Slices of London

Slaves of the 21st century

by urban fox, times online correspondent

If you want ruthless cruelty, find a London mother of small children and ask her about her childcare arrangements. The sweet-faced madonna smiling beside the crib, or cooing at her little darlings in the playground, instantly turns into something altogether redder in tooth and claw.

The emergence of a whole new batch of countries from which to source au pairs (hooray for the collapse of communism) has proved a godsend for hard-pressed parents in one of Europe's most expensive cities. Cheap, cheap labour, in the hugely exploitable form of young girls unsure what people in this country consider hard work, and what is frankly no better than abuse, is flooding into London. There are no controls. And complete freedom over a £50-a-week skivvy is going to the heads of my hitherto blamelessly humanitarian friends. One by one, they're turning into the kind of racist, bullying, heartless employers whose appalling behaviour they would indignantly condemn if they came across it in any other walk of life.

"I'm getting a Serb from Kosovo," Friend A confided at the end of the summer, with a devilish glint in her eyes. "She wept in the interview when I asked her how her parents would get along without her once she came to live in London. It turned out I'd reminded her that her father had been beaten up by Kosovan teenagers the other day. But I figure coming from a war zone is good. She'll be too freaked out to want to go out in the evenings. That means more babysitting and cleaning for us. The downside is that she might go around crying all the time and get on our nerves. But I've sorted that out too. I've told her she's not allowed to cry in the house. And she's banned from using our phone to call home." She beamed happily.

Friend B, meanwhile, having picked a series of apparent innocents who, within seconds of being in the house, turned into drug-taking, fag-stubbing, pole-dancing, child-hating menaces - or at least failed to do the mountains of washing up, cleaning, ironing, feeding, folding and separating of psychotic small boys brandishing swords that made up her list of duties - fired the lot and turned for her next wee slavey to a German Catholic religious agency. "Fabulous," she gloated. "They'll be practically nuns. They won't drink. They'll have been properly brought up, and know how to wash up and fold clothes. And they won't ever have fun or go out - too virtuous. Which means more free babysitting for us."

The London mummy's au pair of choice, it appears, is an abject victim. Friend C chose a Russian girl from a ghost town near a nuclear power plant in Lithuania, though she was worried that "she might glow in the dark and irradiate us all". Friend D picked a "chavvy" Hungarian girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Budapest. Friend E suggested I only employ au pairs who were too fat to attract a social life. "I find that roughly twice the normal weight guarantees you endless babysitting," she said sagely.

When these business relationships go wrong, no one could be more surprised and upset than the mothers. Their eyes widen innocently as they list the young miscreant's crimes. "She threatened to walk out, just because I was kept a couple of hours late at work again and forgot to call her!" they bleat, or "She had the cheek to give two weeks' notice - just two weeks before the Christmas holidays!"

All five of the au pairs I mention above have, of course, been fired - and all in very similar ways. When the Serb from Kosovo tried to hand in her resignation, pleading homesickness, and begged to be allowed to go home after the two weeks agreed in her contract, Friend A threw her out in the street on the very same December evening, her possessions following half an hour later, in a black binliner. "She'd ruined my Christmas! I wasn't having her staying in the house a moment longer!" Friend A raged. "I don't know where she went! And I don't care!"

Friend B, who had been disappointed to discover that the German religious agency supplied just the same pretty, leggy, party-minded teenage girls as all other agencies, lost her temper when her latest was discovered having a fag in the back garden. She got her husband to have the row and fire the girl, but the result was the same - au pair ejected by nightfall, black binliner in hand, with no notice.

Friends C and D also "lost" their au pairs in the space of an evening. Friend C joined forces with her husband for a row over the au pair's excessive use of the shower ("twice a day, can you believe?"), and out she went into the night. Friend D lost her temper with the au pair by phone, on a motorway, at midnight, when the au pair called to see what time her employer was likely to get home and relieve her from babysitting. "How dare you call me so late?" Friend D screamed; the au pair was parked on the doorstep by dawn.

Luckily for the au pairs, they aren't always the victims their employees take them for. However little time they've been in a new country, most of them will have made friends, through English classes or friends from home. So they aren't completely destitute. They turn up, with their black bags and alarming stories, and sleep on a friend's floor (if the friend's boss will let them). And then, resilience and good temper miraculously restored, they go back to their agency and get another job.

History is full of examples of casual cruelty by employers to their staff. Black women keeping house for white families in colonial Africa, never seeing their own children growing up in faraway villages; ayahs brought back from imperial India with the family whose children they'd raised, only to be abandoned on the streets of London once they'd outlived their usefulness.

But it's a bit unnerving to find the same tyranny flourishing in London's liberal suburbs in the 21st century.

Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here

• Hiya, Cool article. Regards, Gregory Carlin, Irish Anti-Trafficking Coalition, Belfast
• This is one of the saddest articles I have ever had the displeasure to read. I know that bringing up children is hard, but exploiting young people of other troubled nations in order to indulge bourgeois festivities is despicable. How can you call these mothers your friends? If I thought that a single "friend" of mine or my wife's was behaving in such an appalling manner, I would raise hell. You know as well as me (and them) that an ethical life is about more than organic veg, opposing the war at dinner parties and £50 in the Tsunami fund. Your report makes for fine journalism, but what’s wrong with a bit of direct action? Brendan Staunton
• Hmm, this article struck a chord with me. When I was 17 I went to live with a family I did not know in order to re-start my A levels. They had three children under six, two boys and a girl, who had been brought up by extremely short-lived au pairs, and were rather naughty and spoilt. The parents were not even working. The mother would sit in the kitchen moaning to me about the au pair, or how messy the house was, and devising new schemes of punishment. She rejoiced in telling me of times she had made au pairs cry or had kicked them out. One girl had been there about a month when a jar of coffee went missing. She said she was sorry and that it had smashed. Mrs X pulled on her rubber gloves and trawled through a week's worth of rubbish bags, claimed to not have found any remnants of coffee jar, and got rid of her for stealing. I actually got the au pair treatment myself: when I had been there three weeks I got a phone call saying they did not want me living there any more, and I was not even allowed back to get my things. I had to wear other people's clothes for a month until a friend and I went back to get my stuff while Mrs. X hid upstairs. There should be an au pair helpline; this mad behaviour must be regulated. Stephanie Scull.