October 7

On Mondays, our part-time maid, Eunice, comes in to clean the cottage and do the ironing. We should have electricity the whole day, although the water is off.  Eunice is our saviour; without her, we would be totally lost.

When we took on the house, we were more or less forced to take on an ancient retainer, Elizabeth.  Elizabeth is not quite sure, but she thinks she is about 78 years old.  I'd put her closer to 110. She is a lovely lady; she is the most honest person I have ever met.  If you were to leave a hundred million dollars in $5 notes on the table for weeks on end, Elizabeth would not touch them. I have never known her to take the smallest scrap of food or tell the tiniest of lies.  

However, Elizabeth is a hazard.  She has been known to clean the floor with a dishcloth and sometimes puts plates away without cleaning them.  For the past four years, we have struggled to inculcate in her the idea that dishes should be washed in hot water and that toilets need to be cleaned more than once a month - and with toilet cleaner.  Invariably, we get home to find brooms and mops littered around the house or tins of polish on the dining room table and bottles of bleach on the dressing table.  Many Saturdays are spent cleaning up after Elizabeth.

Do not get on the wrong side of Elizabeth.  She has quite a tongue when she gets going and will berate you in a volley of English and isiNdebele, clicking her tongue wildly and making sure you understand every second word. She also has a bit of a warped sense of humour.  Once when we came back from a short holiday, she joked that she and her husband had eaten the guinea pigs.  Laughing wildly, and completely unaware of the look of consternation on the girls' faces, she told them how she had roasted them in the oven and that they were quite delicious.  She also very candidly told me that my older sister looks much younger than me and I should do something about it.

Elizabeth has had a hard life.  Originally from Zambia, she came here with her mother as a child and has only once gone back.  Her husband, Jelison, is from Malawi.  He came to Rhodesia in the 1950s, getting a job as a cook for Italian contractors working on the building of Kariba Dam wall. Elizabeth and Jelison had eight children, only three of whom are still alive.  She is a woman of quite remarkable strength, a woman who has managed to carry on despite huge loss in her life and for that alone, she has my complete admiration.

Every so often we say that Elizabeth needs to retire, but it is impossible.  She has no pension and none of her children could look after her. Besi
des, she'd be bored.  It was once suggested that we

give her the cottage to clean and get someone else to work in the house, but the thought filled us with complete horror.  Guests would inevitably find toilet cleaner in the fridge and dusters tucked into their pillowcases. I fear she would also order them to empty their own bins, especially if they contained bottles, for Elizabeth does not approve of drinking alcohol and would probably haul them off to church. And so we struggle on, glad of Eunice on Mondays and busy the rest of the week, righting all Elizabeth's mistakes, but, as I tell myself often, we will miss her when she's gone.