Servants’ Hall (12 page)

16

Even Hilda, normally rather indifferent to young men, admitted that Roy Latimer was quite something. And he liked an occasional drink in a pub which was a great improvement on my previous boyfriend, George. When I went out with him we were passers-by where pubs were concerned. The only drawback was Roy working in London and me some fifty miles away, but Aunt Ellie promised to keep an eye on him and ensure his affections remained towards me.

Life was far from dull working for Mr and Mrs Bishop. He was a pleasant man though, as I have written in an earlier book, he had some peculiar tendencies. As for Madam, years of living in England had not subdued her fiery Latin temperament. Apart from her normal retinue of young men, other young lovers came and went away at fairly frequent intervals. One such was a handsome young man called Clive, who now and again got a small part in films. Madam called Nicolo and his new compatriots, her cicisbeos, but this Clive got special treatment, much to the fury of the others. We would hear them exploding in our kitchen:

‘Girls, who is this Clive? (they pronounced his name, Cleeve). He is a nothing, a nobody, he is not simpatico. Our dear lady buys him clothes and shoes and he does not care for her; it is only for her money that he cares. He must not stay here.’

Considering that most weekends they got free board and lodging, we felt that they were hardly in a position to criticise another hanger-on. But Clive didn’t last very long in any case; his departure was expedited by Mr Bishop who, on receiving the bills not only for Clive’s finery, but for a very expensive gold watch as well, became totally incensed. His quarrel with Madam was really something and her histrionics could be heard all over the house.

I left Mrs Bishop’s not only because I wanted to go back to London, but also because I now felt that I was an experienced enough cook to have a kitchenmaid to help me. I consulted the
Morning Post
and got a job in Knightsbridge where there were seven servants – nine if one included the chauffeur and an odd-job man. Madam told me the previous cook had left to get married, which was reassuring to hear. If prospective employers told you that their servants had left only to look after aged or ailing parents, then you immediately became suspicious of the job; for that was nearly always the excuse you gave to leave a situation you disliked. I’d used it myself, and later on in my married life I left so many daily jobs because my mother had broken her leg, Mum might have been a centipede.

Madam had a butler and a parlourmaid. Most high-class and wealthy families employed a butler and a parlourmaid in preference to two parlourmaids. A butler gave tone to the house. The middle-classes had parlourmaids only. Madam’s butler, Mr Baines with his stately demeanour and grave mien, would have made a perfect stage butler – though the audience would probably have taken him for a caricature. But Mr Baines was never in the least pompous below stairs. He was always making us weep with laughter with his anecdotes about those above stairs – though he was never malicious. Unfortunately for the servants, Mr Baines was leaving in two months’ time as his brother and sister-in-law were starting a small hotel and he was going to be the head waiter there.

‘How many waiters will there be, Mr Baines?’ we asked.

‘Just me and a boy to start with,’ he laughed. ‘So, you see, I’ll automatically be the head waiter.’

At the time of my arrival, Mr Baines was involved in a voluminous correspondence with the shop that had sold some woollen socks to him, and also with the company that had made the woollen socks. Mr Baines asserted they had shrunk to about half their original size, though he had washed them only in Lux. The shop and the company letters were very short and legal, but those Mr Baines had written, copies of which he showed me, covered several pages and went off into wild flights of fancy about a butler’s position being in great peril if, in the course of his duties, his feet were constricted by socks which were not only matted, but too small. I reckon the firm should have sent him a few pairs gratis, if only because his letters must have made them laugh.

Mr Baines had been married to a German cook, whose parents kept a small shop in the East End of London. Although they’d been there for years, they were subjected to much abuse and harassment during the 1914–18 war, so when the war was over they went back to Westphalia and their daughter, Mr Baines’ wife, went with them.

‘Suppose you wanted to marry again, Mr Baines? Could you get a divorce now your wife’s in Germany?’

‘Oh, Cook, I’d never want to marry an English woman – no disrespect to you, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘My Martha could make the best pumpernickel you’ve ever tasted.’

‘Pumpernickel! whatever’s that? I’ve never heard of it. Something to do with pumpkins, I suppose, Mr Baines?’

‘Dear, dear. Never heard of it and you a cook too. Pumpernickel is delicious rye bread. Martha occasionally used to make it especially for me. Now,’ he said mournfully, ‘I expect she’s making it every day over there in Westphalia.’

Having a kitchen maid was a help; no more vegetables to prepare, kitchen tables and floor to scrub and washing-up to do; but it didn’t take Bessie long to realise that I was not like the previous cook who shouted at, and harried her. Consequently, Bessie became slow and lazy and, rather than nag at her, I’d do the jobs myself. This wasn’t good training for Bessie and could only lead to her being a slovenly cook. But I was happy enough because my romance with Roy was going well. We met on every occasion my free time coincided with his. We even got as far as talking about when he’d finished his training as a chef, then we might work in the kitchens of a smart hotel. We often went to Aunt Ellie’s with Mary, whose engagement to Alf seemed likely to come to an end. Alf continually made excuses that doing two jobs made him too tired to go out in the evenings. Ellie made a fuss of Roy and me, assuring us that old Mack liked to see and hear young people, it made him feel alive. That might have been true, but it certainly didn’t
keep
him alive as he died about three months after my return to London. There must have been about forty people at his funeral and Ellie spared no expense to give Mack a great ‘send-off’. There were black ribbon-bedecked horses, many carriages and wreaths, and Ellie had designed a stone which later on would be placed on the grave. It was to be inscribed;
DEAR MACK, HE ALWAYS DID HIS DUTY.
RIP. Malicious tongues said that his duty was to depart hastily from life leaving Ellie all his money; but that was after circumstances debarred them from the use of Ellie’s house and hospitality. Until he became too old to keep up with Ellie, I’m sure that Mack very much enjoyed life and never regretted marrying someone so much younger. Perhaps on his own he would have lived longer, but he might not have been so happy.

After the funeral Ellie dispensed a lavish amount of food and drink; we drank affectionately to Mack’s life, death and probable destination. Apart from £250 left to a cat’s home – Mack loved cats, as do I – all his money went to Ellie. She was now a fairly wealthy woman; and it was easy to see that with her lively nature and love of excitement, plus the money, her widowhood would not be of long duration.

Our new butler, a Mr Kite, was a very different person from lively Mr Baines who, in our servants’ hall, ceased to be a butler and became just a very pleasant man. Mr Kite was somewhat prosy and never ceased to be a butler, albeit kindly condescending, even when he was below stairs with us six females.

Perhaps he thought that a dignified presence was the safest in purely female company – though I’m not sure that Odette, the lady’s maid, was pure judging by the tales she told us about her native village in Provence. When her year with Madam was over she was going back home, and her younger sister, Yvonne, would take her place. I think Odette missed Mr Baines’s frivolous conversation; she certainly scoffed at Mr Kite, saying scornfully, ‘What a name, Kite. That man has never flown high in his life. Que diable! Il n’est pas pour moi. Quelle banalité.’

It was true that most of Mr Kite’s contribution to our ‘after dinner’ conversation consisted of anecdotes about the high-class families he’d been butler to. A first hearing of these stories could be endured, but repeated telling at every opportunity was wearisome. Odette, to whom butlers were no more important than kitchenmaids – she’d not been in domestic service long enough to comprehend the rigid hierarchy below stairs – ruthlessly interrupted poor Mr Kite whenever he embarked upon a twice-told tale by saying, impatiently, ‘N’ importe. Nous savons tout ça’. He’d no idea what she meant but it effectively silenced him. Nevertheless, as he’d been in service from the time he left school at thirteen, Mr Kite was a very experienced butler and looked very smart in the uniform that Madam provided. None of us had to buy our uniforms, though we could choose what colours we liked. In fact, Madam provided a great many comforts for the servants; separate bedrooms, bathroom, a light and airy kitchen and a well-furnished servants’ hall. We even had a bookcase in the room with proper books in it. I wasn’t the only reader; for Mr Kite was pleased to find books on the shelves by Henty and W. W. Jacobs. There were also several books by Benjamin Disraeli, which at that time I found rather heavy-going to read, though I liked the many striking phrases. With my usual vanity and big-headedness, I wrote down a lot of the brilliant expressions and tried to memorise them. I had visions of uttering these bons mots when I was at a party or other social gathering, but the idea was another of my failures. In the first place, most of the people I met had never even heard of Disraeli and secondly, when I did quote him, it never seemed anything like as witty as in the book.

For all this comfort and fairly high wages, Madam expected good service from her servants – as she had a right to. She didn’t take a personal interest in us, but that wasn’t necessary. She looked after our physical well-being in every possible way, and I for one appreciated a kitchen stocked with everything one needed for cooking. I thought of poor old Violet and Lily toiling for Mrs Hunter-Jones and living in dreary and spartan conditions. This place was a world apart by comparison. One day Elsie, the head housemaid, asked me if I minded the previous cook, now Mrs Peek, coming to have tea with us. To my surprise, Mrs Peek had little praise for Madam. After complaining about Madam’s idiosyncrasies, such as wanting dishes made differently from the way she, Mrs Peek, had been taught to make them, and the cook having to wear a clean apron every day, Mrs Peek said:

‘Would you believe that in the five years I worked here, Madam had no idea that I was courting, and engaged to be married. When I gave my month’s notice, Madam was very surprised. She said, “Oh, Cook, why do you want to leave?” And when I told her I was getting married, she didn’t even ask what sort of job my fiancé had.’

Although I kept quiet, I saw no reason why Madam should show an interest in her servants’ private affairs. I much preferred a situation where, so long as your work was satisfactory, there were no enquiries as to what you did in your free time. Madam wasn’t even aware that Elsie, who was about thirty-five, had been engaged for seven years – and I’d have thought Elsie was hardly aware of it after all that time. Seven years, I just couldn’t imagine it. Elsie’s home was in a remote village in Kent and her fiancé worked on a farm there. She saw him only once a month when she had her whole day off and went home. As far as I could tell, both Elsie and her Jack were perfectly happy with the arrangement. By careful saving and spending, she now had a chest of linen at home and a bottom drawer filled with underwear. No frills or furbelows, just plain cotton and wincyette as befitted the farmer’s wife she hoped to be eventually. There was an occasion when Elsie returned from one of her monthly visits and Odette teased her, asking did she and Jack have l’amour. Elsie replied stiffly that her Jack was a gentleman; when he stood at the altar his bride would be a virgin. Afterwards Odette said to me, ‘Je pense qu’il a les pieds glacés.’

I’d picked up a bit of French from Violette but all I understood of that sentence was ‘think’ and ‘cold’, so I thought Odette was referring to the sexual part of Jack’s anatomy. When I replied, ‘Is it ever cold there?’ I wouldn’t have thought so,’ it caused her much merriment.

My friend Mary had little cause for merriment as her engagement to Alf was off. She’d given in her notice because she couldn’t bear now to see Alf every morning. To add to her misery and rage, Alf didn’t seem to mind; he still went whistling around doing his odd jobs, just as though there had never been anything between him and Mary. We decided to visit Rose before she moved from the house in Hampstead to the palatial establishment in Surrey. As Mary said, in Hampstead we could use the front door; in the country house we’d probably end up in the stables.

17

Now that Rose had a baby she seemed more contented, though still averse to the idea of moving into a large country house. She wanted to stay with her parents in Manchester while all the moving went on. But Gerald was against the idea, saying that a back-street in the slums of Manchester was not good for Victoria Helen; and furthermore, he wasn’t having his child acquiring a Mancunian accent. Considering the child was only a few months old, I couldn’t see how she could possibly be affected by accent.

One couldn’t in truth describe Victoria Helen as a pretty baby for, as I’ve said, she had the Wardham features, and to a marked degree. It was to be hoped that in disposition she wouldn’t take after her grandfather. It very much grieved Mrs Wardham that she couldn’t have Rose and the baby to stay at Redlands, but the awful Mr Wardham would never allow it. Neither Mary nor I could visualise Rose as one above stairs in the very house where she’d been a servant, and certainly those below stairs would object to waiting on her. They might not begrudge Rose her new-found affluence, but they wouldn’t want her under their noses, so to speak.

Over tea, Rose told us that there was to be a house parlourmaid and a cook general at the country house, as well as a woman from the village who was coming three times a week to do the rough.