Climbing the Stairs (2 page)

Anyway when I’d got to know him a bit more I found he was a non-stop talker. He showed me photos he’d had taken when he was young and healthy. Apparently he used to go boxing on a
Saturday night to earn himself a bit – in the boxing booths, and he told me he’d won twelve fights in a row and used to be called the ‘Wapping Wonder’.

I was absolutely fascinated at the thought that this elderly man – this one-time ‘Wapping Wonder’ – was interested enough in me to tell me his life history. I began to
think that there must be more in me than I knew about.

But afterwards the bus conductor, Perce, deflated my ego. When Bert went to that place reserved exclusively to men he said, ‘Don’t take a bit of notice of what he says because he
tells everybody that old tale. I’ve heard it hundreds of times. He couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. All he ever talks about is bladders and boxing.’

Then Perce asked me why I wanted to go to Hyde Park. So I said, ‘I just want to look at it.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘you must have a reason.’ ‘Well,’ I
said, ‘when you live down where I do you read about Hyde Park. Surely it’s one of the sights of London, isn’t it?’ ‘Well, I’ve never bothered to go there,’
he said, ‘and I live here.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s just like the seaside. The residents never bother to go down on the beach and sit on the stones –
it’s only the trippers and visitors that do that.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t go into Hyde Park of a night on your own, it’s full of prostitutes.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is it?’ And far from damping my ardour I thought that was marvellous – I wanted to have a good look at them.

I’d visualized them as very alluring types of women, mysterious-looking – rather like Pola Negri the vamp who was all the rage on the films at that time. So I thought I must go and
see them. ‘Yes,’ says Perce. ‘Dressed up in all their finery on the broadwalk there. And woe betide if anyone tries to get on their pitch.’ ‘Well, what do they look
like?’ I said. ‘Oh, they dress in muslins and things like that.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘like Greek soldiers that wear those kind of ballet skirts.’ Then Perce
said, ‘They might look like that but I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with them. My father was in Greece during the war and he was always telling us tales about the Greek soldiers, how
tough and virile they are. “Yes,” he used to say, “it’s more than starch that keeps those ballet skirts up.”’

The implication was lost on me but everybody roared so I laughed too. After all he was providing me with refreshments even if they weren’t light refreshments. Anyway I wanted a free ride
back and I got one. I went upstairs again and this Perce kept running up and chatting to me and then he made a date to meet me on my next night off.

So there on my first time out in London after months and months without a boyfriend in my own home town I’d met one and made a date with him.

Mind you, until Perce had told me what a line-shooter Bert the driver was I’d found little to choose between them. In spite of his age and appearance I’d rather fancied myself going
out as the girlfriend of the Wapping Wonder. But I never could abide line-shooters. I’d had a belly-full listening to George when I was kitchenmaid at my first place in Brighton.

2

G
EORGE WAS THE
chauffeur-gardener at the place where I first went into service in Hove and he was somewhat of a character. He hadn’t always been
in domestic service, which makes a difference because a man who’s been in domestic service all his life – say, from the time he was fourteen – starting off as a hall boy, boot
boy, page boy, or what have you and working his way up to under-footman and butler – is quite a different person from a man who’s done different work and then comes into domestic
service later.

Men who’ve been in service all their life – I wouldn’t like to say they were effeminate – but they have a much quieter, gentler way of talking and they’re nicer in
their appearance and the way they do things. And I’m not using the word nice as a compliment here.

This George, he’d spent years in Australia which in those days was probably a far rougher country than it is now. And not only that, he’d been in the Outback, on a sheep farm. Later
he was in Sydney but most of the time he was on this sheep farm, and he was always talking about the life out there. How it wasn’t riddled with class distinction, how out there Jack was as
good as his master. None of this ‘yes sir, no sir, very good sir’ and ‘bloody hell how are you today sir’ and bloody kow-towing just to earn a living.

Sometimes Mr Wade the butler would say, ‘Well, why do you do it? If you don’t like it why don’t you leave and do something else?’ But George was getting on and it
wasn’t easy to get a job in those days. George ignored him anyway. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘my boss on the sheep farm, he could have bought this bloody Rev’ (meaning
the Reverend who we worked for) ‘he could have bought this bloody Rev up ten times over, and yet at mealtimes we all sat down at the same table – boss and workers on the farm –
and the boss’s wife and daughter waited on us and brought us our food round and everything. Can you imagine that kind of thing going on here?’

Of course you couldn’t. But it was only money that made the boss different from George and the other men on the sheep farm. And working in the Outback I shouldn’t have thought that
there were any grades of service. They were just workers, even the boss himself.

Maybe they had a nice home. According to George it was the last word in luxury but I can’t see that it could have all the refinements that you got here. The nearest neighbour was about
fifty miles away so they had to make their own life. There couldn’t have been dinner parties, balls, operas and the kind of things that the well-to-do had over here. So obviously they did all
mix together because otherwise it would be the boss and his wife isolated from everybody.

But you couldn’t make George see that. He said we were all riddled with bloody class here. He’s like a lot of people who’ve lived abroad and come back. The places they’ve
left are always better. Everywhere’s marvellous where they’re not.

Between George and Mr Wade, the butler, there was always a sort of a feud going on. I think it was partly jealousy because being the only two men in the house they vied for attention from the
servants.

Mr Wade used to think that George’s manner and his speech were crude and vulgar while George thought that Mr Wade with his soft voice and his lily-white hands was no sort of a man at all.
He used to say, ‘Fancy having to bath and dress that old bugger upstairs. What kind of job is that for a man?’

I’d defend Mr Wade. ‘Well, you drive him around don’t you?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s different.’ ‘And I’ve seen you tuck him in
the back like you were tucking up a baby.’ I couldn’t say too much as I was only a kitchenmaid.

Then he’d say, ‘Wade’s no kind of a man at all. No wonder he never got married. He probably could never have performed if he had.’

I wasn’t really sure what performed meant, but everybody laughed so I presumed it was something a bit on the obscene side.

George’s idea of being a man was to swear and spit and intersperse words with ‘bloody this’ and ‘bloody that’ and make dirty jokes out of anything. And between him
and Mr Wade there was a gulf that could never be crossed.

After one of these ‘I love Australia’ conversations Mr Wade asked George in a very lofty tone of voice why, if he liked Australia so much, did he ever leave it? George then gave us
some long yarn about that he never would have left it but that the boss’s daughter fell in love with him and as he didn’t want to settle down at that time he thought he’d better
leave and so he went to Sydney.

Of course the truth of the matter probably was that he started pestering the boss’s daughter and the boss didn’t like it, because no matter how democratic the boss was, if he was as
wealthy as George made out he was, I daresay he had other ideas for his daughter than that she should marry one of his sheep men.

But anyway that was George’s story. So he lit out for Sydney. Then he went off delirious about Sydney and what a marvellous place it was. He said, ‘That’s the place for men.
They keep women in their place in Sydney. None of this bloody taking them out to the pub with you like they do over here. There aren’t any pubs where bloody women can go.’ And that
suited George down to the ground.

‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘the pubs are only open till six o’clock in the evening so you all knock off work at five and you make a bee-line for the pub. You swill all you can,
and then you stagger home or if you can’t get home you stagger to the gutter and you lie down there.’ George thought it was a marvellous life.

Then he told us that while he was in Sydney he married a widow about ten years older than he was and that her late husband had left her a lot of money. And I’m not even guessing when I say
that he married her for her money. Then he persuaded her to come back to England with him.

Now he hadn’t got a picture of this wife of his – we never did know her name. In fact he said very little about her. He used to go off at great length about the other women he could
have married out in Australia; when he did speak about her he never had a kind word to say for her except that the only good thing she ever did in the world was to leave it.

He’d say, ‘She was such a cold-hearted old bitch. She used to dole out her favours as though they were diamonds.’ And he’d add, ‘She was no bloody good in bed
anyway and before she’d let me in with her I always had to wash and shave and clean my teeth. And what the hell’s that got to do with * * * * * * *.’ I use asterisks to denote my
meaning because people make such a fuss about that word as though it was a new sort of vice, but the word and the deed were in use when I was young, I can assure you. In fact I never heard it
called anything else.

Then he went on, ‘And she made me do all the bloody work in bed. Wore me out she did.’ So cook said, ‘Is it still worn out, George?’ She could say things like that, you
see. She had a nerve. So he said, ‘Oh no, I reckon I could bring it up to scratch if the occasion arose.’

Then Mr Wade said, ‘I shouldn’t think the occasion will ever arise.’ George got so furious over this that he said, ‘I’m still a man, you know. I bet if it were a
contest I could beat you any day of the week.’ And an argument started. But neither of them was given the opportunity to prove it. This was the vain kind of boasting you get from men.

The real reason why George used to get so livid about his wife was because when she died instead of him getting the money – the money he’d married her for – it went to her two
grown-up sons. It was in trust for them and he never got a penny. So for the most part of the time George had a grieving hatred of his wife.

But once a month on his weekend off he used to go on a real bender. He’d go to the local pub and he’d order a half-pint of cider to be served in a pint glass and into this he used to
tip two double whiskies and two white ports. And this was his starter. Then he would steadily drink white ports for the whole weekend.

He’d come back in on the Sunday night reeling about, and he would get maudlin.

All drinkers vary. Some people get very merry. I do. It’s always worth anybody’s while to buy me alcohol because they get good value for their money. I get livelier and livelier. My
husband gets very quiet. Others get aggressive, which is no good at all. But old George used to get maudlin.

He’d come in, walking on the balls of his feet to keep his balance, and the tears would be streaming down his cheeks. And then he’d start a long monologue about his dear departed
wife. He’d say, ‘Oh, she was a lovely woman, a lovely woman. I should never have persuaded her to come back to this bloody country. She would still have been alive now if we’d
stayed in Australia. This bloody country is enough to kill anybody. Do you know when she was ill I looked after her like a mother. I waited on her hand and foot. And I could have saved her if they
hadn’t carted her off to hospital. They killed her. They killed her in that bloody hospital. All of them bloody bed baths – that’s what did it. Removing the natural juices that
covered her body. Bloody water.

‘But,’ he said, ‘I tried to save her. That last few days before she died when they had the screens around her I used to go up with a bottle of whisky. And when the nurses
weren’t looking I’d pull back the covers and rub her all over with it. To try and put back some of the warmth that bloody water had taken away.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I worshipped every hair on that woman’s body.’

Then he’d burst out crying and he’d sob himself to sleep while we tiptoed upstairs wondering how many hairs she had and how much worship George would have to have done on them.

3

G
EORGE MAY HAVE
loved Australia, but it wasn’t until many years later that I finally went abroad myself, with my husband Albert.

The day that I heard we’d won fifty pounds on the football pools I thought that the millennium had arrived. We’d never seen fifty pounds in our lives before nor even anything like
that amount.

Well, of course, straight away we started talking about what we were going to do with it. When you suddenly realize you’ve got fifty pounds and the largest sum you’ve ever had before
is about ten pounds then you think that it’s going to do a wonderful lot of things. First of all we thought we’d refurnish the house. We settled on things that would have come to five
hundred pounds at least.

Then I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I like the place as it is.’

Then we decided we’d all have new clothes and then that idea faded out.

And then I said, ‘We haven’t had a holiday in years. Let’s have a holiday with it.’

A holiday to me and my husband meant going somewhere in England. So we started to consider places. We didn’t want to go to another seaside place, living as we did at Hove. And we
didn’t want to go to the country because I can’t bear the country.

I don’t like all those static things – the trees and fields and I don’t really like animals. I wouldn’t walk through a field if there was even one cow in it, never mind a
herd. Have you ever noticed the way cows look at you – as if they can see right through and they don’t like what they see? Scornful-like. And then they start ambling towards you. They
might be going to be friendly but it’s a bit too late if they get right up and you find they’re not, isn’t it? I don’t dislike pigs, but with these factory farms it’s
not like the days when farmers used to let you walk around and scratch the pigs. Nowadays farming’s done on such a big scale that they don’t want strangers walking around.