No, the real issue was the fact that she was not Polish after all… but Moldovan. And therefore illegal. ‘Did you not check?’ Ralph had demanded, when I had confessed that I had sneaked a look at her bag in her room to see if there were illegal drugs in it, or anything that could explain Ana’s total disconnect with the real world, and found a Moldovan passport.

When I told the children, Mirabel was fairly beady, too, especially after I confessed that I had hired Ana after reading her profile on a website. ‘I can’t believe, Mum, after, like, how you totally go on and on at me about chatting to people I don’t know online, that you actually bring a complete stranger you’d met on the internet to come and actually live with us, in our house,’ she chided me. ‘I mean, get real, Mum.’

So now Ana was leaving, I embraced her warmly. ‘I hope you get a great job in London,’ I’d said. ‘There are more Poles in London.’ (We were still going with the pretence that Ana was Polish – it was much too late to stop now.) ‘In fact, there are almost more Poles than Londoners, they should put the street signs in Polish, like they do in Chinatown.’

‘Yes,’ she had replied, watching the noticeboard announcing the usual raft of delays and cancellations, as if her eyes left it for a second, she would fail to make her break for the border.

Then the train had arrived, and I thought it was pretty nice of me, in the circs, to have gone along with the whole Ana thing to the extent I did. It was now definitely time for me to hire a jolly, tanned, cheerful, muscle-bound Aussie who would play… football with Cas, of course! And teach him how to surf, and say, ‘No worries, mate,’ when I asked him to do things like scour the glory-hole, or clean the bootroom floor for the first time in, oh, probably only about four centuries.

So I had composed an ad.

Sporty manny required for three children including cricket-mad 12-year-old boy. Must speak English as first language and love the countryside. Light household duties. Own room and bathroom and weekends free. Pay negotiable. Driver necessary.

I sat back, smugly, and waited for the tanned beach-blond dudes, all of whom came from huge families and fab gene pools, had experience with ‘kids’, lifesaving, summer camps and emergency first aid, and who arrived with their own camper vans, surfboards, guitars and the Jack Johnson songbook, to reply in their thousands.

The telephone rings in the kitchen.