Care work, Kathryn Faulke thought as she scoured job adverts, “is a rubbish job. They’re not going to turn me down.” She had, after all, been a senior dietitian and worked for several years in the NHS – a career that had left her with anxiety and burnout. “I saw an advert and it said ‘in exchange for compassion and reliability …’ and I thought that sounded welcoming.” But the truth is, she says: “I just didn’t think I was good enough for anything else.”
In care work, she found the drudgery, exhaustion and low pay she was expecting, but also so much more. “I was blown away by how interesting and meaningful it was,” says Faulke. “And how it made me feel.” The brilliant book she has written about her experience, Every Kind of People, is, she says, “almost like a love story to care. I wasn’t expecting it.” She didn’t want it to be a “worthy” book. “I just want people to see the joy in it.”
There is certainly joy. Most of Faulke’s colleagues are a welcome reminder that there are wonderful human beings in the world, and the people she calls her “customers” are delightful. Stevie is difficult, but with a sharp sense of humour; Mrs Rose is lovely and sings to her on her visits. When Faulke, faint after not having time to eat all day, collapses at the bottom of the Roses’ stairs, Mr Rose steps in to look after her. Mr Radbert, who has survived a stroke, is bawdy and outrageous. “He’s got everything against him, battling at every front, and it doesn’t matter, he’s got this fantastic sense of humour and spirit that just carries you along. You think things are unbearable, but people bear them, and they still find joy.” She talks to her customers about their younger lives, asks what their earliest memories are, finds out who they are.
One of her favourites is William, who is so old that his children are elderly and find it difficult to visit. (William makes a touching and hilarious, if racy, confession from his youth, which is revealed in the memoir.) “He’s just a case in point; we had a real connection,” says Faulke. She discovered he used to love gardening, and started taking him from his tower block to the park to look at the flowerbeds. When the lift broke down, she planted geraniums on his balcony. “It really made me aware of how wonderful flowers are, and it was a gift to me, because he made me stop and look at things that I’d never noticed before. Just ordinary things – making a cup of tea, having a chat, swapping ghost stories, silly things, but that’s what life’s about, isn’t it? It’s about the joy that you find in the small things, and he really taught me that.”
If all this makes Faulke sound like a saint – and I think she is one – her book also stresses how physically hard the job is – and how relentless. She admits to feeling a pang of relief whenever visits are cancelled at the last minute, meaning she will still be paid for them. She doesn’t romanticise care work – it’s hard to think of it as anything other than messy and human when she is mopping up blood like “a crime scene” or trying not to slip as she empties bowls of urine. But the way she writes does makes the job sound absolutely meaningful.
Faulke – at the start of her caring career, living in London with her husband, after their children had grown up – had been a hospital dietitian for about 10 years, a job she had loved in the beginning but that had became too stressful, with rushed clinics and no time. Crippling anxiety had seeped in, too, and she was “terrified” of making mistakes with vulnerable patients. Helping one woman through pregnancy, she became convinced she had prescribed too many supplements and that the baby would be harmed. “It was ludicrous. She had a beautiful baby, everyone was like: ‘That’s a great outcome,’ and I was thinking: thank God I didn’t do any damage. I just couldn’t live like it. I was really frightened.”
At least with care work, she thought, she wouldn’t be endlessly worrying about people after she had clocked off – but she was wrong. One of her first visits was to Eddie, “this old man in this block of flats, alone, with Parkinson’s disease and experiencing hallucinations. He was just such a lovely man and I remember it mattered to me that he had a bit of companionship, and I really did look forward to going back to see him again.” That night, thinking about him, she knew she would become attached to people. “I have to say that’s good, even though I didn’t want it.”
We meet in a London hotel and it’s instantly obvious why Faulke is a good care worker – she is cheerful and kind and seems very calm, even though she says she is nervous. I notice she is wearing a silver necklace that she describes in the book, given to her by one of her customers (the cross on it was “to keep you safe”, her customer told her, “the way you keep me safe”). Faulke has always written – she is writing about nature in nursing homes – but, although her book deserves to be a huge success, she says she won’t give up the day job (she is working in a nursing home for people living with dementia in Norfolk, where she lives). “It grounds me, gives me joy. It’s completely pure. I’m just looking after people.”
Every Kind of People came out of short scenes Faulke shared with a writing class she was attending. Someone told her it could be a book, so when she saw that the women’s writing magazine had launched a memoir competition, she entered – and won. She must have worried about the ethics of writing about vulnerable people, even if she did disguise their identities. She did, she says, but when she talked to them about it, they were all keen. During the pandemic, “Mrs Rose said: ‘Please write about us, because we’re forgotten.’” Another elderly customer, Margaret, “used to get very frightened, saying: ‘They don’t care if I die.’ So I felt much better about writing.”
When she started working in care, she says she was “terrified and intrigued in equal measure”. She remembers a feeling of anxiety rising before each front door, wondering what she would have to deal with once she was inside. “But it’s surprising how easy it is to get used to. I found being with people in their own homes really interesting. They were all so different and fascinating, but you had to engage with them to reach that point.”
Some people were clear that she was there to do a job and not to become too friendly. “And that’s fine, but, for most people, I think that connection is really welcome. You don’t want to overstep the line, but you’re dealing often with people who are incredibly isolated.” She would envy the care workers who were good at it. “I really wanted to be like that. They were so relaxed with people, they would crack jokes, and you could see how much they lightened people’s days and how much people loved them.”
The need for companionship is something she has felt herself, since moving to Norfolk (“my marriage did not survive the pandemic”). “I thought I’d love living alone by the sea and I wouldn’t particularly need lots of people around me, but I do miss companionship. But then you’re thinking about someone like Bridget, who spends her life on the third floor of her council block with no visitors at all. When you are someone like William, you can’t see, you can’t hear, you can’t read, it’s quite difficult to listen to the television or a radio. Early on, I thought: what must it be like to have no one ever touch you, no one ever hold your hand? I think it’s terribly important.”
Faulke describes what a typical day as a care worker, perhaps a working weekend, would look like: she would leave her house at 7am and cycle to Margaret. “Let myself in, gently wake her, get her through washing and dressing and get her into a chair, make sure she’s got everything she needs.” To get someone ready for the day would take 45 minutes to an hour. “If it’s straightforward, that’s fine. If it’s not, it can be a real difficulty.” Maybe someone’s body simply isn’t able to move as quickly as they’d like.
Faulke would cycle to help another two or three people out of bed until late morning, when she would visit those who were “more dependent”, who needed medication, help going to the loo or having their incontinence pads changed. Then she made lunchtime visits, all involving between 10 and 20 minutes to get to each customer. On a bike, it was fairly easy, but for care workers who rely on public transport, it can be impossible: “You’re not paid for those times, although I think that people are beginning to be paid for travel time.” In the evening, she would begin to help people get to bed and finish at about 9pm. “My shortest slot was half an hour, but I know that some shortest slots in other companies are 15 minutes.”
It can be slow, frustrating work and it requires endless patience. “That’s why talking to people is the thing that makes it magical,” she says. On the days when she didn’t have to rush, Faulke would take her time, and sit with her customers, although she wouldn’t be paid: “If I’ve got nothing on for an hour, sitting with William having a cup of tea instead of going out into the rain is really nice.”
Sometimes, her visits overran because something had gone wrong – somebody was in a bad state, for instance, or equipment was broken – in which case she would be paid extra. She remembers getting to one customer and finding that the hoist was broken. “That makes a really difficult morning. It’s going to be awful – and the stress of getting a big guy washed and dressed on a bed on your own is really hard; £5 extra doesn’t seem like much compensation.”
The average pay for a home care worker is £12 an hour. “At the moment, I work in a place where the pay is quite good. I could complain, but nobody gets paid much at the moment, do they?” Don’t they? Lots of people seem to earn a fortune, doing jobs that don’t seem to bring much benefit to people. Faulke smiles. “Yeah, that rankles. There’s something about the idea of leaving a person in charge of someone who’s very vulnerable; that seems to be such a big responsibility and such a big risk to pay a pittance for. It doesn’t seem equal.”
Although moving to care work meant she suddenly couldn’t afford the things she would have bought in the past without really thinking about it, she felt luckier than many care workers. She had a husband with a salary and they had a house. “I knew carers who were living on sofas,” she says. It’s hard to lobby for change – although there have been care workers’ strikes this year – because for many, she says: “It takes time and energy, and you don’t have those things.” She would obviously like higher rates of pay, but “it’s not even just about money. I’d like [the government] to see us as professionals, not as dogsbodies.” Unless we value care workers, she says, people won’t be attracted to it as a profession and we won’t get good care workers.
Caring for someone vulnerable requires skill, and workers are often at the frontline, she says. “There’s the consultant who passes the case to the GP, who passes the case to the district nurse, who passes the case to our manager, who passes the case to us, and everyone else can walk away from this situation knowing that someone else is dealing with it, except for us.” There have been days, she says, when “it’s been dreadful. The pandemic was dreadful – having people die, and also colleagues die, and having people go into nursing homes and you couldn’t see them.” Never taking a day off, she would cycle to her customers, terrified in their homes, past people in parks, enjoying their well-paid furloughs, and feeling bitter about the poor way the government had treated care workers.
Her work has made her think more about becoming old or ill. “I look after myself a lot, because I don’t want to become isolated and immobile. But if I did, I would be looking for good care workers with whom I could have a relationship.”
What does she think makes for a good older age? “I think the Roses had a lovely relationship, and they were very positive people. They had good relationships with their care workers and Mrs Rose had a massive element of control. I think William, on the other hand, was very isolated, very lonely. Having love around you is very important, and I think having control over things is really important. You can still have control if you’re immobile in a bed, so long as people facilitate it.”
Her job has given her a new confidence in herself. “I don’t think I’m afraid of getting old any more, and I don’t think I’m afraid of not having done all the things I want to do. I have wonderful things all around me and I’m really grateful.” It taught her to slow down – because you can’t rush people who can’t move any faster – and to notice things. “I used to go through things at top speed. I still sometimes do, but I really notice small things now – the sea in the morning, what people are reading, what they’re looking at, conversations between people. I appreciate things like when you’re well and you can move. I have to really be in the moment now and understand that this is a really lovely time of my life, and not let it go by without noticing it.”
What comes through most in the book is the privilege of intimacy that comes from caring, the close relationships and love. “It goes both ways,” she says. “It’s not all about giving – you get something back from it that’s extraordinary.”
• Every Kind of People by Kathryn Faulke is published on 24 October (Fig Tree, £18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
