Nobody’s Business But Lucy’s

Fifteen years ago our first au-pair came to work for us.  Her name was Lucy.  She rang me the night before I was due to pick her up from Cornavin, the railway station in Geneva.

“I think you should know I have a nose pierce,”  she had said hesitantly.

I laughed and said “As long as you are good with children is all that I care.”

What she omitted to say was that she also had a shaved head.   But she appeared wide-eyed and doll like being small and blond, and she turned out to be a hard-working, sweet and gentle au-pair.  She adored babies (ideal) and liked nothing more than to sit quietly for hours rocking them to sleep.  In her time off she would don a pair of Doc Martin’s boots and take the little red train down to our local town.  She caused quite a stir in the village especially amongst the elderly ladies.  She was no Heidi fantasy figure au-pair stomping through the village to the catch the train, just Lucy who mucked in and was good at discipline.

She was barely twenty. 

Over the years we have remained in Christmas card contact and yesterday she came to visit us.  She sat on our terrace with the one permanent thing she took away with her from her year in Switzerland.  Charlie is now fifteen.  He swam in the pool with Ollie and Sophie, stroked my cat, told me he liked cricket and rock climbing and that his one wish is to go climbing in the Alps.  He sat besides me at lunch, a person in his own right telling me that he was about to go off to boarding school in the nearest large town to finish his education and frankly he doesn’t like cheese very much, thank you. 

After I had dropped them back – fifteen years later at another station – I drove home thinking about all the events in life and the decisions all of us must make hoping that we make the right ones. 

Lucy was picked up by her parents and returned to England.  She studied to be a nurse and then moved to her parent’s holiday home in north western France when Charlie was seven.  She lives in the same village today and works with autistic children.  She never married.  

I remember the emotions of fifteen years ago, how ill she felt and all the well-meaning, conflicting advice she was given.  With that old chestnut of hindsight how irrelevant it appears now because, you see,  it was only ever Lucy’s decision to make and most importantly it was only ever Lucy’s business.