In this extract from the latest Idler magazine, Victoria Hull asks entrepreneur Serena Rees and journalist Rowan Pelling how their mothers influenced their attitude to work and life

Most women would probably admit that their own mother’s way of life had a profound influence on their own direction in adulthood. My mother gave up work when she married in the early 1950s and dedicated her life to looking after my father and four children. She was always busy. The kitchen floor sparkled, beds were freshly made and turned down, toys were kept carefully in cupboards, laundry was folded with such care that you could see love in the ironed creases. Bathrooms smelt of Vim, drawers of lavender, halls of floor polish and fresh flowers. The breakfast table was laid with a blue and white checked Seersucker cloth at night, the kitchen cupboard was full of tins of biscuits and home made cake.

As a teenager, I was educated by feminists. I then decided my mother’s path was boring and vowed only to work on interesting projects with fascinating people.

Now I am older I admire my mother, and understand the value of creating a safe haven for her family. It was a direct response to her experiences in World War II. Family, home and hearth were logical priorities when you were trying to rebuild life after years of privation and stress.

Serena Rees, entrepreneur

Serena Rees is best known for founding Agent Provocateur, the world’s leader in the luxury lingerie market. She grew the business from one small shop in London’s Soho to an internationally recognised brand with stores in twenty countries and distribution in 68 countries. In 2007 Serena successfully sold her share to a private equity firm for £20 million. 

I think all women are heavily influenced by their mother’s work and life, or lack of it.

Both of my parents gained scholarships to Cambridge where it seems they worked hard but also had an awful lot of fun. I think that was a very exciting for them: to be surrounded by like minded people, and work together, and play together. Being super bright and eager (and poor) they knew where their passions and interests lay. They both always worked in their specialist fields.  My mother took time off when I was very young but was back at work when I started school age five. I used to walk to school with friends or alone, and my mother would pick me up from friends or I had my own key. I was quite happy being a latch-key kid. I could do as I wanted: watch TV,  eat rubbish, not do my homework unless I wanted to.

My mother is not the type of woman to do housework. She can cook. But didn’t a lot. Our family was quite dysfunctional in that both my parents are eccentrics and it was quite odd in our house. Her work ethic was to do her job, enjoy her job, go the extra mile. We had one phase when we had to travel around the countryside every weekend on a research project to look at stained glass windows in churches. I hated every minute of it.

My parents enjoyed their work and their life and I suppose these are the main reasons for my own work ethic: I love it. I love to be with people with whom I can interact, learn from, thrive and bounce off. I do not want to be at home cleaning, washing, ironing – which probably mirrors my mother’s ethos too.

Rowan Pelling, journalist

Rowan first achieved note as the editor of The Erotic Review. Rowan lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children. She writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

My mother was the least idle person I have ever known. She had five children, ran a pub, rose at 6.30am and didn’t get to sleep until the small hours. She prepared all the pub food, as well as cooking for family, did the washing-up and all the laundry, she chopped wood, laid fires, mowed lawns, gardened, Hoovered, plastered, painted peeling window frames, had her own drain rods and a set of sweep’s brushes to clean the chimneys.

In all honesty, she never stopped. Her hands looked like an ancient Siberian coal miner’s at the age of 50 – calloused and ingrained with dirt. When my father died she became sole licensee of the pub and the workload started to crush her. She refused to take on sufficient extra staff, because she wanted to put aside money for emergencies. And in the end all that hard work bowed her back, made her ill and contributed to her death from cancer at the age of 66. I loved and admired her more than I can say, but from where I stood (truculent middle child) it looked like an errant approach to life.

I strongly felt (and still feel) that by being so self-sacrificing my mother robbed her children of more years of her company. That if she’d learnt how to be a bit more self-indulgent and idle we would have had a plumper, happier, longer-lived mama. I began to feel that a certain form of hedonism (just so long as the pleasure wasn’t gained at the expense of others) was the best path in life.

Victoria Hull is Programming Director at the Idler. She worked as a teacher and in TV before founding the Clerkenwell Literary Festival. She spent the noughties in a farmhouse in Devon.

A longer version of this piece appears in Idler 48. Serena Rees and Rowan Pelling are in conversation at the Idler on 18 May 2016. Read more here