Below Stairs (15 page)

But it was Olive’s home and she was very happy there.

They used to say in towns about villages that everyone knew your business; of course, everybody
does
, but you know their business too, so it’s one close-knit community which I think is a good thing. I live in a town, and I couldn’t even tell you the names of the people that live two or three doors up the road. Nobody speaks to anybody and it’s considered the greatest compliment if you’re known as a person who keeps herself to herself. But this kind of attitude doesn’t help herself to get herself a himself, does it?

21

A
S TIME
went on Lady Gibbons was getting more and more morose. I think by the things she let drop that money was rather tight, and that Sir Walter had made some rather unfortunate investments. Perhaps that was why she was so mean, that there really wasn’t very much money.

When Christmas came round I had to cook a turkey and I made a very sad job of it. I couldn’t get on with that kitchen range, either I made it too hot, or it wasn’t hot enough. This time it was too hot and the turkey got burnt. I scraped it all off as much as I could with the nutmeg grater, I put brown breadcrumbs over the worst of the burns. I hoped for the best and I sent it upstairs. I expected to hear an explosion of rage from Sir Walter, through the service lift. But all was quiet. When Olive came down I said, ‘Didn’t he say anything?’ ‘Not a thing,’ Olive replied. ‘What about her?’ I said. Olive said, ‘Well, her face changed colour a bit, she turned it around, and she looked at it from all angles, but nothing was said, not from any of them.’ So when two or three days had gone by and Lady Gibbons had still said nothing, I began to think that perhaps it had been all right.

But on the fourth morning, out of the blue, old Lady Gibbons said to me, ‘Cook, whatever happened to the turkey?’ I said, ‘Turkey, M’Lady?’ She said, ‘Yes, turkey.’ So I said, ‘Well, it did get a bit burned.’ So she said, ‘A bit burned! It was just like a cinder, and when Sir Walter went to cut it, the flesh just fell off.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s a sign of it being tender.’ ‘It wasn’t a sign of it being tender with your turkey,’ she said. ‘It’s a pity we’re not all vegetarians, because that’s the only thing you can cook.’ So I said, ‘Well, your Ladyship, that brings me to a matter I wanted to speak to you about.’ I noticed she went pale at this – she thought I was going to give in my notice and that most obviously wouldn’t have suited her. Burnt offering was better than no burnt offering. ‘It’s this,’ I said. ‘I thought that I might take a few cookery lessons in the afternoons.’

I really had thought about this and the turkey sort of sealed matters. You see it had been my biggest failure and after all turkeys do cost a lot of money. The wretched bird was on my conscience. ‘That’s a very good idea,’ she said, her face relaxing and the colour coming back into it. Then her jaw stiffened. ‘But you’ll have to pay for them yourself, of course.’ That leopard couldn’t change her spots either.

I looked around and settled upon a place with the title of ‘Léon’s Grand School of Continental Cookery’. It was a very imposing building from the outside, though afterwards I discovered that the part he had was very small indeed, just one large room in a very decayed condition. But the lessons were cheap, 2
s
6
d
for a class lesson and 5
s
for a private one. I took the six class lessons first.

Monsieur Léon was middle-aged with a head of bushy hair which he covered with one of those tall chefs’ hats. He certainly looked professional, and there’s no getting away from the fact that he was a good cook. He taught us to make some marvellous things out of very little. This pleased Lady Gibbons.

For instance one of the lessons was making puff pastry. It rose as high as I’ve ever seen pastry rise, and yet he used margarine. Mind you, he never let us taste it which was probably as well.

All the time he was teaching he’d keep up a running commentary like these French people are supposed to do. ‘Voilà’, he’d say, and ‘Comme ci, comme ça’, and ‘oui, oui’. Well, I didn’t even know what they meant, but it sounded frenchy to me, so I took it at its face value.

When I had my first private lesson I went round to the back of his table and got in close contact with his two gas-stoves and the things that were around them. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life! There were saucepans galore, with bits of food in them that must have been there from time immemorial, and there was enough penicillin in those saucepans to cure a hospital I should think, if they’d known about penicillin then. The frying-pans were stuck on to the gas stoves by congealed fat and the smell, well the smell just finished me off. ‘Monsieur Léon,’ I said, ‘it’s all bloody filthy,’ then I fainted, absolutely passed out on the floor.

When I came to Monsieur Léon was bending over me giving me a drop of brandy, and himself about half a glass. He was talking in a voice from which all trace of French accent had gone. I said to him, ‘Monsieur Léon, you’re no more French than I am.’ ‘Course I’m not,’ he said, and then under the influence of the brandy he became very confidential. ‘I was in the cookhouse in France during the war doing army cooking,’ he said. ‘That gave me the rudiments of it, then I deserted. I had a girl there, we got married as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘Well, she up and left me afterwards, but I’d picked up quite a bit about cooking. Then I came back to England,’ he said, ‘and I set up this place.’ ‘What is your real name?’ I said. ‘Percy Taylor,’ he said. ‘How could I have started – Percy Taylor’s School of Continental Cookery? I wouldn’t have got a single pupil, so I called myself Léon and I used some of the French words I’d picked up. I used to know a lot more but I’ve forgotten them now.’ ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘and you’ve probably forgotten your French cooking.’ Anyway, that was the last time I went to him. Lady Gibbons had to make do with cooking à la Margaret.

One thing she and many like her couldn’t abide was breakages. In domestic service breakages are an occupational hazard particularly when you’ve got a lot of washing-up to do. But no one would recognize this, Lady Gibbons least of all. It was always the same when I dropped anything. ‘What is it this time, cook?’ I’d tell her. ‘Oh no, not that,’ as though ‘that’ was her dearest possession. Now it’s a peculiar thing; in all my years of domestic service I noticed that it didn’t matter what got broken, it was always something that Madam ‘particularly treasured’, or it ‘cost a lot of money’, or it was ‘a family heirloom’, or it was ‘irreplaceable’, or it had ‘sentimental value’; it was never just an ordinary thing that you could go to the shop and buy. It used to remind me of a furniture remover who was packing china and broke a plate. And the owner said, ‘Oh dear, that plate was over a hundred years old,’ so the fellow said to her, ‘Oh was it? Well, it was high time it went then, wasn’t it?’

One morning Lady Gibbons came down and announced that the family would be going into the country for two months, somewhere in Yorkshire, and the house was going to be shut up. She said she’d found another place for Olive with a friend. I was astonished at Olive letting her find a place for her. Nothing would have induced me to work for a friend of Lady Gibbons because very often you find that people’s friends are very much like them. She said she was going to take me with them. There was a cook there already and I was to be the house parlourmaid.

All this without so much as ‘by your leave’, and do you mind having your status changed, and do you mind going to Yorkshire? What did she think I was, some chattel that she could move around? I was determined that nothing on earth would induce me to go to Yorkshire, not even if she was to offer me double money. Not as parlourmaid. I would have suffered agonies of embarrassment having to serve at table; I suffered agonies just going in the room where they were, never mind waiting at table on them.

When I told her I didn’t want to leave London she said that this place where they were going was right in the heart of the country, in beautiful surroundings. If only she’d have known that settled it for me. I’d had enough of the country when I stayed at Olive’s place.

I could imagine Yorkshire. I visualized some spot right in the middle of the moors, and me stuck there with old Sir Walter and Lady Gibbons. I disliked the country in any case, for when you’ve seen one cow, or one tree, you’ve seen them all in my opinion. A cow’s got four legs, a tree’s got branches, but they don’t do anything, do they? I like talk, people, and things that move around with a purpose.

When old Lady Gibbons realized that I was determined not to go, she wanted to get me a temporary job; you see she wanted someone to come back to. The fact that otherwise she’d have to give me a whole eight weeks’ holiday with pay was nearly killing her. Anyway I said, ‘Well, I’m very sorry, M’Lady, I don’t care for temporary work. I’ll take it, but if the position suits I would feel I would have to stay. So I shouldn’t rely on me being here when you get back.’ That was enough for her, I knew she wouldn’t let me go.

She didn’t say anything then, she had to make it look as if
she
’d made the decision, but the next day she came down, and said that Sir Walter and she had thought that under the circumstances it would be better not to shut the house down, and that I could stay to keep an eye on it; I could live at home if I wanted to. She would pay me my wages and fifteen shillings a week board. That was just fine. I got two months’ holiday with pay. Something unheard of. I was in the seventh heaven.

The strange part was that when she came back I only stayed another four months. Perhaps I’d got used to not working there. When I gave in my notice I said that the doctor felt it wasn’t good for my health living in a dark basement with the light on all day.

When you gave in your notice, you always tried to give the impression that you were loath to leave, you just had to make it seem that you were sorry to go. It was because of the reference; you couldn’t get another job without a good reference. Nowadays, of course, people forge them. If I’d have known anything about it, I would have forged mine. It’s all my eye and Betty Martin that they should rely on what the last person you worked for said. She might try to spite you because you left her. If people were the soul of honour, whether they liked you or not, they’d give you a good reference if you deserved it, but people just aren’t like that. I don’t know whether Lady Gibbons swallowed my story but she did give me quite a good reference, she didn’t praise me up to the skies, but she said I was honest, hard working, and a good cook. What more could I expect?

22

A
FTER
I’
D
finished at Lady Gibbons’ I decided to try temporary work for a change. I thought that by doing temporary work I wouldn’t stay long wherever I went, that I’d do lots of different jobs in a short time and that in that way I’d get a lot of experience. It’s very seldom that two people have the same ideas about cooking. Some people like made-up dishes, other people like plain food, some are particular about sweets, others about savouries. So I thought I’d quickly gain knowledge and experience by doing a variety of jobs.

It didn’t work out like that. I discovered that generally the people who advertised for a temporary cook only did so because no self-respecting cook would ever stay with them permanently. The first job I took was at Stanley Gardens in Notting Hill Gate.

In recent years it’s become notorious because of a murder that was done there. At the time I was there it was a collection of large, ugly Victorian houses that were already going seedy.

The people I worked for were Jewish, a Mr and Mrs Bernard. They weren’t orthodox Jews, although they didn’t eat pork or bacon, but they didn’t observe all the things that orthodox Jews do, like keeping all the teacloths and the cutlery and utensils used for milk separate. Later on in my life as a cook, I worked for two other Jewish families who were very generous but Mr and Mrs Bernard certainly didn’t fit into that category. They were just plain mean, and made Lady Gibbons seem like Lady Bountiful, though they were more easygoing than she was.

For example, my bedroom and the bedrooms of the housemaid and parlourmaid were furnished with an absolute minimum. Beds were rock hard, and for blankets we had plush curtains with all the bobbles still hanging on them. I had green, and the other two had red. The quilt had been cut in half so that there was a fringe one side and the other that went by the wall was just a plain hem. There was one chair, and a corner fitment to hang clothes, not a wardrobe, just a few hooks with a curtain across. Then a washstand with a broken leg propped up by books.

Mrs Bernard suffered with phlebitis, and she was for ever complaining about it and showing her leg to all and sundry. It used to drive me up the wall. When I went to bed at night I used to try to creep up the stairs like a mouse, because if she heard me passing her bedroom she’d call out, ‘Who’s there? Oh it’s you, cook, come in.’ And I used to have to go and gaze at this horrible leg that she spread out on the bed. It was a most unlovely sight. All swollen up, like a bladder of lard. I suppose I should have felt sorry for her, it must have been painful and certainly she couldn’t get around very well. But I couldn’t because of this constant parading of her woes, and the very sight of her opulent bedroom and the comparison with ours used to infuriate me. There she’d sit all day in bed eating chocolates and displaying her leg. I think she got to be proud of it. Anyway she felt it was part of our job to look sympathetic.

Edna, the parlourmaid, had to take up a brown roll and a pat of butter last thing just in case she got hungry in the night. If it wasn’t eaten, she used to send it down for us in the kitchen. But I’d never use it for the simple reason that this brown roll and butter used to stand on the night commode. Talk about hygiene!

Mr Bernard was a benevolent-looking old gentleman, but this benevolence was only superficial. They talk about beauty only being skin deep, but benevolence is only skin deep, believe me. If Mrs Bernard couldn’t come down to the kitchen to give her orders, Mr Bernard used to come down. He always tried to get me into a confined space, like the larder or the scullery, and then he’d put his hand on my arm, or shoulder, and his fingers were as bony as a bank-clerk’s. ‘Shall we work out the menu?’ he used to say. I don’t know where he thought the menu was. Then he’d hang over my shoulder while I wrote. I wouldn’t have minded this weak display of amorousness if there had been anything attached to it, like a pair of stockings or a box of chocolates, but there never was. He didn’t want to do anything more than fondle your neck, I know, but there’s no pleasure in that from an old man, is there?