Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (12 page)

It was covered in mud, but was so fresh
it’s not true. They didn’t call it organic, but back in them days
everything was organic. The vegetables had travelled all the way from Woodhall on the
train from Downham Market and Mr Thornton would collect them, like he had me, fresh off
the train at Liverpool Street. No such thing as air miles back then! You
wouldn’t believe it now, would you? Chauffeur-driven vegetables! But
everything had to be the best of the best for the gentry, you see.

Mr Stocks was obviously a great believer in
fresh local produce as he wouldn’t get his fish from Billingsgate. Oh no, only
fish caught fresh from the Norfolk coastline every morning would do. It was also Mr
Thornton’s job to collect the fish off the train daily and bring it to Cadogan
Square. Fresh fish would be loaded on the train at Norfolk, just fished out of the sea
that morning, put on the train at Ryston and arrive, still flapping, at Liverpool
Street.

Oh, it was beautiful: whole salmons, plaice
the size of dinner platters, lemon sole, turbot and cod steaks cut lengthways. The staff
would always have the cod steaks every Friday, as they only cost thruppence each, and Mr
Stocks would have the more refined fish, like lemon sole. Mind you, I didn’t
much mind. Nothing tasted better than a great big cod steak, served with boiled eggs in
a butter and parsley sauce and homemade chips cooked in dripping.

Every so often, Mr Thornton’s son
Louis, who acted as second chauffeur in Norfolk, came up to London to help out his
father and, on the day of the dinner party, he’d come to assist him with the
chauffeuring.

Louis was as handsome as they come.

At twenty-five he was a good ten years older
than me, but he had eyes the colour of milk chocolate, jet-black hair and a bum you
could bounce a penny off. You could keep your weedy-looking gentry; give me a solid man,
a man bred from the land, any day. Louis was a real man through and through. He was as
solid as the oaks that grew in the Norfolk soil.

The minute we heard his whistling come down the
area steps, Flo and I nudged each other. Tummies were sucked in, breasts pushed out and
hair pushed under our mop caps.

‘Morning, ladies,’ he
grinned.

‘Morning, Louis,’ we
giggled back. What silly girls. Honestly, I cringe, remembering it now.

‘How are we all today?’
he said, beaming.

On the left is Louis Thornton (in
the white apron), Mr Stocks’s second chauffeur. A good deal of time was spent
lusting after this handsome man. On the right is Ernie Bratton, Captain Eric’s
valet, a lovely fella who took me to the Chelsea Arts Ball.

All the better for seeing you.

We gazed longingly at his tanned, hairy,
muscular arms as he helped Mrs Jones unpack the fresh fish his father had just brought
in. His hands looked as big as tractors and you could only imagine what he could do with
them.

‘Got a bootiful big one for you,
Mollie,’ he winked.

One look at those dark eyes and my pulse
started to race.

‘Oh, I bet you have,’ I
simpered, flirting outrageously.

Louis oozed charm and having him in the
kitchen was the highlight of the day. Mrs Jones glowered from across the kitchen, but
even her cloud of disapproval did nothing to get rid of the heady mix of teenage
hormones that hung like steam over the room. With all the simmering pans and the
bubbling hormones, it’s a wonder nothing boiled over.

Alan skulked about in the background,
cleaning silver and shooting Louis jealous looks as Flo and I hung on his every word.
When it was time for him to go, we were flapping about nearly as much as the fish.

‘See you all when you come back to
Woodhall,’ he said with a smile, and then he was gone, off to help out his
father.

Flo and I gazed longingly after him as his
magnificent bottom disappeared up the kitchen steps.

‘Any chance you silly girls can do
some work now?’ shot Mrs Jones, bringing us back to earth with a bump.
‘We’ve a dinner party to get ready, you know.’

Alan muttered something under his breath and
stalked from the kitchen.

After that it was my job to prepare the
veggies for Flo and Mrs Jones. Great mountains of potatoes and carrots needed peeling
and chopping, and there were always piles of onions to dice.

‘He’s so handsome,
ain’t he?’ Flo whispered, sidling into the pantry beside me.

‘Reckon I’m in with a
chance?’ I whispered back.

‘Doubt it, Mollie,’ she
replied. ‘I hear he’s courting a kitchen maid back in Norfolk.
Anyway, you want a hand?’
She’d been there and done
that and knew slicing fifty-odd onions in the cold and dark of the stone pantry was no
fun.

‘I’m all right, you go
on, you’ll get into trouble otherwise,’ I said. Then I grinned
wickedly. ‘Afore you go,’ I said, picking up a whole trout from the
icebox and slapping open and shut its wet mouth, ‘who’s this put you
in mind of?’

She snorted so loud I could hear Mrs Jones
clear her throat loudly in irritation. ‘Out of there, dolly
daydreams,’ she bellowed.

‘Best go,’ said Flo,
flashing me a cheeky grin.

As I peeled and chopped the onions, I let my
mind drift back to handsome Louis. I couldn’t wait to start courting. It was
all Flo and I talked about. The laughs and camaraderie that she and I shared were a
tonic. We was giddy girls, high on life. Even a tower of onions couldn’t
dampen my spirits. Besides, I never grumbled in any case, I just put my head down and
got on with it. I knew that the quicker I finished, the more I could hang out in the
kitchen and watch what Mrs Jones did. Watching her at work was fascinating and, though I
didn’t realize it, I was picking up so much just watching.

She’d written out the menu and it
sounded amazing. Clear beef consommé to start, followed by cheese soufflés. Next came
the fish course. Mrs Jones was going to send up a whole dressed salmon. Meat course was
poached chicken in aspic with duchesse potatoes. Next came a pudding of peaches and
raspberry mousse. And just in case anyone was still hungry, Mrs Jones was going to send
up savouries. No one has these any more but back then it
was quite
commonplace to serve small savoury dishes at the end of a meal. Things like eggs stuffed
with prawns, angels on horseback (which is oysters wrapped in bacon), chicken liver on
toast, curried shrimps and sweetbreads.

The meal finished with cheese and coffee and
after that, for the men, port and cigars. Mrs Jones kept the cigars near the range in
the kitchen to keep them nice and dry.

This sounds like a lot for one meal, and it
was, but the portions were much smaller in them days. Mr Stocks would still have as many
courses to eat even if it were him dining alone, apart from the savouries, but most of
the dishes would come down with just a few mouthfuls gone from each plate.

A huge amount of work went into preparing
these meals and Mrs Jones made everything, and I mean everything, from scratch.

Once she’d finished writing out
the approved menu, she delicately slotted it into a silver frame and gave it to Mr
Orchard to take up and place on the table. This wasn’t a special one-off for
the sake of the dinner party. Every day at lunch and dinner, even if it was Mr Stocks
dining alone, she would place the menu in a silver frame and up it would go.

Mrs Jones began work on the soup and
soufflés.

‘Why are you doing that
now?’ I asked.

‘A good cook always looks ahead,
Mollie,’ she replied.

For most of the morning she’d had
a shin of beef and bones boiling away on the stove. We nearly always had a stockpot on
the go. Into that went everything – beef bones, lamb bones, leftover vegetables. These
scraps, when cooked, produced the most amazing flavour. She
added
little muslin bags filled with herbs to the beef stock along with carrots, onions and
celery. While Flo grated huge piles of Parmesan for the soufflés, she tipped egg whites,
egg yolks, and then finally the shells themselves, into the soup.

‘Why are you putting egg shells
into the soup?’ I gasped.

‘That’s what gives it a
lovely glossy sheen,’ she said.

Next she whisked it all vigorously, her huge
arms powering through the big copper saucepan, before adding lean beef and sherry and
leaving it to simmer.

Every so often, Flo would skim off the scum
and fat from the top.

Mrs Jones was right, too. When the soup was
drained through a super-fine hair sieve it was as rich and glossy as a
thoroughbred’s mane. Flo let me sneak a taste and, oh my, I’d never
tasted such a concentrated burst of flavour before.

After that, Mrs Jones made her own aspic
jelly with stock and gelatine for the chicken dish, and the salmon was gently placed in
a massive copper fish pan that seemed to take up half the stove and poached gently with
herbs and water. Meanwhile, Flo was making fresh hollandaise sauce to go with it by
dropping egg yolks one by one into a basin and mixing with olive oil, until she had a
lovely glossy thick yellow sauce. All the sauces were made fresh.

Then she mixed potatoes and mashed them up
with egg ready to pipe out.

Meanwhile, I scooted round the kitchen like
a little busy worker ant, jumping to Mrs Jones’s every command, washing pans
and wiping down. I loved it. What a thrill to
be part of this. Mrs
Jones’s energy, focus and calm as she assembled the feast was something to
behold.

‘Over here, Mollie, and wipe down
my whisk,’ she ordered. ‘Muddle makes more muddle.’

There was none of the shouting and hissy
fits like you get with these celebrity chefs nowadays. There wasn’t time. You
couldn’t turn out a meal like that from scratch if you wasted your energy on
shouting.

Mid-morning we got a break for an elevensy
of coffee, bread and butter or dripping sprinkled with sugar. It was always a welcome
breather. Mrs Jones would reach down and pour us all a coffee from the percolator that
had been bubbling away all morning on the stove.

Wrapping my hands round the steaming mug, I
leant back and breathed out slowly. For the first time in days I allowed my thoughts to
drift back to Mother. Thanks to my new friend I was ashamed to say I was no longer
missing Norfolk or even allowed it to crowd my thoughts as it once had.

Was Mother missing me? Worrying about me?

‘Make us a coffee,
Mollie,’ grinned Alan, snapping me out of my daydream. ‘My
tongue’s hanging out.’ He’d been cleaning silver for the
dinner party that evening and the green baize apron he wore over his livery reeked of
silver polish. The smell of freshly brewed coffee acted like a magnet to that boy.

‘I must have cleaned a mountain of
silver,’ he grumbled.

Behind him Flo pulled a face and I started
chuckling. I knew what was coming next and I was faster than him. As I reached up to the
rack over the stove to get him a warm mug, I knew he’d give my bottom a cheeky
pinch. Quick
as a flash I whirled round and cut him across the hand
with a wet tea towel.

He whipped his hand away and I cackled.

‘That’ll teach
you,’ I snorted. ‘Now keep yer hands to yerself, you filthy
so-and-so.’

Our laughter was drowned out as Mr Orchard
thundered into the kitchen and Alan slunk off.

‘Need I remind you where you
are,’ he said, his mouth twisting in disgust. ‘We do not want those
sorts of unsavoury activities going on under Mr Stocks’s roof.’

Flo pulled another face behind him and I had
to use every muscle in my face to stop myself from falling apart. Didn’t that
man ever have fun? Rumour had it that he had a boyfriend who worked in an office, so I
suppose he may have been homosexual, as were a lot of butlers back then. We never knew
for sure and he certainly wouldn’t have shared such personal information with
me, the scullery maid, but one thing was for certain: he kept his private life very
private.

It must have been hard being a gay man in
the 1930s. Not that we called them gay back then. Gay was someone who was jolly or
happy. Back then they were called pansies or nancy boys. Traditionalists, from the
working class up to high society, frowned upon homosexuality and they were regarded as
sinners as well as criminals. Homosexuals were seen as a threat to marriage, family and
church. It’s hard to imagine it now, but in the 1930s homosexuality was
illegal and was actively sought out by the police and prosecuted by the state. The 1885
Criminal Law Amendment Act, famously used to prosecute Oscar Wilde, specifically
outlawed any sex act, public or private,
between two men, enshrining
in law homosexuals as criminals. These acts could be punished by up to two
years’ imprisonment.

The number of arrests and prosecutions for
these acts went up dramatically between 1919 and 1935 as police focused attention on
increasing the number of raids and breaking up meetings between gay men. Evidence used
was often spurious and custodial sentences were handed out more frequently. In the 1920s
there was some degree of freedom, but from 1931 things became much stricter and a
serious anti-homosexual backlash began. The issue of homosexuality was of such concern
to the police that they held the first Conference on Homosexual Crimes in London in the
same year as I started as scullery maid. Only down the road from us in Holland Park,
sixty men, many working class, were arrested following a police raid at a private
Holland Park ballroom. The men had been caught dancing together, with many wearing
women’s clothes and make-up. ‘Pansy case’ the papers
called it.