by Pam Rhodes
It wasn’t until the third week that she saw a poster about the activities at Hope Hall, and realized that there were daily classes there teaching English to foreign students. She only had a two-hour window to go to the class between the time she dropped Brandon off at playgroup and the time she’d have to leave to collect him again, but that was just enough for her to pop in for that very first visit.
And walking through that door made everything different. She met Terezka, a Czech girl who was nearly four years older than her, and who’d already been in England for eighteen months. Whereas Mili was small, blonde and petite, Terezka was more like a rugby player, strong-limbed and solid, with a loud voice and very definite opinions on everything. By the end of that first lesson, Mili had learned that the average weekly wage for au pairs in the area was £85–95, not the £60 for which she was working, and that there was no such thing nowadays as the family keeping the first week of wages “in hand”, as she discovered it was called. More than that, apparently the rules governing the employment of au pairs dictated that they should work no more than thirty-five hours a week, with at least two clear days off.
“I think I should come and talk to your employer,” announced Terezka. “She’s treating you like a slave. This is not allowed.”
Mili’s stomach knotted with panic at the thought of Terezka facing up to Samantha.
“Okay,” retorted Terezka, “then we must speak to Mrs Morgan, the teacher here. She knows the rules. She has been working with foreign students for years. She can talk to your Samantha. This situation must stop.”
Sure enough, at the end of the lesson, while Mili was glancing anxiously at the clock to make sure she was on time for Brandon, Terezka marched up to Mrs Morgan and explained Mili’s circumstances. After that, things moved quickly. Mrs Morgan wrote a short letter to Samantha, explaining that she was Mili Novakova’s English tutor, and she hoped Samantha could spare time for a conversation about Mili’s employment and progress.
With her heart in her mouth, Mili left the letter on the kitchen work surface for Samantha to read during supper. Minutes later, her employer stormed into Mili’s room without knocking. Struggling to understand the furious tirade, Mili got the gist of what Samantha was saying – that she couldn’t imagine why there was any need whatsoever for her to be approached out of the blue by an English tutor she didn’t even know, especially when she wasn’t even aware that Mili was wasting hours during the working day on English lessons! She went on to say that she was disappointed that Mili should act in such an underhand way, especially when all her other au pairs had been more than capable of learning all the English they needed just by being in their family situation. She finished by asking if Mili had any idea how fortunate she was to be allowed to live in their lovely home, and that if there was any more nonsense, she would be packed off on the first flight back to the Czech Republic.
Mili said nothing, and spent the next day and a half quietly going about her duties, terrified that at any moment Samantha would send her packing. While teaching her class at Hope Hall the following day, Mrs Morgan was deeply concerned for Mili’s welfare and set about writing a formal letter listing the points that needed to be addressed, and enclosing a form which clearly explained the conditions under which au pairs were allowed to work in England. In the meantime, Terezka’s mind went into overdrive trying to work out what she could do to help. After all, Mili came from a town quite near to her own in the Czech Republic, and it was such a pleasure to have another girl around with whom she could gossip in her own language.
By the following week, Terezka had decided that the room she rented was far too big for one person, and that Mili should move in with her. When Mili protested that she had no money for rent, Terezka grandly announced that The Bistro in the High Street at which she had been a waitress for nearly a year was looking for an extra pair of hands. Hours later, after a hurriedly arranged five-minute interview with the owner, Martin, who was plainly desperate for help, Mili had got herself a job. Mrs Morgan rang Samantha during that day, saying that because she’d had no response to her previous correspondence, and conditions for Mili had clearly not improved, she would be calling in the next morning, which happened to be a Saturday. She would collect Mili and her belongings, and the money the au pair was owed after three weeks of work should be paid in full. That evening, Samantha once against barged into Mili’s room shouting that there would be no wages, because Mili owed her a huge amount for her plane ticket to England, and the sooner she left, the better!
And so it was that by lunchtime the following day, Mili had left that house for the last time, without a backward glance. Terezka’s room really wasn’t huge, but it did have its own tiny bathroom and a kitchen area that was concealed behind a curtain in the corner. And as she put her few possessions in the wardrobe and placed a picture of her family beside the bed, Mili listened to the comforting sound of Terezka’s chatter, and decided she was going to be happy here – very, very happy.
Ida was in full flow, regaling her three lady companions at the Grown-ups’ Lunch Club held every Tuesday in the foyer at Hope Hall, her raised voice reaching far beyond her own table.
“These youngsters can’t even count without one of those flashy phones they’ve got glued to their hands morning and night. Whatever do they teach them at school these days? Plainly nothing sensible like mental arithmetic.”
“That’s what my Bert always says,” agreed Doris. “He won a cup for doing sums in his head when he was at junior school. We’ve still got it on our sideboard, although heaven knows why! I’d much rather put flowers there than all those dusty old medals and certificates, but he won’t hear of me moving them.”
Ida gave Doris a withering look, plainly offended by the interruption. “I was saying,” she continued with dogged emphasis, “that they have no common sense. Yesterday I was in the Pound Shop. I bought two items – fragranced disinfectant and a pack of loo rolls—”
“Were they fragranced too?” interrupted Percy from a nearby table. “I can’t bear toilet paper that smells pongy, but I like it nice and thick and quilted. Don’t you, lads?”
His lunch companions, Robert and John, nodded their heads in enthusiastic agreement.
Ida’s eyes narrowed as she stared at Percy with icy fury. “I see, Percy Wilson, that your hearing aid seems to be working properly this morning and without the high-pitched squeal it usually emits. Unfortunately, that means you can very rudely eavesdrop on other people’s conversations and interrupt when you are not welcome!”
“Oh, my dear Ida,” retorted Percy, his face a picture of innocent concern. “I’m not wearing my hearing aid today. I don’t need to when your voice is bellowing across the restaurant for all to hear. So, pray, do continue! What happened to your disinfected loo rolls? Were they going cheap?”
Ida snorted her disdain and turned back to direct her story towards Betty, Flora and Doris, who were keeping a tactful silence.
“To continue,” Ida announced huffily. “The total bill for my two items was four pounds twenty pence, so I gave the sales assistant a five pound note along with a twenty pence piece. But the dope of a girl told me that I’d given her too much money, so I had to explain to her that this way she could just give me back a one pound coin.”
“I do that,” agreed Flora. “I always do that.”
“Me too,” added Betty.
“That is because both you ladies have brains in your head,” pronounced Ida, “but brains were sadly lacking in that young woman. She just gave a great big sigh – very impolitely, I thought – then called over the manager, who was only a spotty teenager himself. He asked me to repeat my request, which of course I did, but he just looked at me and said, ‘We don’t do that sort of thing here,’ and gave me back my twenty pence piece! Then he instructed the sales girl to open the till and take out eighty pence in small change, which she promptly handed over to me.”
“Oh, I hate that,” said Doris. “All those small coins clutterin
g up my purse.”
“I can’t read the values on them these days,” mused Flora. “I think those little coins are very confusing. Why can’t they make the numbers on them bigger?”
“I never go shopping,” replied Robert. “My daughter Joyce won’t let me. She just gives me the money I need when I come here to the lunch club, or when I go to bowling, but she sorts out everything else.”
“I find that too much change in my pocket really spoils the line of my trousers. Don’t you, lads?” guffawed Percy.
“My point,” insisted Ida, “is that basic arithmetic is no longer on the school curriculum, and nobody seems to care.”
“I remember when Marion and I,” started John, “before she passed, you know… I remember that we needed to have our garage door repaired. The man came to look at it and said that our problem was that we didn’t have a large enough motor on the opening mechanism. Well, Marion remembered that when we bought that garage door, the man at the shop said that we were buying the largest motor available, a half horsepower, and she told the engineer that. He shook his head and told her that we needed a quarter horsepower. So I pointed out to him that a half was larger than a quarter, and he said, ‘Nooo, it’s not. Four is bigger than two.’”
“Did you get your garage door repaired?” asked Flora.
“Not by them,” replied John.
“I wouldn’t have bothered with those new-fangled electric doors,” said Percy. “They’re very temperamental. My cousin got locked in his own garage by one of them a few years back.”
“Oh goodness, whatever happened?” cried Betty. “How long was he in there?”
“Until his missus came out to get some of that Neopolitan ice cream she loved.”
“But hadn’t she noticed he was missing?”
“Apparently not. He’d gone out after breakfast with his golf clubs, and wasn’t expected home until tea time.”
“So he was stuck in there all day!”
“Oh, he didn’t mind. He rather liked the peace and quiet. His wife was not one to be argued with, shall we say? So he just switched on the car radio to the sports programme that she wouldn’t normally let him listen to indoors, and nodded off at his leisure. He said it was the best day he’d had for years!”
Chapter 3
“What do you mean, you’re moving back home?” Shirley’s voice echoed around the main hall as she held her phone to her ear. Whatever the answer to her question, she wasn’t having any of it. “Tyler, your dad and I made it quite clear that if you were old enough to move out and live with Jasmine, then you were old enough to pay your own bills.”
There was another silence while she listened to Tyler’s reply.
“Then you need to get a job, Tyler. That’s what Jasmine’s been trying to tell you for months, and who can blame her? And it’s what we’re telling you too. If you want to eat, drink and have an iPhone, you’ve got to earn money, just like the rest of us do.”
Tyler’s next reply was plainly cut short.
“Well, if she’s thrown you out, good on her, and don’t come whining to us. Grow up and sort yourself out, Tyler. And don’t ring me again when I’m here. I’m working to earn money to pay my own bills. You get a job and pay yours!”
And with that she switched off the phone with a flourish and shoved it unceremoniously into her overall pocket.
“Trouble?” asked Kath, who happened to be passing.
“That boy is twenty years old and hasn’t an ounce of responsibility in him,” sighed Shirley. “Mick and I told him he couldn’t afford to live in a flat, even with Jasmine paying most of the rent. She’s far too good for him, that girl. I’ll miss her, but honestly I hope she’s got the sense to kick him out of her life and find someone worthy of her.”
“Will you let Tyler come home?”
“Well, I wouldn’t…”
“But Mick might?”
“In the end, probably.”
“Where would he go if he couldn’t come home?”
“Well, that’s the problem. Some of his friends are a bad lot, into all sorts of things we’d rather not know about. He’s a follower, our Tyler. If he’s not under our roof, we’ll be worrying about who he is keeping company with.”
“Is he at your house now?”
“Apparently. He’s raiding the fridge and making himself comfortable, knowing that if he can get round Mick before I’m there, he’s home and dry.”
“What a worry for you, Shirley.”
“I’m off to scrub a few sinks. I’ll take my frustration out on those with a Brillo pad!”
Once Shirley had stomped off and out of the side door towards the school building, Kath continued her way through the main hall, looking down at the notes in her hand as she walked. It was Thursday morning, and she had been working on the Annual General Report of the Good Neighbours scheme which she managed as part of her role at the hall. The scheme connected willing volunteers in the community with those who needed a helping hand. That might be transport to the weekly activities and facilities on offer at Hope Hall, or it could be collecting shopping, help with work in the house or garden, facilitating hospital visits, or organizing shopping trips out of town for a group of pensioners who all fancied a day out courtesy of a kind driver. It had become a wide-ranging and complex operation over the four years she’d been running it, and it took quite a bit of her time to keep those in real need catered for, awkward pensioners behaving, volunteers feeling loved and cherished for their work and goodwill – and the money coming in to pay for it all.
“Oops!” She had been so preoccupied that, as she arrived at the foyer door, her papers were suddenly flying through the air and she barged headlong into someone coming the other way. She looked up into the blue-grey eyes of a man who was observing her with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“Oh, I am so sorry,” she exclaimed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m in much better shape than your paperwork, I fear,” he grinned, bending down to join her as she scrambled to gather up her notes, which had gone skidding across the floor in all directions.
“Please don’t worry. I can manage!” Kath was uncharacteristically flustered.
“Of course you can, but it would be ungentlemanly of me not to offer help to a lady I’ve practically knocked off her feet!”
Bending down to pick up the last of the papers, Kath wasn’t sure if she was grateful or just surprised by the way he took her hand to help draw her upright again. “No harm done,” she reassured him, hoping she sounded suitably efficient after her initial display of clumsiness. “I’m Kath Sutton, by the way, the administrator here.”
“Ah, then you are just the person I need to see. Is this the area the Sea Cadets are now using for their meetings?”
“Our main hall, yes, for indoor activities during their Wednesday night sessions, but they also make very good use of the old school playground outside. Would you like to see that?”
“No need. I assumed that’s what happens, so took a look on my way in. I gather they also have a storage facility here?”
“We’ve made a room available which can be accessed from the outside of the school building. They moved all their equipment in the first evening they arrived.”
“Under the direction of the Mighty Muriel.” His eyes were glinting with amusement.
“Yes,” she agreed, hoping her expression was serious enough to hide the fact that laughter was bubbling up inside her. “Muriel is a very forthright woman.”
“She is indeed,” he said, as the two of them grinned at each other.
“Richard!” The Hope Hall accountant, Trevor Barrett, was striding towards them, a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm. “Good to see you. You’re bang on time!”
“I was early, in fact. I haven’t been inside Hope Hall before, so I thought I’d take a look at the facilities first. This charming lady has been showing me round.”
“Well, you couldn’t be in better hands,” replied Trevor, beaming in Kath’s di
rection. “Is your other half with you?”
“Celia’s coming under her own steam. She’ll be here shortly.”
“Let’s get started then, shall we? I didn’t book a private room for our meeting, Kath, because we’d prefer to make ourselves comfortable in that far corner up in the balcony lounge, if that’s all right? It’s quiet and secluded there.”
“Of course. How many of you will there be? I’ll organize coffee.”
“Five of us in all, I believe. Sheelagh Hallam is already upstairs with William Fenton.”
William Fenton, thought Kath, the organizer of the Money Advice Service that had recently started holding weekly sessions on Friday mornings in one of the schoolrooms. Of course, this was the meeting of the trustees of that group, and Trevor was Secretary for those trustees.
“Ah, here’s Celia now!”
The woman making her way through the foyer towards them was the picture of elegance. She was probably in her mid-forties, but looked much younger, with a stylish haircut, subtle make-up, and a dress and jacket that Kath recognized straight away as coming from a high-class designer label. Richard immediately moved towards her, kissing her warmly on the cheek, his arm protectively round her shoulder as they shared a few private words before walking over to join Trevor and Kath.
After Trevor had greeted Celia in a more formal way, he indicated towards the stairs up to the balcony, explaining that they could have coffee up there. Celia looked back over her shoulder to glance briefly in Kath’s direction.
“Decaf, one sweetener and almond milk, please!”
Kath watched the couple as they walked away arm in arm, Richard smart but casual in a light brown jacket and chinos, alongside his “other half”, who looked as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Glancing down at her serviceable trouser suit that worked well for all the different jobs she was likely to find herself involved with during any average day at Hope Hall, Kath sighed before making her way to the kitchen to organize coffee and a selection of Maggie’s cakes for them all.