Servants’ Hall (2 page)

The kitchen was the usual very large room with flag-stones covered with strips of brown coconut matting. The usual huge dresser took up one wall, and the equally huge kitchen range almost all the other. There was, too, a small gas stove on which Mrs Buller cooked the breakfast and kept the dishes hot until needed. She also baked simply wonderful soufflés in it although the oven had no Regulo; one had to use judgement and a lot of commonsense. Nowadays, with all the automatic kitchen equipment, judgement and commonsense are of little use. What one needs to be now is a qualified engineer, electrician and gas-fitter so that when the labour-saving devices break down, as they frequently do, one doesn’t go mad with irritation waiting for the experts to call.

After tea, Mary and Rose took me up to the bedroom that I was to share with them – Doris had a little boxroom. Although there were three beds, we weren’t cramped and we each had a washstand. Also, wonder of wonders, there was a bathroom for the servants which we could use any day we liked – after first enquiring whether the upper servants would be using it. I said to Mary and Rose how nice it would be when we got to be upper servants, then we’d have all the privileges. Mary, who was a year older than me, said she didn’t intend to be in service long enough to become an upper-housemaid. When her merchant navy boyfriend came home from this voyage they were going to be married.

‘When will that be?’ Rose enquired.

‘Oh, not for another year yet, it’s a two-year voyage.’

‘Oh, Mary, fancy having a boyfriend that you can’t see for two years. What ever do you do when you want to go to dances, and you engaged and all.’

‘Well, silly, I don’t tell boys. Besides, I’m not really engaged, it’s just an understanding. Sid knows that I go to dances, he don’t expect me not to have any fun while he’s away. He trusts me.’

I couldn’t help feeling that he must be a singularly trustful young man; because if one was lucky enough to get a partner in a dance hall he invariably became somewhat amorous. The type of dances encouraged that feeling, for dancing waltzes and foxtrots one was held in close embrace. Even so, we were all encased in heavily-boned corsets, held so rigid it was like wearing armour, and a young man wasn’t exactly clasping a mass of palpitating flesh. But if you didn’t respond at all to his advances, then, unless you were a marvellous dancer, that would be the one and only time he’d ask you to dance and you would find yourself joining the other wallflowers. A girl as pretty as Rose, though, whether or not she was a good dancer, would never lack for a partner.

On her bedside table there was a picture of a young man. Rose said that her mother wanted her to marry him, he earned good money working in a mill in Manchester – where Rose lived. ‘Are you going to?’ I asked, and Rose said that she supposed she would some day, her mum liked this Len.

‘You’re not going to have him just because your mum likes him, are you? Besides,’ I added, ‘his ears stick out like jug handles, he’ll never be able to wear a bowler hat.’

Mary started to laugh as she told us she had once a boyfriend with large floppy ears and every time he got a bit passionate not only did he breathe heavily, but his ears waggled like deflated balloons; it was a good warning that he was about to get inflated elsewhere. Rose screeched, ‘Oh, Mary, you are awful.’

By this time I’d changed into my uniform and was all ready for work downstairs. Mary had already told me that the family consisted of Mr and Mrs Wardham, an unmarried daughter of about thirty-five, an eighteen-year-old niece, and a son, about thirty, who’d only recently returned home after three years farming in Rhodesia. According to Mr Hall, the butler, the son had come back because he couldn’t make a go of it out there. This had greatly incensed his father who’d put up the money for the project.

3

As I’d never worked in a house with a between-maid, I wondered just what our spheres of activity were. Mrs Buller told me that Doris kept the scullery clean and I would do the kitchen. Doris also lit and cleaned the kitchen range, which I was overjoyed to hear. I must admit that she made a marvellous job of it, the range really looked quite something; such polished black and burnished steel. She took a real pride in the job too, standing back to admire the effect then giving it another little rub. Like all such ranges, it burned coal and Doris was forever filling the scuttles. As I was bigger and stronger than her, I often used to carry the scuttles in from the coal-house, but Mrs Buller wasn’t altogether pleased by this, saying that if we all did each other’s work where would we be. With the licence of being only a temporary, I answered that I wouldn’t dream of offering to help Mr Hall. Later on, young Fred, the under-gardener, would often carry them in for me if he saw me struggling, which I suppose bore out the cook’s theory that you should stick strictly to your own sphere of work.

My first evening there wasn’t too arduous, physically or mentally, as there were only just the five of them upstairs for dinner – though they still got through six courses. The main course was fillets of beef, and Mrs Buller, with an air of faint hopefulness, said to me:

‘Well, Margaret, I don’t suppose you know how to make a Béarnaise sauce to go with the fillets? It is a tricky sauce to make.’

Though I would have preferred not to have to demonstrate my knowledge on that first evening, I did know how to make the sauce and I could see that my value had already risen in the cook’s estimation. For the sweet course she’d made a baked lemon soufflé, and she certainly was a dab hand at making them for this one rose above the dish like a balloon. They dined at eight o’clock so by the time that we sat down to our supper – a lovely steak and kidney pie – it was getting late. As usual, we ate in the servants’ hall; Doris and I laid the table and brought in the food. Mrs Buller sat at one end of the table and Mr Hall at the other; I reckon they both thought they were at the head of the table. One sensed a faint antagonism between the cook and the butler, although they were meticulously correct in their dealings with each other – except on one occasion, after I’d been there a few weeks. Mr Hall told me off for something, whereupon Mrs Buller intervened saying:

‘I’ll thank you, Mr Hall, not to admonish my staff, if you have any complaints, come to me.’

Mary said that because the cook had known the family for years – she had worked for Mr Wardham’s mother and, incidentally, seemed to be the only person in the house that Mr Wardham had a pleasant word for – the butler felt that she had an advantage over him, as he had only been there for five years.

Up in our bedroom we four younger servants settled down for a good gossip about the family. Mary remarked that Gerald, the son, although he’d been home only a few weeks, had taken quite a shine to Rose, his eyes were always following her around the dining-room. Rose, though blushing a deep red, denied that he took any more interest in her than he did in any of the staff, for how could one of the gentry be interested in the likes of her. Her mum would be horrified at the very idea, because her mum had been in one place only in service all her life until she married, and she still started her letters to this lady with ‘Dear Madam’, never Mrs Paine. Like Kipling’s ‘East is East’, I said, but the allusion was lost on Rose.

‘What does one do on one’s free afternoon and evening in this benighted place? I can’t see any kind of social life around here and I’m not addicted to country walks. I have always had this feeling that farm animals take an instinctive dislike to me; and they know that I have no rapport with the country.’

‘Cor, Margaret, can’t you use long words, you are clever,’ and Doris gazed at me admiringly.

‘She always could,’ said Mary; then she added, slightly maliciously, ‘trouble is, Margaret can’t pronounce them like they do upstairs.’

I pretended to be indignant, but of course Mary was right. An extensive vocabulary was in no way comparable with the right accent.

‘Anyway,’ Mary went on, ‘you have Wednesday off, same as me. We could go to the village hop, it’s only three miles away and the buses run every thirty minutes. The dance finishes at ten o’clock so it’s not as though we’d have to leave while it’s in full swing. Course, it’s not like a proper dance hall; rough floor and just a piano and drums, but at least there’s nearly as many males as females so you don’t have to lay on the flattery knee deep to get a partner.’

‘Don’t expect any high-toned conversation,’ interrupted Rose. ‘The last time I was there, my partner talked all the time about muck-raking, horses and all the gory things that went on when cows calved.’

She was right too, as I found on my first evening there. Most of the young men worked on farms and were wearing great clod-hopping boots. They reeked to high heaven of brilliantine which didn’t mix well with the farm odours. My perspiring partner – I made allowances for the perspiration as I was a bit hefty to propel around the floor – kept pigs. Although I like pigs in the abstract, an evening devoted to the idiosyncrasies of these animals was not my idea of conversation. When I, never loth to show off, murmured, ‘… and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings’, he looked blank. I added, impatiently, ‘You know, “through the looking-glass”.’ But if it were possible, he looked even more vacant. Once we were outside the hall, I was somewhat surprised when I found that his porcine preoccupation was the prelude to being held in a rock-hard embrace, with slobbery kisses and grunts that would have done credit to his charges. I hasten to add that not all the village swains were like him.

Doris had to be up by six o’clock, and Mary, Rose and I at six-thirty. At first I wished Doris had slept in our room so that I could actually witness, from the warmth of my bed, somebody having to start work before me, who up to now had always been the first to rise. I’d never have wanted to be a between-maid; it’s a hard job having to help the cook in the early mornings and then, after breakfast, having to help the housemaid. My mother had three months at that job and she told me that forever the cook would be blowing the whistle for her to come down, and the housemaid blowing down for her to come up. Doris didn’t seem to mind, and neither Mrs Buller nor Annie were tyrants. Nevertheless, it meant she had two bosses.

By the time I came down there was already a roaring fire in the kitchen-range so the bathwater was getting hot. I put a kettle on the gas stove and made tea for us under servants, then a fresh pot at seven o’clock for those august personages, the upper servants. I took a cup upstairs for the cook; Mary took one to Agnes, and Rose left one outside the butler’s bedroom. He’d have liked her to bring it in to his room, but Rose had told him her mother would never let her stay in a place where she had to enter a male servant’s bedroom. Presumably, as those above stairs were almost sacrosanct, it would have been all right to take a cup into the son’s room. At seven-thirty Annie took tea upstairs for Mr and Mrs Wardham, Miss Helen, the daughter, and Miss Sarah, the niece. The valet, Mr Burrows, did the same for the son.

By seven-thirty I’d laid up the cook’s table with all the things she needed for cooking breakfast for us and upstairs, and Doris had laid the table in the servants’ hall. We had a good breakfast of porridge, which had been cooked overnight and left to keep warm on the stove, and bacon and eggs. Doris and I had to dish everything out on to the plates, so there wasn’t the same formality as there was for midday lunch, when the butler solemnly carved the joint and the vegetables were passed up and down the table in strict pecking order. Our official breakfast time was from eight o’clock until eight forty-five. Upstairs, it was at nine-fifteen. I was pleased to discover that the servants didn’t have to assemble upstairs for prayers. And later on, when I caught sight of Mr Wardham’s sour-looking face and heard his harsh and overbearing voice, I could tell that it would have been incongruous for him to orate about how we were loved by the One above when it was obvious that the one above, who paid us our wages, didn’t even like us.

It rather grieved Mrs Buller that no prayers were said in that house. She considered that to have fifteen minutes of spiritual communion was to start the day well; though as Doris and I said – only to each other of course – as we’d already been up for a couple of hours of hard work without spiritual communion, we could continue to manage without it. But Mrs Buller appeared to be on almost familiar terms with God. Casting her eyes upward, she always spoke of Him as the ‘Master’. I got extremely confused about this owing to the fact that when she was working for Mr Wardham’s mother, Mr Wardham was always known to her as Master Edward. Now that she worked for him, she referred to him as the Master. Once, when Mrs Buller admonished Doris to hurry with stoking up the range for dinner, the Master didn’t like to be kept waiting, I whispered to her that he’d been waiting for hundreds of years so a bit longer wouldn’t matter. And besides, I thought, one stoked up for ‘him below’. Doris giggled so much that Mrs Buller enquired sarcastically whether we thought we were in training to be cooks or a couple of comics on the stage; and Mr Hall, a balding man of fifty who occasionally tried to be avuncular with the young servants, said, ‘Ah, Mrs Buller, when they get to our age they’ll realise that “life is real, life is earnest”, which drew no response from Cook, who disliked any mention of age. I thought that Mr Hall was being very tactful for Cook must have been ten years older than he was. The only person allowed to be jokey with Mrs Buller was young Fred, the under gardener.

4

On my first morning at Redlands – the name of the house – I realised that Mary had spoken the truth about Madam. Mrs Wardham was a rather sad-looking lady, but so very pleasant. She actually called me Margaret and thanked me for helping them out at such short notice. Mrs Buller sniffed audibly on hearing this but I didn’t let that detract from my pleasure. I really felt for a few moments that I was just as important in the scheme of things as the upper servants. Subsequent remarks from Cook and the butler soon dispelled such ideas. Not that Mrs Buller was ever really unkind. For one thing, an experienced kitchenmaid such as I was could lighten a cook’s load of work considerably. After reading the menu, I knew just what utensils she would require on the kitchen table. And I knew just what was within my capacity to cook. As Mr Wardham was only in to lunch at weekends, the meal for them upstairs, unless there were guests was a simple affair of two courses and cheese. But a lot of food had to be cooked for our dinner, which was our main meal at two o’clock, for as well as the nine servants in the house, both gardeners and the chauffeur sat down with us. Proper ritual it was too. The cook and butler were ensconced at each end of the table, Agnes and Violetta each side of Cook, Mr Burrows, the valet, and Jack, the chauffeur, each side of the butler, and the rest of us in between. It was my job to lay the table with a huge white cloth, and we all had serviettes rolled up in different coloured rings. It was difficult at first remembering the right places at table to put them – not that it mattered with Fred, the gardener or the chauffeur, as they never bothered to use theirs. Doris and I had to bring in the hot plates, vegetables, gravy and sauce. By the time we all sat down it was quite an impressive sight. Once, young Fred whispered to me, ‘You’d think we were in training for the State Banquet,’ which caused me to giggle and Mr Hall to frown. If I forgot some item for the table, such as the salt, or enough tablespoons, Mr Hall, as was the way with most butlers, would not address me directly but, looking very grave, and as though he’d just been given private information on some impending catastrophe, would say to the cook: