Below Stairs (16 page)

He used to do the shopping. Every morning he’d go to the Portobello Market. If we wanted a salad he’d bring back a lettuce and a beetroot, or a lettuce and tomatoes. Never anything else. To make a salad with. I ask you. He said it provided scope for ingenuity. But even ingenuity requires some raw materials, doesn’t it? I wasn’t a miracle worker. I wonder he didn’t bring the water down to see if I could turn it into wine for them.

The trouble was they couldn’t afford to keep three maids, but the house was of a size that couldn’t be run with less than three. Even as it was, nothing really got done as it should have been done. Everything looked old and shabby, except for her bedroom and the drawing-room.

In the kitchen there were just worn linoleum, shapeless wicker chairs, an ancient kitchen stove, and all the utensils were worn out and the implements, like the brooms and brushes, were always losing their hairs, and nothing ever got replaced. I’m not surprised they advertised for temporary maids. They knew they wouldn’t keep them for any time.

I stayed for three months and the only good I got from it was that it was there I invented my famous kipper savoury. It was funny the way this happened. One morning we had kippers for breakfast, and Mrs Bernard, who always had her breakfast in bed, didn’t eat hers. When Ethel brought the tray down I threw the kipper into the pig bucket under the sink. But when Mr Bernard came down to give the orders he said, ‘Cook, Madam would like you to make her a savoury for dinner tonight using that kipper that she left from breakfast.’ My heart sank. I didn’t dare say I’d thrown it away because if I had it would have ruined the day for both of them, and I didn’t see why I should ruin someone’s day over a kipper. So I just said, ‘Oh yes, Sir, that’ll be all right.’ As soon as he’d gone upstairs I rushed to the pig bucket and I fished the kipper out. It was covered in tea leaves and some other nasty bits and pieces. So I rinsed it under the tap. Unfortunately as I rinsed, I was washing up at the time, it fell into my bowl of washing-up water and soap suds. So I fished it out again and hastily gave it another rinse, and I kept smelling it to see if the soap had gone. At last I thought it had. Then the problem was what to do with it to make sure it didn’t taste of soap suds. Anyway I got all the flesh off and pounded it well in the pestle and mortar, and I used that good old stand-by, Escoffier sauce. It’s a marvellous thing for disguising the flavour of something you don’t want noticed. I sent it up well garnished and decorated, and to my surprise Mrs Bernard sent the parlourmaid down with a compliment. She said, ‘Tell cook that’s the most delicious savoury we’ve ever eaten.’ I thought, ‘That’s it, girl. When you want real flavours stir things around in the pig bucket first.’

As you can imagine I hadn’t been there long before I realized I’d got all the knowledge I was ever likely to get from them. So I left. The next job that I took was with a Lord and Lady Downall in Chelsea.

The contrast was fantastic. They were the most thoughtful and kind people I’d ever met, ever since I started in domestic service. Unfortunately
they
’d advertised for a temporary because they really needed one. Their own cook was in hospital and was only going to be away three months. They were so pleasant and unassuming in their contact with us that I think for the first time since I started work, I lost the feeling that we were a race apart, and that the gap between us and them was unbridgeable. They spoke to us in exactly the same way that they would speak to people of their own society.

For instance we were all called by our Christian names. And it was the first place that
I
’d been in where the people above – ‘Them’ – called you by your Christian name.

And the servants’ hall was an absolute revelation to me. This one was comfortably furnished and it had a colour scheme to it. We had comfortable armchairs, a carpet on the floor, a standard lamp, and other small lamps around, pictures and ornaments. Things that you could tell were bought specially for us, not cast-offs from their rooms. Things that really matched instead of a room full of bits from the conservatory, bits from the drawing-room, and bits from the dining-room. The whole room was welcoming, so that when you had spare time you felt you could really relax even though you were still on duty.

We all had a colour scheme in our bedrooms, mine was green. I had a green carpet, a green eiderdown, and green blankets with satin bindings, and it was absolutely fantastic – a bedside lamp and a table.

Everything was done to make you feel that they really cared about you. All Lady Downall’s servants had been with her for many years, and none of them had any intention of leaving.

As I’ve said, the reason I was there was because her own cook was in hospital. And when she was ready to leave the hospital she was to be sent away to convalesce for a month at Lady Downall’s own expense. To be taken care of for a whole month! Such things were a revelation to me.

And when it was the servants’ birthdays they all had lovely presents, not print dresses, black stockings, and caps and things like that, but real presents. Things that they wouldn’t have thought of buying themselves. Just to show you how good they were, my birthday came round six weeks after I got there, and
I
got a present. I hadn’t told Lady Downall, she must have found out for herself, and she bought me beautiful silk underwear, the sort of thing I’d never been able to buy. Yet I’d only been there six weeks and she knew I was only going to stay three months, but it didn’t make any difference.

It could have been that they were the real aristocracy. I think the name was very old.

Lord Downall had been something in India, like so many of the people I’d worked for. He must have been a big pot then. I never did find out what he did or had been. He was a very tall man, six foot three, extremely aristocratic-looking. He had eyes that sort of could see right inside you.

I remember the first time I met him. I happened to pass him on the stairs, and he stopped, and he said to me, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘are you our new cook?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Sir,’ you know, colouring up like a beetroot, and he said, ‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy here. You’ll find it’s a very happy house.’ And he was right, it was. The parlourmaid said to me, ‘You ought to be here at Christmas. We have a simply wonderful time at Christmas,’ she said. ‘We have our own tree and our own presents, all put round the tree,’ she said, ‘none of this business of having to go up there and parade in front of them. They’re all put there overnight,’ she said. ‘We can go to a theatre during the month of January, any theatre that you choose, and you don’t have to go together, you can take your own friend.’

I didn’t wonder that Lady Downall never had a servant problem. There the servants really cared about their employers. If anyone had said that to me before I’d have said, ‘Oh, that’s my eye, no one cares about the people they work for. You work for them and you do the best you can because they’re paying you, and because you like to make a good job, but you can’t care about them.’

I got four pounds a month there too. You know I didn’t wish their poor cook any harm, but I couldn’t help hoping that she’d get complications and be away for a year or so. It’s terrible, isn’t it, to be like that, but I was so happy there.

And it was so pleasant when Lady Downall came down in the mornings; she’d say, ‘Good morning, Margaret. Have you any suggestions for lunch?’ in a pleasant tone of voice. Or, ‘Oh Margaret, as there’ll be such a large dinner party we’ll have a cold lunch today. That’ll give you more time for the preparation tonight.’ Consideration, you see. A rare quality.

This gave me the incentive to cook as well and better than I had done. One of my specialities was soufflés. I used to make marvellous soufflés, I had a light hand in those days. Either savoury ones, or sweet ones. But I could never do much with them on those kitchen ranges. Either they got too hot and the soufflé shot up like mad before the centre was cooked, or else it never rose at all. I’d battled for so many years with kitchen ranges that I got a thing about them and used to look on them as my bitterest enemy. But there I had a gas stove and I was fine.

Every night when I went to bed there I used to pore over Mrs Beeton’s cookery book. That was the book we all used in those days. I’d pick out a recipe and study it well so that when Lady Downall said next day, ‘Have you any suggestions?’ I could produce this recipe, sort of casual like, as though it had been a thing I’d done often. I used to work it out in my imagination until the dish was absolute perfection. In my mind that is, not always on the table. Still that happens to all cooks, we all plan things, but they don’t always quite work out as we hope they will. Lady Downall used to appreciate any suggestions, and once she said to me, ‘You know, I’m very fond indeed of old Aggie’ (that was her real cook) ‘and she’s been with us for years, she started as kitchen maid in my mother’s house, but it has been a very pleasant change having all these different things that you know how to do.’

Little did she know I’d sat up half the night before, learning them.

Lady Downall loved going to the Caledonian Market. It’s closed now, but at that time it was thriving in Camden Town. She used to love wandering around looking at the genuine antiques, well, that’s what they told you they were; genuine antiques. We used to take it in turn to go with her, and great fun it was. The chauffeur used to bring the car round about ten o’clock. I sat in front with him.

He was a very handsome man, not that I could do much about it because Lady Downall could see if you were laughing too much or anything. Anyway, the fact that he was handsome couldn’t mean that much because he was already snaffled. He was married and had two children.

We used to wander around the market, and Lady Downall would pick out any items that she fancied and that she thought were good. She never bargained for them because she said immediately she opened her mouth she put her foot in it. She meant that if she asked about the price they knew that she’d got money, and they put their prices up accordingly. So if she saw anything she fancied, she would get whoever she had taken with her to go up and ask the price, and bargain for it.

I remember once while she was looking to see what
she
fancied, I was wandering around to see if there was anything I fancied, and I noticed on one stall a very large blue pot with a handle each side. I thought to myself, that would be just fine for my mother’s aspidistra – everyone had an aspidistra in those days. So I approached the stall-holder in what I thought was a nonchalant manner; mind you, they know perfectly well you’ve got your eye on something, they weren’t born yesterday. But I looked at everything but this pot, and I thought I was being very clever. At last I said to him, ‘How much is that blue pot?’ so he said, ‘Oh, ten bob to you,’ so I said, ‘How much to anyone else, half a crown I suppose? I’ll give you five shillings for it.’ So he said, ‘Five bob? You must be joking. Anyway, what do you want it for?’ I told him I wanted it for my mother’s aspidistra. ‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘and when she’s finished using it for that, she can knock one handle off and stick it under her bed! Two things for the price of one. You’ve got a good ten bob’s worth there, haven’t you?’ I blushed like a beetroot, and beat a hasty retreat. I never went near that stall again!

23

A
LL TOO
quickly those three months passed. Perhaps flushed with my success at Lady Downall’s I decided I’d try one more temporary job.

I got a place near Victoria Station. It was one of those grim, tall, rather shabby houses outside, with an interior to match. It was one of those ‘I’m here for ever’ kind of houses.

Here again we were underfed and underlodged. For the first and last time in my life I slept on chaff. The mattress was made of chaff, and laid on lathes, you know, not on a spring at all. As I moved in the night it rustled as though I was a horse turning over. Even at home we had flock beds that you could shake up and make comfortable.

I didn’t sleep a wink on my first night, and when I got up in the morning I was determined to complain about the bed. But at ten o’clock when my employer, Mrs Hunter-Jones her name was (Hunter-Jones, hyphenated you know, you must always sound the two together), when she appeared she looked so formidable that all my resolutions to moan about it faded away completely. I just hadn’t got the pluck to say a word. It’s terrible to be a coward like that but one look at her face finished me. I comforted myself with the thought that I wasn’t serving a life sentence, I had only gone there as a temporary, and temporary I now decided it was going to be.

The housemaid and the parlourmaid, they’d been there two years, but as their ages were sixty-three and sixty-five it wasn’t easy for them to find other employment. Conditions were beginning to get a little bit better – not that people had suddenly changed and become more humane, but there were now more occupations for women to choose from, and naturally if there was other work they could do instead of domestic service they did it. So there was some competition and this meant providing better conditions. But at the ages of sixty- three and sixty-five domestic service was the
only
thing left to do.

For these two poor old things years of spinsterhood and working in other people’s houses had made their hands bent, their faces all craggy, and their dispositions extremely foul. And the appearance of these blighted specimens of womanhood plus that of the formidable Mrs Hunter-Jones made me determined to leave at the earliest opportunity. You see all the time I was thinking I might get married, that was my main object in life, and every new job I got I thought somebody might come along, perhaps one of the tradesmen might be all right, and that would be that.

But I could see that this house was a dead duck from that point of view straight away, and the idea of getting experience as a temporary wasn’t going to work either because Mr and Mrs Hunter-Jones did no entertaining at all, and the plainness of the food was only equalled by the scarcity of it. So with no pleasure in cooking, no company but those two old drears, and a house that was as quiet as a mausoleum, I was very depressed.