Servants’ Hall (24 page)
Authors: Margaret Powell
Inevitably, I saw much less of Mary and Rose. Mary occasionally came to tea but she preferred, as I would have done, to go as far as Streatham on her free afternoon; not only was it more of an outing, but the food was considerably more sumptuous. With three children in five years, I literally couldn’t afford the fare to see Rose. About a year before the outbreak of war, she called on us one evening – we were living in three rooms in Kilburn at that time. She brought Victoria Helen with her and I was surprised to see that now the child was older, she was also prettier. I could sense that Rose was simply bursting with news of some kind, and so it proved. She had, as she put it, that very day set foot in Redlands for the first and only time since she and the son of the house, had departed in the night.
‘Oh, Margaret, it was so strange seeing the place after all this time, I thought I’d never have the courage to go up the drive. And what do you think, Mr Hall opened the door. Who’d have thought he’d still be there? And afterwards I went downstairs, and Mrs Buller is still there and Mr Burrows.’
Interrupting this seemingly nonstop flow, I asked the important question: why did she go there?
‘Well, Margaret, I had a letter from Vicky’s Aunt Helen, to say that Mrs Wardham – I can never get used to saying my mother-in-law – was very ill indeed, and that she’d like to see me and her only grandchild again. And I cried when I saw her, she looked so thin and white and could only whisper, and yet she tried to smile at Vicky. Oh, she was always such a nice lady. And, what do you think, Margaret, Gerald’s father was in the hall and he looked as mean and hateful as ever. He wouldn’t even look at Vicky and never spoke a word to me. Miss Helen – ’ ‘your sister-in-law’ I interjected – ‘said that her father had never spoken to her since she left home, just the same as with Gerald.’
Mary and I seldom mentioned Gerald’s name to Rose because she herself never spoke about him. We knew that she still refused to divorce him, but we’d no idea whether or not he was living with his partner’s wife. Now suddenly, Rose, perhaps under the stress of revisiting Redlands, said, ‘I’m sure that you and Mary think I’m mean and pig-headed because I won’t give my husband a divorce. You think what have I got to lose, he’d still support me and Vicky. You don’t see it my way. Why should I be an ex-wife? I’ve done nothing wrong. Why should Vicky, through no fault of hers, or mine, have a divorced father and another woman where her own mother ought to be. Weren’t we joined together in holy matrimony in a church? We’re legally married not only in the eyes of the law, but we are one in the eyes of the church.’
In all this self-justification I could hear echoes of her mother’s sectarianism, her unloving and far from Christian attitude to anybody who strayed from the path of moral rectitude.
* * *
Towards the end of the second year of the war my husband was called-up; and then I, with our three sons, left London to live in Hove, my home town. I received an occasional letter from Mary and Rose, which dwindled eventually to a card at Christmas from Mary and nothing at all from Rose, who’d moved down to Devon with her daughter. Then quite suddenly, some months ago, I heard from Mary that Rose had died. It seems incredible to me that so many of that period have gone while I, who nearly died with a massive haemorrhage when I had a gastric ulcer, was knocked down by a car in the middle of the Fulham Road and have had cancer, am still alive and well. I must be, as my sister and I used to say about our mother, indestructible – though I don’t really want to live to ninety-four. Even Mary, though only a year or so older than I, has had two heart attacks and lives a very quiet life. Death through old age has taken some of the principal protagonists: the Wardhams, Van Lievdens, Rose’s parents and the older servants I knew. Gerald was killed in the last year of the war, and Miss Helen while driving an ambulance. Poor little Vicky, living in Devon to be safe from the air raids, was run over by an army lorry as she ran out of school. Mary never did marry, her Conrad, like his namesake, deciding he preferred to roam the high seas.
When we met again after so many years, there was a great deal of ‘do you remember?’ We talked of many things; of a life that seems now so remote and alien it is as though it never existed. Like me, Mary is not afraid to talk of death; as she says, it is a journey that one starts upon from the moment of birth. And surely it must be the only journey that the older one gets, the more the speed towards journey’s end accelerates? If taken in time, as with mine, doctors can cure some forms of cancer; but for death they can only offer halts on the way. Three years from our golden wedding, my husband and I make jokes that perhaps sound macabre, though to us they are not. Sunday mornings, on the way to our ‘local’, we pass two cemeteries, the old one on the left, the new on the right. One Sunday he remarked that the new was filling-up rapidly – as is only natural in a town to which old people retire.
‘Don’t you worry, my love,’ I said, ‘there’ll be room for you. I’ll have you buried near to the road so that on the way to the local on my own, I can just throw the flowers over the wall to save me getting out of the taxi.’
‘What d’you mean, bury me? I thought we had equality in our marriage?’
‘That
is
equality, love. You’re five years older than me.’ And we laugh and hope we go together.
Also by Margaret Powell
Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey”
Margaret Powell’s Cookery Book: 500 Upstairs Recipes from Everyone’s Favorite
Downstairs
Kitchen Maid and Cook
MARGARET POWELL was born in 1907 in Hove, and left school at the age of thirteen to start working. At fourteen, she got a job in a hotel laundry room, and a year later went into service as a kitchen maid, eventually progressing to the position of cook, before marrying a milkman called Albert. In 1968 the first volume of her memoirs,
Below Stairs
, was published to instant success and turned her into a celebrity. She died in 1984.
SERVANTS’ HALL.
Copyright © 1979 by Margaret Powell. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
ISBN 978-1-250-02929-4 (hardcover)
e-ISBN 9781250029287
Previously published in London by Michael Joseph
First U.S. Edition: January 2013