The arrival of the Monsoon in mid-October fills Indians with a renewed enthusiasm for life. The weather in the streets is formidable. A river runs down the main highway and, while the odd person laboriously pokes at a drain with a stick, others plough through the torrents dressed in plastic bags, apparently impervious to the inconvenience.

I succumb to monsoon fever and lie in bed listening to the sounds of India. The shout of the vegetable vendor, the constant honk of cars, the drawn-out cry of the garbage collector, the twitter of a group of babblers flitting across the red roof like a group of gossiping old ladies, and the clunk and whirr of the airconditioning units leaking their icy breath, and what not! The jangle of Cook Rita’s ankle bracelets reminds me of the daunting task ahead. Do I dare to go down and confront her over the evening dinner? Or will she as usual produce her famous chicken pie?

The first response from English people when I say I live in India is “you lucky thing, all those lovely staff to look after you”. Both Indians and Europeans will tell you straightaway that this is not the case. Employing, trusting, and retaining a staff in India is one of life’s biggest challenges.

I soon discovered that if you want anything done in India you have to go through someone else. It was our driver who proposed candidates for the interview process of Cook, Maid, Gardener, and Dhobi. In my naivety I employed the first people to come along.

Anyone who has read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier will be familiar with the wicked housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. From the moment Rita presented her tattered references from “That Madam”, she had the upper hand. She traded on my inexperience of Indian domestic staff and took advantage of my gullibility, but she made me laugh, and laughter is the best medicine for living in India.

For many hundreds of years, until the Great War, employing others to do your domestic duties was considered by the middle classes to be normal. In England, with the advent of World War II, all this changed and nowadays only 10 per cent, the elite, can afford to pay someone to clean their house. I was unfamiliar with a houseful of servants and it took me a month before I had the courage to leave the environs of my bedroom to confront the low level snipping and small but daily crisis that occurred between the different members of my household employees.

The Cook and the Dhobi were at war. The Dhobi was a cadaverous man, who biff, banged and walloped our clothes. During the monsoon season, the laundry was pale khaki, damp, limp and musty smelling. He had a huge charcoal iron, curved like the bow of a boat, the point of which could rip through my husband’s shirts in a most alarming way. It was not long before both collars and tempers were too frayed and the maid took over the laundry duties. Victory to the Cook.

The Cook and the Gardener were at war. He was a Hindu and she was a Catholic. She was a snob and he was from a lower caste. The staff lunches I had so cleverly instigated to bring all the staff together proved to be a dietary and social minefield. So, it was the rolling pin versus the scythe. The Cook had to go! The Gardener stayed.

Ramsi (I think that is his name) arrives at six-thirty every morning and drifts around the garden like a spectre, hacking the heads off the Bougainvillea when it is in flower. I have long since given up trying to impose my wishes on him and now that he has finally mastered the lawn mower we have the shortest lawn in Madras. He speaks no English and my Tamil is limited to a few words, one of which sounds distinctly like “Sorry” in English. Confusion over language can lead to many misunderstandings. Recently, when I asked him to paint one garden pot blue he took up the baton and ran with it. Next time I looked he had painted two hundred pots blue and seemed very pleased with his ingenuity.

The security guards, although technically not employed by us, have remained the same during the last ten years. When caught asleep they spring to attention and rush to the gates. I rather doubt their efficacy should an intruder appear. They do however refuse to walk our dog ‘Spicy’. This is pure snobbery because she is an Indian street dog. I receive stares of amazement as I walk her around the block, mainly from security guards dragging reluctant basset hounds or thick-coated retrievers and other pedigree pooches.

The staff regard us as their family and as such we provide for their families. We pay their children’s school fees. Help with their daughters’ dowries. (In an attempt to keep them out of the hands of rapacious moneylenders.) Assist with medical bills, and give time off for suspiciously numerous family fatalities.

The English have always been obsessed with class and taken a keen interest in the welfare of their staff. The runaway success of Downton Abbey is an example of the snobbery that is inherent in both the English and Indian middle classes, but the most famous of all master-servant relationships is PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster. It is clear that Jeeves controls his master’s life, despite Bertie’s incompetent attempts to assert his independence. Most of us enjoy the interplay between the Toffs and the working classes, and in many cases the working classes are portrayed as having more brains and savvy than their aristocratic, vacuous employers.

Servant is an unpalatable word; it has too many connotations with slavery, but it is an old English word for domestic worker. Employment of servants reached its peak in the Victorian Era and by the Edwardian times of the Raj in India and Imperialist Africa the relationship between staff and employer had become complex.

At this peak of employment the English established an elaborate sense of the etiquette between servant and employer, providing ostentatious costumes for their staff to define their role in a household. We no longer impose any of these restrictions on our staff; we provide new clothes at Diwali and treat them with the respect that they deserve as invaluable members of a working household.

Of course, the object of staff is to leave you free to do something more valuable with your time, like make money, or develop intellectual and creative talents. For many of the wives of the civil servants during the  time of the Raj in India running the staff proved to be an all-consuming mission, and to a degree it still is.

Having permanent help initially meant relinquishing my own high standards of cooking, gardening, and not least hygiene! Gradually I was able to incorporate my skills and their labour, and we both benefited from the experience.

When I arrived in India I was one of those foolish people who wanted to be liked (a very English trait), doing imaginary good deeds in a land of people, foreign in looks, language, religion, standards of living and ideals and customs. I am a guest in this ‘Incredible India’, but I will never understand its complexities.

My driver once said to me, “Mam, you and Sir are like my Gods.” I was horrified, for although I respect his loyalty, we are as fallible as the next human being. On one occasion we were forced to suspend him. He ignored the suspension. He still turned up for work every day, and every day I sent him away, until after two weeks I relented. Sometimes dealing with the staff is like having children; you need to be cruel to be kind.

Living together in one house we all share the daily burden of life in Madras, with its many contradictions. The delights and the disasters, the tears, and the laughter, but whatever the future brings, these people will have a special place in my heart.