A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (7 page)

In the nursery, home remedies would be doled out for those feeling poorly – Kepler’s Malt, cod liver oil and milk of magnesia were all kept in the cupboard. Bumps and bruises were treated with Pond’s Extract and Pommade Divine, both of which sound suspiciously like face cream and hair oil and may have been similarly as effective. Food was delivered up to the nursery, but nannies and cooks famously fought, with furious notes sent downstairs: ‘The children cannot be expected to eat this.’ Nursery food was just as one might expect – soft, hot and milky. One woman recalled from her childhood ‘a good deal of porridge, bread and butter, hot buttered toast and a great many milk puddings … On better days there was roly-poly (suet) pudding … and spotted dog, a suet-y sausage stuffed with currants. Also, treacle tart, pancakes, apple charlotte and the dizzy delight of chocolate eclairs.’

An advertisement for baby milk from 1925.

One nanny, when taking the children to stay at their grandparents’ house, instructed the cook that her charges would eat ‘porridge with thick cream … followed by bread which has been well soaked in whipped egg and then fried. On this they have little rolls of bacon. Mid-morning they have fruit … usually apple well shredded. Lunch at one sharp, they have jellied or clear soup, fish or chicken to follow then a milk pudding to finish. For tea at four o’clock, bread and butter, little sandwiches of jam and a sponge cake.’ It all sounds rather delicious to me, but the children may not have had much choice as to whether or not they were going to eat it.

Stuffed with food, the babies would be rolled out for a walk in their perambulators dressed in – to our modern eyes – extraordinary outfits. Despite those past generations being used to freezing-cold houses (no central heating, remember), there seems to have been a real fear of a child catching a chill when they went outside. Whether hot or not, until 31 May, an infant would typically be dressed in a vest, a woolly binder (a sort of soft baby corset, to keep the tummy warm), mackintosh knickers over the cloth nappy, wool knickers, a voluminous starched petticoat, a robe and finally a pelisse (a long-sleeved cotton coat) with a big cape collar.

Comfort food for children and grown-ups alike, ‘eggy bread’ is a great standby dish for breakfast, tea or indeed any other time of day. Serve with bacon or fresh fruit, or spread with jam – or just as it is.

SERVES 1 ADULT AND 2 CHILDREN

Crack the eggs into a wide, shallow bowl. Add the milk and whisk well with a fork. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat a frying pan over a medium heat and add a knob of butter. Slide a piece of bread into the egg mixture, coating it all over. When the butter is sizzling, place the eggy bread in the pan and fry for a few minutes on each side until golden. Repeat with the other slices of bread, adding more butter for frying if necessary.

Transfer the French toast on to plates, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and cut into triangles or fingers to serve.

Traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday, pancakes are a way of using up any milk, butter and eggs in the house before the abstinence of Lent. These are the thin, French-style crêpes which were popularised in England in the eighteenth century.

MAKES 12–14

Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Make a well in the middle of the flour and break the eggs into it. Add half the milk and start to whisk the eggs and milk with a balloon whisk, gradually incorporating the flour from the edges. Pour in the rest of the milk and carry on whisking until you have a smooth batter.

Heat a frying pan over a medium heat and add a knob of butter. Swirl it around until melted and then pour any excess into a saucer, leaving just a coating of grease in the pan.

When the pan is nice and hot (but not smoking), pour a ladleful of batter into the pan and tilt the pan from side to side so the batter runs evenly over the surface. As the pancake starts to set, lift the edges with a spatula and when it looks golden and lacy underneath (this should take no longer than a minute), flip it over using the spatula. Cook for less than a minute on the other side and then slide on to a warm plate.

Continue to cook the pancakes in this way and pile them up on the plate, covered with a clean tea towel to keep warm.

Serve with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of sugar.

The nurseries themselves varied, of course, from house to house. Children’s nursery furniture was expensive to buy but ravishing, such as elaborately built dolls’ houses with their own custom-made exquisite furniture. In her memoir
A Nice Clean Plate
Lavinia Smiley tells us that the nursery at Parham had its own pantry, a lift to bring food from the kitchen, a telephone, a rocking horse, a piano and toys, clothes and medicines, ‘all of it as bright and pleasant as could be’. You can see how some of these childishly pleasant nurseries, even the ones less elaborately tricked out, were preferable to the chilly atmosphere of the parents’ drawing room.

All children must grow up and eventually Sybbie and George will need to be educated. Generally, children were educated at home until the boys were sent to boarding school at around the age of six or seven. Few aristocratic girls went to school, although some of the cleverer ones might have demanded it. Instead they were taught by governesses – a tradition that was beginning to die out by the 1930s, although not completely for some while after that.

It stands to reason that the education a girl received was only as good as the governess that taught them, and this standard varied wildly. While education for upper-class boys and young men had long been taken seriously in schools such as Eton, Winchester, Harrow and Ampleforth, that of the girls was less well established. Schools for girls were far from non-existent – there were some well-known good ones, such as Sherborne School and Cheltenham Ladies’ College, as well as many Catholic convent schools – but they tended to focus on music, dancing, languages and social skills rather than aiming to get their pupils into university, where they might study medicine or law. Upper-class young ‘gels’ were still largely expected to acquire their position in life through their marriages rather than their careers. Of course, for many, after the First World War, marriage simply wasn’t an option; the 1921 census made it clear – there were nearly two million more women than men. Yet, for the majority, their education had prepared them for little else. Despite this, in the 1920s, university became an increasingly popular option for the female sex – of the 1,679 people that obtained degrees in 1922, 20 per cent were women.

A watercolour sketch of Eton College, 1880.

Amongst the working classes, education had steadily improved since the 1870 Forster’s Education Act, which filled in the gaps where existing school provisions were inadequate. Constant amendments to educational law and discussions led by the likes of Keir Hardie, arguing that education should be free and open to all, encouraged many families to send their children to school. This meant that even the likes of Daisy, born at the very tail-end of the 1890s and the lowest of the low in the social scale, would have had basic literacy and numeracy skills.