The Time of Their Lives

Each month best friends Claudia, Sal, Ella and Laura meet for drinks, celebrating 45 years of friendship. They know each other and their lives inside out. Their ambitions, careers, husbands, lovers, children, hopes, fears, the paths taken and not taken...

Sal had spent a lifetime building a career as a successful magazine editor but she hadn’t banked on the one thing over which she had no control.

Claudia loved her urban existence - the thought of the country sent shivers down her spine. But, as many women will know, other people’s needs always seem to come first...

Ella is ready to try something different. But she hadn’t bargained on quite such a radical change...

Laura succumbed to the oldest cliché in the book. But it didn’t make it any easier to accept.

Outside of the supportive world of their friendships, they find their lives are far from what they expected - the generation that wanted to change the world didn’t bargain on getting old.

A truthful, provocative, funny and inspiring novel, The Time of their Lives, asks hard questions about what the world offers women as they get older and finds both moving and joyously uplifting answers in the different ways the four friends celebrate their coming of age...

The Time of Their lives by Maeve Haran (RRP £7.99) is available on Amazon and from all good bookshops. If you'd like to win one of five copies of The Time of Their Lives, do post a question and/or add your comments to our Q&A with the author, Maeve Haran.

An exclusive extract

Here's a taster of The Time of Their Lives. You can download the PDF to read the full extract (41 pages!)

Claudia put the photograph carefully back in her bag. ‘I have a question to ask.’ She poured them another glass of wine. ‘The question is, seeing as we may have another thirty years to live, what the hell are we going to do with the rest of our lives?’

‘Won’t you go on teaching?’ Ella asked, surprised. Claudia was so dedicated to her profession and had been teaching French practically since they left university. ‘I thought you could go on forever nowadays.’

‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Claudia replied.

They stared at her, shocked. ‘But you love teaching. You say it keeps you in touch with the young!’ Laura protested.

‘Not enough in touch, apparently.’ Claudia tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I’m out of tune with tech- nology, it seems. My favourite year group has been reassigned to a younger teacher who gets them to learn slang on YouTube.

It’s having an energizing effect on even the slowest pupils according to the deputy head.’

Claudia tried not to remember the deputy head’s patronizing tone yesterday, when she had explained, as if talking to a very old person, that Peter Dooley, a squirt of thirty known by the rest of the staff as Drooly Dooley because of his habit of showering you with spit when he talked, would be taking over her favourite pupils.

‘Mr Dooley!’ Claudia had replied furiously. ‘He has no experience of the real France! He looks everything up on the Internet!’

Too late she realized her mistake.

‘Exactly!’ the deputy head insisted; she was only thirty herself, with an MBA, not even a teaching degree, from a uni- versity in the North East - an ex-poly at that, Claudia had thought bitchily.

‘But you’ve always been amazing with your pupils!’ Sal defended indignantly. ‘Do you remember, years before the Internet, you made tapes up with you and Gaby speaking French to one another? Your pupils loved them!’

Claudia blanched. The deputy head had actually produced one of these twenty-year-old anachronisms during their inter- view and had had the gall to hold it up and ask in a sugary tone, ‘Of course you probably think the old ways are best, don’t you, Claudia?’

Claudia had wanted to snap that she was perfectly au fait with modern teaching methods, thank you very much. But the truth was she was beginning to feel defeated. For the first time, since those heady days of the photograph, she had started to feel old. And it wasn’t the fault of memory loss or the war with grey hair.

It was technology. Jean-Paul Sartre might say hell was other people, but he’d never been to an Apple store on a busy Saturday, only to be told you needed an appointment to talk to a ‘genius’, one of a thousand identikit geeky youths, before you could ask a simple question.

Nor had he to contend with the horrors of the ‘managed learning environment’ where pupils and even their parents could go online and access their school work from home. Even the tech-savviest staff found it a nightmare to operate. As if that weren’t enough, now teachers were expected to identify their pupils’ weaknesses using some hideous software developed by a ten-year-old!

‘Snotty cow,’ Ella’s angry voice echoed through The Grecian Grove in Claudia’s defence. ‘You’re far better at technology than I am. I still think an iPad is something made by Optrex. What are you going to do about it?’

‘Actually,’ Claudia realized the truth for the first time herself, ‘I might even resign.’

‘Claudia, no!’ Laura was shocked. ‘But you love teaching and you’re really good at it!’

‘Am I? Seriously, girls, the bastards think we’re has-beens. Drooly Dooley even said, "If it’s any consolation, Claudia, a lot of the older teachers are struggling with the system."’

‘Bollocks!’ protested Sal, emptying her glass.

‘Anyway, another school would snap you up!’ Laura, always the positive one in the group, happily married for twenty-five years and a great believer in the virtues of the institution, was attempting to answer Claudia’s question. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. You’d find something else useful to do. Funny, it only seems the blink of an eye since we first met. We should just keep calm and carry on. It’ll only be another blink till we’re ninety.’

‘Except that this blink will be punctuated by arthritis, memory loss and absence of bladder control,’ Sal pointed out laconically. ‘And anyway, you should fight back! Don’t take ageism lying down. We’re not old yet. Not even middle-aged.’ Maybe because she was the one who most needed to earn her living, Sal was fighting ageing the hardest. She had declared war on body fat, laughter lines and any clothing in baggy linen. The dress she wore today was black gabardine, strictly sculpted and teamed with high heels. Ella had given up on anything but flatties years ago, and Claudia was wearing trainers so that she could walk to the tube. She liked to walk to work on school days. But would there be any more school to walk to? Claudia asked herself glumly, as she poured out the last of the resin-flavoured Greek wine into their glasses.‘ You’d definitely find another teaching job,’ Laura comforted, with all the encouraging optimism of someone who didn’t really need to work.

‘Would I?’ Despite the jeans, Claudia felt suddenly old. Who would want to employ a teacher on a high pay-scale who wouldn’t see sixty again?

‘Come on, Clo,’ Ella encouraged. ‘You’re the dangerous radical in our midst. You were in Paris in ’sixty-eight throwing paving stones! You can’t just give up because some snotty jobsworth is trying to sideline you!’

Claudia sipped her wine and winced. The trouble was she wasn’t sure she wanted to fight back. She was beginning to feel tired. She looked around at her friends. ‘A toast.’ Claudia raised her glass. ‘To us. It was bloody amazing while it lasted.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sal seconded. ‘But it isn’t over yet!’

‘Oh, come on, Sal, admit it.’ Ella shook her head. ‘We’re not middle-aged, we’re ancient.’

‘No we’re not. There’s no such thing as old any more. We’re YAHs - Young At Hearts. Or maybe we’re SWATS.’

‘I thought that was a valley in Pakistan,’ Claudia giggled.

‘Or some kind of police unit,’ seconded Ella. Sal ignored them. ‘Still Working At Sixty.’ ‘If we are still working,’ Claudia sighed. ‘Or in your case, Sal, maybe it’s SOTs. Still Out There at Sixty.’ ‘That makes me sound like an ageing cougar with a drink problem!’ ‘And your point is . . . ?’ Ella teased. ‘Now, now,’ Laura admonished. ‘Don’t gang up on Sal.’ ‘The thing is, we’re just not old like people have been old in the past,’ persisted Sal. ‘At my age my mother looked like the Queen - with a curly perm and twinsets. I wear jeans and shop at H&M!’

‘It’s true we all look nothing like our mothers did,’ Laura conceded. ‘The only way you can tell a woman’s age these days is to look at her husband!’

‘The thing is we may be old but we don’t feel old,’ Sal insisted, ‘that’s what makes us different. We’re the baby boomers, the Me Generation. We’ve always ripped up the rules and done it our way. Ageing isn’t inevitable any more, it’s a choice! And I, for one, am not choosing it.’

‘I don’t know.’ Ella stretched out the arm in which she got occasional twinges of rheumatism. ‘Sometimes I do feel old.’

‘Nonsense! We’ll never be old. We’re the Woodstock gener- ation! What was that Joni Mitchell song?’ Sal delved into the recesses of her memory. ‘You know, the one about being stardust and needing to get back to the Garden?’

‘Yes,’ Ella raised her glass. ‘Let’s just hope the Garden’s wheelchair accessible.’