With four children under 11 and a deadline-driven job as a freelance journalist, I used to view impending school holidays with the kind of dread normally reserved for a trip to the dentist or an upcoming smear test.

Those long summer weeks often seemed like an exhausting balancing act between childcare and work where I always felt I’d failed at both.

Ensuring we had an au pair in our home for July and August (and sometimes the rest of the year, too) seemed the most cost-effective solution.

We had a spare room, and all it cost was £100 weekly ‘pocket money’. Classed as a cultural exchange, it’s seen as a reciprocal arrangement, where young people can immerse themselves in another culture and language. A win-win all round!

Except these things are, as I was soon to discover, rarely straightforward and, more often than not, a lot more hassle than they’re worth.

While my experiences didn’t quite match the horrors depicted in the Channel 5 series The Au Pair, starring David Suchet, I did encounter drama.

For starters, what no one tells you is that many au pairs don’t really want to look after children at all. In fact, they often don’t like them.

If you look on AuPairWorld – the main website for matching hosts with potential candidates – they all describe their ‘deep passion’ for childcare and how it is their life calling. Utter nonsense.

Shona Sibary with her four children. She also has a deadline-driven job as a freelance journalist

And I speak from experience, having burned through 14 au pairs over 14 years. I’ve had young people from Switzerland to South Africa, Poland to Portugal. The longest stayed a year, the shortest just 24 hours.

One of the first was a teenage French girl, Blandine – who, on her breaks, would insist on lying in the middle of the lawn in the back garden in a tiny bikini and then complain about the children being ‘too noisy’ on the trampoline, making it difficult for her to read her book.

I pointed out it was their back garden too, but the more she complained, the more the children wound her up, until it got to the point where they were treating her as an obstacle to be leapt over and accidentally-on-purpose aimed at with the hose.

She ended up staying just two weeks. I remember her calling her mother and wailing: ‘Maman, je deteste les enfants anglais!’

Another au pair, a girl from South Africa, would take my little brood into town in their bare feet. When I asked her why she never put shoes on them she told me: ‘They don’t need them. We never wear shoes in Africa.’

Later that night my husband Keith pointed out that I had wanted the children to embrace this cultural exchange, so what was I complaining about? Well… dog poo and broken glass for starters. In the end, we asked her to put them in flip-flops.

Indeed, it did sometimes feel that all I did was complain a lot. But as anyone who has ever had an au pair will know, the last thing you need is another child to look after. They are, after all, supposedly there to help you.

One Romanian girl, Silvie, who was just 18 (what was I thinking?), would regularly come into the kitchen in the mornings, eyes bleary and yawning.

I soon discovered that after we’d all gone to bed, she’d been driving our family Ford Galaxy from our home in Liphook, Surrey, 27 miles down the A3 to Portsmouth to dance the night away with naval petty officers.

She ‘fessed up when I got in the car one morning to find the petrol tank empty. She couldn’t see what my problem was. We ‘let her go’ soon afterwards.

Dutch au pair Lisa met George Best in a pub. They got chatting and soon the 21-year-old was sneaking sport’s greatest lothario into Shona's house. When the tabloid press got wind of the affair, Shona woke up one morning to find 15 paparazzi photographers outside her house

But this was nothing compared with Dutch au pair Lisa, 21, who arrived the following year and promptly got a bar job down the road to earn some extra money.

The pub she worked in was near Champneys health spa where football legend George Best was residing following his divorce in 2004. What happened next truly beggars belief. They got chatting over the bar, and soon Lisa was sneaking sport’s greatest lothario into my house.

Their affair went on for several weeks before the tabloids got wind of it, and I woke up one morning to find 15 paparazzi photographers outside.

Lisa was sacked from her job at the pub (but not by me, because she was actually a pretty good au pair) and sadly left Liphook the next day never to return.

George Best sent her a card that arrived in the post shortly afterwards which she asked me to open. It said: ‘I get a kick out of you.’ Funny. But by then I wasn’t really laughing.

Another Romanian girl stayed just two days after taking an inexplicable dislike to me, and left a letter on my bed saying: ‘This is too hard. I quit.’

The next day my husband drove her to the station and gently suggested she might be better off with a different kind of job. Her answer was: ‘Perhaps you’d be better off with a different kind of wife.’

At this point I decided that female au pairs were too much trouble. Busy, frazzled working mothers don’t want to have to be filling hot water bottles when their au pair has her period, or passing tissues when she breaks up with her boyfriend.

So I changed tack and decided a male au pair was the way to go.

For starters, these young men find it much harder to get childcare and so are grateful to be asked. Secondly, they’re less hormonal and hopefully less interested in lusty old footballers.

After going though 14 au pairs, Shona decided she’d had enough of cultural exchanges, and switched back to muddling through the school holidays with kids’ clubs and calling in favours

I envisaged a rugged type who would spend all day outside running the children ragged. What I actually opened my front door to was an immaculately dressed French boy, in his early 20s, called Fabien, in designer trainers and a manbag. ‘Is he gay?’ my eldest, Flo, whispered.

He wasn’t – one of his main motivations for spending a summer as an au pair was, sweetly, to impress his fiancee – but he wasn’t the alpha male I was expecting. He spent more time in front of the mirror than the entire family put together.

I often think back to Fabien and worry that we probably put him off marriage and children for life. Although, to give him credit, he did last the whole summer.

It’s important to remember the au pairs who survived with smiling faces. After Fabien came Aron from Hungary and then Tomas from Poland. Both lovely boys with ‘can-do’ attitudes.

But the successes were, sadly, few and far between. I had my last au pair when my youngest, Dolly, was five and Flo 16. We decided we’d had enough of cultural exchanges, and switched back to muddling through the school holidays with kids’ clubs and calling in favours.

My mother used to have a saying that house guests are like fish – they go off after three days. It’s a salutary lesson in not overstaying your welcome.

For me, the same applies to au pairs. One or two months is probably perfect. Any longer and you’ll find yourself willing them to leave and deciding that, quite probably, looking after your own children isn’t so bad after all.