Liv came from Kiruna in the north of Sweden. It’s not far from the Arctic Circle; in the wintertime there’s no daylight and in summer no darkness. The hotels have black blinds at their windows so that in June and July guests can sleep. Kiruna’s mountain of iron is what once made Sweden rich. A curious feature of the place is the Iceland poppies that grow wild there, pushing up their papery orange and pink and red blossoms through cracks in the paving stones and out of the thin green grass. I went there three years ago to see the midnight sun.

Liv was eighteen and just out of school when she came to London. She was the only child of respectable hard-working total abstainers, her father a mining engineer, her mother a dental nurse. They wanted her to go to the University of Uppsala, which is the Oxford of Sweden—they had ideas much like my parents’—but, like mine, her school exam results didn’t reach the required level. Her job as an au pair was properly arranged through a reputable agency with headquarters in Stockholm and a branch in London. She was to be paid the statutory rate, do light housework and occasionally fetch a child, aged seven, from school. There would be baby-sitting too but she would have three evenings off a week and time in the day to attend her English classes. All Swedes learn English at school and most speak it well, but Liv didn’t. Part of her reason for coming here was to acquire good idiomatic English, at least as good as her father’s.

I’ve mentioned the postwar houses, of which there are enclaves in Maida Vale, as if bits of suburbia had intruded to remind visitors that the suburbs proper would start a mile or so up the Edgware Road. It was in one of these houses, two-storied, detached, half-timbered, with a steep red-tiled roof, that Liv’s employers or “hosts,” as they called themselves, lived.

“As if I was a guest and didn’t work for them,” she said.