Below Stairs (20 page)

As well as books I had advice from people – it’s amazing the amount of people that are always so lavish with their advice, isn’t it? It would be, ‘What you need is to have a family’, or ‘You need to educate yourself’, or ‘What you need is to travel’. Well, as the first of these exhortations was the easiest to accomplish I decided to go in for that. And it certainly occupied my time because I had three children in five years. Three boys. I got quite blasé about it.

I remember when the last one arrived it was a Sunday. Incidentally, all my three children were born on Sundays, I don’t know if that means anything or not. My husband went to fetch the midwife, who was just going to church, and was far from pleased about it, though how she thought you could possibly regulate when they were going to come, I don’t know. Anyway, the sight of her gloomy face didn’t help me at all – having a baby isn’t a picnic at the best of times. When it arrived she said, ‘Oh what a pity it’s another boy.’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t care if it’s a blooming monkey so long as it’s got here at last!’ She looked at me in shocked amazement and said, ‘You know, I look upon every child I deliver as a flower sent down from above to be planted in the earth’s soil.’ This kind of talk from someone who had produced no flowers at all – she was a spinster – made me say, ‘What about all the seed that falls on stony ground?’

I took a very prosaic view of the whole proceeding, because when I was a child I’d lived in a street where most babies were born as a result of Saturday night revels. They were all known as ‘beer babies’.

When Albert and I decided to get married naturally I wanted to leave service straight away. After all’s said and done, all my working years had been building up to the fact that by getting married I could get away from it with all possible speed and rapidity. So when the date was set I gave a month’s notice.

This time I had a perfectly legitimate reason for doing so and Madam was very pleasant about it. It was a funny thing that although none of them really liked you to leave if you were going to another job, if you left to get married it was a totally different thing. It was acceptable and it was respectable.

And yet the business of getting a young man was not respectable, and one’s employers tended to degrade any relationship. It seemed to me one was expected to find husbands under a gooseberry bush. Their daughters were debs, and they could meet young men at balls, dances, and private parties, but if any of the servants had boyfriends they were known as ‘followers’. I think ‘followers’ is a degrading term, it brings to your mind people slinking through back streets, not seeing the light of day, with any young man that cares for you. Why should you have to do that? Why should the fact that you’re a servant and in love be wrong when the whole deb set-up was manufactured to bring their daughters together with young men? They could have said, ‘If you have a young man you’re interested in, you can ask him in to the servants’ hall when you’ve finished your work.’ But no, you had to slink up the area steps and meet him on the corner of the road on some pretext like going to post a letter. And on your night out when you came back you couldn’t stand at the top of the area steps with him or bring him down to say goodnight to him. He wasn’t a young man, he was a ‘follower’. They made you feel that there was something intrinsically bad in having a member of the opposite sex interested in you at all.

We decided to get married in a registry office. We hadn’t got much money, and Albert and I didn’t think much of all the pomp and ceremony. It was a quiet affair. I got all the usual inquisitive remarks. Such things as, ‘You’re getting married to get out of service’, and, ‘Are you really in love?’ I wasn’t madly in love, but I cared about him, which I thought was a good basis to get married on.

In view of the fact that my husband only earned three pounds five a week, of which I had three, you might wonder why I didn’t go out to work. Women simply didn’t then. Working-class husbands bitterly resented the very thought that their wives should have to work outside the home. It seemed to cast a slur on the husband and implied that he wasn’t capable of keeping you. If a man was unemployed, well that was a different thing. Then you had to.

Our first home was in Chelsea and there was a woman living in the basement next door to us who was married to a Russian, a Mrs Balkonsky, her name was; her husband was of course Boris. She had five children, and she got about the same money as I did. She was an extremely good milliner, an occupation that she could have followed in her own home, and supplemented the family income. Yet her husband was so against her doing any work or making any money apart from what he gave her, that she wasn’t allowed to.

Mind you, I didn’t want to go out to work. The time never hung on my hands at all, I was only too glad to have nothing to do for a while. Although I was a feminist and stuck up for the rights of women, it didn’t go that far. I asserted an independence as regards the running of the home, I wasn’t subservient in any way to my husband. I considered that he received good value for the money he gave me in every way; in the physical relationship, in the running of the home, in the social relationships too, and I considered that I wasn’t under any obligation to him at all.

In any case the only kind of work that I knew how to do well was cooking and to do that would have meant going out at night and doing dinners. Well, I don’t think that the wife going to work at night is a very good basis for a marriage relationship.

I wanted to make a success of marriage as I wanted to make a success of other things in life. And so much of my time had been spent thinking about getting out of service that it was a long while before I felt that home life wasn’t enough, and by then I had collected a family of three children, so that any aspirations I had had to go by the board for the time being. Looking after three children is a fulltime job to me at any rate, because I was a mother in the full sense of the word, I think.

As I’ve said, after we got married we lived in what we considered was the best part of London, Chelsea. We paid fifteen shillings a week for a bed-sitting-room, with a minute little kitchen. We had the first child there. But naturally as the family increased, one room and kitchen wasn’t enough so we had to move. We went in turn to Willesden, Harlesden, and Kilburn. They’re very dreary, dingy places with houses to match the kind of locality.

I had three children in the first five years of my marriage and by then – Albert was still a milkman – money was getting a bit tight.

When our eldest child was about five years old I happened to be out one day and 1 met one of the maids who I’d been in service with. She told me that the people she was working for were at their wits’ end because the cook was away and they’d got to give a dinner party. She said, ‘Why don’t you come in and cook the dinner for them?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t, I haven’t done that sort of cooking for years.’ ‘You’ll pick it up again straight away, you can’t forget that kind of thing. Why don’t you try?’ So I went home and spoke to Albert about it. I put it to him. It would mean at least ten shillings or a guinea for doing it, and the money would be very handy for the children. So he agreed and I did it.

I made quite a good job of it too, and after it was over the lady of the house came down and asked me if I would like her to recommend me to her friends. I said ‘Yes’. From time to time people that she knew would write to me and ask me if I could come and do a dinner; sometimes for six, sometimes as many as twelve, in which case they would have some dishes in from outside as well. When it was a small dinner I got half a guinea, but for an elaborate one I earned two guineas, and when you consider that my husband was only getting about four pounds a week even then, two guineas was a lot of money indeed. And I quite enjoyed these little expeditions. Apart from the money it gave me an insight into a different kind of life. People were so different, so friendly. They’d be in and out of the kitchen talking to you as though you were one of them. In domestic work things had certainly changed.

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HIS WAY
of life passed pleasantly enough until 1942 when my husband was called up. Albert was conscripted into the Royal Air Force, so I decided that I’d move back down to Hove.

I didn’t want to stay in London in wartime with three young boys, so I wrote to my parents to see if they could get me a house. It was quite easy to get houses in Hove at that time because a lot of people had left. They didn’t like the hit-and-run raids they were having there. They got me a six-roomed house for a pound a week. It was marvellous, the first house we’d had since we’d been married. The most we’d ever lived in before was three rooms and a share of lavatory.

I remember one place we had at Kilburn, we had to go downstairs and walk through someone’s kitchen to get to the lavatory. All through the summer the man used to sit right outside the lavatory door on a deckchair, and it was most embarrassing to ask him to move. I’m sure that’s where I first suffered with constipation!

Now everything would be my own, I thought. I was in clover. You can imagine what our stuff looked like in it, because we only had enough for three rooms. It had to be spread all around. I just had one bed in each bedroom, nothing on the floor, but I didn’t care.

All the boys got on well in Hove; they all went to the same elementary school at first, and then they passed the examinations to get to the grammar school. While this was a great joy, it was also a terrible worry. With three young boys to look after on my own I couldn’t go out to work, and the separation allowance that I got at that time was very poor indeed.

It wasn’t until I’d written goodness knows how many letters to the Education Authorities that I managed to get more money. But I found great difficulty in managing even so, and each time Albert got a promotion – he was eventually made up to corporal – we didn’t benefit, because out of his increased money the government docked my allowance. So there was no incentive for him to try to get further.

I couldn’t make the boys’ clothes now. If they’d been girls I could have, but boys have got to look the same as everybody else. You can’t send them to school in home-made suits.

I remember one terrible occasion, the only time in my life when I had to apply for charity. They only had one pair of shoes each and although when my husband was home he used to mend them, he had been posted overseas. I was at my wits’ end as to how to get them repaired. So I went down to the Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Airmen’s Association who sent me over to the Council. It was something too terrible for words. You need a hide like a rhinoceros, it seemed to me, to ask them for anything. Some people were used to getting all and sundry. They never turned a hair. But this was the first time I had ever asked for anything. I went in very nervous with a face as red as a beetroot. I felt like a pauper. ‘Why do you want shoes for them? Why haven’t they got shoes?’ I said, ‘They’ve only got one pair.’ ‘Why don’t you get them mended?’ they asked. ‘I can get them mended,’ I said, ‘but in the meantime they won’t be able to go to school. They’ve got no others.’ After this kind of talk they returned me to the Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Airmen’s place. I went back to them and I said, ‘They said it comes under your jurisdiction,’ and they said, ‘It doesn’t, not to supply shoes. You go back to the Council and start again.’ When I went back and through the whole process again, they grudgingly gave me some forms. They don’t give you money and they don’t give you shoes, they give you forms to take to a special shop in Hove.

They wouldn’t let you have shoes, you had to have boots, charity boots. My sons had never worn boots before. I never entered fully into how much they must have felt it. I was so obsessed with how I felt, I never investigated their feelings. Going to school wearing boots, and everyone knowing that they’re charity boots because they were a special kind.

When my boys went to this grammar school, it was still a fee-paying school. So naturally the parents of the boys that were there were far better off financially than we were. A lot of them had been to preparatory schools. And they had money. Some of the boys had a pound a week for pocket money. A pound a week! I couldn’t give mine a shilling. I remember when I had a bit of trouble with one of them – he drew a moustache on the headmaster’s photo – the headmaster saying to me that it was all poppycock their feeling inferior because they hadn’t got money. ‘I came up the hard way,’ he said, ‘I only got to a grammar school on scholarship level, and I only had sixpence a week pocket money.’ But times had altered. People had more money then.

Another terrible thing was that if you had an income of under five pounds a week you were entitled to free dinners. Well, there was no one else in any of their classes that had free dinners, and each new term the master would say, ‘Stand up those who want tickets for dinners.’ Well, you just imagine how you would feel if you’re the only child in the class whose parents can’t afford to pay for your dinners. I didn’t fully understand it myself at the time. If I had realized the situation I wouldn’t have been ambitious to get them to a grammar school, I really wouldn’t. I used to write to the master in advance, I knew which one they would have, and say, ‘Will you please not say out loud, “Who is going to have a free school dinner?”.’ I admit they did take notice then, and they didn’t do it.

Another thing that I didn’t realize was sport. Cricket for instance. I couldn’t buy cricket flannels or cricket boots. I ran up football shorts for them, but I couldn’t afford the journeys for away matches. I thought, it doesn’t matter, they’re getting a good education, that’s what matters. But those other things did matter.

I think that one can be too ambitious. You educate them, you send them into a social community of which they can’t be one. People have the same herd instinct as animals. There’s only got to be one that’s different and they kick hell out of him.

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ITH THIS
struggle on I decided to go out to work. I decided to do housework again. I couldn’t take on cooking because there wasn’t a lot of work for cooks in wartime. It had to be housework. It was very poorly paid at that time. When I first started I got tenpence an hour. It seems fantastic now when you think about it. I suppose everyone must have been getting the same otherwise I’m sure I would have asked for more. I worked for a vicar, which was jolly hard work. You know what vicarages are; there’s the day for the boy scouts, the day for the girl guides, the day for the Women’s Institute, the Mothers’ Union, and of course these old vicarages are not labour-saving places. They were planned with a house full of servants in mind. Still I enjoyed it there. The money was bad, but there were perks; left-over food, and when there was a jumble sale the vicar’s wife always used to let me pick out anything I wanted first. She’d say, ‘Just give a few coppers and take your choice,’ and many a decent suit or jersey I got for the boys before the horde came in.