Maisie came knocking at our door one day some 41 years ago. Word had got around that there was a 'foreigner' living in Quatre Bornes, Mauritius. Mauritians preferred working for foreigners who treated and paid them better than the locals.
Another story doing the rounds was that foreigners loved animals. So ever so often I would find a litter of cats or a puppy behind our door - which went straight to the animal welfare society. I am no great animal lover. We had too many of them when we were children. I also tend to reserve my compassion for human beings rather than animals. After a year living in Mauritius I was already suffering from compassion fatigue over Third World misery.
So, Maisie told me she was looking for a job; that she was good at looking after children as there were 16 at home and she was one of the eldest.
So we negotiated a salary and she started working the following Monday.
Her childhood had been spent in one of the seaside villages where her father was a fisherman. In patois creole she would give me vignettes of her life over a mug of coffee, at the kitchen table, on a Saturday morning, when I was not working. Even a single coffee break with Maisie yielded some sad piece of autobiography. Each episode was a cross between Greek tragedy and a particularly lurid episode of Dallas.
They had never had enough to eat. There was no organisation at the time to distribute food to the needy so she was brought up on flour mixed with water and fish her father had not managed to sell.
Water was collected from a communal tap placed outside the compound. In spite of the seasonable torrential rain that tap, too, was often empty. Water did not feature high on the government priority list.
Sanitary facilities consisted of a pail or the mango or banana tree outside.
Maisie had been married for six years and was desperate to have a child. That was all she wanted, a baby of her own, like ours. She had married into poverty and lived in more or less the kind of hut in which she had been brought up. Yet she never protested. She knew no better. However her childlessness had left her bereft of any religious belief. For Maisie, religion had lost its efficacy.
Just before the mild Mauritian winter set in, I would collect the month's newspapers and drive her home with them to cover the cracks in between the corrugated iron sheets which made up their home. The ritual was repeated winter after winter.
The cyclone season was an anxious time for Maisie. Cyclones were a yearly occurrence and it was mostly the poor who suffered. Would the corrugated iron roof which was held in place by a few concrete blocks, fly away? This would mean taking shelter in the local government school or in one of the tents donated by the American government and remaining homeless for a few weeks, sometimes a few years.
Her possessions were so few that losing them did not worry her except that she did not want her most precious possession, her television, to be damaged or stolen.
Hers was a hand to mouth existence as it had always been.
While she was working with us she managed to survive many cyclones without a serious mishap. But she was lucky. Each year there were casualities especially from flying corrugated iron sheets or the concrete blocks which held them down as the high winds displaced them. Not to mention flying TV antennas. What we have recently experienced on these islands would have been classed as Cyclone warning Class I in Mauritius. The official message was: stay indoors and make sure you have enough food for a few days. We dreaded Cyclone warning Class 3 with electricity and often even water taking a holiday.
Maisie's ancestors had been slaves, stolen from Africa and made to work in the sugar cane fields. Slavery was finally abolished in 1835 and at the time there were 76, 774 slaves who abandoned their masters and drifted into poverty. They were soon replaced by Indian indentured labourers who were engaged for five years but in fact never returned to their native land. They are now the dominant ethnic group in the country and govern Mauritius.
Maisie never grumbled, never begged - except that occasionally she would tell me how she wished she could get pregnant. It was foremost in her mind. After all, her mother had had 16 children, why couldn't she just have one? I used to tell her that it was impossible to understand the kiss of fate; that maybe one day she would have a child; that some people conceived even after ten or fifteen years of marriage. Otherwise, apart from this one great desire, Maisie had the wisdom to escape want by rejecting all wants.
She was a decent cook. She produced a wholesome dish for us to eat in the evening. Her pride was her corn soup, and with justification. She would laboriously clean the corn cobs after boiling them and then use her magic wand (and much butter) to turn them into a delicious soup. There were no jars of baby food available at the time, in faraway Mauritius, and Camille only ever ate freshly prepared food. She loved Maisie's corn soup in particular.
I have to say however, that Maisie's cakes were more suited as building material than sustenance. I discouraged her from making them.
I almost felt guilty when I became pregnant with our second child. I barely had the courage to look her in the eyes. But she had to be told as we had decided to move to a bigger house in a cooler part of the island. Maisie told me that it was going to be impossible to stay on as the journey from her village to our new home entailed taking two long busrides. So I helped her find another job. I was reluctant to let her go. She had a noble spirit and loved pleasing us in small ways. She always gave the impression that nothing was too much trouble.
I often wonder whether Maisie is still around; whether she has had that much desired child; or if the windmills of the gods had given her another blow and she had become one more causalty of life's inexplicable lottery.
I write this as I remember her birthday being in March though I forget the date. March, the feast of St Joseph and also the birthday of the eldest of my two darling who was born on that feast. A month not to be forgotten.
Everything is in other hands Lucillus," wrote Seneca the Stoic. "Time alone is ours."
A very Happy Birthday Maisie, wherever you may be.
Please note that Haro is not a Jewish surname, as I wrote, wrongly, in my Diary two Sundays ago. A reader kindly sent me an email thus: "'Haro' was not the surname of one of the Jewish families who took refuge in Malta in WWII. That was a business name and the surnames of the families concerned were Eder and Berger... As for the origins of the business name Ha-Ro I believe it was a combination of the first two letters of the names of the Eder couple (could be Harold and Romina?) who started the business."
Another reader emailed saying: "I believe they were Hans and Robert Eder - Austrian Jews who came to Malta in the mid 1930s fleeing the Nazis - hence the name HA-RO.'"
Thank you both very much.
I still have a feathered hat left from my mother's collection of hats which she had bought from Haro, all those years ago.
I can't bear to throw it away.
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