Back in Lincolnshire, we realised not much had changed in our absence. Mr I was still unemployed, the house was still largely uninhabitable, the children were still largely feral, and I was still grumpy. Something radical had to happen, and quickly.
You need to understand the degree of chaos that reigned at home. Keeping the place clean enough to live in, in the face of a constant gentle settling of dust made even the simplest task properly tricky. Left uncovered, newly laundered school uniform, meals, and every surface in between would within seconds be covered in a fine film of grit, sawdust, paint flakes … you name it, it fell out of the air onto and into everything. The asthmatic baby didn’t seem to notice the crunchy bits in his meals, and the rest of us got pretty used to gypsum with everything, but keeping the place habitable was a genuine battle of considerable proportions – not helped by the ever-changing landscape within the house. One day the front stairs were out of use; the next they were fine but half the back flight had gone. Loos were, and then were not usable, with alarming speed and no notice: the anguished yell of someone who had just found their relief delayed was simply another noise in the cacophony of our days. The idea was that she – or he, or they, or whoever - would help with the cooking, cleaning and laundry, and hold the fort when I needed to be elsewhere – taking Angus back to school, finding the bits the Guys needed for the next stage, gently (or maybe not) propelling Eeyore back into the workplace.
We had tried a variety of helpers since our arrival. There had been Emma, the fearlessly unreliable Irish maternity nurse; Yana, the pneumatic Czech ‘paediatrician’ who had no clue how to fix a nappy to a squirming, yelling baby; Vicky, the Pole with the piranha-like underbite who managed to roll the car we provided and then demanded another; Hungarian Theodora who accused Whizz of stealing; Latvian Lucia who took to her bed on arrival and stayed there sobbing for three days, clutching our landline phone and ringing up huge bills to her parents, until we persuaded her agency that we were not the one child, pet-free urban family she insisted she had asked for … we had covered most of Europe in our search for someone to bale us out, and we were beginning to despair that we would ever find anyone reasonable and reliable. Let alone safe and trustworthy.
And then …. cue: Sylvia. Wonderful, saintly, rescuing Slovakian Sylvia, like salve on chapped lips and a ray of sunshine in a miserable world. 28, the loudest woman you ever heard, possessed of curves and a smile that made everyone cheer up - even me - and in due course made our builders the most attentive of artisans.
She got lost on her way to us (not a great sign, we couldn’t help thinking) so we met her on the village green and she followed us home. She was dressed to the nines in stilettos and spray on clothing, and her hair was dyed pillar box red. Not by nature one to blend into the background, she brought sweets for the children and spoke better English than we had dared hope. In our desperation we even agreed that the volume was good, due to Eeyore’s almost total deafness, and we took up her references telling ourselves that at the very least she’d get us through the beginning of the building works.
Within a week Sylvia, with her unbelievable work ethic and her endless smile and enthusiasm, really was utterly indispensable – even Eeyore said so, and he manages to be a man both of few words and exacting standards. While I was always likely to grovel with gratitude at anyone who did anything to help, his opinion was much more masculine and unemotional, and not founded on relief.
So with help on hand and the new found optimism that goes with a huge problem solved, we approached the next phase of the building works with excitement and enthusiasm. How the gods must have laughed.
