LOMBARDY MEETS BIRMINGHAM: THE NIGHTMARE

After spending my summer on a goat farm in rural Galicia, I thought that it would be a wonderful and well-deserved treat to then hop across to Italy and live with a lovely Englishwoman and her Italian husband in their country house. I scored this utopian non-paying job with a wealthy Brummie who, for all intents and purposes, shall hereby be referred to as Karen.

Even reflecting back on my time with Karen, my fight or flight instinct is triggered. She is still alive in my nightmares, and every now and then, I get flashbacks to something horrendous she said and sweat forms on the back of my neck. I had never met anybody so triggering before, and I pray to God that I never do again.

After briefly talking on the phone before our arrival to pass her selection process, we turned up at the country house expecting a very high-maintenance, graceful, Cheltenham-educated woman – presumably with long flowing blonde hair, puffy injected lips, and a flawless manicure. What we didn’t expect was a very rotund woman waddling over with a ‘HELLO DARLINGS I AM KAREN GOLDEN CRYSTAL JUNIOR!!’, naked except for an oversized white t-shirt that did nothing to hide her dark, bulbous nipples.

My girlfriend and I said our hello’s to the stranger, who pulled us both into a hug and softly kissed the top of our heads. ‘Grand tour?’ she asked, pushing us towards the kitchen before we’d even had the time to grab our things.

On arrival to the kitchen, Karen gestured dramatically at the white, high-ceilinged room, where her four cats were manically dribbling on the kitchen island next to a grand prosciutto board for lunch, licking up their food straight from the counter.

‘This is my haven!’ she declared, pointing past sticky fly traps that hung down from the ceiling and covered us all in dying insects. She turned away from the hoards of British royalty memorabilia that stood proudly in a glass cabinet, and asked us how the journey was.

‘A little difficult, because of the Covid restrictions, but–‘

She cut me off. ‘Anyway!’ She leant forward on the kitchen island, half-naked body thankfully obscured by the counter. ‘Thank God you don’t have a Welsh accent, that would have been disgusting! All I’m a taffy this, and llchchlch that, I can never understand a single thing those people say. I always pretend I’m Italian so that they stop talking to me!’

Considering I had only been on the property for about six minutes, I felt shocked, and was lowkey tamping. Considering that so many of my ancestors had been bullied into submission by English imperialists to surrender their mother tongue, and even more ancestors had been brutally attacked because of their accents, I felt my skin prick up. But, we all act strange under nerves, and perhaps the poor woman was merely anxious to have two foreign strangers wander into her home? I could only hope.

With an eager attempt to lighten his wife’s abrasive remarks, Karen’s husband stepped in with glasses of wine for us all.

‘My name is Antonio,’ he said softly, smiling at my girlfriend and I. ‘Born and raised in Rome, it was my dream to retire to the beautiful Italian countryside with a beautiful woman by my side. I have always wanted my own cabin.’

His smile beamed, lighting up the room. His skin was a dark bronze colour, with light hazel eyes and a thick, greying beard. He looked not too unlike Paul Hollywood, and I liked him immediately. Unfortunately, before he could continue with his story, Karen interrupted.

‘He means he has always wanted a house, a CASA, in Italy. Not a cabin! I have been trying my best to teach him English, but I fear his brain is a lot smaller than his big skull!’ She laughed to herself and knocked back her glass of wine, Antonio looking at the ground.

The rest of the day felt more than just mildly uncomfortable, as I informed Karen that I have Crohn’s Disease and as such cannot consume dairy, and she stated ‘I know other people that supposedly have that too, although none of them seem to be honest, and I HATE dishonesty’ – and continued to add a tin of cream to Andrea’s homemade carbonara. When I ate it out of politeness, despite the stomach upset, she continued to talk about her seething hatred for liars.

As the sun began to set, we had a short Italian dinner, before Karen retreated to the living room to curl up in a wine-induced slumber, Antonio reading a novel in Latin at her feet. My girlfriend and I decided to tackle the thousands of dishes in the kitchen sink, eager to leave a positive impression on our gracious hosts. Surrounded by cats and engravings of young Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher, we spent the next hour cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom. By the end of it, we were pretty spent – but ready to start the hard work tomorrow.

After a difficult night sleeping in a very hot bedroom, where fresh fox pelts glared at us from Karen’s spare wardrobe, we woke up at seven a.m. to start the day. We sat downstairs in the kitchen sipping tea when Karen came in, one giant knot of hair twisted up in the back of her head.

‘Good mooorning girls!’ She sung, wearing the same shirt from yesterday, still without pants.

‘Good morning!’ We both called back.

‘God, last night was heavy, huh?’ She said, before looking around at her newly immaculate kitchen. ‘We all really had a hard night of cleaning!’

Confused at her lack of acknowledgement, we continued sipping our teas. Karen looked at my girlfriend, at me, at our hands, which were laying on top of one another on the counter.

‘Where exactly did you two meet?’ She asked, suspicious.

‘In a cave in mid-Wales,’ I answered, taffy accent and all.

Karen frowned, the corner of her lips caving down into her chin. ‘I would really appreciate it if you two were honest with me. About whether or not you have Crohn’s Disease, or coronavirus, or AIDs.‘ She burrowed her eyebrows. ‘And also–‘

Antonio walked into the kitchen, gleaming smile and all. ‘Good morning ladies, how are we all?’

‘Good,’ we all said in unison.

‘Today I would like you two to paint the outside wall, if that’s alright?’

The next few hours were spent in the shade-free hot Italian sun, painting the outside walls of the farmhouse a gleaming shade of white. Cora and I were drenched in sweat, with the liquid running down our arms, dripping into our eyes, making deep welts of liquid in the band of our shorts, so we grabbed a bottle of water and sat at the outside dining table, recovering the lost fluids.

Karen came out with a breezy ‘afternoon, dolls!’ wearing a thin white shirt with yellow lemons printed on it, barely covering her torso and showing off her bright pink swim thongs.

‘Good afternoon,’ we chimed back, the sweat on our bodies cooling in the shade.

‘All finished are we?’ She asked, walking up to the wall and looking at it.

‘Yeah, two coats on each section.’

She held up a finger to the painted walls, suddenly dragging her finger down the middle of it.

‘That’s weird,’ she said. ‘Because my finger is dry. It doesn’t even look a different colour.’

‘You can see the newest area that we painted, it’s a brighter white but it dries to this duller cream colour,’ Emily replied.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I will paint it myself.’

And with that, she grabbed a (wet, quite obviously used) roller and began plastering another layer of paint onto the wall. Personally, I had never had someone run their finger over my paintwork in disbelief before, so that was definitely a new one.

Cora and I continued to sip our water, exhausted.

We watched her paint in the scruffiest way possible, slathering paint all over the ground and ignoring the neat edges we’d pored over. After ten minutes, the wall was once again wet with paint.

‘There,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave it to dry and come back to it later. In the meanwhile, how about we go on a trip, to see real Italy?’

Karen had covered up in tight purple booty shorts and a thin white shirt (those areola stared me straight in the face), with toxic pink lipstick engraved in her teeth and a thick knot of hair still standing in the back of her head. Whilst it was a welcome change to finally see her wearing trousers, this overall look was terrifying. When we had met her in the garden, all dressed up, she exclaimed loudly ‘I couldn’t possibly go out without dressing! I have a reputation around here for being a classy British lady – and who would I be for letting them down?!’

She had driven us and Antonio to the local town, which was a warm, bustling area, filled with delicious-smelling patisseries, quaint bars, and gorgeously manicured dogs. All of the signs were, obviously, written in Italian, and when I tried to use my limited knowledge of the language to translate the name of a lovely little tea shop, Karen stated, ‘oh, don’t bother, dear! These aren’t very intelligent people, apart from dear Antonio none of them can even speak English!’

We had run into several of Antonio’s friends, all tanned, moustached men with big hands and twinkling eyes. Some of them joked with us, off-handedly inviting us to local parties, and offering us a glass or two of whatever they were drinking. Sat at a bar with an olive-skinned young local, Karen grabbed the arm of another passerby.

‘Hello, dear!’ She exclaimed. ‘It is me, and these two lovely English ladies, out for afternoon aperitivos!’

The man stared at her for a second, before recognising her.

‘Where is Antonio?’ he asked.

When Karen explained that he was in the bathroom, probably talking to another Italian, he slipped out from her grasp and sped off.

‘They all know me around here,’ she announced to us.

‘It’s just like that in Swansea when I go out and run into a million other family members,’ I replied, making light conversation.

She stared me in the eyes, exaggerated a yawn, and went ‘Anyway, when my girl was young…’

We had only been with Karen for two days, and yet everything she said seemed made to anger and belittle us. That following evening, she spent half an hour asking questions such as ‘What’s the point in Wales, anyway? The language is dead, why bother keeping it alive?’ and ‘How on earth can the Welsh even consider themselves to have a culture?’

The next few days were especially difficult, as temperatures soared and Cora and I worked outside for six, eight hours a day. I don’t want to say that it was unbearable living around Karen, but it was difficult.

We once went on a walk as a group to a local house, made from beautiful old stone which had blackened slightly over the years.

‘This, girls, is the place that time forgot! Can you believe that some people are still forced to live in dirty little shacks like this?’

She announced several times that the place was a disgusting, run-down area, until the neighbour walked outside and Antonio begged her to quieten. When she went, ‘imagine living here, so ugly, so decrepit!’ Antonio shouted ‘hush!’ at her, and she threw an actual tantrum for the next ten minutes, complete with head banging against the table we sat down at until sedated with a glass of wine.

One week into the trip, and Cora and I were close to losing it. For the whole day, Karen would make snide comments about Cora and I (and everything we stood for, Wales, the working class, and Italians – especially Italians), she would shut down Antonio whenever he attempted to tell us fun stories, she would belittle every other local we happened to run into. We had visited Lombardy to experience the beautiful region, but instead we were left babysitting a very short Satan.

After one particularly exhausting afternoon, where Karen 1) said that ‘people here are civilised, not those predators from Egypt and Morocco!’, 2) had a very patronising conversation in which she told a warehouse worker step-by-step how they should be doing their job, 3) bragged about smashing up the house when she gets angry, 4) kicked a dying pigeon and laughed at it suffering for the rest of the day, 5) made uncomfortable, suggestive comments about the concept of homosexuality, and finally 6) rolled her eyes at me when I cut open my hand washing her plates and retracted my hand in pain, we decided that we absolutely had to find another place to live and work.

But just before we could tell Karen, she read our messages on our phone and told us, in no uncertain terms, that we were no longer welcome in her house and had to leave within the next 24 hours.

It was both a relief, and the worst thing that could have happened. We were situated, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere – with no back-up plans, no local contacts that could save us, and very little idea of where we could possibly go next with so little warning. We spent the whole evening staying awake, trying to figure out where the hell we could go next, and in the morning the next day, Karen threw open the door of our bedroom.

‘I see you have both decided that you won’t be working this morning?’

As it happened, despite the fact that we would be leaving in only a few mere hours, Karen had expected us to get up again at 7am (somehow finding enough time to sleep and find another host family to stay with*) to get back to work. Thankfully, Antonio had other plans.

‘The next train leaves in thirty minutes, so you should both be going.’ As we grabbed our bags to leave, he handed us each a small book, a gift for our work. ‘I am sorry it had to end like this,’ he said, and smiled sadly.

When we went out to the car, Karen called after us, ‘you’re welcome to stay for a couple days if you’re ever back in the area!’ (After kicking us out in the midst of a pandemic, in the middle of nowhere, with zero travel options available). She winced as she hugged me goodbye, but then pulled Cora in for a long, hard hug, until Cora writhed out of it and Karen planted two wet kisses on her forehead.

In the car, looking back at the house which was now a greying shade of cream, with newly-dug trenches by the swimming pool (by us), exposed brick wall which had the old plaster removed (by us), dilapidated brickwork which had been polished to perfection (by us), we felt proud of the work we had done – even if the boss had been the worst possible person to work for.

Antonio waved at us with a smile, and Karen’s bulbous nipples glared out at us from her shirt. As the gate closed behind us, I relaxed into the leather seat, knowing that I would never see her whiney little face again.

Thank f*ck for that.

* Which we did! We had somehow found a woman in Piemonte to stay with, and as it happened, she turned out to be the most wonderful person we had ever met. Our time in Italy ended on a positive note, thanks to Luisa.