Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (59 page)

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Sybil now becomes proactive, she's going to take Gwen to the interview.

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I like the relationship between Matthew and his mother, which in many details is the work of Dan Stevens and Penelope Wilton. By this stage of the series, I was writing material that would work with the characters they had developed. He likes and admires her but he can't see why she always has to make trouble. I think this is lifelike. By now Matthew identifies with both families, with his mother but also with Robert. He's the pig in the middle really.

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As I have said before, Robert loves his three daughters but he doesn't really know them. He thinks they're all nice girls who will marry nice gentlemen and have nice children. He doesn't realise they're born at a period of change which is bound to affect them all. This doesn't mean they don't get on. In fact in some ways Mary is like his son because she is dynamic and worldly and they have a lot in common but, in the last analysis, I think Mary's cleverer than Robert. I wonder if she'd have taken Patrick when it came to it.

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In the first series, Cora is still playing along with the values she's married into even if, every now and then, you can see she disagrees with them. She sticks up for Matthew's having a job for example, but she has yet to re-connect with her beliefs from before she was a member of the British aristocracy. It is not that her spirit has been broken, but she doesn't feel entitled to rebel. So, she assumes that Mary will marry someone like Robert and everything will go on as before. Robert doesn't disagree with this in principle, but he has a clearer view of the qualities that would interest Mary. And Strallan hasn't got them.

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You often see servants depicted as grovelling, but this was not true at all. The upper servants, who were masters of their own domain, expected to be treated with a degree of respect, while cooks were notoriously touchy and for a cook to talk back would be quite normal. Sometimes cooks were absolutely impossible but if the food was marvellous people didn't want to let them go. Usually the master of the house would have little to do with them, but his wife would frequently require all her diplomatic skills. Each house had its own way of managing this relationship, which was illustrated for me when we were making the film
Gosford Park
. We had three former servants advising us, and one day we were doing the scene where Eileen Atkins, playing the cook, is asked to accompany Stephen Fry. As she leaves the kitchen, she instructs a kitchen maid to ‘see that those menus go up on her ladyship's tray'. Immediately one of the advisory board said: ‘Oh, no. That's quite wrong. The menus were always done in her ladyship's boudoir.' Whereupon, a second advisor contradicted her. ‘I don't think so, no, her ladyship would always come down to the cook's sitting room to do the menus.' At which point the third one remarked that ‘ours went up on the tray'. It made me realise that people are wrong in thinking everything was governed by universal rules when it often depended on the ways of an individual house. At any rate, for Mrs Patmore to refuse to follow a new receipt would not be a first for Cora.

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This is an important marker moment in the development of Sybil. She is no longer content to sympathise with Gwen's ambitions. She is determined to give her practical help.

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In supporting the claims of old Mr Molesley, Isobel is making trouble. Partly because Violet irritates her and Isobel would love to take her down a peg, but mainly because, like pretty well every newcomer to a village in the country, she can't leave anything alone. I remember in the village where I grew up, there was a harvest supper every summer which was organised by my mother and two or three other women. Then a new artistic couple arrived, arguing that this was terrible and patronising and of course the supper had to be run by the villagers, themselves. My mother was perfectly content to be free of the work but she warned them that the supper would vanish within three years. They laughed at her, seeing this as proof of her self-importance and vanity. But in fact it had vanished in two.

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The one thing no servant could afford was to attract even the faintest suspicion of theft. A career in service really depended on having good references, and while an employer might swallow a bit of bad temper or a lack of punctuality, they would never overlook theft. Once you were perceived as a thief you would not work again. So here, it may only be about a little snuff box, but Thomas and O'Brien are attempting to ruin Bates.

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Scenes 31 and 32 were originally separated by what became Scene 33, but during the shoot the decision was made to combine them.

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This story is exploring that strange transition when your children grow into adults and begin to have an independent life of their own. Even in their teens, you know what your sons and daughters are doing and, for the most part, where they are. You take them and you collect them and then, suddenly, you're not quite taking them but you're meeting them off a train, and soon after that you don't know where they are and you ring and find they're in Suffolk but you don't know why. This, for most of us, comes as a shock. Here, Cora has reached that moment with Sybil. She doesn't know where her daughter is.

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I think this kind of complicity happened a great deal in these households, as it does in any workplace. Even though Anna is both a moral person and a completely truthful one, it wouldn't occur to her to give Gwen away. This class loyalty, which can be very strong, must often have been tiresome for the employers because they knew that even the members of staff they loved and trusted would cover for less worthy co-workers. It is a human instinct.

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It is impossible for Daisy not to tell the truth here because, for her, to be questioned by a daughter of this great house, would be like our being interrogated by the secret police. She feels completely disempowered. And Edith is forceful and determined in her desire to humiliate Mary. She is a nicer person after the war has changed her, but at this stage, she is still fuelled by a kind of jealous rage.

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That line came from a great aunt of mine who said that things with her had got to the point when she felt that if a man could walk and talk and hadn't actually spilt something down his front, she was expected to marry him. In fact, I had two aunts who were sent out to India on the ‘fishing fleet'. One of my great great uncles was the Governor of Bombay and two of my grandfather's sisters were despatched to stay with him, but neither came home with a husband. They were what was known as ‘returned empties'. They both got married eventually, but quite late by the reckoning of those days.

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Mary's quite harsh to her mother, but then I think young women are often harsh to their mothers and Mary is not a hypocrite. She may not want the world to know the details of her adventures but she doesn't lie to herself. She never pretends about the events in her past or about Pamuk and, to me, that seems an important part of her character.

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I blush to recount that this incident, when they rescue the chicken from the cat and take it up to the dining room, comes from my own life. I was giving a lunch party in Sussex and I walked into the kitchen to find that the cat had hooked the joint out of the oven in some way and both he and the dog had both had quite a go at it. I had nothing else to give my guests, so I just cut off the chewed bits, carved the rest in the kitchen, then took it in and served it up. I thought at the time, what the eye doesn't see the heart won't grieve over, so that's what we make them do here.

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At a dinner party like this one, it is still the hostess who decides in which direction her guests will talk. You hear people say you have to talk first to the right, or some such, but this is nonsense. The hostess is the decision maker. If she talks first to the man on her right, every woman talks to the man on her right. If she talks to the left, every woman talks to the left. Then or now, she will usually keep the more interesting fellow for the main course, so it's a slight insult if she speaks to you first, but anyway, when the pudding arrives, the table breaks up and you can chat to whomever you like. This rule continues to be observed over most of England, but not in artistic circles, and a director said to me the other day how stiff it must be. In fact, he was quite wrong. One can go to a dinner in Hampstead and spend an hour in silence because both neighbours are talking in the other direction. That never happens where you observe these rules.

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I love Mrs Patmore. I think Lesley Nicol's performance is fantastic. She is the kitchen Violet. Maggie Smith delivers the cryptic comments upstairs, Lesley has the barbed tongue downstairs. In a sense they balance each other, as Robert and Bates, or Anna and Mary, balance each other. But I suspect Mrs Patmore is a little more soft-hearted.

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Mrs Patmore knows that if her suspicions are correct and she is indeed going blind then her situation is very serious, as she will not be able to work. The Granthams may pension her off but it means a severe drop in income and probably intense loneliness after years spent in a loud and busy kitchen. It might not exactly be ruin, but it will be very, very bad. I think Jim and Lesley play this scene wonderfully. It always makes me cry.

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Violet of course is irritated by the idea that she hasn't won on merit in the past, at the same time acknowledging in this judgement that she's aware of what has gone on. I was accused at the time of copying the scene from
Mrs Miniver
, where Dame May Whitty, as Lady Beldon, makes the same decision. I wasn't conscious of it, but when I re-watched the movie not long ago, it was pretty close, so I suppose it must have been hovering in my brain. Funnily enough, I thought I was inspired by something that happened to my mother when I was growing up. We lived then in a house with the most marvellous climbing roses and we always won the prize for them, year after year, at the village flower show. Someone on the committee suggested that my parents might like to donate a cup and my mother, shamelessly really, volunteered to present a cup for the best climbing rose, knowing she would win it. So they bought a very pretty, large silver cup which I suppose my mother planned to use as the table centrepiece and they gave it to the village. Everyone was very grateful, they were thanked a hundred times, and she never won the prize again.

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Violet, like Maggie in a way, is completely unsentimental so she would hate for anyone to think that she had read her own name and yet given the first prize to Mr Molesley out of kindness. She needs them to believe that the judges made the award, but of course no one, certainly no family member, does think that because they know that no villager would be brave enough to challenge the Dowager. I suspect one of the keys to Violet, as Maggie has developed her, is that she doesn't need praise. It is not one of the things that motivates her. She doesn't need approval, and in a way that is what gives her strength. Incidentally, I had written that old Mr Molesley won for a
Papa Meilland
rose, which was my mother's favourite, but we learned it had not yet been launched and so I changed it to the
Countess Cabarrus
, a fictional flower, named after a friend.

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The envelope is correctly addressed to SW with no number, because numbers came later.

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This is the moment when Sybil is identified as a rebel, not just a political rebel, because I never really know how political she is, but from now on we know that she is not going to lead the life that was ordained for her. Her natural ally in the house is Branson because he is also living within a system of which he disapproves. So in that sense they are both in the same moral position of seemingly upholding values that neither of them support.

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I always think it's rather disheartening for an actor when you have been given, as here, pages to say in the script but you end up with only a moderate place in the finished scene. You think: Oh good, I can really do something with this. But inevitably the programme makers focus on the principal characters and you're just banging away in the background. As an actor, I cannot tell you how disappointing it can be when you see the final edit. So Jamie de Courcey has my sympathy because I thought he was very good.

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I won't say Isobel is more progressive here than we have seen earlier, but by going to a meeting like this, she is making a statement. It doesn't surprise us that she is on the side of women's rights, most of us would have seen that coming from Episode Two when we first met her, but she is a little bit more proactive in the cause of her beliefs than we might have expected, and of course as the series progresses will become increasingly so.

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In this scene, we begin the romance, but we don't do much more than that. We simply hint at the fact that there is a natural sympathy between these two because they are both essentially rebelling against the respective authorities in control of them.

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I think the problem for living-in servants was that you were in a very unrelenting situation. Especially when individuals did not get on. In many jobs there are some people you don't much like, whether in an office or a theatre or down on the farm, but most of us go home at the end of the day and get rid of it. The living-in servants did not go home. They went upstairs. So if you were embroiled in a feud, you had no real break from it. Then the hours were so long, apart from your one day off a fortnight you were there all the time, eating together, sitting together. I've tried to show that this was one of the drawbacks of the life.