A Mother's Story Read Online Free Page A

years old and suddenly helping to care for a newborn, and I couldn’t have been happier. I would come home from work and immediately take him off Josephine’s hands. And over time, caring for Terry served to bring us closer.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, the world of high finance in the rural branch of a small bank failed to fire my imagination for too long, and so I began to wonder what lay beyond the stone walls and green fields of English village life. It was this natural curiosity that Josephine had always fostered, that led me to a new life in Austria. I had spied an advertisement for an agency placing English au pairs with European families, and I recognised it as my ticket out of there. And so, with only a backpack and a hopelessly inadequate grasp of German, I decided to head to Innsbruck to work as a live-in nanny.
    I spent the first few weeks after arriving crippled by homesickness. By day I was looking after a two-year-old and a four-year-old whom I couldn’t understand, and by night I cried myself to sleep. But I was too proud to tell anyone, a trait that would prove hard to shake later on in my life.
    My employees were a wonderfully stereotypical Austrian family who were kind enough in their way but perhaps a little dull for my adventurous twenty-year-old spirit. Mercifully, not long after arriving I met Sue, another young English girl au pairing for a local family. We hit it off immediately and set about exploring Innsbruck by night, a far more interesting and entertaining place than you might imagine. Mind you, coming as I did from the bustling metropolis that was Laneham, an outpost of the Soviet Empire in Siberia would have looked cosmopolitan. I was so fantastically unworldly that I used to waitfor Sue outside her apartment each night wondering what all the scantily clad women were doing lounging against street lamps. Sue and I would go to the nightclubs of Innsbruck until five in the morning then come home, get the kids off to school and sleep until their pick-up time.
    It shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise (and yet it did) when the family and I had a falling out. I discovered they had been phoning home to my parents, complaining about my extracurricular activities. I threw an impetuous strop of the kind only a twenty-year-old in a foreign country who doesn’t know a soul would, and packed my bags and left. I was furious, I was homeless – and I was determined more than ever not to go home.
    Not long after, I was placed with another family in the even smaller Austrian town of Thaur. It was a pretty little Austrian village, but even more isolated than Innsbruck. I read a lot and smoked a lot of cigarettes. As my language improved, I got to know many of the local Austrians around my age, including Richard. He was a few years older than me and rather conveniently lived in the apartment downstairs. He was extremely good-looking, didn’t speak a word of English and took me out a lot. We found ourselves conducting one of those wonderfully wordless romantic affairs that are the exclusive preserve of young travellers everywhere.
    Richard had a false leg, having lost one of his limbs in a motorcycle accident, but he was one of the best skiers I had ever seen. I liked him because he never moaned about his disability. If he wasn’t skiing, he was rock climbing or dragging me to Munich for Joe Cocker, Chris de Burgh and Supertramp concerts. (It was 1982. They were the height of cool back then.) In Thaur I also met Coleen, another nanny who lived a few doors down. Coleen was from Vancouver and we became goodfriends. Together we would travel down to Riva del Garda in Italy’s lake district, hunkered down in my tiny Renault 5. I loved Austria for its neat collection of cookie-cutter buildings and general orderliness, but the ruggedness of Italy – the unkempt houses, the comparatively impetuous and passionate people – also really appealed to me.
    Once my Austrian nanny contract