Below Stairs (7 page)

A hair sieve was like a wire sieve in shape, but instead of being covered in wire, it was covered in very fine hair – it felt like horse hair but yet it seemed a lot finer than that.

About five minutes before Mrs McIlroy was going to send it up, she would put a whole gill of cream into the tureen – a great big china one with a ladle with a long handle. It always used to remind me of that saying about the devil and the spoon. I used to say, ‘They’re supping with the devil all right, up there with that spoon.’

If there was any left Mrs McIlroy used to give it to me because there wasn’t enough to share among everyone. I was always hungry, and I used to eat everything there was to eat. She used to say, ‘You’ll go off your food in the finish, you do when you’re with it.’ I never did. I think it was the years of semi-starvation when I was a child. Even now I can eat anything there is to eat.

Often there was an entrée for the next course. Sometimes Mrs McIlroy used to do pieces of chicken in aspic jelly. She used to make her own aspic jelly, with stock and gelatine; nowadays it’s all bought ready made. If they’d had chicken the night before and there was some left over, I used to cut it up in small pieces and Mrs McIlroy would make this aspic with the gelatine, the stock, and the seasonings, place these pieces of chicken into it, and then put it in an icebox. We didn’t have any refrigerators, of course.

We used to have a big metal galvanized box, and every morning the iceman would come around with a large lump of ice, which I put in a tray on the top of the box. The food that needed chilling was put in there. Having a larder that was practically all made of slate and in the basement into the bargain, very little food went bad. In any case, nobody tried to keep food, it was brought fresh in every day.

Then would come the fish course. Sometimes salmon if salmon was in season, sometimes lemon soles, sometimes turbot, each with the appropriate sauce; hollandaise, tartare, or mayonnaise. It was my job to make the mayonnaise sauce. And what a job it was too. I never thought I’d get it right. First I would drop one egg yolk in a basin, then add olive oil, one spot at a time, only one spot, and I kept stirring and stirring and stirring, until I got a lovely thick yellow mixture, rather like custard. But if I tried to hurry it – to put the olive oil in a bit quick – the whole thing curdled and I had to throw it away and start all over again. I threw away a lot of mayonnaise sauce in my time!

Then came the main course, sometimes a round of beef, sometimes, if they had visitors, it would be a whole saddle of mutton, sometimes just a leg of lamb.

Mrs McIlroy used to make a beautiful sort of glaze. I really never knew how she did it. You can buy it out of bottles now, but she used to make her own out of a kind of burnt sugar. It used to melt and go a lovely toffee colour, and she would spread this over the leg or saddle before she sent it up; it really looked glorious.

Then the sweet. This could be anything, but was nearly always something cold; perhaps a chocolate whisk, which used to be made with grated chocolate, eggs, and castor sugar; or perhaps fruit, fresh fruit with sugar boiled down into a syrup and tipped on top of it; perhaps a compote of oranges, or a compote of bananas; not always a savoury because the Reverend Clydesdale wasn’t very fond of savouries. He sometimes liked sardines or anchovies on toast. Nothing too fancy.

Then came cheese and coffee. That was their dinner.

What we had at night were the left-overs of the day before or a macaroni cheese or welsh rarebit. It wasn’t Mrs McIlroy’s fault, she wasn’t allowed to give us more. Some of the maids used to moan like mad and say they never got enough to eat. I didn’t moan, but I used to feel it wasn’t fair.

Although their dinner at night wasn’t until eight, I had to get things ready for Mrs McIlroy before six o’clock because as well as laying out the table, everything she cooked was prepared by hand. For instance, if she was making a cheese soufflé, which was a thing they were very fond of, Mrs McIlroy used to do it with Parmesan cheese because it’s a lighter cheese in texture and in weight than the ordinary kind. Now today, of course, you can buy Parmesan cheese ready grated in bottles; in those days you had a lump of it, and believe me, it was as hard as a rock, and I used to have to grate this on the fine side of the grater. That took quite a long time, and some of my knuckles at first.

If it was horseradish sauce, that had to be done by hand too. Grating horseradish is far worse than doing onions. The tears used to stream from my eyes. I used to dread having to do it. If it was creamed spinach, this had to be put through the sieve and that was another long chore.

The worst job of the lot was when they had minced beef cake. The raw beef, generally a fillet, had to go through the mincer. This wasn’t easy. But then I had to get it through a wire sieve, still raw, so you can imagine how long this took. I thought it was impossible when I first tried, but I found I could do it if I kept on long enough.

The sieved beef was then mixed with herbs and a yolk of egg, tied up in a piece of muslin, and dropped into a little stock and simmered for not more than twenty minutes. So that when it was cut open the steak was still more or less raw, but because it was so fine after going through the sieve, it tasted as if it had been cooked until it was tender. It was a marvellous thing but it took a lot of work.

If they were serving game they had potato crisps with it. Nowadays everybody buys potato crisps in bags or tins, but in those days they had to be done by hand. First of all you peeled the potatoes, then you got a clean tea cloth and laid it out full length on the table and sliced the potatoes by hand so thinly that when you held them up you could see right through them. They were like little rashers of wind. You laid each one separately on the cloth. Then you covered them up with another cloth until they dried. Then you melted fat – lard, not dripping because that was too coloured. (We used to get our lard not in half-pounds, but in whole bladders as they used to call them. They were about the size of a rugby football and about the same shape.) You melted a portion of that in a frying-pan, a very deep one, and when it was boiling and blue smoke came off, you dropped these crisps in, one by one, because if you dropped two in at a time they stuck together; they wouldn’t separate out. By the time you got the last one in, the first ones were already cooked, so it was one mad rush to drop them in and get the first lot out again. If you left them a minute longer than you should, instead of being pale, golden crisps, they were dark brown chips, as hard as rocks.

When my mother asked me if I’d learnt much cooking I said, ‘No, Mum, there isn’t any time’, but I suppose I really was absorbing knowledge, because when I took my first place as a cook, I was amazed at the things I found I could do.

13

A
LTHOUGH
M
R
C
LYDESDALE
had a gardener/chauffeur and a car of his own, on two mornings a week he used to have a hackney cab call at the door, with a decrepit old horse in the shafts. It looked as if it should have been in the knacker’s yard. It was driven by an elderly man called Ambrose Datchet.

This Ambrose Datchet, so he told me when he used to talk to me (which wasn’t very often because he mainly talked to the cook), had been a gardener in a large household, far bigger than my mother or I ever worked in. It had two stewards, two chefs, seven footmen, six housemaids, and over twenty-eight gardeners, of whom he was one. He started off as a hallboy, but he didn’t like working inside, and when he saw the footmen, who always had to walk around in uniform and wear white gloves and even wigs, he said he couldn’t stick that life, so he went to the outside and became a gardener.

I used to hear him talking to Mrs McIlroy about the things that used to go on in this great big place where he worked. I listened all agog – you know how it is when you hear anything you think you’re not supposed to hear, you think it’s something out of this world. Well, according to this Ambrose Datchet, the most outrageous affairs used to go on in this household, and strangely enough, not so much among the women servants as between the footmen and stewards and the people upstairs; not only the people who owned the house but the visitors too. Once I heard Mrs Mellroy say, ‘Not her ladyship!’ Ambrose Datchet said, ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’ So Mrs McIlroy said, ‘What, with her?’ ‘Her, and with him too,’ he said. ‘He was a very handsome young man.’ I gathered it was one of the footmen having an affair with both the lady and the master of the house.

Mind you, what Mr Ambrose Datchet saw with his own eyes must have meant he had eyes at the back of his head, because if I heard him say, ‘I saw it with my own eyes’ once, I must have heard him say it a hundred times.

I remember a story he told me once about a raw country girl who went into service – it was her very first place – and the lady said to her, ‘Elsie, I like my breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning.’ So Elsie said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, Madam. If I’m not down, don’t wait for me.’

When Ambrose Datchet came back from these outings with Mr Clydesdale he used to be allowed to come down in the kitchen. If it was the summer he’d have a glass of lemonade, if it was the winter he would have a cup of cocoa. He would sit there and jaw to Mrs McIlroy and sometimes to Mr Wade, the butler.

When it was time to go, he used to walk right through the kitchen into a sort of yard place at the back. I thought at first he was going to talk to our gardener/chauffeur, but when he came back Mrs McIlroy used to say, ‘Hello, Ambrose. Been to shake hands with your best friend?’ I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were laughing at, but the fact that they looked at me made me go as red as a beetroot. After it was explained to me, I used to laugh too. Mrs McIlroy, although she looked a bit prim, she could say things with the best of them.

Most mornings Mrs Clydesdale went out for her constitutional. I used to dread it when she came back because she used to scrutinize the front door. The brass on that front door was something too terrible for words. The door handle was all convoluted and the Brasso would get into the cracks of it, and there was a tremendous knocker, the shape of a big gargoyle. That was all nooks and crannies, and there was a big brass letterbox too. The doorstep was also all brass. Some mornings when it was bitterly cold and my hands were covered in chilblains, I used to skip a bit. I didn’t leave anything showing as far as I knew, but she could usually find something.

If the bell used to ring two minutes after she came in, I knew what it was for. The parlourmaid would come down and say to me, ‘Madam has sent down a message that she wants to speak to Langley’ (that was me) ‘in the morning room.’

My legs used to feel like rubber at the very thought of going up there, because I knew what she was going to say; I knew it was about the front door. She would start off with a very ambiguous remark, ‘Langley, whatever happened to the front door this morning?’ Well, she could have equally meant that it looked a picture as that it wasn’t done very well, but I knew perfectly well what she meant. Then she would go on to say, ‘Langley, you have a good home here, you have good food and you have comfortable lodgings and you’re being taught a trade, and in return I expect the work to be done well.’ By this time I was in tears, what with feeling so inferior. I was only fifteen years old; by the time I’d been in service a bit longer, I got much harder, and it never used to make me turn a hair when they said these kind of things to me.

When I got back downstairs, even Mrs McIlroy used to be sympathetic. She’d say, ‘Oh well, never mind, girl, just remember their bodies have to function the same way as ours do.’ I couldn’t see what difference that made, and in any case their bodies could function in comfort. All we had was a lavatory in the basement which was the haunt of all the fauna, hairy spiders, blackbeetles, and every other kind of insect.

Many a night Mary, who used to share the attic bedroom with me, used to wake up and want to go to the lavatory. She was frightened of going down all those stairs alone, so she used to wake me up to go with her. We used to creep down, trying to avoid the stairs that creaked – just like criminals. As a matter of fact, I reckon Mrs Clydesdale would have thought we were criminals, because she would have said that servants should be as regular in their habits as they were in anything else, and not go to the lavatory in the night.

One morning when Mr and Mrs Clydesdale were out, Mr Wade came down and asked Mrs McIlroy if she could spare me for a bit.

Mrs McIlroy and Mr Wade were quite friendly, although Mrs McIlroy always thought Mr Wade had a secret in life. Later on, when I had been there some months, he came home ‘drunk to the wide’, and he was found wearing one of the Reverend’s suits. He got the sack there and then. When we went into his bedroom at the back of the butler’s pantry, we found a cupboardful of empty whisky bottles. Maybe that was his secret.

Anyway, this particular morning, when Mr Wade came down and asked if she could spare me, Mrs McIlroy said, ‘Why?’ ‘To see the ten o’clock totterers,’ he said. ‘The ten o’clock totterers, Mr Wade?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. Mrs McIlroy said, ‘All right, I can spare her for half an hour,’ so we went upstairs, opened the front door and looked.

Up and down Adelaide Crescent were the cars with the smartly uniformed chauffeurs. They wore knee breeches and shiny boots, peak caps, and white gloves. Some of the uniforms were grey, some green, some blue. The chauffeurs stood rigidly to attention beside their cars, ready for when their employers came out.

Almost on the stroke of ten the Crescent sort of sprang into action. It started at the house next but one to ours. The door opened and out came an old gentleman. He was helped down the steps by the butler, then came the old lady on the arm of the housemaid, the under-housemaid carrying a footstool and a horrible old-looking lap dog. The pair were ushered into the car, the footstool was arranged under the old gentleman’s feet, and the dog was tenderly placed on the old lady’s lap. The chauffeur leaned in and carefully wrapped a rug around both of them. No wind must blow upon them (though goodness knows, some years after that the bitter winds of adversity blew all around them), and off they went. This scene was repeated all around the Crescent. These were the ten o’clock totterers.