[imagesource: Facebook]

Sarah Thomas (above) has spilt the tea on what it’s like to tutor the children of the ultra-wealthy.

The tutor-meets-author began life on an “unremarkable middle-class trajectory” getting an English degree at a top university and then an entry-level job in publishing before finding herself as a tutor speedboating across the Indian Ocean towards a giant superyacht.

While dreaming of writing a book one day, Sarah spent her days teaching the children of super-wealthy families, moving between classrooms that were on “yacht decks surrounded by dolphins, in Monaco penthouses with infinity pools, and in Mayfair townhouses with halls full of Mapplethorpe”, she writes in the British Vogue.

She even had the lux experience of working from an underwater hotel room in Dubai where sharks swam past the windows.

Her employers were mostly billionaires who had “made their money from sweatshops, from authoritarian regimes, and from tech companies with profits hidden safely offshore”.

She said the job constantly moved the mark on what was too extreme – I mean, nothing is off the cards for these wealthy families.

“I remember a ‘doctor’ fastening 20 electrodes to the skull of my pupil Cara, explaining that they’d help her—16, Prada-clad and passive—revise for her biology GCSE exam; Cara’s mother telling me that she’d flown him in from Zurich and that the electrodes would stimulate Cara’s ‘problem-solving brainwaves’ as she studied.”

Another parent hired a reflexologist to massage her kids’ pressure points before bed, while one mother fed her daughter so many vitamin supplements at breakfast that she felt nausea right up till the afternoon.

She was also subject to the strange antics of the wealthy mindsets, one even finding herself having to wear dirty clothes “after being told by one of the richest families in Europe that running the washing machine was ‘too expensive”:

“I remember one mother telling me, ‘Please, Sarah, when you aren’t teaching, either stay in your bedroom or leave the property. This is a family holiday.'”

…”On one particularly bad job, the housekeeper and I would sneak to the end of the driveway at night to share cigarettes. We had no common language, but one night she tapped some words into Google Translate: bad family.”

But the novelty wore off – “but it felt like the same place…be it a yacht off St. Barts or a chalet in Gstaad, it was all eerily the same” – and as such, Sarah’s novel came into being.

💎 WIN! 💎

We’re giving away a signed copy of the most buzzworthy debut of spring – @xxsarahxthomasx‘s incredible #QueenK.

To enter, follow us & RT by 4pm tomorrow. UK only. Good luck! Your yacht in the Maldives awaits… pic.twitter.com/icFJuukdIi

— Serpent’s Tail (@serpentstail) February 21, 2023

Queen K is inspired by her experience as a tutor for the children of billionaires:

“It started as texture. I blended what I had seen in the past 10 years, and characters began to form. At first this was no more than easy satire. But I remembered the woman who had told me not to use the washing machine, and little scenes I’d witnessed between her and her husband that gave me a sense—nothing I could put my finger on—of a darkness in their dynamic.”

Is it just me or can you hear the White Lotus soundtrack playing right now?

[source:vogue]