Below Stairs (5 page)

When we got outside I told Mum how I felt but she’d decided that the job would do for me. So that was that.

The trouble was the uniform. My mother worked it out that it couldn’t be done – all these things that had to be bought for me – under two pounds. I know that it sounds a ridiculously small sum now, but two pounds was untold wealth to us then. We hadn’t got two pounds but anyway she managed to borrow it and she fitted me out.

On the day I was due to go there she got her old, battered tin trunk that she’d been all through domestic service with, and I packed the few things that I had in it. Apart from the uniform my own clothes were very few indeed. I was dressed up in a blouse and skirt and a coat that had belonged to my grandmother.

I said to Mum, ‘How are we going to get the tin trunk down to Adelaide Crescent? Are we going to have a taxi?’ She said, ‘You must be stark, raving mad. Where do you think we are going to get the money from? Dad’s going to borrow the barrow.’ Dad worked for a decorator at that time, so he was going to load the trunk on to the barrow and wheel it down there. We must have looked a peculiar lot – my Dad walking in the road with the tin trunk on the barrow, and Mum and I trailing along on the pavement. When we got there Dad carried the tin trunk down to the basement.

As she said goodbye my Mum put her arms around me, which was very unusual because in our family we didn’t indulge in any outward show of affection. I felt as if I could have howled and howled. And yet they weren’t going miles away, they lived in the same town, but to me it was a terrible thing to see my mother and father retreating and leaving me in this alien environment. I thought, ‘Oh, no, I can’t stay here’, but I wouldn’t say so. I knew I’d got to work as my parents couldn’t afford to keep me.

The first person I saw was another young girl just about my own age. She told me she was Mary, the under-housemaid, and she said, ‘I’ll help you upstairs with your tin trunk.’ Help me upstairs! I’d never seen anything like it! I never thought there could be so many stairs in a house.

From the basement until you got up to two floors below the attics there were back stairs for the servants to use, so that you never interfered with ‘Them’, and ‘They’ never saw you running up and down the stairs or anything. And of course the back stairs were very different from the front stairs. They only had linoleum on them, the same as our stairs had at home.

It was a good job I didn’t have many clothes because I don’t know how we would have got this tin trunk up to the room.

When we did get there I said to Mary, ‘What do I do now?’ She said, ‘The first thing you do is to change straight away into your uniform and come downstairs. And by the way,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to do something about that hair of yours, you can’t come down like you are.’ I had very long hair because it was before the days of people having their hair cut off. I’d tried to put it up in a bun to go into service and Mother had helped me to do it, but it was all falling down and I didn’t have half enough hairpins. Anyway Mary said, ‘I’ll help you.’ She scraped it all back off my face; I had pulled it forward in an effort to make myself attractive. But Mary said, ‘The cook won’t let you have your hair like that. When you’ve got your cap on none of your hair must show in the front at all.’ So she scraped it all back and she screwed it in a bun at the back, and not only did she use all the hairpins I had but she gave me a dozen of hers as well. I felt like a pincushion at the back. When I put my hand up I could feel nothing but hairpins, and when I looked in the glass at my face with not a scrap of hair showing, I thought I looked hideous. Little did I know I was going to look hideous the whole time I worked there, so really it made very little difference starting off like that.

I got the uniform on, and oh how I hated it! As a kitchen maid I had to wear this uniform morning and afternoon. I didn’t change into black like the upstairs servants did. It was a blue uniform, not navy blue, a sort of between navy and saxe blue. Then I put on one of those wide aprons with a bib and straps over the back that buttoned on to the ones that went round your waist, and then the wretched cap. I hated that cap until I got to be a cook, and I never wore a cap then. I had a battle royal with one woman I worked for over it, but I’d never wear a cap as a cook.

When I was dressed Mary said, ‘Now we’ll go down to the kitchen.’ When we got down there it was teatime for the servants. That’s one meal the kitchen maid doesn’t have to get, the under-housemaid gets it.

10

I
THINK ONE
of the worst ordeals was meeting all the servants, although compared with some of the other houses I worked in later, there weren’t so many. There was a butler; a parlourmaid instead of a footman; two housemaids – upper and under; a governess; and a gardener/chauffeur; the cook and me.

The first thing I was shown before I sat down and had my tea was a list of the kitchen maid’s duties. When I looked at this list I thought they had made a mistake. I thought it was for six people to do.

Kitchen maid’s duties – rise at five-thirty (six o’clock on Sundays), come downstairs, clean the flues, light the fire, blacklead the grate (incidentally, when you blackleaded the grate you didn’t have nice tins of liquid polish, you had a hard old lump of blacklead, which before you went to bed at night you had to put into a saucer with water and leave soaking all night before it would assume any kind of a paste to do the grate with. I didn’t know this, and nobody bothered to tell me. I tried to do it next morning with this lump; I thought you had to rub it on the stove. No one told me anything. Why people should assume I knew, I don’t know), clean the steel fender and the fire-irons (that steel fender, without exaggerating, was all of four foot long, with a tremendous shovel, tongs, and poker all in steel, which all had to be done with emery paper), clean the brass on the front door, scrub the steps, clean the boots and shoes, and lay the servants’ breakfast. And this all had to be done before eight o’clock. The things that were written down to do after breakfast throughout the day, well, I’d never seen such a list in my life.

So what with the uniform, the cap, my hair, and the list of duties, well, when Mary said, ‘Come and have your tea and meet all the servants,’ I felt that life couldn’t hold anything worse for me. I was in the lowest pit. I thought, ‘How could my mother let me come here and tell me that things were better now, you didn’t have to work so hard, you’ve got more free time, and people think more of you?’

So I went into the servants’ hall, and when I say I met the other servants, don’t think I was introduced to them. No one bothers to introduce a kitchen maid. You’re just looked at as if you’re something the cat brought in. One of them said ‘She looks hefty enough’. It was just as well I was hefty, believe me.

I sat down and had my tea, but how I ate it with all these servants looking at me, I don’t know. Fortunately my mother – and father – had always been very insistent on table manners. We were never allowed to sit anyhow at the table, we always had to use the right things.

I hadn’t yet met the cook; she was out, she’d gone to see a film. The cook had a lot more free time than anyone else; the cook could go out any afternoon she liked, so long as she was back in time to cook the dinner at night. Naturally, she was the one I was most keen on meeting because it was with her a large part of my life would have to be spent.

Mary told me that Mrs McIlroy – a Scots cook she was – was quite a pleasant person, but I took that with a grain of salt because Mary wasn’t under her, so it didn’t make a lot of difference what Mary thought about her.

After tea I went and had a look at the kitchen. That was enough to strike a final note of depression.

Occupying one whole side of the kitchen was the range, and I stood and looked at the thing in amazement. We had a kitchen range at home, but my mother never cooked on it, she had a gas stove. But there was no gas stove in this kitchen, only this tremendous range, which was to become to me, although I didn’t know it at the time, a nightmare. It had ovens each side of it, one big and one small, and it had been so polished up with blacklead by the previous kitchen maid that you could almost see your face in it. It never looked like that after I did it somehow, I don’t know why. As the cook said, some people can polish and some can’t. In front of it was the steel fender, and that also was polished to a silvery brightness.

Opposite it was a dresser with great big cupboards on the lower half of it and five shelves on the other half, all plain white wood. Not the small kind of dresser we had in our own little kitchen at home, but one that could take a whole dinner set, and when I say a whole one I don’t mean the kind you buy now which are really only halves; a hundred and twenty-six pieces of china were ranged on the shelves, and on the flat part of it, which was the top of the cupboards, were an enormous soup tureen, vegetable dishes, and sauce boats. It was my job, written down in my duties, to take this whole lot down once a week and wash every single piece of it, and scrub the dresser.

On the third wall there were two doors; one led into servants’ hall. It used to be quite an enjoyable occupation when we were sitting in there having our meals to look at the legs of the passers-by in the street and to give a face to the legs. If you saw a fat pair of legs go by you would say, ‘Fifty if she’s a day’, and somebody would say, ‘No, not her, she’s got duck’s disease or water on the knees.’

Incidentally, I never know why they called it a servants’ hall. It didn’t resemble a hall, it was just a room. But everywhere I went the room the servants sat in was called a servants’ hall.

The other door led into the butler’s pantry. Although it was called a pantry it was not a place where food was kept. There were two sinks, one to put the soap in to wash all the silver, and the other with plain water to rinse it and to wash all the glasses. The butler and the parlourmaid between them did all the silver and all the glassware; not the knives, that came into the kitchen maid’s province.

Another door in the fourth wall led into a long passage from the back door to the kitchen – a huge place, all stone-flagged. In this passage, hanging on the wall, was a long row of bells with indicators above them to show where they rang from, and it was my job every time a bell went to run full tilt out into the passage to see which bell it was. We had whistles in the house. You pulled a plug out in the wall and whistled up to the various rooms to see if you could catch anybody to tell them they were wanted. If you didn’t run like mad out into the passage, the bell would stop ringing before you got there, and you had no idea whether it was from the blue room, the pink room, first bedroom, second bedroom, fifth bedroom, drawing-room, or dining-room. So you would come back to the cook and say, ‘I don’t know which bell it was.’ ‘You must be quicker,’ she’d say, ‘otherwise all hell will be let loose upstairs.’ But what could you do? If you were in the middle of something you couldn’t drop it straight away. I was always in trouble over these bells at first, but at last I mastered the art, and nobody shot out quicker than I did when they rang.

The kitchen floor itself was all stone, not nice shiny stone flags that you see new, but just sort of large bricks. They had to be scrubbed every day. Down the whole length of the room was the kitchen table; a heavy great thing on four of the hugest square legs I have ever seen, and it had been scrubbed to a whiteness that would have been the envy of any washing powder today, although we only had soap and soda then. That was the cook’s table which, Mary informed me, I had to set out.

She said to me, ‘You know how to set a cook’s table, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I know how to put things out for cooking,’ but little did I know how to set it out, really and truly.

That same evening, about six o’clock, Mrs McIlroy, the cook, came in, and a very pleasant person she seemed. She came up to me and actually shook hands, which was more than anybody else had done.

She was a woman about fifty, a Scotswoman, rather short with grey hair, very down-to-earth type of person, rather plain, but she had such a pleasant personality that you never really noticed how plain she was.

Later on, after I had got to know her better, I said, ‘Mrs McIlroy’, the Mrs was just a courtesy title; most cooks, if they had not married and if they were a Miss and they were getting on in years, were called Mrs not only by the people they worked for, but by the other servants as well. ‘Mrs McIlroy,’ I said, ‘I wonder you’ve never got married,’ and I piled the old flattery on because I found it always paid off, especially when you happened to be under the person, ‘you’ve got such an attractive personality’, nearly choking myself when I was saying it. She said, ‘Well, it’s like this, my girl. When I was about twenty-five I looked in the mirror and I said to myself, “Girl, a good plain cook you’ve decided to be, and a good plain cook you’re going to be all your life. It’s certainly sure you’re plain and it’s certainly sure no one is going to want to marry you.” That’s how I found it was too.’

That first evening after she’d introduced herself she said, ‘Well, girl, we’ve got to get on with it. You’ll lay up my table, won’t you?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, and she went up to her room.

All I put out was a knife, a fork, and a spoon, the flour, the salt, and a sifter. I thought that was all she’d need for cooking the dinner. Luckily for me, Mary came out while I was doing it, and after explaining with a fit of giggles that my idea of laying out a cook’s table was hopeless, she said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it. I’ll show you before Mrs McIlroy comes back, not that she will grumble, but she might start laughing when she sees what you’ve put out.’ Mary began. There were knives of all kinds, all shapes and sizes, big long carving knives, small knives for paring fruit, pallet knives, bent knives for scraping out basins with, and then metal spoons, not the ordinary type – they were like a kind of aluminium-coloured spoon – huge ones, about six of them. The largest ones had the measures on them, from ounces right up to dessert-spoonfuls. She put out two sieves, a hair sieve and a wire sieve, and a flour sifter, and an egg whisk. Naturally, there were no electric whisks in those days. In fact, there weren’t even the ones with the wheels, you had a kind of wire contraption that you had to beat by hand. Then there were two kinds of graters, one fine one for nutmegs, and one to do the breadcrumbs on; there was a big chopping board and a small chopping board, three or four kinds of basins, paprika pepper and cayenne pepper, ordinary salt, pepper, and vinegar. Half the table was covered with these things. All these implements had to be laid out twice a day; for lunch, although the lunch was only three courses, and for dinner again at night, when there were five or six.