Below Stairs (11 page)

Gladys and I were avid readers of those women’s magazines of the time; things like
Peg’s Paper
,
The Red Circle Magazine
, and the
Red Heart
. Between their pages many a poor and lonely heroine ended up marrying some Rudolph Valentino sort of man, or a Rothschild with loads of money. Of course the girl, in spite of her upbringing, always had a lovely almond-shaped face and beautiful liquid violet eyes, and although Gladys and I hadn’t got these attributes, it didn’t prevent us from dreaming that we had and that one day our prince would come. My idea of heaven at that time was a place where there was absolutely no work to do.

Gladys had a very vivid imagination, maybe Stepney is a place where vivid imagination is the only thing that keeps you going. She used to be able to rattle off details of an imaginary job to any boyfriends that she got to know. It was useless for me to pretend that I did any other sort of work except physical work because my hands were always so red and raw, and that was a dead give-away. How could they be anything else because there weren’t rubber gloves in those days, or if there were kitchen maids didn’t wear them, and barrier-cream certainly hadn’t been invented. Even if it had, by the time I’d done the front stone steps and the brass in the morning and all the washing-up that followed done in strong soda water, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

I think one of the things I hated most was doing the steps with hearthstone. Nowadays if you do hearthstone your steps, and not many people do, you can buy it in a packet of powder, but we used to have a big lump like a beach stone, and had to rub it hard on the steps. There you were in a sacking apron with your bottom sticking out and the errand boys throwing cheeky remarks at you. In the beginning I tried to do the steps from the bottom one up, but I couldn’t because I tipped forward. They had to be done from the top down.

Another pet hate was cleaning the copper saucepans. Every time they were used they got filthy. All the bright polish would be tarnished after every meal. They had to be cleaned with a horrible mixture of silver sand, salt, vinegar, and a little flour. You mixed all this into a paste and then rubbed it on with your bare hands. You couldn’t put it on with rags because you couldn’t get the pressure that way, you dug your hand into the tin where you had previously mixed it all up and you rubbed it on the copper outside. It was a foul job. Every morning I had to do it. Mind you they looked lovely when I’d done them, they used to hang all along the wall in the kitchen, right from the very tiniest little saucepan, which didn’t hold more than a teacup full, to the most enormous one in which you could put three Christmas puddings side by side. And there was a big fish-kettle as well. I used to get so miserable sometimes that I used to wish that they’d all get ptomaine poisoning from them. I was always being told that if I didn’t clean them properly they’d get ptomaine poisoning. If they had they might have changed their saucepans.

They did eventually change them I heard afterwards because the new kitchen maid flatly refused to clean them. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d refused to. I suppose they’d just have given me a month’s notice.

After I’d been there a year I did give in my notice, and a very nerve-racking procedure that was. First, of course, I had to tell Mrs Bowchard, the cook, and that brought on, as I knew it would, a long diatribe on the ingratitude of young people in general and kitchen maids in particular. ‘You train them,’ she moaned, ‘and for what? As soon as they’ve picked your brains they go off somewhere else.’ She continued in this strain for some moments, glaring at me all the time.

It was a lot of tripe. She never taught me how to do any of her special dishes, the things I really wanted to know. All the ordinary stuff you can pick up out of a book, but every good cook has specialities with that little something that’s not in any cookery book. Many a time I’d ask her what made a particular thing taste like this or how it turned out like that, but she would never tell me, ‘that’s the cook’s secret’, she would say. It was most unfair because when you go as kitchen maid you’ve taken the worst job in the house, you work harder than anyone else and you wait on servants because you eventually hope to have the best job in the house, the cook’s. So it really is up to the cook, if you are doing a good job for her, to return it by helping you.

Anyway, my notice. I got over the ordeal of telling her. The next thing of course was to see Madam. I really don’t think there was much to choose between them, they were both terrifying ogres as far as I was concerned. But the performance when you want to see Madam and you are only a kitchen maid! First you’ve got to ask the parlourmaid to ask Madam if she could spare you a few minutes of her time, and you have to say it in the tone of voice that shows you know Madam’s time is so very precious.

During the year that I’d worked there I don’t think that I’d seen Madam more than a dozen times, because when Mrs Bowchard knew that she was coming down to the kitchen, if I looked particularly scruffy which of course I often did, she’d just shoo me out until Madam had gone. No one considered that the reason why the kitchen looked so clean, the table white as snow, and the copper saucepans as burnished gold, was the reason you were so scruffy. So, as I say, I really only saw Madam about a dozen times and even then I don’t think she saw me. She didn’t appear to because she looked right through me.

Anyway, through the parlourmaid Madam graciously gave me an audience at ten o’clock the next morning and I gave her a month’s notice. She naturally wanted to know the reason, ‘Aren’t you happy here?’, with the slightly indignant air that meant how could anyone work in her house and not be happy? And, ‘You wouldn’t find a better place anywhere’, and she was sure I must have learnt a lot. I said that the work was too hard and the hours were too long. Well, much to my astonishment she said she’d get help for me, that if would stay on she would get an odd-job man to help out. I would still have preferred to leave, but I was so overcome anyone really wanting me that I couldn’t get over it. I found myself agreeing to stay, and I even said that I liked the job.

I must have been stark raving mad. But you see no one had ever wanted me to stay before except one boyfriend, and I knew what he wanted me to stay for.

Even Mrs Bowchard, that old harridan of a cook, looked slightly less grim when I told her that Madam had asked me to stay on. She said, ‘Is she giving you more money?’ I’ll bet if I’d said yes she’d have been up there herself the following day. So I said, ‘No, she isn’t giving me any more money but I’m going to have an odd-job man to help out.’ Of course, she had to say, ‘Girls aren’t what they used to be in my days, you all want pampering now. But never mind,’ she went on, ‘it’s better than having to train another girl. I’d sooner you stayed than have to start all over again. When you’ve had one kitchen maid you’ve had them all.’ On she went. I’d heard it all before. I didn’t take any notice.

Anyway, every morning except Sunday we used to have a man called Old Tom. I don’t know if he had a surname, we only knew him as Old Tom. He used to come in at six o’clock and he worked for an hour and a half, and I can’t tell you what bliss it was not to have to go out and do those front steps. It didn’t matter Old Tom doing them. Nobody throws ribald remarks at a man scrubbing with his rear sticking up to high heaven. He used to do the boots and shoes, and get all the coal in as well, it was absolute heaven. I stayed there another year after that, I didn’t find it nearly so hard. It was too good to be true.

18

E
VERYTHING NOW
went on very much the same in the house – the same routine broken by dinner parties and ‘at homes’.

The ‘at homes’ didn’t really affect me, not workwise, but they interested me. Everybody used to have them once a month – Mrs Cutler’s used to be on the first Thursday, and there’d be a constant procession from half past three to about five. Mostly women, but a few gentlemen – they’d just come in, say, ‘How do you do?’, have a cup of tea, and rush off again, presumably to someone else’s ‘at home’. ‘Keeping in the swim’ I suppose they called it.

In the swim! The parlourmaids I know would have liked to have pushed their heads under and drowned them. The parlourmaids had to do all the work; cutting platefuls of thin bread and butter and anointing them with some stuff called Gentlemen’s Relish. I don’t know if you can still get it, or why it was called that. I didn’t like the nasty salty stuff. I suppose it gave gentlemen a thirst for the drinks they had at around half past five.

Madam was always on the look-out for new ideas for these ‘at homes’, and used to badger the cook and parlourmaids. Sort of putting one over on the Joneses. I suppose they still do it today at debs’ dances – trying to get the latest beat band, and things like that.

But it didn’t affect me like the dinner parties. Although it meant a lot of extra work and a bad-tempered Mrs Bowchard, there was always a sense of ‘occasion’ about these dinner parties. You could feel it in the kitchen, but you could see it upstairs.

I always used to try and pop up to the dining-room before dinner. The table would be laid out with a lace cloth that was a family heirloom, it was a wonderful thing, all handmade, and you can imagine the size it was to stretch out on to a dining-room table that had two more leaves put in it. It was the most marvellous one of its kind I’ve ever seen. In the centre was a crystal epergne, the silver was all Georgian. With that, and the two crystal chandeliers with the candles lit, it used to look like a scene from the Arabian nights.

I do think that when you had a cloth on, even if it wasn’t a lace cloth but a snowy white damask, it looked a lot better than all these bits and dabs of mats do today, stuck all over the table.

Mrs Bowchard was never the soul of amiability, but on a dinner party day she was something too terrible for words. A sort of aura of grimness and unapproachability enveloped her. You would have thought she was cooking for Buckingham Palace and a regiment of Guards all at once. It used to make the work that much harder. But the most exciting part about these dinner parties was the chauffeurs who used to bring the guests. They would stay and sit in our servants’ hall while their employers were upstairs.

You never saw such a fluttering in the dovecote as there used to be on these occasions. There we were, six or seven of us women who hardly ever spoke to a man and whose femininity was so suppressed that we got to be like female eunuchs. We would suddenly realize that we’d got a sex, that we were real females. So noses would be powdered, hair all fripped up, and waists pulled in. People had waists in those days, there were none of these shifts. Bosoms were stuck out, and rears stuck out, so if you pulled the waist in, you looked like an hourglass, but it was fashionable then. Even Flora, the head parlourmaid, and Annie, the head housemaid, both well over forty and resigned to a life of spinsterhood, would become one of the girls for the night. Our servants’ hall would be a sort of magnet for the females, even the sewing-maid and the nursemaid would find some excuse or other to come down. And all because of these chauffeurs in their uniforms.

Probably they were the most nondescript collection of men in private life. It’s like the soldiers in the war, isn’t it? They all looked so handsome when they were wandering around in uniform, but if you met them in civvies you wouldn’t cross the road to speak to them, well half of them anyway, especially the American ones.

To Gladys and me these chauffeurs looked simply wonderful, and to be actually able to speak to these hundred-percent men in leggings was something too glorious for words.

It’s a sad fact that uniform does nothing for a woman at all, it just accentuates all the wrong bulges, but even the most insignificant male seems to look masculine when he’s got a uniform on. Maybe because it’s cut to show off whatever points he has got (I’m not being vulgar), I mean to accentuate them.

They were, of course, delighted to be the centre of interest. What man wouldn’t be if he had five or six females fluttering around him, plying him with biscuits, and cups of tea, and hanging on to his words with bated breath. Men are very susceptible to flattery. Even a man with a face like the back of a bus, if you tell him he doesn’t look too bad, believes you. You can stuff men up with any old yarn. They believe anything. You’ve only got to gaze into their eyes, and sound as though you mean what you say. I’ve tried it so I know it’s true.

They used to tell scandalous stories about the gentry. Anybody upstairs was called the gentry in those days. We would hear all about their employers. The good, the bad, the spicy. They used to talk about their affairs. A lot of the male gentry had what was known in those days as a love nest, a flat they’d set up for some woman, and the chauffeurs used to drive them to it. That was really the extent of their knowledge. They never went into the flat, they never actually knew what went on. But to listen to them you would have thought that they’d partaken of the love feast. Using the royal ‘we’ like Mrs Bowchard’s brother-in-law, they would take us through the whole ceremony in all its amorous detail. They couldn’t have known it but, I suppose, it wasn’t hard to surmise.

In any case some of them were chauffeur/valets and I’ve no doubt were looked upon as a sort of respository of secrets by their employers. They knew that they were never likely to talk on social terms to anyone that mattered, and it probably got it off their conscience if they had one. Anyway, men like to talk about that sort of thing.

I used to work for a man myself who had a little place on the seafront. And when the rest of the family were in London he often used to pop down and go round to this little love nest.

People used to expect it of men. Mind you, if it was a woman doing it . . . Now there’s the unfairness of life, you couldn’t set up a love nest for a man, and yet maybe you would like to. It’s like those ‘red light’ districts, isn’t it? Why should men have the advantages in their sexual life? When all’s said and done women can have husbands who don’t supply enough, and I think there should be places where they can go where all the men have been vetted and are ready to oblige for a small fee. We are the underprivileged sex, really and truly, in every way of life.