Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (25 page)

The young lad in the back row,
far left, is loyal farmhand George Thornton, Louis’s younger brother, aged
about seventeen. I fear I broke that poor man’s heart.

Back then I was a flighty girl,
living for the moment, and I daresay I gave no more thought to his stolen glances at me
or the sadness in his eyes when he spotted me and Alan giggling together.

There was no real start to my relationship
with Alan, but like a territorial animal protecting his lands I suddenly
found I was drawn into his protective clutches. Like a couple of
hormonal young creatures, our courtship was passionate, intense – and deeply unpopular
below stairs.

Alan would use any excuse to sneak up behind
me in the game room or the scullery, run his fingers down my back, spin me round and
plant a long, lingering, passionate kiss on my lips.

‘Steady on,’ I laughed,
the first time he cornered me. ‘You’ll bruise my
lips.’

Our eyes would lock over the
servants’ hall table and Alan would fix me with a look of longing and lust so
intense I’m surprised the table didn’t burst into flames. The air
between us crackled.

At first we managed to keep it secret,
meeting in our half-days off or after lunch service. We’d hide behind a
haystack for a quick fumble or run through the shady woods and rest against an ancient
oak. Summertime at Woodhall was beyond beautiful and there was no shortage of places to
meet for secret assignations. A balmy haze spread over the orchards and the fragrant
hedgerows made a perfect spot to hide behind and while away a couple of hours.

The intoxicating scent of wild flowers
seemed to have a powerful effect on Alan. ‘Oh, Mollie,’ he moaned
one afternoon, ripping off my cap and running his fingers through my red hair.
‘I want you so much. I knew you’d be mine one day.’

‘Well, you’ll wait
then,’ I said, slapping his hands away. ‘If you really like me, that
is.’

I liked him, I really did, and he was ever
so good-looking. His dark eyes shone like conkers and his hair
was so
black it was almost purple in places. I daresay he could have had the pick of any of the
girls at the village dance, but the fact that he had chosen me made me feel special.
Whenever he tried to take things a step too far, or pushed things, I reminded myself of
his unfortunate start in life. He’d had no one to love him growing up or to
teach him boundaries.

Living and working together in such close
proximity, it was almost impossible to keep a secret and soon the cat was out of the
bag.

‘I know you’re seeing
Alan,’ muttered Mrs Jones, soon after we arrived at Woodhall. She was kneading
dough to make a tart and I could see her knuckles turn white as she angrily turned the
dough over, slapping it down and kneading it between her podgy fingers. ‘I
warned you courtship below stairs was forbidden, didn’t I? The very day you
started I told you! The boss won’t like it, see, nor will Mr Orchard.
Doesn’t pay to date the staff.’

Biting my tongue, I said nothing, just
carried on beating eggs in a large bowl.

‘You know,’ she said
angrily, ‘sometimes you don’t know it all.’

What did she know about young love? She
wouldn’t know passion if it came up and slapped her between the eyes.

‘Just cool it off,
Mollie,’ she said, turning to me with her hands on her beefy hips.
‘I mean it.’

I stared miserably at my pudding bowl and
said nothing. Who was she to say who I could and couldn’t date? It was utterly
infuriating. Just why should she and Mr
Orchard have the power to rule
our lives? It was all right for Mr Stocks’s niece upstairs. She was off being
presented at court, with no end of parties and events for her to meet a suitable man.
But what about me? How was I ever supposed to meet a man? When I spent ninety hours a
week below stairs it was little wonder I ended up being attracted to someone I worked
with!

To escape the heat from my private life I
immersed myself in the heat of the kitchen. Cooking provides a wonderful escape to lose
yourself in. Under Mrs Jones’s expert tutelage, I was learning so much. I may
only have been sixteen but already I could finally pluck, gut, draw, bone and truss a
bird, fillet a fish with my eyes shut and make soufflés as light as air. I was forever
making sauces, from béchamel to Béarnaise, caper to cardinal, bread to bordelaise,
hollandaise to horseradish. Mrs Jones was a firm believer in sauce – the cooking of, not
receiving, I hasten to add.

In 1933 sauces were all the rage. Nothing
was served on a gentleman’s dinner plate without some sort of hot
accompaniment. Until the end of the eighteenth century, cooking was a neglected art in
England. A Frenchman of that age once described us as a ‘nation with one
sauce’. Well, not when I was learning to cook. Mrs Jones was often wont to
quote Alexis Soyer, who said in
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household
Management
: ‘Sauces are to cookery what grammar is to a
language.’

She would hover over me whenever I made any
sauce. ‘It’s all in the lightness of hand, Mollie,’ she
would say,
planting a wooden spoon in my hand. ‘I never ever
want to catch you making a sauce with anything other than a wooden spoon.’

Hollandaise was the worst. I had to make a
basic white sauce, put it on the heat and then add stock and egg yolks bit by bit and
whisk by the side of the fire until it thickened. Woe betide you let it boil.

‘It’s ruined!’
she’d shriek. ‘Chuck it out and start again. Never boil a sauce,
dolly daydream. Keep your mind off Alan and back on this hollandaise. A good sauce chef
is about genius, Mollie, yer hear? I can only teach you so much, the rest is instinct.
You have to feel it deep in here,’ she said, thumping her plump hand against
her left breast.

I could take or leave it, mind. It seemed no
end of trouble to go to. The hours I spent grating horseradish for horseradish sauce,
it’s a wonder I have any knuckles at all left today!

The meat was what I loved cooking the most.
When you grow up poor with not much meat, to be able to then cook and eat it nearly
every day is wonderful. Most of what we cooked came from the surrounding farms or what
Mr Stocks had shot, so it was all what you might call local and we knew its provenance
all right. In fact, we knew to the last square inch where everything that landed on our
plates came from. Everything we ate was either grown in the soil of Norfolk, grazed off
the soil of Norfolk or swam in the seas off Norfolk – none of this meat from Argentina
or fruit from Africa. It makes no sense to me that. Why buy food that’s been
flown from thousands of miles away when we have the most
delicious
produce right here on our doorstep? Daft, ain’t it!

Back then we didn’t just move with
the seasons, we ate with them too. I learnt to make the most wonderful meat dishes,
dishes you just don’t see that often on menus nowadays. Game in aspic jelly,
pheasant croquettes, loin of lamb, rabbit quenelles, partridge pie, stuffed quail,
sweetbreads in aspic border, jugged hare with port, rabbit pudding and roasted saddle of
mutton were all favourites. There was no end of techniques to learn and all the
accompaniments, from stews to sauces, were of course made from scratch. I loved the
smell of it all roasting and sizzling over the range.

Mrs Jones’s eyes would light up
when the gardeners brought the fruit and vegetables in straight from Mr
Stocks’s large kitchen garden. Garden makes it sound small, doesn’t
it? But it wasn’t. The plot of land was out the back of the estate and was
like stumbling across a secret, magical world. You followed a little lavender-lined path
to a magnificent black wrought-iron gate with Mr Stocks’s initials, MS,
interwoven in capitals in the ironwork. Once inside the walled garden, beds of the most
incredible-looking vegetables spread out in immaculate rows and were lovingly tended to
daily by a team of gardeners. Rows and rows of trees groaning with fruit lined the
ancient walls of the garden. There was even another greenhouse at the far end to grow
more exotic fruit like pineapples.

Mr Stocks loved his fruit and vegetables and
only those dug out of the ground or picked that morning were allowed to be served on his
dinner plate.

The head gardener was responsible for picking
the fruit and vegetables that Mrs Jones told him she needed for that day’s
menus. It was then delivered to her in big wicker baskets and placed on the kitchen
table for her inspection. Fat asparagus, earthy new potatoes, all dug up just moments
before and still covered in earth – they were as fresh as they come. She would brush off
the dirt and insects as she inspected each item individually.

‘The vegetables that grow in the
ground you cook in the pot with the lid on and you start them in cold water. Vegetables
that grow on top of the land you put in boiling water and you don’t put the
lid on,’ she said.

It wasn’t just cooking techniques,
either. By watching and observing Mrs Jones closely I was able to see how she planned a
week’s worth of menus, what leftovers could be turned into something equally
mouth-watering the next day and just how much or little to order to keep supplies topped
up without being frivolous – a dirty word in the kitchens of Woodhall!

She saved her best smiles for my uncle
Albert, the delivery man from Harcourts the butcher. Goodness knows whether she was
getting kickbacks from the butcher for choosing him as the meat supplier to Woodhall,
but Albert always got a coffee, a slice of cake and a rare smile when he delivered our
meat order. It went both ways, mind. We would sell him what game Mr Stocks
couldn’t eat and in return we’d get the pick of the best beef, lamb,
cutlets and sausages.

Soon after we arrived at Woodhall, the new
scullery maid, Phyllis, started. Our trembling new recruit was just the same age I was
when I started, fourteen, and had
absolutely no idea what
she’d let herself in for. She got the same regimental rundown from Mrs Jones
that I’d got and my heart went out to her. She was a timid little thing and
looked like she might burst into tears at any minute or blow away in the wind when Mrs
Jones hauled her up about something.

As she scrubbed the floors and tackled the
dirty dishes on her first morning I gave her a conspiratorial wink.

‘It does get easier,’ I
smiled, making her a cup of coffee when we paused for elevensies. ‘And
don’t mind Cook. She might seem like an ogre, but she’s not so bad
underneath it all.’

At the end of her first week she looked
quite exhausted, poor girl, and she made the dreadful mistake of dropping one of the
best gravy jugs.

‘Whatever is wrong with you,
girl?’ screeched Mrs Jones as pieces of shattered porcelain skidded over the
wooden floor. ‘That happens again and I’ll have to dock it out your
wages. Watch what you’re doing or you won’t last long here. Just
follow what Mollie does, all right?’

Poor Phyllis. I found her later in our
bedroom, sobbing her eyes out.

‘How do you do it?’ she
said. ‘I can’t do a thing right and it’s such hard work.
I’m dead on my feet.’ Her hands were stained dark black from raking
down the coal fire. ‘I can’t seem to get this coal dust off my
clumsy old hands neither and there’s nowhere to wash them,’ she
sobbed in despair.

I smiled gently, went downstairs and filled
up a jug with warm water. Taking her hands in mine, I started to sponge off the worst of
it.

‘You’ll get there, I
promise,’ I said. ‘Don’t mind that old dragon downstairs.
She mostly blows hot air, not fire.’

Phyllis started to laugh.

‘That’s
better,’ I said. ‘You’re ever so pretty when you smile.
Tell you what, I’ve got my mother’s gramophone downstairs in the
servants’ hall. I’ll teach you all the latest dance moves if you
like. Someone very special taught me …’

‘Oh, would you?’ she
beamed, all thoughts of the smashed gravy jug vanished. ‘I’d love to
be like you one day, Mollie,’ she sighed.

‘Whatever for?’ I
laughed.

‘Well, you have pretty
clothes,’ she said, gesturing to the rail where Flo’s black dress
hung, ‘
and
a handsome footman boyfriend.’

I frowned. Seemed my relationship with Alan
was a little more out in the open than I’d realized.

Finally August and the much-anticipated
holidays came round.

Mr Stocks was only going to shoot grouse on
one of his friend’s grand estates up in Scotland, but you’d think he
were going to Outer Mongolia the way Mr Orchard fussed. As his valet, he was responsible
for packing his trunk and making sure everything was just so.

‘A gentleman cannot turn up
unprepared,’ he said snootily. ‘Irene, can you press Mr
Stocks’s linen handkerchiefs ready for his journey? I need his velvet house
slippers and the cashmere bath slippers too.’

After that, he busied himself packing Mr
Stocks’s tweed suits, his shooting jackets, dinner suits and bow ties for
the evenings and mid-grey flannel suit to travel in. His best cigars
were taken down from the shelf near the range and delicately packed away in an engraved
silver cigar case.

All I needed for the short journey back to
Mother’s was my bike and an old canvas bag with a few summer clothes thrown
in.

It was arranged that Alan would stay behind
in the servants’ quarters, but would cycle up every day and spend time with my
family and me. I was ever so nervous of how my family would take him. He could be a bit
mouthy, after all. On the bike ride there I did what I usually do when I’m
nervous – talk.

‘I don’t know why Mr
Stocks only goes to Scotland on his holiday,’ I said as we cycled.
‘I hear it just rains all the time up there. If I had his money I should go
somewhere hot and exotic.’ I’d read all about Spain in a copy of Mrs
Jones’s
Home Companion
magazine once. ‘I should love to go
to Spain,’ I sighed. ‘The warmth of the sun on your skin all year
round, bull fights, oranges as big as yer head. They even have them palm trees like they
have in the fancy hotels. One of these days I’m going to go to Spain and seek
out my fortune.’