Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (41 page)

Flo is now one hundred years old and would
you believe we’re determined to meet up soon for a cup of tea and a chat about
old times. Until that happens, we talk regularly on the phone, and boy do we have a
laugh! We cackle until the tears are streaming down our faces when we remember climbing
out of the servants’ quarters at Woodhall to
sneak out to
the dance that time or the memorable occasion the runaway pheasant burst through the
kitchen window, showering glass in the soup!

They really were the best of times and I
feel so honoured to have shared them with Flo. She is the most kind-hearted person I
know. She’s talented too. Do you know, she went on to make cook too, in her
twenties. She worked for the Marquess of Lothian at a grand old home called Blickling
Hall in Norfolk, where she cooked for, amongst others, the Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin during the abdication crisis and Queen Mary, George V’s widow.

Between us we’ve cooked for
royalty, politicians and the gentry. They truly were remarkable times. We could tell the
writers of
Downton Abbey
a thing or two, that’s for sure!

Here we are, 196 years of experience between
us, and still got our wits about us. I put our remarkable good health down to the fact
that we have eaten well all our lives. No vegetables stuffed with chemicals or nasty
processed food. We’ve worked hard and never sat down on our bums for long.

Granny Esther lasted until 1953 and the ripe
old age of eighty-five, and my mother didn’t die until 1985 when she was
ninety, so I suppose you could say the women in my family are battlers.

More than anything – and I passionately
believe this to be true – I’ve enjoyed my life and tried to find the fun in
any situation. That’s why I’m still here to tell the tale. More than
can be said for most of my old employers, I’m sad to say.

Kind old Mr Stocks passed away in 1957 and
left Woodhall to his son, Captain Eric. Mr Orchard remained faithfully by his side until
the day Captain Eric died in the summer of 1974, aged seventy-six. He left Woodhall the
minute Captain Eric’s wake was finished. Where he went, nobody knows. Loyal to
the end, Mr Orchard had devoted a lifetime to the service of the Stocks family,
unshakable in his belief that what he was doing was worthwhile, that he was born to
serve them. Every day for over forty-four years he tended to his master’s
every need, carefully placing the silver-framed menu on the table, faithfully
sounding the gong to announce dinner at seven thirty p.m.

Larking about shortly after the
birth of my son, Timothy James, in 1946.

The sound of a chiming dinner gong
may well have died out in the hallways of upper-class houses in Britain, a symbol of a
bygone age, but I like to think Mr Orchard’s legacy lives on. He certainly
taught me a thing or two about hard work and devotion to duty.

That butler was one of a dying breed. Once
all the rank and deference had collapsed after World War Two and domestic service faded
away, he clung to the ways of the old world. He couldn’t have coped with the
new, more democratic, way of life. Flo and I may have been born to serve in the way that
Mr Orchard was, but we didn’t live to serve. We took our opportunities and we
used them to our advantage.

Mrs Jones will long since have died. I
don’t know where she went to as, sadly, we lost touch, but I’ll
never forget her. She was fierce, yes, but also fiercely loyal and I have her to thank
for turning me from a scullery maid into a cook! I thought I knew it all, but in reality
I was just a kid. Sneaking off with that troubled footman and Henry the Blackshirt
showed me up for what I was, a rebellious little girl. I thought she was just exerting
control over me but now, with the benefit of hindsight and wisdom, I can see she was
only looking out for me. She always did. She’s probably up there now, sitting
on a cloud, giving some cherub hell.

As for lovely gentle George the farmhand,
believe it or not we stayed in touch, even after I left Woodhall, and we remained
friends for years. He became a proper old bachelor. I got him a job near where I lived
years later in
Bournemouth. He was a dear, sweet, kind man and I often
wish he’d found the love that eluded him. He died in 1986 in a nursing home,
aged seventy. I was with him when he took his last breath. It may sound strange but we
became so close that he was almost like family. When he got ill, suffering from cancer
of the throat, and we knew the time was near, Timothy and I visited him every day.

On the day of his death a nurse rang.
‘George is asking for you, Mollie,’ she said. ‘Can you get
up here now, he’s not got long.’

I grabbed my keys and raced up to the
hospital. As I burst into the ward I was relieved to see him propped up in bed. When he
spotted me, a gentle smile flickered over his face and his eyelids closed.

‘Mollie,’ he whispered,
slowly stretching out his hand across the bed sheet and lacing his fingers through mine.
My name was the last word he ever said. Sixty seconds later, he died. I’ll
never forget my lovely farmhand.

I’m afraid to say that kind Mrs
Luddington didn’t have quite such a peaceful end. After I visited her that
day, during the war, I never did see her again. I was horrified to hear that on 29
February 1960 she was killed in an earthquake in Agadir in Morocco. It was the most
destructive and deadly earthquake in Moroccan history and killed around 15,000 people.
It lasted just fifteen seconds, but killed one third of the population of Agadir.

Poor Nell. She would have been fifty years
old. Such a terrible end for such a gentle woman. My heart went out to her poor husband
and children. I don’t know what became of her husband, but I understand
Wallington was passed down through the generations until it was sold in
2007. The location of the buried treasure remains a mystery to this day, but
I’ve heard the bitter ghost of Elizabeth Coningsby still makes her presence
known!

The rest of the gentry that I knew of fared
no better than Nell in many ways.

Before and after World War Two Wallis and
Edward were suspected by many of being Nazi sympathizers. After the duke’s
death in 1972, the duchess lived in seclusion and was rarely seen in public.

In May 1940 Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana
Mitford were interned. They were released in 1943 but spent the rest of the war under
house arrest. The war ended what was left of his political reputation.

As for our beloved King George VI, the
stress of the war was believed to have taken its toll on his health and he died in
1952.

I walked over miles of heather from
King’s Lynn to pay my respects and watch his coffin being placed on the train
at Wolferton Station, the official station for Sandringham. What a strange day. I and a
group of sombre onlookers bowed our heads in respect as the queen (the Queen Mother as
she later became), Elizabeth and Margaret all walked down the platform past us,
following the coffin, in long, heavy black veils.

There was no security or burly bodyguards to
hustle us back – there simply wasn’t the fear that anything bad could happen
to them. They were so loved by their people that they accepted us just standing there
within touching distance of the coffin.

It may sound strange, my wanting to watch
the coffin
go off, but I adored our royal family. Their lives felt so
intertwined with my own. In many ways we felt like they were our own family, and so I
too wanted to pay homage as the king left his country home for the last time.

Elizabeth would have been just twenty-five
as she followed her father’s coffin up the platform, aware of the enormity of
the task ahead of her. I’d seen her playing as a little girl in her garden
and, nineteen years later, on the threshold of being made our queen. What an enormous
responsibility for one so young! How incredible I find it that sixty years on we have
just celebrated her Diamond
Jubilee. Not since I witnessed her
grandfather King George V’s Silver Jubilee back in 1935 have I seen such a
total outpouring of patriotism and love.

Me and my son, Timothy James,
aged two. We had our photos taken at Selfridges for half a crown. The war was over but
rationing was still biting, so photos like this were a small, affordable pleasure.

The end of World War Two brought about many
changes, not just the demise of our king and accession of his daughter Elizabeth. It was
also the end of the domestic servant as we had known it.

Many trends that began the decline in
service from the First World War were accelerated by the Second World War, but in a more
pronounced and permanent way. For the first time, after World War Two, domestic
appliances such as cookers, Hoovers and electric irons became available. Time-consuming
tasks that would have required housemaids like Irene suddenly became easier and quicker,
meaning servants weren’t needed.

Huge employment opportunities, like clerical
work, became available to young women as a result of the war. What young woman wanted to
work long hours as a scullery or kitchen maid when she could get paid more and work
fewer hours in an office? The rise in the school-leaving age meant that girls like me,
who would have started as a scullery maid aged fourteen, now had more educational
opportunities open to them. Thanks to the war, people viewed domestic service
differently too. Doing things for yourself became popular and the idea of the
‘housewife’ as an identity also took off.

Although many households did still employ
servants, it was on nowhere near the scale that I had witnessed. Usually it was confined
to just one or two servants, such as a cleaner or a charwoman who lived out.
It’s impossible,
really, to overstate how much the war
changed the lives and homes of Britons from every single class background.

It was all change for me too. In 1953, soon
after the death of King George VI, with two young children in tow – Ruth and a son,
Timothy James – I finally departed British shores. My husband rose through the ranks to
become an officer and was posted to the Far East and we went with him.

I may not have made it to Spain but I did
make it to Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Yemen to name but a few.

As an officer’s wife I had an
incredible time and saw some amazing sights. I saw Singapore before there was even a
single high-rise building built, travelled over developing countries in an eight-seater
Commodore plane, watched native burning ceremonies in Kuala Lumpur and drank gin and
tonic on a troopship from Singapore to England. What a trip that was. It took us a month
to get home, sailing through the Suez Canal, stopping at Yemen and then Gibraltar. Every
night there were fancy-dress parties, card games and drinks for the officers’
wives and we all dressed up to the nines. I even had a man assigned to my cabin who ran
my bath for me every night and brought me whatever I wanted. They virtually wiped your
bottom for you. It was a high old time!

The kids and I once travelled through the
Malay jungle under armed guard, clutching a Sten gun for fear of kidnap by communist
terrorists. But after facing Mrs Jones in the kitchen, nothing fazed me. Like I say,
nothing frightened me much when I was young.

The ultimate irony to my mind is that as my
husband
rose through the ranks and we grew in so-called social
prominence, we began to have staff of our own. Suddenly I found myself in charge of a
household of staff. In Singapore we had no end of servants to help cook, clean and look
after the children. As a commissioned officer in the RAF, my husband even had his own
airman-come-personal-servant, known as a batman, who would come to the house to do our
cleaning and sort out his uniform. I hated it. How would you feel having a strange bloke
in your home doing your housework? Maybe it was the years of cooking and cleaning I did
for the gentry, but I knew just how I wanted things doing and it felt wrong to sit back
and let other people do it for me.