Switzerland

Switzerland

Having left London in pouring rain - I arrived in Zurich to gloriously hot sunshine! I can remember clearly seeing two women coming towards me - one tall and smiling, the other short and - er, not smiling. I sent up a little prayer that the tall woman was going to be my new employer - alas, I must have been a bad girl at some time in my life because my prayer was not answered :-(( Ah well, it was a lovely drive through the most beautiful scenery towards St Gallen, in the German speaking part of Switzerland. The smiling lady tried to converse with me with the small amount of English she knew, and I was far too nervous to attempt to use any of the German I had tried to learn. I had a gut feeling that things were going to be a tad difficult...........

I don’t know what Mrs. B expected of the English girl she’d hired, but I kind of got the feeling that I wasn’t it lol! Maybe she expected someone more ‘homely’, I was tall and slim with long blonde hair (hanging in rats tails, thanks to the rain!). I didn’t wear much make-up - I hated the feel of lipstick on my lips and found that make-up base and powder just somehow looked wrong on me, so I never bothered with it, I did like my eyeliner and mascara tho............. Maybe Mrs. B expected to see a fresh faced, quiet, mousy little thing - if so, no wonder she looked so disagreeable lol!

Mrs. B already had a young girl, Irna, working for her, but she was from a farming family and had been called home to help on the farm. Irna was a quiet, shy girl, plump and rosy cheeked,  who didn’t speak a word of English, but we got on very well together. She showed me what my duties were and it was nice, the two of us working together, I was really sad when, after a couple of days, she had to leave.

Mr. & Mrs. B have a lovely big detached house in Rotmonten, which is high up, in the posh suburbs of St Gallen. It’s quite a walk down hill into the town, but it just takes a couple of minutes on the bus. I was up at 7.30 on my first day, which wasn’t bad really, because when I was on the early shift at Stratters, I had to be at work by that time, not just trotting downstairs. But when Irna left, I then discovered that my day started at the rather earlier time of 6.30am :-(  There’s plenty to do. Certain things have to be done on a particular day of the week - every week.......Washing up the crockery, making beds, dusting, vacuuming etc. was par for the course, but when it came to cleaning out the cellar, which was used as the laundry, I was quite taken aback by the extent of the cleaning. It was the usual type of cellar, white washed brick walls, stone flagged floor, large white ‘butler’ sink with great big brass taps and lots of copper pipework. The floor had to be scrubbed and the pipework polished till it gleamed - I was pretty stunned, I can tell you lol. Til now, cellars had always been grimy places where coal or junk was kept, but I soon found that ‘grimy’ does not exist in the Swiss way of life!

The dining room had a beautiful parquet floor, no one was allowed to walk on it in high heels, even Mrs. B’s daughter-in-law would kick her beautiful stiletto heels off at the door. Every Wednesday I had to get down on my hands and knees and examine every part of it, seeking out the tiniest blemish. This flooring had been down for twenty years - and looked like it had been laid yesterday lol!

Mr B. owns a fabric factory near Zurich, so spends quite a lot of time away, which is a shame because he is really nice, life is much more pleasant when he is at home, her son, too, is really nice and so is the daughter-in-law - it’s just Mrs. B who has the personality disorder.........

I had to go to Rorshache for a medical - and discovered just what a small world it is. I met a girl called Nancy who is from Yorkshire and used to work at The Grand Hotel in Sheffield! We have decided to keep in touch and hope to meet up again sometime.

Mrs. B has arranged for me to have German lessons with the student son of one of her friends and I go during my ‘repose’ or siesta, as they would call it in Spain! I have about 2-3 hours to myself before starting work again around 5.30-6.0pm, earlier if they are having a dinner party. Apart from a sense of not liking each other very much, Mrs B will insist on my eating enormous amounts of food, she seems to think that my stomach is a dust bin and wants me to eat ALL the left overs from any meal. I cannot eat large amounts of food - I am a ‘grazer’, so things are getting rather tense between us. She also puts down my friends, which really, really annoys me grrrrr. Soon after I arrived in Switzerland, Friedel, Eugen’s sister rang to welcome me and ask me to go round to see her, it seems she and her husband live in an apartment block really close by - walking distance in fact. Mrs. B could not believe that any friend of mine could possibly live in such an exclusive area and declared that they were probably only the caretakers of this quite up-market property. I was furious - I’m afraid that the relationship between Mrs. B and myself, worsened daily!

Mrs. B used to be a nurse and a senior one at that, she was a very spritely and rather domineering lady in her fifties, I thought,  but sometimes, come 6.0pm she would start to change - it was actually quite scary - she seemed to shrivel into a much older lady and would prattle away ten to the dozen in Switzerdeutch, which she knew full well I did not understand - believe me, it is very, very different to standard German.   Come the next morning, much to my relief, she would be back to normal. 

My student teacher, Heiney, who is not quite 19 years old, and myself, get on very well together on a social level, although he is a very hard task master and insists on the correct pronunciation of a word before he will move on.  I remember spending ages trying to pronounce the word 'brucke' which has an umlaut (2 dots) above the 'u' which changes the sound and I couldn't get it right, arghhhh! I got so cross because he would not let it go.  But in time I found that I was able to talk to him and he was not in the least suprised to hear that I was having trouble with Mrs. B.  I'm afraid I used to take all my troubles to poor Heiney, but he was vey supportive.  I told him about Mrs. B's 'queer turns' and that's when I discovered that in fact Mrs. B was actually 68 years old!

On my trips down into the town, I had taken to stopping at one of the many cafe's, one in particular, The Neugasse, became my favourite, Rosemary, one of the waitresses is very friendly and asks me to help her with her English, which is much better than my German.  Rosemary and Erma, another waitress, become my best friends.