methane pledge, because if we can get methane down, it's more lethal than carbon and it will help a little bit. The deforestation pledge, which is more robust this time with money for indigenous peoples, that will help. A lot of investment commitment. The private sector has kind of stepped up pretty significantly, those who are here,

because they're in crisis mode. The private sector leaders that I meet, the B team of business leaders and others, they're in total crisis mode as I am. Unfortunately, some other leaders are not in crisis mode. And I know you've called those people out. Just tell us who particularly you think isn't in crisis mode and isn't taking this seriously. I think it's been disappointing that China hasn't increased its NDC. I know that China implements when it pledges and sometimes under-pledges and over-performs, unlike some Western countries where we pledge and then don't perform enough.

But Russia definitely, Brazil, Saudi Arabia. And one of the countries that I particularly target because it's an industrialised rich country, Australia. You know, Australia is in fossil fuel mode, not crisis mode. It has exactly the same approach as the fossil fuel companies. Oh, we need the fossil fuel for the next indefinite number of years so that we can go green faster. I'm sorry, the world can't tolerate that. So in light of that, would you say that the UK and Ireland are doing enough? Well, you know, the UK has been making pledges that are significant and Ireland, of course, is part of the EU

where we've committed to reducing by 55% by 2030. That's a big step up for Ireland. Frankly, we didn't meet our 2020 pledges, and we know now we have to get into a completely different mode. And I'm kind of happy that people in Ireland now realise, take, for example, my hometown of Ballina in County Mayo. Today, because they know it's the last day of COP, they are having a local event.

It's involving schoolchildren. It's involving a march in the streets of Ballina. And of course the river, the river Moy is very important. So they'll be kayaking on the Moy. And I've sent them a message in advance because I'm proud that they're doing it locally. And today I'll be talking to 2,500

schoolgirls here in Glasgow, aged I think it's 13 or 14. And they're talking about climate justice. So that's what I'm talking about. Make it, you know, personal in everybody's life. Know that you can do something and think about this world that we need to be hurrying towards.

And we know that young people are engaged in this because, as you rightly point out, it's young people who are really going to bear the brunt of this. But do you think that the politicians who are sitting around the table, who are negotiating right now, and possibly over the coming days, if they don't reach an agreement, do you think they're listening? Are they listening to you? Are they listening to young people? Are they listening to the scientists, I guess, as well? Some of the young people who have spoken here have really made an impact. On the opening day,

Brianna Fruin, who was on my podcast, Mothers of Invention, some time ago. She's a young woman from Samoa, you know, a small Pacific island. And she spoke, you know, with great heart and courage because she said, we are not drowning. We are fighting. I liked that. And yesterday, Vanessa Nakate made a really, really strong speech. And Shia Bastida. I mean, I know a number of these. And, you know, they're not all women. Jerome Foster has been very active here and he's in the Biden White House advising as a

young advisor. So some of them are getting, you know, real attention and they have big followings, which is important. So, you know, and of course, Greta Thunberg was here earlier. But, you know, there are an increasing number and I think they are making a difference and they're influencing their parents and they're influencing their community and hopefully they're influencing leaders. But some people will argue that the last fortnight has been a complete waste of time and money. This COP was all about making sure that we don't go over the 1.5 degrees Celsius, and it looks by all accounts that that is going to happen unless something massively changes in the coming hours, I guess, coming days.

Also, Glasgow is on track to be one of the most polluting climate summits of its kind. It's worse than the last one in Madrid. When you reflect on this, do you think that COP26 will have been a failure? I don't like the word failure. The elders bring hope. So I'm going to think through when I see the final result, how to message about it. But frankly, you know, the framework to reach agreement on climate is probably the weakest framework we have in the UN system because it's a framework by consent and we can only move with that framework we don't have any other framework to actually make it happen and you know Paris was extremely important and we got that agreement for the and luckily because of the work of the small island states and developing countries we

got 1.5 degrees mentioned in the goal that we would be well below 2 degrees and work for 1.5. And then the scientists told us the whole world is to stay at 1.5. I still hope that we will be able to be what I call aligned with 1.5. We won't close the gap here in Glasgow. We know that.

We knew that actually before we came. The gap is quite significant that we're on a course for 2.4 degrees Celsius as far as the government commitments are concerned. It'll be helped by some of the pledges here in Glasgow. So it hasn't been a waste of time. There has been a lot of concentration of effort. And also, people generally are in a crisis mode now

because they've seen, you know, fires in California and flooding in the UK, flooding in Germany, fires in Australia. You know, the permafrost up and is melting in parts of the, you know, near the Arctic. So people just know this isn't just a crisis of developing countries. And as I mentioned, I've spelt out what a 2.4 degree world would mean. It's not acceptable. It's not allowable. And it must be on the conscience of leaders here if they don't show how we can align. They've said the countries have to come back next year with more ambition. That's better than the Paris five years. So, you know, I'm sorry that the reference to fossil fuel,

the phasing out of coal and getting rid of subsidies on fossil fuel has been weakened, and I hope it will be strengthened back. It actually should say, phase out fossil fuel. Fossil fuel is killing us. Phase out fossil fuel. It should be simple to say, but you know that there's a very big lobby. It's bigger than any country, the lobby of the fossil fuel world here. And I know that you've been critical previously of the pressure that Saudi Arabia appears to be able to exert when it comes to drawing up these agreements.

Do you worry about this when the final agreement is presented to everybody? Well, I've known the habit of Saudi Arabia and I've been amazed at the influence it has because this is about reducing emissions and they have got a kind of strong position and they're always there at the table. And sometimes the countries that would resist what Saudi Arabia is doing, like removing human rights, gender equality, reference to the needs of indigenous peoples from texts, including future education on human rights, the ACE programme. They've damaged it because other countries weren't there to stop them. And they're now trying to push back.

They were the ones with Russia who pushed back on phasing out coal to phasing out the, you know, to weaker wording on that. And, you know, it's sad because that's a G20 formula of, you know, phasing out unabated coal and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. That's never worked. We need phasing out of all coal urgently. And even the International Energy Agency is clear on that. I mean, it's kind of frustrating when you have a body that was very conservative in the past that actually has a good head of it now, Fatih Birol, who says, you know, we shouldn't be extracting any more fossil fuel out of the earth because we have enough fossil fuel to tide us over to a just transition to clean energy. And he's right. Just to finish off, I want to ask you...

Oh, and actually, it is good that there's an initiative to phase out oil and gas led by Costa Rica and Denmark and a number of countries. And I'm glad my own country, Ireland, has joined. But the United Kingdom hasn't. I'm sad about that actually because they have the presidency and they haven't signed up to phasing out oil and gas so that's a bit sad. Before I let you go Mary Robinson I want to ask you at the beginning of this year you were brought into the controversy surrounding Princess Latifa in Dubai and the allegations that she was being held hostage. Now, as the months have passed, has it become any clearer what the truth is? It doesn't seem clear to the media. I

wonder if you knew any more. I don't know any more. I've seen pictures of her in various locations where she seemed happy. I went back to Dubai to a green climate conference deliberately a few weeks ago and I spoke openly there about human rights. I called for the immediate release of Ahmed Mansour who has been imprisoned for 10 years. He's a blogger. It's a total encroachment on his freedom of speech and it caused quite a tension at the conference, and I did it very deliberately. They abused me, and I was going back to say, I am a human rights person, and I don't like what you've done,

and you should release not just Ahmed Mansour, whom I know personally and care a lot about, and he's been tortured in prison, but also other political prisoners that Amnesty has been championing. You know, I felt very badly abused by what happened. When you say you feel very badly abused. Well, I produced private photographs for proof of life to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michel Bachelet, in a private letter. And then they released the photographs. And I was, you know, put in an almost impossible position.

And damaging to your reputation. Well, it was at the time, but, you know, life moves on. Anyway, I have moved on, I can assure you. And on a final point, because you bring up that point about the human rights issue. I know in an interview on RTE in February, you said far too many women in the UAE and across the Middle East generally find themselves in this situation. It's clearly something that you feel very strongly about. Very much so, and I've spoken about it openly. The UAE has advanced women quite a bit in education and in science and in technology

and in ministries in the government. But there isn't a free climate in the UAE. And it's a deceptive country because of that. People are afraid to speak out. And certainly when I called for the release of Ahmed Mansour, it was as if nobody would talk to me except François Hollande was the other former president who was there. And he joined me at lunch at my table and others joined. But nobody from Dubai would come near us. So it just shows there's still a problem. And it's worse, of course, in Saudi Arabia.

Women are making some progress. I'm always keen to talk up progress when I see it of women in the Middle East because we mustn't, you know, say it's all bad. In some cases, it is improving a bit, but there's still a long way to go. Mary Robinson, thank you so much for your time this morning. Very grateful to you. OK, thank you.

She was president of Ireland, of course, in the 1990s and now chair of the group The Elders. Lots of you sending in your messages about daddy issues. I'll read those out a little bit later on. But we've had this text on 84844. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia. It's too late. The media continues to give out mixed messages, not enough to avert disaster. It's the only way humanity learns, as in World War I and World War II. Everyone wants to be optimistic. That's not appropriate anymore. Sorry to the next generations. Do keep your messages coming in on all of the things we're talking about this morning. Now, the reality of no jab, no job is starting to bite in the care home sector. A new mandatory

rule in England came into force yesterday that means staff in care homes have to be double vaccinated. Well, care home managers and directors say they've had to let workers go and are seriously concerned about staff numbers coming into the winter months. Some say they feel like care home workers have been discriminated against as this rule only currently applies to care homes. You'll remember that the health secretary, Sajid Javid, says this policy will extend to all frontline NHS staff in England as well from April 1st. But how is this going to affect recruitment issues facing care homes? Well, we can speak now to Nicola Richards. She is director of Palms Row Healthcare in Sheffield. She manages 160 staff across two nursing homes and a healthcare staffing agency.

And she spoke to us about this policy a few months ago. Hi, Nicola. Morning. Also with us is Nadra Ahmed, who is chairman of the National Care Association, which represents care providers. Hi, Nadra. Good morning.

Thank you both for joining us. Nicola, I want to start with you because I know that you had a pretty tough day yesterday, didn't you? You had to, well, I guess, effectively sack two people. Yeah, it was a really emotional day yesterday. We had to do exit interviews and obviously dismiss staff for not having the job. So I can't tell you how sad it was. There were tears around from care staff, from residents, from myself.

It was just, it was heartbreaking, really. And why did they tell you they'd taken the decision not to be vaccinated? One of the staff had had a really bad reaction when she had the first jab. She was really unwell, but she wasn't medically exempt. So she just said she couldn't put herself through it um and the second worker just felt as you've just mentioned discriminated against really she she sort of she said to me yesterday why is it that people um in the nhs don't have to have the vaccine she said i've worked here for eight years and she has on the front line

she didn't miss one row today during covid she has suffered anxiety looking after residents obviously petrified she she used to go home and shower herself before she took touched her children early on in the pandemic um and she's she's really put her own life at risk so i think she's she's felt that we should have had more time and it should have been in line with all of the healthcare sector, not just care home workers. So I think she feels very angry that we've been discriminated against and she just wanted more time.

But people listening to our conversation now, particularly those who maybe have relatives in care homes, I mean, you say there that that care worker put her own life at risk. Some people will say she'll be putting residents' lives potentially at risk by not having the vaccination and working with them. I think it's very difficult when the public think like this, because the jab is only one part of keeping our residents safe. You cannot ignore that we, you know, we have infection control measures in place. That is only one part of keeping our residents safe. You cannot ignore that we have infection control measures in place. That is only one small part.

And we can still transmit COVID even if we've had the vaccine. But I think for our staff who know that our residents go to hospital, come back from hospital and being cared for by people in hospital who've not had the jab, how is that fair? And I think that's where the problem lies the government have not applied this across the whole health care system so people in in home care people in the hospital and our care workers have we feel as though we've been discriminated against and i can't stress these care workers put their lives at risk back last year when there

was limited PPE, no testing, no jabs. Nadra Ahmed, I want to bring you in and do stay with us, Nicola. Is this a sense you're getting across the care sector, this feeling of being discriminated against that Nicola lays out for us? Absolutely. I mean, I think it's, Nicholas articulated it really well. I think from the very outset, we were not, you know, we were at a loss to understand why the care home sector had been singled out and therefore discriminated against because it felt very much as though there was a bit of a blame that we were the ones that needed to be regulated into this quickly. And when you think about the numbers of people that were in hospital with COVID and people getting COVID whilst in hospital, especially through

last year, and then actually being discharged into our services, one wonders why this wasn't brought in as a consistent message that went across that if you're looking after vulnerable people, that's what you do. It would have been easier in the health service because they already have it in their contracts. In our sector, of course, our staff were not even mandated to have flu vaccine. So it did very much feel like that. And I think a lot of providers have found it really difficult to get that messaging across. But we've worked really hard from the time it became available until that consultation started. We were doing really well because we were working with our staff. We were explaining to them the reasons

behind it. And we were working really hard to answer every question. Soon as the consultation came out, what you started to get was, why us? Why not everybody else? And those people who then started to feel that this was unfair actually started to walk away and walk into the healthcare sector. So they just left our services in care homes and said, well, we don't have to be vaccinated in healthcare. So we saw nurses leaving to go into the healthcare sector. And that has damaged us. Nicola, what impact is this ruling having on your ability to look after residents? So you had to let two people go yesterday.

Are there more people who are going to have to go? And what impact will it have on the people you look after? I've been incredibly fortunate that, as Nadja just said, we've had a really good uptake in people having the vaccine. So it's only impacted on two people but that is two people too many I've lost nearly 20 percent of my workforce during Covid so when we've got empty beds and many providers across the country have got empty beds they need those beds to be filled to keep the doors open ultimately to remain viable but if you've not got the safe staffing levels to look after your residents,

you cannot accept new admissions into your home. So this may impact on bed blocking in hospital. It may impact on the community, people in the community who need 24-hour care in a care home. This could directly impact on the NHS and the community. So, you know, as we've been saying, we've been asking for the government to pause this. They've not listened.

And ultimately, winter looks very bleak. Let me read this message to you, which has come in from Leslie. It says, I have myositis. Maybe I pronounced that wrong. Apologies if I have. My sister has dementia. If we need care, we expect the staff to be safe

so that we are safe. If we want to be a care worker, if you want to be a care worker, if you want to be a care worker, get the jab. That's the sense which is coming in from Leslie. I'm wondering, it is April 1st, the NHS frontline staff in England will have to be double jabbed. Do you think, Nadra, that some of the people who left to go to the NHS may come back when the double jab rule comes in for frontline NHS workers in April? Well, one can only hope, but I can't see that happening. I think there may be a few that might do that. But I think generally, if they've got a role in the NHS, they will have better conditions, they may have better pay now. And that will cause them to make those decisions.

We are not seeing people coming back into social care now. We are not being able to recruit easily despite a recruitment campaign. These are things that should have been done six months ago. So it is a bit late in the day. And when you look at the vacancy rates within care homes, where some people have done that in order to be able to deliver safe care, then I think what we also have to think about is how long will that viability of that business last? People will have to go. And I absolutely understand your listeners' view around wanting somebody who's doubly vaccinated to come into the service. And I think we wouldn't disagree with that at all.

We'd like that to happen. But when they're going into hospital setting, people are not doubly vaccinated or not vaccinated even once. And what we have to think about is in the care sector, is if there are no staff, we can't deliver the care. So if there are no staff we can't deliver the care so if there's no staff there's no care that's that's the reality of it. Let me read you a couple more messages which have come in Ming Ho says on Twitter still struggle to understand why care staff who indeed put their lives at risk working without PPE now refuse protection of the vaccine yes it's just one part of protecting residents but it's a key part. Why is unfairness, really, NHS, more important? And Wynne Jeffery says this discussion is on the wrong track. It's not a question of discrimination. Far more important is the moral imperative that if you're working

with vulnerable people, you should be vaccinated. Nicola, just a final point. At the moment, if people are medically exempt, they can do that by themselves, can't they, till the 24th of, they can self-exempt effectively till Christmas Eve. After that, they'll need to be medically exempt by a practitioner. Do you worry that the situation could then get worse at Christmas? Absolutely. I mean, it's worry. I'm worried now. The situation now, I cannot express enough, is chronic at the moment. We know locally, we know nationally that there's a huge shortage of skilled professional care workers.

And we do worry about what winter looks like. And that absolutely will get worse come December 24th. Thank you both so much for speaking to us this morning. You heard there from Nicola Richards, director of Palms Row Healthcare in Sheffield, and also Nadra Ahmed, Chairwoman of the National Care Association. Now, Dame Rose Tremaine is a novelist, a short story writer. Her first book, Sadler's Birthday, was published in 1976 when she was 32. She'd been writing since she was 10 years old in an effort, she said, to fill the void left by her father when he walked out on his family. She gets called a historical novelist, but her subjects actually range far and wide and are often contemporary. Restoration, probably her best known work, but her new one is called Lily.

It's a tale of revenge set in Victorian London. Baby Lily is abandoned outside a park, but is rescued by a young policeman. I'm delighted to say she joins me now in the studio. Good morning. Hello. Thank you so much for coming. It's lovely to see people face to face. This book, you really feel it with Lily.

I felt like I was dragged through it with Lily, which it really connected with me. And she had a tough start in life. She was abandoned outside a park. She was attacked by wolves. She was abandoned outside a park. She was attacked by wolves. She was rescued, but then she was taken to the foundling hospital. And the descriptions of the plight of those children in that hospital is very difficult to read. I'm guessing that's what you wanted because you know that resonates with the reader. Yes. And also, I think it resonates with a contemporary reader particularly because we're appalled to find, I mean, this is more than 150 years ago that conditions inside institutions were like that.

And we read today, don't we, of children being maltreated, being abused, being really not looked after in any proper way in an institution. So it's still with us, this way that society treats children who have been abandoned for some reason or other, usually by the parent that the parent is not able to look after them or whatever. So I have gone back in time. I know this period of Victorian London very well. My last book was partly set there. So I felt that I was quite steeped in this research about London. a very young child who is indeed rescued. She would otherwise have died. But the plight that she finds herself in within an institution, I felt that that really would resonate with some of the things that we're hearing about how children are treated today.

And, of course, the judgment of women for giving up children as well. It was very interesting, on the first page of the book, you made the decision to say that Lily is a murderer. Why on the first page? Because that's incredibly early. Well, this is not a book about who done it. It's a book about why she's done it. So this is the question the reader is asking. And I wanted to implant this question straight away. Okay, she's young, she's 17. It has two timescales, one which goes forward from when she's 17 to what becomes after she's committed this crime and another timescale which goes back and gathers together the events which led to the crime. And I just felt that it was very important to establish the huge jeopardy and the big dilemma that she's in right from the start. So the reader is not

asking, you know, this is a crime which is unsolved. They're asking the question, what is the crime? And why? Most importantly, why has she done it? And the book answers that question. Religion, charity, they both get a pretty tough ride in this novel. But there are two wonderfully warm, caring characters who have a genuine love, I think, probably, for Lily. There's the foster mother, Nellie, who looks after her in the early years on the farm. And then also Belle, who employs her at a wig emporium later on.

Where did you find the inspiration for those characters in particular? Nellie is very significant. When I was a child, you mentioned in your little intro that my father left home and we were really, my childhood, the salvation of my childhood was a paid nanny, a lovely woman called Vera Sturt, who looked after me and my sister because our parents couldn't really be bothered to look after us. And so Vera, my nanny, fulfilled the maternal role. And Nellie, my character, who shelters Lily

for the first five or six years of her life, draws a lot of characteristics. The characteristic of patience, of expressing love, expressing tenderness, wanting the child to be taught things so that she has some chance of succeeding later in life. I'm creating a warm environment for her. And then, of course, what happens, what was the protocol that they followed at the Coram Hospital was that they farmed the children out to these lovely, well, in most cases,

lovely foster homes, usually in the countryside. Lydia finds herself in Suffolk, to the age of about five or six. And then they brought them back. They severed them again from the people they'd come to love. And this struck me as a tragedy. And it was a sort of tragedy that happened to me that when my father left, our household was broken up and my nan also left. So I lost not only him but her and my house and my friends and everything.

So that was a sort of very weird thing to happen at age 10. And perhaps that in other books of mine, there have been characters who have resembled Nellie stroke Nan, kind of maternal kindly people who pick up the pieces of something that's been broken. And then the other character you mentioned is very different from her. This is a very flamboyant woman called Belle Prettywood, who runs a wig emporium, very important in the 18th and 19th century wigs, all the women were very dependent on wigs, I mean, less in the 18th and 19th century, wigs. All the women were very dependent on wigs. I mean, less in the Victorian era than the century before

when they had those enormous sort of confections upon their heads, but the Victorians still liked wigs. But Belle, she's a sort of shady character. She makes her living partly by running her wig emporium and partly by being a sort of high-class whore with a house in seven dials. But she is tender-hearted, and she understands. And the one thing that Lily has learned, both from Nellie and from her so-called education in the Coram Hospital, is how to sew very beautifully.

And this makes her very, very good at her job of making wigs, which is quite a hard thing. I studied wig-making in order to write this book. It's actually quite a hard task. I think it would take you and me quite some time to learn how to do this, you know, special blocking pins and lots of kit. And it's a very, very precise thing and very arduous. Relationships are so key in this book. And there's so many fascinating relationships. There's her best friend, this book and there's so many fascinating relationships there's her best friend Bridget there's the police officer who saves her there's the cruelty within the Coram Hospital and you also included a female sex abuser within the story which I'm interested to know we don't often see that we don't often read that we We don't often read that. We're not often exposed to that. And I wondered why you made that decision.

It was very important that the sort of what I would call the everyday cruelty of this institution, which is quite well established, it was very important that that led to something even worse, as I suspect it probably often did. If we read Victorian research on what happened in the hospital, I couldn't find any instances of it, but it seemed to me to be very likely that the children who were beaten, who were starved in some occasions,

they were made to wear ridiculous clothes, their heads were shaved. There are all the sort of accoutrements of cruelty going on in this, which purported to be a benign organisation. And in fact, the way that it treated the children was bad. It was neglectful. It was not caring. It started from the premise that they, in fact, this is a title that I toyed with for the whole book. They use this word, the undeserving, that these children were undeserving, that their mothers had sinned by having them out of wedlocklock and that they had to pay for the mother's sin and they were told to forget that anybody could possibly love them.

The only person, the only deity who could love them was God and they were taught to love God and reject the idea of all human love. And it seemed to me entirely possible that the sort of environment of cruelty existing in a place like that would lead to something as bad as sexual abuse. It felt right, really. And you dedicated this book to theiao at Addenbrookes Hospital, who I underwent an operation a couple of years ago for pancreatic cancer, which is a rather fearsome operation, which I will not describe to you on air.

But he had very wonderfully skilled hands, and he was a delight to deal with, and he cared for me. And I've come through it. And not everybody comes through this operation. How long I will stay alive after it is a moot question. But I do, in every real sense, owe him my life. And for the future now, I mean, what next? What do you plan to write next?

Well, what I'm working on at the moment is I'm going back, when I was sent off to school at the time that I've earlier described, at 10, 11, in order to sort of displace my homesickness, I started writing plays. It was quite fun because at school you could actually write the play and direct it and star in it and do everything. And I've decided now I would like to try my hand at a

stage play. So watch this space. I don't know whether I can succeed with this. It's a very different form, very different form from novel writing. I know what I'm doing in a novel. I'm not sure I know what I'm doing on the stage, but before it's too late, I want to try. Do you ever worry about what you can write and what you can't write in the current climate within which we live writing lives and

experiences you haven't had? That's a very big subject and we yeah it's it I do is the answer because I'm I don't know how familiar you are with my work, but this is the way I've always approached it. I've always displaced myself into somebody else's sensibility. My first novel written when I was 30 was about an ageing man. I've written about young boys. I've written about transgender people. All kinds and conditions of people who are unlike myself. And now there seems to be an edict to say, you must not do this anymore.

And I haven't figured out, I am honest with you, I haven't figured out really where that leaves me because to displace my imagination has been my route to writing and has given me huge joy actually and I think a lot of learning through time trying to imagine what it's like to have other people's lives and have their problems not mine and I haven't yet worked out quite where I'm left now when I'm there is a kind of idiot that I should not do this anymore. We're going to talk in a moment about daddy issues so-called daddy issues got lots of messages coming in about this.

And I wanted to get your perspective on this because it's often a term which is thrown at women, often used as a criticism. You've talked about how your dad left and it turned your world upside down. Do you identify with this idea of daddy issues? Do you mean that the fact that you go on blaming this one thing that happened in your life and you kind of make it the excuse for everything that you do wrong or you say wrong or things that happen to you that don't quite go right I really have very little patience with that I think many of us do have what you call daddy issues

but I think we need at some point I think it happened to me relatively late, probably not until I was around about 40. And I said to myself, I am not going to be haunted by this for the rest of my life. This is ridiculous. I'm a grown-up person now, making my own relationships with a child,

with people I love. I'm not, by an act of will, I'm going to cast this out of my mind. And I think we should be able to, we should be able to do that, sons and daughters. It's not just, you're not just talking about daughters necessarily. No, absolutely. And we're getting these messages coming in. Listen, thank you so much for coming in. If you want to listen to our next item, you can put those headphones on, you'll be able to listen to our conversation. you can put those headphones on you'll be able to to um to listen to our conversation dame rose tremaine there speaking to us about her latest novel lily we're going to talk about these so-called daddy issues some people squirm at the idea of this but it started out as a kind of psychological concept it's become

an easy jab at women across pop culture do they exist what impact do they have let's speak now to katherine angel who is an author and Anne Harrod George Carey who is the host of the Daddy Issues podcast good morning to both of you and it's interesting when you say daddy issues to people Catherine people have different views on what it means is it you put your dad on a pedestal and no one can ever reach those heady heights or is it that you know maybe you feel left let down and and you're constantly trying to to make up for that well I think the phrase is partly a phrase that um points the spotlight at women themselves actually rather than their fathers so it's often used as a way to invite

us to mock I think or scorn women's sexual. So the idea being that if women have daddy issues, they've somehow fallen for a version of their father. But I think what's interesting is to kind of turn the spotlight away from women's so-called daddy issues and think about how we represent the relationship between fathers and daughters and how the representation of that relationship can actually often serve to teach us lessons in gender and lessons in heterosexuality. So in part, what I'm interested in is how we may have forgotten about fathers when we think about feminism. So many messages coming in on this this morning. One email says, my father was a violent drunk. When I was a kid, he used to habitually come home drunk and punch my mother. From the

age of 10, I went into open war against him. When I was 15, my parents got divorced, initiated by my long-suffering mother on the grounds of mental cruelty. I have major issues with men ever since. In general, I don't like them. I don't trust them. I I'm now 66 and whilst being on very good terms with many of my ex-girlfriends I live alone I always knew I would um and Harrod does this always have to have negative connotations or or can women own this and and turn it to their advantage yes I mean absolutely that was one of the reasons why I started Daddy Issues podcast because I realized a bit like sort of slut shaming what often happens especially particularly towards women and daddy issues is that it was used as something against us and it was sort of shame upon shame upon shame and so I thought well actually daddy issues is a very very real. And it's a very real thing for all genders.

And actually to try and understand why it exists and, you know, to normalize that conversation and for everybody, rather than to continue just to sort of categorize someone who's already had whatever trauma she in terms of sort of thinking about going towards women. But she has had or anyone has had and then to sort of continue to shame them for it. So, yes, that was one of the things I wanted to start to normalize the conversation and make it a positive thing where you can begin to understand that if you understand what your trauma is around your father you know obviously honed into this but whatever trauma you've had whatever obstacle that is you can actually use it to benefit you rather than it sort of continue to feel like it's a negative and something that's going to hold you back in life and Catherine presumably this can seep into all kinds of relationships it's not just a

sexual relationship or a partner relationship it It could be a relationship with children, for example, or your peers, family members. Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting about the phrase daddy issues is that it does sometimes provoke a kind of horror in people. In thinking about this idea that, you know, our relationship with our parents and our relationship to them, you know, when we were infants, when we were children, can affect the rest of our life and has traces in all our relationships. I think people can find that really discomforting because thinking about the kind of emergence of the, you know, a child's sexuality, you know, the teenager turning with the previous speaker that this it's a really productive thing to think about the traces of these profound, formative relationships in the rest of our life. And thinking, too, about how we might have to, you know, individuate how we might have to separate from our parents in order to become the adults that we are. And I think traditionally, you know, certainly within psychoanalytic thought and the kind of idea of the Oedipus myth, individuation and kind of coming into being as an adult has often been focused around the father intervening in the sort of

very merged absorption between the mother and the infant. But actually, I think there's some fascinating work that's been done by novelists like Sarah Moss and Sophie McIntosh and filmmakers like Sally Potter and Deborah Granik in really putting to the fore the perspectives of the daughter and the daughter having to reckon with failures of parenting, with ways in which their own fathers have been driven mad by grief, by war, by the constraints

of masculinity itself. And individuation having to happen through a kind of empathy, but also disillusionment with the father. And I think that's a really fruitful place for us to think culturally. Maybe that's where we're at. Let me read you some more of our messages. We've had one here, an anonymous one. My relationship with my father effectively ended when I was 10 years old. As an adult, I think this has caused me to seek male validation much more and to attempt to find in romantic relationships a pseudo-father figure. This hasn't always yielded the best results and probably contributed to my clinging on to unhealthy relationships. I'm happy to say, though, that my current relationship is a healthy one. I feel I'm beginning to move past this need for male validation. GB in Somerset has got in touch on 84844 on the text saying, while daddy issues

may be more prevalent with daughters, I believe it's widespread with sons and it's a shame this is often overlooked. Angharad, do you agree with that? Yes, absolutely. I mean, most, I would say it was never really planned, the sort of genders that would come onto my podcast. But oddly enough, well, I guess in the less cliche way, it's actually much more I've got more men than women onto the podcast. And I think that's because, again, you know, throwing the term at women is just a sort of another way of repressing and shaming and etc women but actually what it does is it does the same thing for men because I think it it stops it disallows you know a problem with the father to be given to a man so it's like well actually this is a woman's problem and let's just like continue to shame them for it when actually a lot of men have their own very real and very

traumatic daddy issues, which will then manifest in all sorts of negative ways throughout their lives as well, but in a different way often to women, if I was to generalise. But yes, no, it's absolutely an every gender problem. And I think it's something that's so under-discussed because it is so normalised. And so I think to normalise, yeah, sorry, I'm probably rambling on here. No, no, you're not. No, not at all. Not at all. It's a really interesting discussion. We've got so many messages coming in this.

Thank you both for joining us this morning. Anne Harrod, George Carey, host of the Daddy Issues podcast, and also heard from Catherine Angel, who's an author. So many messages, just one here. My dad died suddenly just before my third birthday. This message is from Charlotte because I didn't really remember remember him i idolized him and then transferred this to my boyfriends the relationships quite a lot inevitably ended after a short time as my expectations were so high it's taken me years to realize what was going on subconsciously and it really affected

my journey from adolescence through to adulthood thank you for all of those messages do keep them coming in here at Women's Hour. Now, if you thought Black Friday and Cyber Monday were big in the shopping calendar, they have nothing on Singles Day in China. It's a bigger event than the two combined, making it the world's largest 24-hour shopping spree. And it's just come to an end. It's a kind of anti-Valentine's Day sort of celebration of self-gifting. Now, despite the spectacle of Singles Day, being unattached in China is actually a concern for the government. Marriage rates have tumbled over the last decade. Single women are particularly stigmatised, especially unmarried career women

over the age of 27, who are often dubbed leftover women. We'll be getting into all of this shortly with Dr. Yu Yin Yu, a sociologist from King's College in London. But first, let's speak to Nina Yu, who is a senior strategist at Highlink, a digital advertising agency which focuses on China. Now, Nina, I knew nothing of this till late last night, where I suddenly started getting some emails about Singles Day. So it feels like it's starting to actually cut through. Yeah, indeed. Hi. So the Singles Day. So it feels like it's starting to actually cut through. Yeah, indeed. Hi. So the Singles Day, indeed, is still the largest online shopping festival in China, and which is actually an official holiday in China as well. So what has been incredible is just in one day, normally the shopping site can generate billions. For instance, yesterday,

we also probably some of us have already seen the result. Only the Timo site, which owned by the tech giant Alibaba, generated around $85 USD in one day. And together with other platforms, including JD, there were about $160 billion of sales were generated just in one day. so if i may put it that in the perspective so last year the black friday in the uk only generated 1.9 billion in the sales wow so it is huge um dr yin you it's interesting isn't it how this is a celebration of being single in china but there's still this social stigma that surrounds it. Absolutely.

You know, what does it mean to be single as a woman in China? Chinese women are increasingly getting marriage hesitancy because women are having more education than previous generations. And these women, the women we were talking about right now, are more likely to be from the one-child generation. So they are children of one-child policy. They have all the investment from their family. They have more education than before. So they take their time to balance the career,

to find, in China, in my interview, they call it misfit. So it's not misright. They want to find a misfit. So in good old days, women had to marry up, marry young. But nowadays, women don't have to. They have a choice. They can find the spouse they feel would be kind of more compatible in terms of education background, social background and experiences and interests and hobbies.

But there's still a lot of cultural trappings you mentioned earlier about leftover women. So just to paraphrase Jane Austen's universal, you know, acknowledge the truth, but in China it's about age. It's not about fortune, it's about age. So women of age must be married off. So this kind of cultural trappings hold women back. Still, you know, social stigma around unmarried women. And there's another thing similar to this kind of age, so the big word, the A word, age, is about women's education levels.

In China, there was a saying, there were three sexes, men, women, and female PhDs. So having a high level of education is definitely a liability in a marriage market. So women have a lot of kind of strong headwinds against them in terms of balancing a sinking Korea? Yeah, lots of challenges there.

Nina, it's kind of made me think that actually we started the programme talking about COP26, about sustainability, about how much China and many other nations need to do. And yet this is a day where people are just buying, buying, buying. It kind of goes against everything we're being told right now. Yeah, indeed. Probably some of us have heard, right, yesterday, actually, China and the US announced agreement to cooperate on the COP26. And also we all know most of the tech giants have been criticized

in the past for the mess of packaging wastage. So in the recent years, the national wide initiatives have been done so much to set up proactively encouraged recycling and even gamified approach. However, from the consumer's perspective, what has been incredible for the country has achieved single state is just the right mix between the entertainment and the commerce. Because apart from the consumers can enjoy the good, discounted goods, which normally they pay more, but also there are a lot of entertainments packed together. For instance, yesterday there was a Timo Gala kicked off with impressive settings. A lot of celebrities also joined it too. So in that case, for the consumers, it's definitely enjoyable. If you ask most of the Chinese people, I would bet most people would tell you

single stay is fun because who doesn't enjoy shopping? I have to say, I do have a soft spot for shopping. Thank you so much for speaking to us this morning. That is Nina Inouye who is a senior strategist at Highlink. We also heard from Dr Yir New who's a sociologist from King's College in London. So many of your daddy issues texts coming in. Thank you so much. One here from Oliver saying I've been accused of having mummy issues as a man and pre-adulthood it was a commonly used insult for many in the shape of being a mummy's boy your discussion on daddy issues is a bigger problem but you did ask and as a divorcing father i do worry a lot another one here saying i had an absent biological father and i grew up seeking love from any man i could it resulted in me being in an abusive relationship

with a man 10 years older than me when i was 16 i'm happily married now when i had my daughter i vowed history would not repeat itself thank you for all of your messages this morning. Sorry, we haven't been able to get through all of them. Thanks for listening to Woman's Hour. Have a lovely weekend. And of course, you can listen to Weekend's Woman's Hour tomorrow. That's all from today's Woman's Hour. I hope you can join us again next time. If I think I've made a mistake, I'll just sort of pause and try and read it again so you can get your scissors in. Paul McCartney as you've never heard him before.

Are you ready? Revealing the stories behind his life and music. We hear about superstardom. When the show aired, 73 million people watched us. Drugs. What we had to get into our lives, it seems, was marijuana. Falling out with John and Yoko. The thing is, so much of what they held

to be truth was crap. His grief after Lennon's death. I was just sitting there in this little bare room thinking of John and realising I'd lost him. And his sense of wonder. Sometimes I pinch myself and think, were we there? To hear all ten episodes from

BBC Radio 4, just search for Paul McCartney inside the songs on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, 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 was 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.