Living with au pairs

R was Finnish. She was sensible and reliable making her a good start to having au pairs. When after a week of briefing her, I hesitated, she told me “Go on Liz - go and work". 

L from Hungary was I think our second au pair, arriving emotionally mature for her age, and in many ways very confident. She'd left a boyfriend in Hungary - she's still with him decades later. L's English was good despite having grown up behind the Iron Curtain when they preferred to teach Russian in school. She was one of the first out after the wall came down. She had and still has a philosophical approach to life. She's highly intelligent yet like most au pairs who arrive at 18, not a university graduate. Years later she's now at university. She got on particularly well with daughter, G, inviting her to come and stay with her when she went back to Hungary. The child broke her arm skating there, but L dealt with it, getting her medical treatment and to ring me without panicking me.

S also from Hungary was next, but only for a few months because au pairs tended to come in September and my work year died down in October, unless I did a bit of exam marking, and didn't start again till February. I still regret not keeping her with us for those winter fallow months. But we had a break. 

When work started again M from Slovakia came. He told us he was a triathlete and so would go out on his bike, then come back and grumble about British kerbs compared to Slovakian more dropped ones that he could quickly mount to get out of the way of traffic. The appetite of an 18-year-old young man was a shock - he could easily eat a whole loaf of bread a day. He amused the children though with his escapades, such as going out to fetch them from school without taking his key. Fortunately, he had left his bedroom window open - and fortunately no burglar arrived before he did. In front of the children, he dragged the wheely bin to the porch, climbed on it and into the house – not a good example. To me, the main point of having an au pair was to mind the children when I was working, so I could work. Minding the children in those years meant fetching them from school and bringing them home safely, but other mothers at the school gate reported that M didn't hold my five-year old's hand to cross the road. He was far more concerned about his bike and that was a worry. He had little idea what a child would do, recklessly providing the younger one with paint while he went back to watching the sports. He played chess with our son. "Of course Miss L" he'd say to me, "I'm going to beat him because I'm better than him." He was a pleasant young man. He'd lost his mother some years earlier and had a good relationship with his father who came to stay with us for a few days. He wrote when R was killed obviously identifying with the childrens' loss.  I'd like still to be in touch with him.

M from France didn't want to be here and thought I should give her more time off and more pocket money so, worrying about her attitude I rang the au pair agency who told me she'd been in touch with the agency complaining. She'd also been complaining to a French neighbour. Neither neighbour nor agency could see her point. I suggested if she wasn't happy then she shouldn't come back after Christmas, but she decided to come back, and shut up. She ate lots of Nutella and cheese and biscuits, then toddled off to the GP to complain that she'd put on weight, then complained to me that the GP couldn't or wouldn't help her. (She hadn't put on a lot of weight at all). By summer, since she seemed happier, she and I agreed that she'd return in the autumn. Then she didn't get in touch. Eventually I rang her father and asked (I spoke pretty good French). He explained that no, hadn't she told me? she wasn't coming back because she was going to university. I never heard from her again, even though R's death in France must have been in the French newspapers. 

When M backed out without warning me, it was a bit late to get an au pair through the agency, but I was in touch with L in Hungary who had a classmate who wanted to be an au pair. Be warned – she was a quite different personality from L.

So, Z from Hungary arrived. She arrived with a different contract from planned, a different situation because husband R and I had worked together, but R had died. He wasn't there to take over the children on Saturday when I was out running tutorials, and the au pair had to be available on Saturdays. Z did the job perfectly. Her sociability also was an antidote to my depression, despair, and sadness at the time. About a month or two after she arrived, I was sitting at the kitchen table when Z came through the back door with three young men following her. I'm going, "Er? Who's coming in my house? What happened?" She had a way with men. The first year, at the local pub she befriended a young man still living at home with his mother. She got him to lend her a bike. I wouldn't have strange men or au pair's boyfriends stay in my house. Not safe when I was a single mother.  So, Z persuaded him to move out of his mother's house so she could stay with him. She enjoyed cooking, like baking a big freshwater fish like the carp you get in Lake Balaton. Carp isn't an English dish, and not usually available so that was an expensive meal.  The second year with us, she met a new boyfriend with a house, so she stayed with him some weeknights, when his wife was in the flat in town. Z wanted to drive and he lent her a car. You could drive for a year without the test, and then you must take it. She took it in his sports car. I think there was a problem passing.

She baked a carp for our neighbours. One evening she was round there when boyfriend arrived with wife! She kept me amused. She didn't realise till the end of the two years she stayed with us just how bad I'd been when she arrived. She asked me why I hadn't said something two years earlier - because I was too upset then. She was too young to realise.

Anita also from Hungary, via the agency came for the last two years of au pairs. She was very shy coming to the Hungarian agency at least for the first visit, with her mother. She was then so nervous that she couldn't or wouldn't dare do anything, believing that her English was too bad. Then in December I took the children and her skiing in France, and she realised her English was better than her non-existent French. She was good with the children, even with P getting more awkward as he grew older. And she talked with our neighbours too, getting advice on how to handle him when he was stroppy or in the way of a particularly aggressive neighbour, like a Saturday when I was working and there was a neighbour’s party. P upset Mr J who picked him up by the shoulders or neck. Then P ran home and A worried because normally I wouldn’t let the children be at home by themselves, but the neighbours advised her that that P would be safer and better and happier in the garden by himself, and they’d explain to me. She stayed two years and watched romance blossom between A and me. Now she's a mother herself.