Her Ladyship's Girl (3 page)

Like I said, I didn’t see much of Lilly the nanny or Mona the lady’s maid. Lilly was a jolly kind of woman but Mona was the toffee-nosed type and suited her nickname – Mona the
moaner. She called me ‘Moyle’ like she was the lady of the house and knew I had no Christian name, even though she was a servant, just like me. She wore fashionable clothes and I
wondered how she came by that job and I thought it was something I might like to be some day. But there was a long way to go before I got that far above my station.

Kathleen and Nora were right: I was too tired after the long hard day to go walking and all I wanted to do was fall flat into my little thin bed. On the way there, I noticed Bart slipping into
Nora’s room and the penny dropped – he paid attention to Biddy in the kitchen so nobody would make the connection between him and Nora. He was only a young dog, but already a sly one.
Kathleen was in the room when I got there.

‘Listen, Annie, I should tell you . . . you’ll have to watch out for Mr Harding.’

Harding was the name of the family who owned the house and Mr Harding was the head of that family. I’d not seen him so far.

‘Why?’

‘He has no respect for women.’

I wondered what she meant by that, but I didn’t worry too much about it because I was already asleep before my head even hit the pillow.

I didn’t want to get up the next morning; my body felt like it had been beaten with a blackthorn bush. I was in pain from the bun on the top of my head to the nails on the toes of my feet.
As time went on, Cook put more and more work my way and I came to realise that she was right: a scullery maid’s life was the lowest of the low. I had many bosses, not just the tyrant cook,
and all the hardest and dirtiest jobs going – and only two shillings a week in wages, one of which I had to send home for the family. I was working sometimes sixteen hours a day and I only
got one afternoon off, on a Sunday. If my mother could’ve seen me she’d have tut-tutted and rolled her eyes and bit her nails to know what I’d become.

At sixteen, I was still the youngest member of staff and that meant doing what I was told, no matter who was doing the telling. The only good thing about it was that newfangled, labour-saving
devices were coming out all the time and the Harding household was forward-looking enough to try them – things like a washer/wringer and the electric flat-iron and refrigerator and an
Electrolux vacuum cleaner. But there was still a lot of scrubbing and scraping and beating carpets over a line and polishing steps and, if anything went wrong, I got the blame and blather –
whether it was my fault or not.

Like when Lucinda spilled her watercolour on the stairs – it was supposed to be watercolour but I don’t know what else was in it, because it just wouldn’t come out. And I had
to wet it and dry it and wet it and dry it until the stain was the same colour as the rest of the rug. It took me ages and I got behind with my other jobs and had Cook on my back the whole
live-long day after that. It wasn’t my fault in the first place, but I got the blunt and badger of it. That kind of thing happened a lot in the house and being called nasty names by some of
the staff made me feel bad. Many’s the time I wanted to run out the door and find my way back to my family in Wales. Many’s the time I would’ve cried into my pillow at night if I
hadn’t been too tired for tears. But I decided not to let it drive me down into the dust, and I knew who I was to myself – even if I was only a skivvy to everyone else.

L
ong before I became a skivvy, I was born in Llangynwyd, a mining village in the Llynfi Valley and part of the medieval
cymwd of Tir
Iarll
²
. Back in those olden times, the basic unit of land was a
tref
and a
cymwd
was about thirty or forty
tref
s. Even as a
young child, I was always interested in the old ways and I read what little I could find about the things people believed in before the Christians came. My grandmother on my father’s side
knew a lot of stuff that she learned from the elders when she was a young girl. She told me stories from the
Mabinogion
and the
Dynion Mwyn
³
and the
Cymry Gwyddoniad
⁴
, and I always felt I had more in common with those old legends than I had with the chapel-goers.

I was given the name Anwyn, which means ‘very fair’ – Annwn, with a double n and without the y was also the name for the Otherworld in Welsh mythology. It was a world of
eternal youth with no disease and an abundance of everything and a far cry from little skinny-legged, black-faced me. The year was 1918, and more people were employed in the coal industry in Wales
than ever before or since. We lived in a valley with hills and mountains all around and a tributary of the Nant y Gadlys running through a forest close by. Although the river wasn’t very big,
it was sometimes fast-flowing as it hurried on its way to meet the Afon Llynfi. We climbed the mountains to get away from the choking coal dust and jumped the rocks in the river like gadding goats,
and fell in more times than we got safely across. It was all a part of growing up in the dull, starless streets and the breathtaking highness of the hills.

Llangynwyd was a small village back then and the only work was down the mines – everybody depended on ‘the coal’ for their bread and butter and beans and there were five or six
working pits dotted around the area, all connected by a little railway. You could see the steam engines chuffing around the hillsides and the smell of slack and steam hung in the air and the dust
covered the houses and the lower slopes. At the pithead, coal was brought up to the surface and loaded into drams. The drams were coupled together like big buckets on wheels and pulled steeply up
along a ramp that eventually tipped them into the waiting railway trucks, to be taken away to keep the fires of industry burning around the whole of the United Kingdom and maybe further afield as
well.

All the miners were allotted a free allowance of coal and this was issued by the ton and dumped by a lorry outside the houses. Everyone in the street would come out with their buckets and tin
baths and shovels and brooms and make short work of shifting the lot through the house and into the
cwch
at the back. Our house was small, with the barest bits of furniture and a lavatory
down the end of the garden where the spiders wore striped jerseys. Water came from a tap on the side of the house and the cooking was done on an open fire that was part of the range. We had
gaslight downstairs and candlelight upstairs and it was a place that some city people might call picturesque – but not them that had to live there.

Sheep wandered anywhere they liked and did their droppings everywhere they liked and everyone knew everyone else’s business. There was no cinema or anything like that to entertain us kids,
and television hadn’t been invented – at least not in Wales. So we amused ourselves with our own version of knock-down-ginger, where we tied a thin string at night to one door knocker
and the other end to a knocker across the street. Then we’d knock on one of them and, when the person in the house opened the door, they’d pull the string which would raise the knocker
on the other side and, when they closed the door, the knocker would fall and knock that door. The other house would then open the door and you can see what happened. Us kids would be hunkered down
and hooting until the people realised what was happening and came chasing us down the dark road. Other games were bobby-kick-a-tin and skipping and us girls would knit squares to make blankets out
of and the crocheted shawls of many colours that all the women wore. We’d go up the river to find birds’ nests and snakes and try to catch trout by tickling them under their bellies
– but I never could get the hang of that and the coughing from the coal dust always frightened the fish away.

The coughing was caused by what we called ‘black lung’ and it was dangerous if it developed into emphysema or bronchitis, which it often did. But I was lucky because my little lungs
were healthy enough to cough up the coal dust and I left the village before something more serious than coughing took hold of me. I survived, which was more than many other tumble-headed little
smowt did back then.

I was the first-born of four children – Walter came after me in 1920 and Gwyneth in 1922 and Bronwyn in 1924. Some people asked who made my mother pregnant with me, considering my father
was a soldier at the time. But she said it was when he was home on leave and he was happy with that explanation – at least, he seemed to be. Whether he actually was on leave at the time or
not, I’ll never know. My father’s name was Hugh and he was gassed during the Great War, but he never knew how bad it affected him until later, after he came home. He married my mother,
Katherine, and went down the mines with the rest of the men, hewing coal in the dark and dangerous world underground. He’d come home covered in black dust from the pit and wash it all off in
a big wooden bath in front of the fire – that was before he developed the broncho-pneumonia.

It was when Katherine was having her fourth baby that he had the first attack. He said it was caused by the coal, but the bosses said it was caused by the gas he inhaled during the war. After
that, he couldn’t work anymore, so my mother had to do it all instead – she did the washing for people who could afford it and painted their walls with distemper, and she had so much
mother’s milk on Bronwyn that she breastfed babies for drier women and they paid her a few pennies for the protein. Us kids would fill old sacks with coal we found lying around and collect
sheep dung from the roads and sell it for a ha’penny a bucket. People soaked it in water then poured the slurry over their vegetable plots – or they dried it out and burned it on the
fires to make the coal go further. It was a hard enough life, but most were in the same boat and no doors were ever locked and neighbours would pop in and out during the daffodil days for a cuppa
and a mouthful of Welshcake that some called bake-stones and others called griddle scones.

As well as all the work she did, my mother would traipse into Maesteg once a week to get her ‘Lloyd George’ – which was the benefit of those days, brought into being in 1911 by
David Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. It gave workers the first contributory system of insurance against illness and unemployment and took away the need for the
stigmatised social welfare provided under the Poor Law. All workers who earned under £160 a year had to pay 4d a week into the scheme; the employers paid 3d and the government paid 2d –
Lloyd George called it the ‘ninepence for fourpence’. Workers were paid ten shillings a week for the first thirteen weeks of sick leave and five shillings for the next thirteen weeks
and they were also given free treatment for tuberculosis. My mother took me and my brother and sisters with her sometimes to collect the Lloyd George and do her shopping in Maesteg and we stayed
close to her all the way through the dingles and dells, which were full of
afancs
⁵
and
gwyllions
⁶
and
llamhigyn y dwrs
,
⁷
waiting to leap out at us children and drag us away to
diawl
.
⁸

And in winter, just after Christmas, the Mari Lwyd, or Grey Mare, would come trotting down the street with its ‘Ostler’ and Merryman and Sergeant and with Punch and Siwan dressed in
tattered clothes with blackened faces. Its bony mare’s skull would be bleached white and have green fire inside its eyes and its jaws would snap and frighten the living daylights out of the
women as well as the children.

This darkest time of year was traditionally believed to be the time when the veil between the upper world and the underworld was thinnest and creatures could cross from one to the other. The
tradition of Mari Lwyd was a calendar custom that went all the way back into ancient times and the festivities would go on for a week or two and was supposed to bring good luck.

A mare’s skull was fixed to the end of a wooden pole, with a white sheet fastened to the back of the skull, hiding the pole and the man underneath carrying it. Black cloth ears were sewn
onto the sheet, along with ribbons and bells, and the eyes were made of green glass. The jaws could open and snap shut again at passers-by and people in the houses where it would stop. The Mari
Lwyd was led by the Ostler with his whip or stick and the Merryman played music and the others sang songs as they wassailed along the way. Punch carried a long iron poker and Siwan swept the road
before them with a besom broom.

The skull was carried through the streets of the village and they stood outside the doors of the houses and pubs, banging to be let in. They’d sing a verse and my father would try to sing
a verse back at them from behind the closed door. They’d start off with something the likes of –

And my father would cough –

And they’d come back at him with another verse and he’d answer them and Punch would rap on the door with his poker and Siwan would beat her broom against the windows
and it would go back and forth until the coughing got the better of my father and he couldn’t answer any more. Then we’d have to let them in. Us children would cower in the corner
because, once they got inside, the Mari would run around the house neighing and snapping its bony jaws and it would chase us into the arms of Punch, who would try to kiss the girls and be beaten
over the head by Siwan. My father would offer them food and drink and eventually they’d move on to the next house, after bringing good luck for the coming year and frightening away the bad
luck of the previous year, and everything would quieten back down into the dark dull wintertime, while we waited for the spring.