Patricia Nicol

SEVEN weeks ago, my mother had a fall. Thankfully, she is recovering well. But her hospital stay, and literal need to put her feet up, catapulted my family into a new chapter.

In my mother’s case, the logistical challenges thrown up by her being absent from her home, then physically incapacitated, were arguably more complex than her ankle injury. She is my father’s full-time carer, and her children live far away, so plans needed to be put in place for when we could not be there.

Suddenly, we all had to navigate a new world of care managers, plans, assessments, Zimmers, grab rails and panic alarm systems. Now carers, who were strangers to them just weeks ago, are regular visitors to their home.

It is such a strangely intimate role to be a caregiver; one that gives an insight into many lives. The Promise by Damon Galgut, which won the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction, begins in 1986, in apartheid-era South Africa, on a family farm near Pretoria.

Rachel, the matriarch of the Afrikaner Swarts family, makes a dying wish that Salome, the black housekeeper who has cared for her, be given a home on the family’s land. Daughter Amor hears her father’s reassurance that this will happen. But successive failures to fulfil that promise see familial relations fester.

Another Booker-nominated novel is A Passage North by Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam.

Krishan, a professional in Colombo, receives news that his grandmother’s former carer, the depressive Rani, has died. Travelling to her funeral, at the epicentre of Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, he thinks of the burden of trauma Rani carried, and of her close but impenetrable relationship with his grandmother.

The Carer by Deborah Moggach also explores the mix of guilt, jealousy and gratitude grown-up children can feel for the person employed to look after their elderly relative. At first, Phoebe and Robert think their father’s carer Mandy is heaven-sent, then misgivings creep in.

It is a tough job to care for your own family, let alone someone else’s. Employers, as well as employees, have a duty of care.