Lime Juice and Pansies - Entry for journalism competition

(The theme was women through the ages) When I was twelve years old I discovered the 1930s. I watched Brideshead Revisited, learned what a cocktail shaker was and read Daphne Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek. And Lady St. Columb, I miss you. Your life seemed so perfect with your games of lawn tennis, the lime juice and gin on the verandah at 6pm prompt, the pleated skirts, the neat drawers of matching gloves, the racket presses, the reliable Hillman. Today's teenage girls no longer lie long-limbed on the lawn making daisy chains and flirting at the cricket club over lemonade. We’re juggling school work, growing responsibility at home and saturday jobs, and then calling Mum at 2.00am the next day because we’ve lost the taxi money. We barely have time to eat with our families as we struggle with the next university prospectus, update our facebook and twitter pages, remember we have history exams, let alone send scented valentines and perfect our croquet. Mothers aren't taking off their floured aprons for a pre-dinner brandy on the veranda at 6pm, they are too busy reading emails while helping with the homework, booking the holiday to France and checking the lasagne hasn’t burnt. Katharine Hepburn had milkmen and free dentists, the trains were clean, the teacakes home-made, the GPs came round to your house, men proposed after they'd kissed you in the car, a home was affordable and families ate together. No wonder we all secretly hanker after the simplicity of Brief Encounter, the idea of bridge parties in the afternoon, planting pansies in the borders and eating tea in the conservatory. But was it ever really like that? Your average 16 year old would be pining after freedom over a half completed cross-stitch, torn between the domestic bliss of emerging icons such as Hepburn and the first opportunity to become a respectable woman with a career. I would have been helping mother polish the fish knives, scrape the marmalade off the table cloth and do the hospital corners before elevenses. In Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, a 1950s novel by Penelope Mortimer, "the wives conform to a certain standard of dress, they run their houses along the same lines, bring up their children in the same way, all prefer coffee to tea, play bridge and own at least one valuable piece of jewellery." The heroine, Ruth, is going mad. Or as Pink Floyd put it in The Dark Side of the Moon, "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way." Sixty years is a long time, women have forgotten how restricted and predictable many women's lives once were. Our's now seem so chaotic and complicated and we have so many choices that we think we are worse off. We've become so exhausted by doing everything, we crave boredom again. Women are giving up on work, they've forgotten the point of it. They don't need to prove themselves in a meeting, it's more relaxing to go for a skinny latte on the way home from dropping off the kids, before contemplating a quick trip to the gym and logging on to Mumsnet to share a joke. Child-care costs are so high that there is little financial incentive to continue a career and women are constantly being told that their children will suffer without them. And us youngsters are afraid for the future, with the ever more competitive job market and the possibilty of lifelong, crippling debts. Our lives are uncertain, and for us there is little chance of a proposal outside a golf club in a fashionable Rolls-Royce. We face years of cramming, bedsits and a range of rollercoaster relationships. But we do have what Lady St. Columb never had - the freedom to choose.