Climbing the Stairs (12 page)

The under-parlourmaid used the butler’s pantry for washing up all the silver – none of it was washed up in the scullery. The silver and the afternoon tea things were washed up in the
pantry. Then there were cupboards to put silver away in and green baize covers to fit everything into. There were shammy leathers galore for polishing and special cloths and
papier-mâché bowls so that the silver didn’t get scratched. All very different from the stinking old sinks I had out in the kitchen.

But back to our hovering around the tradesmen. It was really an absolute waste of time because the ones who called for orders were either already married or, if not, were far too old, and the
errand boys that came with the things were always much too young.

The butcher’s boy at my first place in London was the only errand boy I really fancied but unfortunately it was all too obvious that he didn’t fancy me. He was tall and handsome like
an Adonis and he had wavy hair. He was a real heart-throb. Agnes the under-parlourmaid used to vie with me for his favours. She was a sentimental girl and had a real crush on him, but like me she
was wasting her time. All her sweet words and languishing looks were repeated ad infinitum by the servants wherever he went. He had marvellous opportunities so you can be sure that he shopped
around for the best and the easiest. I adopted a sort of a hard-to-get attitude, completely ignoring this Adonis – I thought that this might intrigue him enough to make him become interested
in me. But what a hope! I might have been empty air for all the notice he took of me. When I think about it now it’s obvious that if you want to intrigue somebody you’ve got to look
intriguing yourself and I certainly looked far from intriguing. Not many kitchenmaids could look intriguing, especially just after they’ve done the kitchen range.

When I later became a cook I acquired a position of authority over the tradesmen and at one time I did contemplate a life of bliss with a fishmonger. Well, not a life of bliss exactly but life
with a fairly substantial income. I know that sounds a materialistic approach to matrimony, divorced from the sort of romantic ideals, but unless you’re so violently in love that time and
motion cease to exist, money does count. I mean, in exchange for a nice home, nice clothes, and good food you can look at any man through rose-coloured glasses. Well, I thought I could.

This fishmonger, Mr Hailsham, certainly needed looking at through rose-coloured glasses. He resembled nothing so much as one of the large cod fish that he used to bring – considered very
suitable for servants’ meals, being very nourishing, you know. His flesh was dead white and it was always cold, and he had tiny little expressionless eyes. But he had a very flourishing
business. He used to supply far larger establishments than ours was and, according to Mr Hailsham, his father and his grandfather supplied the gentry and nobility. He showed me photos – so I
suppose there must have been some truth in what he said.

The only time Mr Hailsham showed any sign of animation was when we were talking about fish. You might think it was difficult to wax poetical over a salmon or a turbot but Mr Hailsham could. He
used to go to the market every morning and he’d start off on a great rigmarole about looking into their mouths, studying their scales and their tails – ecstatic he used to get. And
that’s why he got to look like his fish. You see, he lived, thought and breathed fish.

He was about twenty years older than me so not unnaturally I assumed that he was married. One really cold morning I invited him in for a cup of coffee – what with the fish being so cold
and him looking so cold I took pity on him. And he got a bit forthcoming. I found he lived with a brother and a sister and none of them was married. I kept on with the recipe of a cup of coffee and
after a few weeks he thawed out even more and became quite friendly towards me. Then I commented on the fact that all three of them were still single.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my dear mother, God bless her, made us promise before she died to keep together and always help each other.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘she didn’t mean that you’d got to look after each other to the extent that you couldn’t ever get married? She couldn’t have meant
that. After all the name’s going to die out if you don’t get married and with your business so long established you don’t want that to happen.’

So he said, ‘Well, we’ve never had any inclination to get married up to now.’ And he looked at me in a meaningful way.

At least I thought he looked at me in a meaningful way. I suppose it was a meaningful way – it was difficult to tell with his eyes. He certainly looked at me. So I continued to cultivate
him, to sort of get closer to him, though the all-pervading odour of fish that hung around him was hardly an inducement for closer proximity.

Then the other servants said, ‘You’ll never get him, you know. He’s been a bachelor far too long and his sister looks after them both too well.’

This was a bit of a challenge. It’s amazing what a determined woman can do. I find even the most rigid and intractable of men lose their powers of resistance where a woman’s
concerned. You’ve only got to look at Adam and Eve, haven’t you? – going back to Biblical days. Adam could have refused to bite the apple, couldn’t he? The reason he
didn’t refuse it was because he knew that Eve had already had a large bite out of it and that she’d be banished from the Garden of Eden in any case and he didn’t want to stop
there without her, so he thought he might as well have a bite too and then they’d both have to go. That’s the reason. Not because she really tempted him but because he thought what was
the good of the Garden of Eden if he was living in it on his own?

Mind you, I had to put in an awful lot of spadework to bring this Mr Hailsham up to scratch. Cups of tea and homemade cakes, and listening to long dreary anecdotes about the fish business and Mr
Hailsham’s acumen and judgement and that he’d made it such a flourishing concern – not his brother. You see Mr Hailsham did the buying and the orders and the brother did the
selling in the shop, and according to Mr Hailsham it was the buying that was the main thing because if you didn’t buy well you wouldn’t sell well. There was something in that, I think.
Then when his sister was ill I made nourishing dishes for her – egg custards and things like that. It paid off eventually because there came the fateful morning when Mr Hailsham said to me,
‘Don’t call me Mr Hailsham, call me Cyril.’ Cyril – I ask you – anyone less like a Cyril I’ve never met in my life. And this was the prelude to Cyril asking me
to go out with him on my next evening off. I agreed, though with some trepidation. I wondered what he’d look like when he was dressed up. But never in my wildest imaginings did I visualize
the figure that I saw waiting for me at the end of the street when I went out. Talk about Beau Brummell and Beau Nash rolled into one. He was wearing spats and he had a flyaway bow, yellow
shammy-leather gloves and a silver-topped cane, and he was holding a bouquet of flowers. Well, I nearly died of mirth. Talk about seeing Mr Hailsham the fishmonger turned to Cyril the fop. And yet
despite this he still had the odour of fish pervading him and it was hard to associate this sort of Beau Brummell with the fishy smell.

Anyway I went out with him on several occasions and eventually it led to an invitation to tea with his brother and sister. His sister was something of an invalid – she enjoyed bad health.
They lived over the fish shop – quite a lot of rooms they had because there were two floors, but they were the kind of rooms that gave me claustrophobia. They were so heavy, crowded, and
ornate. They had flock wallpaper in a dark red colour and I felt as though the walls were pressing in on me all the time. And they were full of things that had belonged to ‘dear Mother’
and were kept for sentimental reasons. ‘Dear Mother’ had collected these little small pieces of china from wherever she went on holiday. There were things from Margate and Ramsgate and
Broadstairs, little bits of crest china, a whole cabinet full of them, with antimacassars on every chair and stuffed birds in cages. And wherever you sat the beady eyes of these things followed
you.

I must say though that they were all very nice to me. I’d been a bit scared about meeting the sister. After all, everyone had said she wouldn’t let any female get her claws into
either of her brothers. She was charm itself. ‘Miss Langley – or may I call you Margaret?’ That sort of thing. And she showed me over the flat. No, I was welcomed with open arms.
It wasn’t until a bit later that I realized the full Machiavellian plot that was being hatched over me. It was only disclosed when Cyril and his brother had gone out to get a drink and to
bring in a bottle of port for her and me. She was drinking it for medicinal purposes and I would be drinking it for never you mind what. They hadn’t been gone five minutes before his sister
came over and put her arms round me, and if there’s anything I hate it’s a woman mauling me around. I’m not that keen on some men mauling me around, but a woman – never.

Then she said, ‘Oh, I’m so very glad that Cyril’s found a friend like you. You know one that can cook well and look after a house. We need another pair of hands here –
now that I’m an invalid. Cyril and Harry, they’re so fond of their food and only the best is good enough for them. You being a cook will appreciate that.’

And she went on, ‘I can’t tell you how glad Harry and I are that Cyril’s found you.’

I was absolutely dumbfounded. As far as I was concerned we were only in the very early stages.

So I said, ‘Aren’t you going ahead a bit? We don’t know each other all that well yet.’

‘Oh, but you will,’ she said. ‘I know Cyril’s made up his mind. He talked to us about you and about how domesticated you are. We shall all live here so happily
together.’

I nearly passed out. Here had I been thinking it was me that was doing the chasing and I’d swum straight into the fish-net. You can just imagine. I mean married to old cod’s eyes
Cyril. It mightn’t be the realization of a maiden’s dream. But taking on Cyril, his brother, his sister, and all the Victorian impedimenta as well – well it was a life sentence
that I wasn’t prepared to serve, I can assure you. Maybe a ready-made home and material comforts had to be paid for but not to that extent. Just a bloody unpaid housekeeper.

Then I visualized the night I first went to bed with Cyril. Those two would be holding their breaths and conjuring up the kind of orgy that they thought he and I would be conducting in our
bedroom. And for all his lifeless exterior he might have been like that. These late starters often begin where others finish, on the assumption that now they’ve got the property they might as
well make all possible use of it because they may not have what it takes that much longer to do it. So forewarned was forearmed. As soon as I possibly could with politeness, I dropped off inviting
Cyril in for cups of coffee. And I certainly left off sending any delicacies round for his sister. And it was fortunate that at that time my mother became ill so that my evenings were spent going
round and looking after her.

13

A
FTER ALL MY
efforts to get and keep a man I eventually found one right on my own doorstep. Somebody who’d been calling twice a day since
I’d been cook in the house – the milkman. His name was Albert – Albert Powell.

I’d never thought of him as a possible husband because he was five years older than I was and I guessed he must be married. Most working-class men were married at his age, particularly
with all the surplus girls there were about then – so I thought he’d already been snaffled.

I’ve written a lot about catching a young man and it may seem as though I never thought of anything else and that I was blatant in my efforts to get hold of one. But what you should
realize is that everyone was the same then. The upper-class girls were just as keen to get married as we were. But they could do it in a more civilized manner. They had coming-out parties and went
to theatres and deb parties and were introduced to men. The whole idea of being debs was that they should meet young men and get married. Then of course more than now. In any class marriage was a
career for a girl because on any level there weren’t the jobs for women. But our efforts had to be blatant. The only way we could get young men was either to meet them at dances or pick them
up in the cinema or in the parks. So although this method may seem vulgar it was the only way open to us. We would have liked to have been properly introduced to them but if we’d waited for
that we would have waited for ever.

Another reason why I thought that Albert was married was that he always wore a ring on his wedding finger. Not many married men wore rings – never mind single ones. When I got married and
I found that it wasn’t compulsory for married men to wear wedding rings I promptly left mine off as well. This was one inequality between the sexes that I could do something about.

Ever since I’d been cook at that house I’d enjoyed seeing Albert the milkman, because he was always so lively and cheerful no matter what the weather was like. He’d always have
a laugh and a joke – all tradesmen were like that. I used to see him regularly twice a day. But in all that time he never showed any kind of endearment. He never tried to get over-friendly
with me or to kiss me, so I never really thought about him that way at all.

When I look back on it I often think that the reason that we got on so well, when we did start going out together, was because we’d seen so much of each other and knew each other so well
that I didn’t have to keep trying to impress him the way I’d done other men. And I don’t have that horrible sick anxiety when I’d said goodnight and made a date to meet
again as to whether he was going to turn up the next time. I knew I would see him the following morning.

Admittedly I didn’t feel any transports of love but then I didn’t want to feel them any more. You know, each time you met a boy you felt, ‘This is the one I’ve been
waiting all my life for,’ and then you’d realize that if it was you’d have to wait alone because he certainly didn’t feel that way about you. I was glad that was over. And
we got on fine. He was kind and he was generous. Every time he met me he’d have a box of chocolates under his arm and it was the best seats in the cinema and sometimes even a taxi back home
and flowers. He was a kind and generous man and I liked him very much. And he liked me.