mns  2009-09-04 16:50   

‘The Umbrella Tree’ is finally finished and is due out late in October or early November. I am sorry to see it go as I had become a part of it and there is a feeling of loneliness at saying goodbye, but I think every writer must feel that.

Goodbyes have been relevant of late, not real goodbyes, but farewells, as my wonderful son moved to Canada; Vancouver in fact, which is as far as you can get – almost. It made me think of when he was sixteen and went on a work-exchange to Hamburg and was held-up with a knife to his throat and I still shudder when I think about it. Some years later he found himself in a ‘bad’ part of Chicago having taken a wrong turn, and was approached by a member of a gang who asked him for money. Brilliantly, he paid the gang member to get him to a bus stop and to stay with him until a bus arrived.
It always struck me as being a truly ingenious thing to do. I miss him, but am so aware of the joys of modern technology (not to mention flight); we can email, chat online, telephone any time we are free. Very often weeks pass like that when he is in the same country as me and there is no feeling of sadness attached to that.

His move makes me think of when I was very young, and recently, in the same context, I was writing an article for the Daily Mail about a particularly difficult time when I was in my late teens and was au-pairing in Italy. I had been an au pair before and on this occasion I thought I was quite mature and in control.

But you never quite know what life is going to throw at you, and in this case it threw a truly horrible child at me.
My charge was a ten year old girl, a spoiled, indulged, cruel child with whom I tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to bond.
The very first Saturday I was there, she sold the family dog outside the supermarket while I was inside buying the family’s breakfast. I searched high and low to try to find the dog, but to no avail and with a heavy heart I went home to tell them what had happened.

The Signora, the mother of this little monster, seemed to think it was a good idea as the dog, she said, barked too much anyway. The reason the dog barked so much was because my charge teased it.

My job was to hover over this child, to make sure she didn’t drown in the sea or get lost or stolen, to check the temperature of her bath water, to hand her a towel when it was required, and to generally indulge her as she had been all her life.
One afternoon when the Signora was away, my charge, upon waking from her siesta, gathered four of her friends and took us up an avenue into a neighbour’s garden where some twenty of the tallest and largest sunflowers I had ever seen, stood gazing at the sun. It was a brutally hot day, a cloudless sky, the temperature soaring above 30⁰. She shared her plan with us. She was going to chop down the sunflowers.
‘Over my dead body,’ I said, herding them back to our garden and suggesting we find something else to do. They appeared to accept my authority – fool that I was. A game of hide and seek started with me as the seeker.
‘Stand by the pole,’ my charge instructed me. The plastic-coated wire of the clothes line was attached to the pole at one end, while the other was lying on the ground.
‘Close your eyes, and count to a hundred.’
I leaned against the pole, closed my eyes and counted backwards as I thought it would be more interesting. By the time I had got to ninety-seven she had trussed me up, my back against the pole and the wire wrapped tightly around me. Plastic-coated wire has no give in it. In fact, the more you pull against it, the tighter it becomes, and I was tied up with the sun burning down on my bare head as the gang headed off out of the garden with malice in their hearts, ignoring my screams to be untied.
At some point I became aware of an army of ants making their way across the grass. I kicked out as best as I could as they scurried over my flip-flops and started up my feet and legs. The more I struggled, the more they bit me. The more they bit me, the more terrified I became, not just because my charge had escaped, but also of the red weals that were appearing on my feet and legs, and the terrible sick feeling that was rising in me. Eventually, mercifully, I blacked out.

I came to, to find the Signora slapping me across the face as waves of nausea rose in me.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ she screamed at me.
I felt so ill that I could not find the words in Italian to ask her to untie me, and I had to wait until she had vented her fury at my inadequacy as an au pair, before she finally unwound the wire and, covered in ants and bites, I collapsed to the ground.
I was suffering from such severe sunstroke, and was so badly burned and bitten, that a doctor had to be called and I spent the next twelve hours crawling between bed and bathroom.
In the meantime an angry neighbour was searching for the criminals who had decapitated his prized sunflowers.
Asked if I knew anything about this, coward that I was, I said ‘no.’

My pay was docked for the time I was ill. I felt demeaned, belittled, humiliated beyond words at what had been done to me. I waited until my free day the following week, packed my bag and left a note saying, ‘Arrivederci’, and I ran.
Somehow that summer has metamorphosed into a magic memory. On the train, on my break for freedom, I bumped into three Americans heading for Greece. I went too and spent the next month on a Greek island, sleeping on the beach and purging myself of the true awfulness of my au pair experience.
However, I am afraid of plastic-coated wire, insects, ten year old girls, and I never go out in the sun without a hat.
Speaking of sun and hats, we are off to Venice next week, and I can hardly wait.