The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 18

18 WOMEN THE GUARDIAN Wednesday December 11 1991 When John Tanner was arrested on suspicion of murdering Rachel McLean, his aunt found herself torn between her belief in every woman's right to say no and her loyalty to the nephew who had denied his girlfriend that right Put to the test 4 the ropes and provided the solidarity only women can share. Once inside the visiting room, it became me and him. In the past our closeness had never been impaired by my straight talking and in this situation I had to trust to that Even on the days when he was at his lowest I could not betray my own long-held belief that it is for every woman to make her own decisions. I recall one highly-charged visit when I told him there could be no exceptions, even for "my With tears running down his face, he replied, "I know, you've taught me better than that." During this period, I was also invited to lunch with a group of women. We shared one common interest; we all had a serious offender in most cases a murderer in the family.

This very supportive group was a branch of a new but solid tree called Aftermath, set up in Sheffield a few years ago to offer counselling and help. They were a godsend; like me, they were suffering so deeply and battered so constantly for the crimes of a relative. Small wonder we want to hide away in a corner. Aftermath doesn't let you go under, it holds your head above water until you can float. The first day of the trial, I arrived late; I couldn't find the court The courtroom was full and the usher wouldn't let me in.

I backed away in tears as I discovered that the aunt of a murderer has no official place in the court, but must take her chance with press and public. The usher saw my distress, found me a seat and kept it for meveryday. The days became more harrowing. As the evidence became more vivid, the press corps wanted a relative of the accused and my panic increased. All the conflicting feelings Elspeth Barker 'I love writing but I'll do anything in the clothes and think, oh good, some washing to do' IT REALLY started during the evening of Thursday, May 2, when a friend's sister called to say that Rachel's body had been found under the floorboards of her room and that my nephew had been arrested on suspicion of murdering her.

Ten days before, Rachel had been a name in a newspaper, a missing person, and I shared my brief fears for her along with the rest of the news-reading nation until, that is, I noted that her boyfriend, John Tanner, was a student at Nottingham University. From that moment Rachel and her family stepped into my life and have never left it The telephone took oven calls to and from John, to his parents in New Zealand, and tape-recorded messages from concerned family and friends swept me along on a wave of fear and uncertainty. Photographs of Rachel's family fed my awareness of how they were coping, their fear and uncertainty far outweighing mine. The headlines got bigger, the television reconstruction took over, the search went on and my conversations with my nephew left me torn and confused as to where my loyalty lay. Cracks between the family were beginning to show, as minor arguments developed.

The cracks became a split, the split a gap as the arrest became news. Panic set in the next day in Tesco. The newspaper counter was a sea of John Tanner. Bystanders became prosecutors and pronounced him "killer" and the tabloids became the jury that would, for this man, bring back hanging. I felt everyone was looking at me and pointing out words on my forehead that said "John Tanner's Back home, hourly news bulletins kept me informed as I progressed through my black Friday and I tried to track my nephew down if only to check that his rights were protected.

The Nottingham Police were downright unhelpful, while those at Thames Valley were quite the reverse and told me he was with them. If the Custody Sergeant thought me a pain as I probed him with questions, he never said so. 'Throughout it all, I was constantly reminding myself that if this was my struggle, whatever were the McLeans going through? The inevitable phone call ''How's it-' ing?" He replied, "It isn't I have told them I killed her." I was in a minefield of emotions, but some inner strength took over. I knew at that moment anger was not what he needed from me. Despite the awfulness of his confession, he needed assurance, honesty, advice and most of all love; what he did not need was rejection.

1 wasn't sure if I could give all this, even if I wanted to give it, yet I knew I had to. He was my sister's son. Was I emotionally capable of taking on board the enormity of his crime, yet still caring about him? Could I absorb my fear. For years best known as the devoted spouse of poet George Barker, Elspeth Barker has made a late but lauded literary debut. Marianne Brace reports Larger than wife PHOTOGRAPH: HAMILTON WEST total male chauvinist I often thought longingly of encouraging George to bring in some other woman so we could be Martha and Mary.

I think wives need wives." With 0 Caledonia, Barker wanted to write "about pity such a dangerous emotion." And she wanted it to be funny, sad, serious like life. "Even with George's death, there have been so many things that would make him laugh. For example, the day after he died, the Samaritans wrote to him, saying, 'Have you ever felt you can't last one day And the outfit the undertakers dolled him up in just so hilarious a frilly christening robe. While standing by the coffin weeping, I thought 'George would have been so amused by this'." Now there is more time to write, but no George. "One of the children said it's as if he'd hung on to make sure Fd do what he'd always told me to.

And it's the flrsttime in. my life I will do what fie tells'me." Barker still teaches Latin at a local school while planning her next book. Winning the prize, receiving such praise, has committed her to writing. "I love it" she says, "but I'll do anything in the world not to start I see a pile of clothes and think, oh good, some washing to do." 0 Caledonia is published by Hamish Hamilton at 14.99. The two women had "a brief falling out when I first took up with George, but then we resumed our friendship and it grew deeper." George Barker had five romantic liaisons, spawning IS children, the oldest several years Elspeth's senior.

"He might not be what Elizabeth called husband material, but he was certainly father material," says Barker. She remembers him "getting horribly drunk, hurling abuse and chucking people across the room. We'd left a tiny visiting baby sleeping in our bedroom. George stormed off to bed." Creeping upstairs, she found him "sound asleep, cradling the baby on his chest and looking so saintly, the old swine." BARKER'S initial jealousy over George's past gave way to fascination: "Suddenly I just wanted to round up the whole family." She gets on with all her husband's offspring. When his first wife a Catholic died two years ago, she and George decided to formalise their relationship.

"The children were rather surprised because they'd assumed we were married." Despite encouragement Barker only recently felt brave enough to write. "George never had much patience for any moans. Did he help me? God no! Never. He'd hold babies, but that was the limit He was a UNLIKE AUTHORS who spend their literary prize-winnings on a new swimming pool, novelist Elspeth Barker used her advance to "get the cats For-a writer who has "never had a it was money well spent She lives with four cats, two dogs and a "non-resident" horse in a Norfolk farmhouse. They're joined at weekends by Barker's brood of wild, charismatic children and grandchildren.

And life revolves around the kitchen table where Barker also writes. Last week Elspeth Barker's book O'Caledonia woh'theJ David Higham prize for a first novel. The excitement has been overshadowed, however, by her husband's death six weeks ago. "A close friend was also killed in a car crash the day before the book was launched. And my horse died." She met her late husband, the poet George Barker, when she was 22 and says she never 3 world not to start I see a pile of opening a tin of tomato soup, dropping a raw egg in and seeing what happened.

We ate out quite a lot" Sewing is a skill still to be mastered. "Copydex has always been my refuge. You can Copydex anything: hems, patches on to trousers, curtains. It's really good." It's a far cry from the nannies and nursemaids of Barker's own home, a castle in northeast Scotland (once the King of Norway's) which features in 0 Caledonia. "When my parents left it I felt truly bereaved and I always wanted to write an elegy to the place." -i CALEDONIA is that elegy.

Its heroine is unloved, bookish Janet murdered at 16. "There is a fair amount of me in Janet." Bleak weather nurtured a love of reading and writing. "You were confined indoors and it was dark so early in the winter and the winter was so long." Barker soon discovered the the mighty men of rock Emery on bass and, surprisingly, Eric Erlandson on guitar. "The pool of women to play with is small. I've kicked girls out of this band for playing too much like guys.

Even Eric plays like a girl. Girls' playing is compassion and rage, and it can also be ugly and jarring. To deny my femininity and just rock out like a guy would not be part of evolution. At school, women are discouraged from learning maths but when it comes to writing good songs, you need maths. You can't just do it primally." Her tattered beauty image is as much a part of Love's peculiar femininity as is her playing.

Her smeared eyeliner and torn baby doll dresses have earned her the status of a wayward Cinderella. In truth, she simply likes pretty things, but her inner conflict between a desire for adornment and a feminist ideology tempts her to make a mockery of girlhood trappings. "I'm not embarrassed about being a feminist and I'm not opposed to pretty dresses. On the other hand, girls are supposed to like pretty as a way of caring for children and continuing a career. A recent survey by the Policy Studies Institute found that although only two per cent of women in private companies reported access to jobshares after taking maternity leave, 15 per cent of those in the public sector were offered jobshare schemes.

In local government particularly the large metropolitan authorities, jobshares are growing apace. Birmingham City Council, one of the largest local authorities in Europe, states that all its vacancies are open to jobshare unless specifically exempted and 27 of the 32 London boroughs now have jobshare policies. "It's a gradual, growing trend," says Carl GiUeard, director of the Metropolitan Authorities Recruitment Agency. "The recession hasn't helped with flexibility and perhaps some of tho developments we might have expected in the Liz Evans meets the woman daring to challenge Calling the tune pleasures of thawing out at Oxford University. "The landscape and climate astonished me.

I'd never seen cherry trees in blossom before. I found them stunning And the green, slow river. Scottish rivers are so wild and dangerous and Acutely shy, Barker spent much of her first year doing good works like "taking a horrible, ungrateful old lady out in a wheelchair. And I was so bad at it I kept forgetting to put her brake on outside shops and she'd ask me to buy some bacon and I'd buy back when she wanted streaky. I'd never done any shopping in my life." She joined CND and went on marches: "In heels, of course, in case anyone thought my legs looked fat I marched all the way from Aldermaston to London in stilettos.

God, that was a stupid thing to do." And then everything changed. Through a mutual friend, Barker met Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart with whom she had a "sort of mother-daughter relationship. We enjoyed drinking and talking together." She knew nothing of Smart, had never read her lachrymose prose lyric By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept celebrating her affair with George Barker (over before Elspeth was born). Smart introduced Elspeth and George who immediately had "a very serious, big Courtney Love 'I've kicked things and I don't want to do what I'm supposed to." Like all women, Courtney Love is confused. She doesn't pretend to have any answers, but she is not the lost, vulnerable creature many have intimated.

This woman wants to kill rock stars, open for Guns 'n Roses and "have 50,000 people throw shit at She early part of the nineties have slowed down, but there is now a general acceptance that local government can ill afford to do without the skills and experience of its women workers. Beyond that, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that two people doing one job gives you greater productivity." A middle manager with a county council, Alison has worked in two jobshares. "I don't think it matters if you have different personalities. Often that can help," she says. "In my job you have to be a good talker, but the other side is organising information.

It's very rare to find someone who can promote and organise to a high standard. Between us we get the job done much better." Alison also feels her jobshare is rooted in a proper career structure that is much preferable to her previous part-time posts. "The difference is wo are now taken seriously," she regretted marrying a man 30 years her senior. "The hard thing is that George should die Well, we've had almost 30 years, which is wonderful." Barker didn't only marry a much older man, she devoted her life to him and their five children, leaving it until now, at 50, to write her debut novel. The oldest of five herself, she had no love of infants but with the arrival of her own became addicted and had "three children in less than three Up to her elbows in nappies, Barker tried book reviewing but "was too exhausted.

The Only tmtti evet1 managed to stay awake was Saturday nights when there was always masses to drink and people would come round." Lack of money meant she could not afford help and that put paid to dreams of writing. She had chosen to run a household, learning as she went. "When I first met George, my notion of cooking was physical imagery. "But writing songs has a lot to do with your sexuality. I danced for a while and just being around that made me aware of what people use.

And if you grow up blessed with a certain beauty or a certain intelligence that enhances your beauty, you can get into a better position in life." Years of being fat brought this home to Love. "When you're fat, no one looks you in the eye, they think you're bitter and ranting. Personally it makes me hate those people." Despite her abhorrence of such physical prejudices, Love realised the advantages of a svelte outline once she'd decided to make music. After a rootless childhood spent travelling across America and New Zealand with hippy parents, a role in Alex Cox's Straight To Hell and a short spell singing with San Francisco rock band Faith No More, Love deliberately settled in the creative void of LA and began searching for women who shared her taste for a more subversive expression. She eventually went for Caroline Rue on drums, Jill seven days a week, I would never really see my child.

I wanted to be there at certain times when she goes to playgroup and in the normal way of meeting other children in the community where we live." Apart from needing the money, the chance to balance a job with family responsibilities is the most important single factor attracting women back to work. Whereas part-time workers, 80 per cent of whom are women, can face poor training and promotion prospects, jobsharing is increasingly seen 'Across the courtroom I could see Rachel's mother, just as she could see me two women sharing the same tragedy from opposite poles' to get through the trial came to the surface. As I watched John in the witness box, I felt his pain as we tried to absorb the pathology report, police statements and gruesome details. Where was the boy who could turn a football on a sixpence, the scholar with so much promise, the caring teenager who had arrived from New Zealand? Across the courtroom I could see Rachel's mother, just as she could see me two women sharing the same tragedy from opposite poles. In the intervals there was no hatred, just warmth and affection from the mother of a murdered daughter to the aunt of her killer.

Solidarity of a different kind. The verdict delivered by a distressed forewoman was the right one, but there is nothing quite like hearing the words, "Prison for Life." My grief had to be shelved for the benefit of his four friends from college who had sat through his trial with much turmoil. I would cry later. I went to see my nephew be fore they took him away; so much to say but too little time. He asked me to tell his mother, just as he did when he rang to ten me ne naa confessed, i leit the court by the back door.

I have been fortunate; thanks to the McLeans, I have never felt the power Of hate that has been felt by other families in a similar situation. Instead, I have benefited from the depth of their faith. I will never forget the woman who forgave my nepnew for taking from her, so violently, her beloved daughter. If I am to reconcile all I have ever felt for the rights of women with what John has done, then I have to forgive himtoo. All rights reserved to senior personnel officer Christine Geschke.

The council also offers flexible working, career breaks, a nursery and school holiday childcarc, and has a 70 per cent returner rate. "If I had to pick out the most significant contribution towards women's issues," says Geschke, "it would be job-shares." Despite the current interest in flexible working, however, the Policy Studies Institute survey shows both the growing numbers of women returning to work after having children and the lack of measures to help them. It estimates that jobshares are available to only one woman in 20. The work patterns of Woman's Hour where the editor's job-share is just the latest example of a four-year programme of flexible working arc still rare. Jobsharing may be working well for women, but many more employers need to share in its success.

WITH HER long pale form, blonde tangle and scarlet pout, Courtney Love is the ideal candidate for male journalists seeking another broken siren for their catalogue. Men, it seems, have trouble with her. Love sings, screeches and plays a vicious guitar with Hole, the latest hippest rock roll thing to come out of Los Angeles. Their name comes from Euripides' Medea flame of the skyPierce through my and warnings to Love from her mother "not to carry a hole around inside me just because I suffered a problematic childhood." Currently on tour, Hole's debut album, Pretty On The Inside, topped the independent charts earlier this year and sent the music press into lip-smacking frenzies over such lines as, "Is she rotten on the inside, ugly from the back." But while Love may rattle with conflict, she's just a normal woman, telling it like it is. "It's not on purpose," says Love of her graphic use of girls out of this band for playing and his, of the vitriolic newspapers as they sank their teeth into nun? uouia i protect us both from the anticipated hate due to us from Rachel's family, her college and her mends? I was sreatly disturbed by the knowledge that he had broken every one of my personal principles and moral codes but above all had totally ignored Rachel McLean's right to say no.

All my adult life I have been involved in various ways with the aims of the women's movement With his crime, John had gone against the grain of everything I stood for and yet still, I could not turn my back on him or withdraw my support: he needed me. Despite my total rejection of his violent actions, I set about the long seven-month journey to his trial. This became tne turning point in a balanced life. There were practical things to be done, solicitors to see, barristers to be chosen, prison visits to arrange, uvermgnt i became the stand-in mother, dealing with his friends and aquain-tances I had never met Encouragement came in un expected ways. At Winchester Prison, the other women in the aueue became my allies as.

over the weeks, they taught me in which jobsharing is particularly applicable, the National Union of Teachers fears financial constraints on schools will now discourage it The NUT has written to the Prime Minister protesting that previous government advice to education authorities encouraging flexible working has been dropped in the Department of Education's 1992-3 circular. Although jobshares are scarce in private companies, in which only 30 per cent of women return to work after having a baby compared with 60 per cent in the public sector, the charity New Ways To Work reports a steady number of enquiries about jobshares in all types of employment Leicester City Council, which started job-shares in 1986, has 200 at every level, from manual workers to management including some men. It is now the norm to return to a jobshare after taking maternity leave, according With the recession putting a premium on the skills of women workers, jobsharing is gaining in popularity, as Lynn Hanna reports Double or quits like guys' making the void bigger, you're making it smaller." With Madonna's lawyers currently pursuing Hole's legal representatives in the hope of signing the band to the pop icon's new label, and virtually every major record company queuing up to breakfast lunch and dine her, Courtney Love looks set for stardom. The BBC is one of 61 companies and organisations backing Business in the Community's Opportunity 2000, many of whom include jobsharing in their 10-year targets to improve women's representation. The National Health Service, which was criticised by the Equal Opportunities Commission earlier this year, is also a signatory and is finalising an agreement that includes jobsharing.

As a working practice, job-sharing is now encouraged throughout the Civil Service, but government legislation to help working mothers is conspicuous by its absence. The Department of Employment's own jobshare incentive scheme, currently supporting just 146 people, is to close this month. It has attracted hostile comment from jobshare campaigners who claim it was primarily designed to take full-time workers off the unemployment register. Although teaching is an area wants to wrench open the attitudes towards women in the predominantly white male game of rock 'n' roll. "The American male runs half the global world and grows up on rock music from day one.

If you can alter the psyche of someone who's growing up to be a rapist or a total misogynist, you're creating values and instead of says of herself and her partner. A job can be divided into responsibilities or, more usually, simply handed between the two partners for each half of the week. Jobsharers cite good communication as essential. "I flunk a certain maturity is required," Alison explains. "We've reached the stage where it doesn't hurt if one of us says, I don't like the way you're doing this.

We're both honest and we like thrashing things out" CLARE Selerie would agree. "You've got to be open," she says of the job she now holds jointly with former Woman's Hour deputy editor Sally Feldman. "We have to speak with one voice on policy decisions, but if we're voicing an opinion, it's proper that there should be two inputs. So the employer gains because there are two minds working at full strength." WHEN CLARE Selerie went back to work after taking maternity leave, she chose to jobshare. Since Selerie is the editor of Radio 4's Woman's Hour, her decision created the highest-ranking jobshare in the BBC.

Her post may be a public endorsement of a new way of working but her reasons for jobsharing are the same as those of a growing number of women with young children. "If I were doing my five-days-a-week job, which is often.