The Real Mona, by Penny Hancock
Fatima has a broad, open, expressive face
and hands that dance and mime and add emphasis to everything she says. She wears a headscarf and tells me how this can
put potential employers off. One employer even asked her to take off her
headscarf while she was working for her.
‘I just don’t understand it. I wasn’t
asking her to cover herself!’ she laughs.
Fatima was forced to seek domestic work
after her father died, her mother required expensive medication and her younger
sisters needed feeding and clothing.
Domestic work was one of the few options available to Fatima as she had
left school at fourteen – her parents hadn’t been able to pay for the books
required for schooling in her country.
Eventually she found a domestic placement
in Dubai, hundreds of miles from her own country, putting all her savings into
the cost of the ticket. The family gave her a two year contract – a stipulation
being that she wouldn’t be allowed to leave until she had worked out the
contract and paid for it. The wife expected Fatima to work all hours. ‘It was
as if she didn’t have her own pair of hands,’ Fatima tells me. ‘She relied on
me for absolutely everything – washing, shopping, cooking, cleaning, taking
care of the kids. When my mother fell critically ill and I asked to borrow the
air fair to go and visit her, she said she couldn’t cope without me and refused
to let me go.’
Fatima’s mother died before she ever saw
her again. Tears come to her eyes as she relates this heart-breaking story to
me. ‘My employer could NOT put herself
in my shoes or see me as a person. I was her chattel, so she treated me as if I
didn’t have feelings, as if I wasn’t another human being.’
Fatima worked out her two year contract and
traveled to the UK with the family from Dubai but left them when her contract
was up finding a job with an English family. But her new employer wasn’t much
better.
‘She wouldn’t let me out of the house’ Fatima
recalls. ‘She said if I went outside
without permission the police would catch and arrest me.’
And this is another aspect of the domestic
workers lot that makes them vulnerable to exploitation – they are terrified of
being found to be in the country of employment illegally. Their experience of
police may be a lot more frightening than ours. They fear imprisonment or
deportation, or worse, if they are discovered to be without documents. For this
reason, many are afraid of losing even the most degrading jobs – it is safer to
be working like a slave and sending a meager wage home to a needy family than to
be picked up as an illegal immigrant.
The
Darkening Hour is based on a story I read in the
paper, about a domestic worker treated as a slave by her highly educated
British employer. I wanted to explore the motivation behind the employer’s
abuse, and to imagine the possible dark consequences. Mona, my migrant domestic
worker who comes to help over-stretched radio presenter Theodora Gentleman is a
fictional character. But I was helped
enormously in my research by women such as Fatima who shared their stories with
me. I would like to pay homage to them, to thank them for what they gave both in
time and in their confidence in me.
Her story is both shocking and impressive. Since
she arrived in Britain, she has been studying journalism on her one day off a
week so that she can – in her own words and in a language that she has,
amazingly, learnt to speak, read and write since she first set out as a barely-educated
domestic worker – write her own incredible story.
(Fatima’s name has been changed).
