Below Stairs (14 page)

Although Lady Gibbons was an old cow, I usually only saw her in the mornings when she came down to give orders. She used to moan about some of the things I did. After I’d been there a week, for instance, she came down and looked at the kitchen table and she said to me, ‘Cook,’ she said, ‘this table’s getting awfully yellow.’ I said, ‘Is it? Must be the colour of the wood, M’Lady.’ So she said, ‘Well, it must have changed its colour since you came here then.’ But it didn’t dampen my spirits.

After I’d been there a few weeks, Jessica the housemaid left. The new parlourmaid, Olive, was only fifteen years old. A parlourmaid only fifteen years old, even under-parlourmaids are often older than that! Lady Gibbons generally got very young girls as housemaids or parlourmaids and what she called ‘trained’ them. She did this because she got them very much cheaper, and also because she was getting so well known among the fraternity of domestic servants that she couldn’t get anybody that was experienced.

Olive was a country girl. She came from a remote little village three miles from a railway station or a bus. She was exceptionally good-looking with beautiful eyes, lovely black hair, and with a most placid disposition. She needed it at Lady Gibbons’. She became a life-long friend of mine.

Sir Walter was a quiet man, he seemed to be sunk in reveries of past glories, and was oblivious to what went on around him. He’d been somebody abroad. I don’t quite know what. With the East India Company perhaps; he certainly had a brown complexion. Lady Gibbons would sometimes expound about Sir Walter, ‘When Sir Walter dined with the Maharajah . . .’, so I got the impression that he had been somebody at one time.

And I also got the impression that his marriage to Lady Gibbons had been his greatest mistake and had dragged him down socially. She spoke like a fishwife and seemed to have had no kind of education at all. Talk about Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’, she was it.

He only ever came to life at meal times. I remember Olive reporting to me that he had commented that good cooks were a dying race so he had a sense of humour. Looking back he needed it with some of the dishes I served. I remember another occasion. In that house the food lift was situated in the kitchen, and when pulled up went through the dining-room floor, thus noises in the kitchen could be heard. I’d been singing merrily all the evening as I sent up each course, and Sir Walter evidently couldn’t stand any more of it because he came to the lift and called down, ‘Cook, will you sing “God Save the King” and finish the concert?’

But Lady Gibbons used to impress all of us with the importance of her title. She used to say, ‘When you speak of me don’t call me Lady Gibbons, say “Her Ladyship”, and similarly when you’re speaking to Sir Walter, don’t say “Yes, Sir”, say “Yes, Sir Walter, No, Sir Walter”.’ One day Olive came down with a water jug on a salver, and she walked round the table saying, ‘Water, Sir Walter? Water, Sir Walter?’ much to our amusement.

Although there were only three in the family the work wasn’t all that easy. I still had to get up early to light the kitchen range; Sir Walter couldn’t have his bath until that range had been on some time. Then I had to get an early breakfast for the son, about half past seven in the morning. He went to business. Then there was our breakfast at eight o’clock, and Sir Walter and Lady Gibbons’ breakfast at nine. Then before she came down at ten to give the orders I had to scrub out the kitchen and the scullery, and tidy the servants’ hall and the larder, because she used to look at everything.

The parlourmaid, poor Olive, had plenty to do, especially in the winter when the coal fires had to be lit. She had to carry scuttles of coal from the basement to the ground floor for the dining-room, and to the first floor for the drawing-room. And they had a fire in the breakfast room as well. These three fires had to be lit every morning by eight, and only half a bundle of wood was allowed for each. Some mornings poor Olive could do it on her head, but other mornings when the wind was in the wrong direction she just couldn’t get them to go. She used to keep dashing up and down carrying cups of paraffin. And the tears ran down her face, mingling with the soot.

The housemaid was lucky, because they were so mean they never had fires in the bedrooms.

An odd thing happened there which I’ve never seen before or since. They used warming-pans. Now warming-pans really went out long before that time, but Lady Gibbons had two. One used to hang in the hall as an ornament, but into the other one we used to rake the hot coals from the range each night and run them over the beds. I used to think we were better off, because on winter nights I used to put bricks in the oven and we used to wrap them up in a bit of flannel and put them in our beds. Believe me, I am sure we used to have better benefit from those bricks than they did from their warming-pans.

There was only one attic room and Olive and I shared it. I could have had the room on the floor below, but I let the housemaid have that because I wanted to be as far away from ‘Them’ as I possibly could be. Lady Gibbons thought it was very unusual that the cook should share, because she always had a room of her own, and the housemaid and parlourmaid shared. But I preferred the attic.

At Lady Gibbons’ I had every Sunday afternoon and one afternoon a week off, as well as the whole day once a month that I’d stipulated. Olive only got alternate Sundays. But when it was possible we used to go out on Sunday afternoon together to a tea-dance. They sound quite hectic affairs and would be today probably, but then they were very innocuous dos. You mostly went with a partner. If you went with a girl you might have to dance with her all afternoon.

But you went there of course in the hopes of picking up a boyfriend. That was really the only opportunity you had of meeting one. If you went to watch a film, for instance, and a young man sat next to you and started nudging you and all that, you naturally thought the worst. Anyway, you could hardly see what he was like in the dark, and you couldn’t very well converse. When anyone nudged me he usually turned out to have a face like Frankenstein’s monster and morals of the farmyard, so I didn’t dare chance it often. But at a tea-dance you could study the opposite sex and if there was anyone you fancied you could go all out to get them. And believe me when we went all out we went all out.

You see I was determined to get married. I didn’t want to be an old maid. In those days people put on a very contemptuous expression when they talked about ‘being on the shelf’, or being a spinster. It meant you were lacking practically everything. Nowadays women who don’t get married have often had all the sex they want and all the security. They just don’t want to take a man for life, which I don’t blame them for in the least. But I needed one to support me. I couldn’t see myself being a cook for the rest of my time. I wanted one to take me on for life.

Olive, as well as being a good-looking girl, was an excellent dancer, far better than me, and as she was so attractive she always got plenty of partners. And the reason for her success was confidence.

She’d been brought up in a village and she’d always gone to the village dances. Parents used to take even their young children. So they learned early, and they had all the confidence in the world. I didn’t really know how to dance at all. I could never follow anyone. Being of a rather aggressive disposition, I was wanting to lug them around, instead of letting them take me around.

My only asset was that I could talk, and that’s a doubtful asset on a dance floor. People don’t go to dances for conversation, they go to dance and to see who they can collect to take home later. It really did me a disservice to be able to talk because I deviated from the norm in my conversation. It should go like this: the boy says to you, ‘Do you come here often?’ and you answer, ‘Oh yes, fairly often,’ then he says, ‘Lovely floor, isn’t it?’ then you say, ‘Oh yes, very springy.’ Then he’d say, ‘It’s a good band, isn’t it?’ and you answer, ‘Yes, it’s got good rhythm, hasn’t it?’ Instead I’d talk to my partners about historical London, or ask them if they read Dickens. They must have thought I was some kind of freak. They’d never even heard of Dickens, let alone read any of him.

I was beginning to lap up culture; even in those days I always found time for reading, I mean books that were worth reading.

Sometimes I would try talking about Conrad, books a boy would like, Henty even, or O. Henry. But they’d never read anything like that at all, and I’d get dropped like a hot cake.

But Olive, she was a soulful, sentimental sort of girl, and would gaze up into their faces with a loving expression and have all the right answers at the right times. And she was a good dancer as well.

I’ve always found that when two girls go around together one of them’s always more attractive than the other, and it was the same with Olive and me. She was much more attractive than I was. It’s the same when you collect two boyfriends, there’s one that’s handsome and the other who’s got a face like the back of a bus. I suppose it’s nature’s way of compensating.

Olive, although she’d come straight from the country and was only fifteen, used to collect boyfriends like bees round the proverbial honey pot. She knew how to talk to them too and keep them sort of dangling. There’s an art in that sort of thing.

Naturally I got the dud one. Sometimes he wouldn’t be too bad and I would think, well this is it. Another time it would be a receding chin, a vacuous kind of a creature, and I’d just stick him for one evening and then throw him up.

Although you may want to get married you’ve got to watch it. If you don’t like a weak-chinned, vacuous kind of an individual for even a few hours, you’re not going to want him sitting opposite you at the table every morning and every night of your life, are you? Olive used to say, ‘You’re too particular, what’s it matter? Have him until you find another.’ But how can you find another if you’re going out with the same one all the time? ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘you can.’ She could. As I say there’s an art in that kind of thing, I didn’t get to know it, I never had the social graces. When I moaned about one, Olive used to say, ‘Any port in a storm,’ but it was never as stormy as that at the age of eighteen. Later on when I did get married I got a reasonably good-looking one.

Although Olive must have had endless opportunities, she didn’t make the same mistake as Agnes. She seemed to have her head screwed on the right way. Again I put it down to village life.

Olive had been brought up in a Sussex village called Ripe. It sounds like a Cockney immoral assault. It wasn’t the same as villages nowadays, with the young people trying to get away at the earliest opportunity. They had a social life, and the centre was the village hall.

People used to take their children to the various functions, thus from a very early age they mixed with the opposite sex. So it was that Olive never got as embarrassed with the opposite sex as I did. It’s all very well to talk about country boys being yokels, but a boy’s a boy and a man’s a man in any place.

Another thing about a village is that if you put a foot wrong everyone knows about it – so you’re a bit careful where you tread. But if you do stumble there isn’t the condemnation you get in a town. People there live much closer to nature, and they know that when a boy and a girl get together things can and may happen. Mind you, if they did, the parents of the girl, if not of the boy, certainly expected him to marry her. Olive told me that many a girl that got married in white was already on the way to the family way. In fact, some people considered you a bit of a snob if you weren’t, after all babies were God’s gifts, the way they arrived was only incidental. And, village folk are in contact with the animals that are breeding all the time. In any case there’s very little else to do and the opportunities are so profuse, I mean you’re wandering round country lanes, there’s no lights, it’s pitch dark. Opportunity’s the great thing, isn’t it?

In a town it’s vastly different – it’s such an impersonal place, you don’t get the same chance to go out as a family; you don’t get to know the opposite sex. If you get pregnant the man can slip through the net and you’re left with a baby and the reputation ‘she goes with everyone’.

I once went to stay with Olive at Ripe. Now I’ve talked about the social advantages of village life – but living in a town certainly had compensations. To start with the village was three miles from the nearest bus stop, so that meant over an hour’s walk with my luggage. There was no water laid on, no electricity or gas, just oil lamps at night, and you washed yourself in an enamel basin on a built-up brick arrangement with a hole to get rid of the water – you tipped it down the hole and it just cascaded on the floor all over your feet if you didn’t stand back; I got caught by it the first time. You got water from a well in the garden. There was nothing to wind it up with, you just knelt on the ground and stuck the bucket in. It was full of little squiggly things that looked like tad-poles. Olive said they got boiled before you have them in tea. I thought I wasn’t very keen on boiled tadpoles. And everything tasted of smoke. Her mother only had an open fire to cook on.

I shared a bed with Olive, a lovely comfortable bed it was one of these feather mattresses you just shake up. I thought it was the last word in comfort. But there was the most terrible scratching noise going on overhead. I said to Olive, ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘Oh, it’s only a rat up in the roof.’
Only
a rat up in the roof! I nearly died. ‘Search the roof and get it out,’ I demanded. ‘It never comes out,’ she said, ‘it’s got a nest up there.’ I nearly passed out.

The sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive. They were right down the garden path, and believe me they needed to be. It was the most attractive place in the daylight overgrown with rambler roses, but when you went in! It was one of those awful arrangements which the man every so often had to dig out and bury. And it had one of those seats with two holes. The sort for Darby and Joan who couldn’t bear to be separated. Talk about two hearts that beat as one! Heaven knows it was lethal enough when only one had been in. I shouldn’t think two could have come out alive.