Servants’ Hall (3 page)

‘Mrs Buller, I’m afraid that Margaret has forgotten something.’

Very occasionally Mr Hall would be in a jocular mood, and Mary and I reckoned this was when departing guests had given him a substantial tip. Then he’d try to be witty, as on the day I gave him the wrong coloured serviette ring.

‘Ah, Mrs Buller, what a pity that Margaret is colour-blind.’

Mrs Buller was very nice in that she’d never tell me off in front of the servants, but would have a word with me in private to try not to give Mr Hall any chance to complain.

The under-gardener, a good-looking twenty-year-old, was known as ‘young Fred’, to distinguish him from his uncle Fred, the head gardener. According to Mary, rumour had it in the village that young Fred was a by-blow of Mr Wardham’s. The head gardener’s sister had worked as a housemaid for Mr Wardham’s mother and had married rather hurriedly the village postman. Young Fred bore no facial resemblance to Mr Wardham and probably the rumours originated in the fact that he had paid for young Fred to have two years’ training in horticulture – much to the disgust of Fred, who had natural green fingers and didn’t believe in new-fangled methods of gardening. Fred, like a lot of old gardeners who had tended the same garden for years, was extremely possessive about his products. He didn’t mind young Fred cutting and uprooting the vegetables for the kitchen, but when it was a question of flowers for upstairs, only he should cut them; and even then, unless Mrs Wardham asked him personally, he was very grudging in the amount he cut. Years of stooping had made his back permanently bowed, and to see him trudging along the road to his home in the village always reminded me of ‘the ploughman homeward plods his weary way’.

Young Fred, perhaps owing to his horticultural training, spoke in a far more refined voice than did the village lads. It says much for his likeable personality that his mates never resented what they termed his ‘la-di-da voice’. I liked him very much, but although he often kissed me – in the coal-shed of all romantic places – I was sensible enough to know that he meant nothing serious; half the village girls were in love with him. Besides, he also kissed Doris in the coal-shed so I knew he would never be
my
young man.

Young Fred was a great favourite of Mrs Buller’s. None of the other men would have dared to make the frivolous remarks to her that he got away with. But then he was a charmer, and that word could never be applied to the butler or the valet, or even to Jack the chauffeur – not unless one was a female on the last gasp for any kind of man. I think the valet was the only person who didn’t like young Fred; the reason being that occasionally Fred got articles of clothing from Mr Wardham. Mr Burrows considered that his job as a valet entitled him to any cast-offs. I still remember the day when young Fred was given a pair of almost new brown boots, because they squeaked. He came into the servants’ hall just before our dinner time, when all the servants were assembled, and squeak, squeak, squeak went those boots as young Fred walked, quite unnecessarily, round and round the room. Poor Mr Burrows’ face got redder and redder and his food nearly choked him. Afterwards, Cook remonstrated with young Fred, saying he’d been unkind and embarrassing to the valet; but that irrepressible young man was in no way abashed.

‘I’ll tell you what, dear Madam Beeton,’ and he grinned merrily, ‘tomorrow I’ll come in carrying the boots under my arm.’

And did she frown? She did not, but set to and made him his favourite ‘seedy’ cake for tea.

*   *   *

Our five o’clock tea was the most relaxed time of the day, for unless there had been a special lunch upstairs, most of us had been able to have an hour or two’s rest in our rooms. Furthermore, we never ate in formal style around the table but just sat around haphazardly – well, perhaps not quite like that, as certain chairs were sacrosanct to Cook and the butler. It was always the under housemaid’s task to get tea for the servants, so I could sit down and watch Mary rushing around from kitchen to servants’ hall – quite a long walk, incidentally, along stone-flagged corridors. We nearly always had fruit cake, and even now I still remember how rich and moist it was. Mrs Buller was a dab-hand at making cakes, bread too, everything was home-made. The tea was strong and black because Mr Hall liked it that way. Just like the way Mother made it for my father if he was in work, and if she had the money. When it was weak tea, my father would say, ‘What’s this then? Water bewitched and tea begrudged.’

At tea-time, Mr Hall and Mr Burrows would discuss our employer; what a foul disposition he had, bullying his wife and daughter and being barely polite to his son. Mrs Buller, out of a kind of loyalty to Mr Wardham’s parents – who’d been very good to her – seldom joined in their conversation; but even she had to admit that the master had changed considerably from the boy she had known as Master Edward. Mr Wardham was particularly disagreeable to Miss Helen, his daughter, telling her for God’s sake to put a smile on her face and stop mooning around like a love-sick cow. Poor Miss Helen’s fiancé had been killed in the last month of the First World War. They were to have been married on his next leave. She’d never recovered from the shock of losing the man she’d loved and been engaged to for three years. Nowadays, no woman of her age would stay at home to be bullied by her father; but it wasn’t easy then for an unmarried daughter to be independent. Miss Helen had no income of her own, hadn’t been brought up to work and, furthermore, was rather plain.

For three years she had been writing a book about war heroes but unfortunately, now it was finished, no publisher would accept it. I thought it very sad that all her work should be unappreciated. At that time I was unaware that the world was full of authors who all considered they had written masterpieces.

After the butler and valet had finished discussing Mr Wardham, they’d talk about previous employers, The valet – as I noticed with most personal servants – invariably related how illustrious were the people he’d worked for and how much they’d thought of him. One couldn’t help wondering why he’d ever left such a servant’s paradise. The usual excuse was that the marvellous employers were going abroad. Mrs Buller was fond of talking about death, especially her late husband’s – though he hadn’t died, merely ‘passed over’. The way she described the manner of his dying, well, the ‘death of Nelson’ was as nothing to the passing away of Mr Buller.

They’d been butler and cook together in a place where the Master and Madam had thought the world of them. So much so that when the Master was dying, he’d insisted on having Mr Buller round his death-bed with his other friends. Madam died soon after of a broken heart. I noticed that no such fate had overtaken cook after Mr Buller’s death. She always referred to him as ‘one of nature’s gentlmen’, and when he ‘passed away’, he undoubtedly went straight to heaven – where, Mary whispered irreverently, he was probably flying around waiting on the archangels, having worked only for the best people down below.

I’d been at Redlands a week when they had the first dinner party; This also was the very first occasion of the son, Gerald, coming into our domain when there was a no necessity for him to do so. The dinner was given for Miss Sarah, the niece; and eleven people had been invited, making sixteen in all. Doris and I had no time to gossip on that day, especially as Mrs Buller was slightly irritable with all the preparation of the food. Though she wasn’t so rancorous as old Fred when he saw his flower-beds denuded for the vases.

There were caviar canapés, followed by chestnut soup. This involved rubbing pounds of cooked chestnuts through a fine sieve – not a job I would recommend if one is in a hurry. The third course was salmon maître d’hotel, then the entrée, sweetbreads en caisse – and I made that dish. The main course was sirloin of beef and, thank heavens, Doris had to grate the stick of horseradish – it’s worse than onions for making one’s eyes stream with water. There was a cold sweet, a charlotte russe; and the last course, the savoury, was cheese aigrettes. That finished our work; the butler had to look after the Stilton cheese and the dessert. Doris and I were faced with mounds of washing-up and by the time we’d finished, and Mr Hall and Rose had cleared the dining-room, it was eleven o’clock when we sat down to our supper of cold ham, jacket potatoes and salad. We were just having a cup of tea before finishing the tidy-up when, to our astonishment – and the displeasure of the upper servants – the son came into our servants’ hall. Such an event was unheard of. Occasionally those above stairs would come into the kitchen on some pretext, but never into the servants’ hall; that was our private domain.

Master Gerald knocked on the door, came right in and said, ‘The dinner was splendid. You all worked so hard and I’m sure must be very tired.’ Then, turning to the valet, he added, ‘Burrows, you needn’t do anything for me tomorrow morning, I’ll look after myself. Goodnight to you all.’

Far from being gratified at hearing this praise, there was an uneasy silence after the son had gone. Then Mr Hall spoke, to nods of agreement from Cook, Agnes and Mr Burrows.

‘Why should he come into our place without so much as a ‘by your leave’. If anyone is going to say thank you, it should be Master or Madam, not that Gerald. And I don’t know if you noticed it Mrs Buller, but I didn’t like the way that he looked at Rose. It’s not the way a gentleman should look at a young servant girl.’

Rose blushed a vivid red and kept silent. Mr Burrows, who should have been pleased that he’d only Mr Wardham to valet, said, in an aggrieved voice, ‘Mr Hall, did you ever hear the like? Look after himself indeed. To say that to me, who’s valeted the best in the land.’

When we were in our bedroom Mary and I agreed that Mr Hall was really annoyed because Gerald – we dropped the ‘master’ when nobody was around – had looked at Rose instead of at him. Though, come to that, we were secretly a bit chagrined that he’d ignored us and we lost no time in telling Rose that Gerald would have forgotten about her in the morning.

I think everybody must have liked Mrs Wardham as she was really kind and thoughtful. Talking to Cook the following morning, she said that they would all be out to dinner so perhaps the young girls, that was Mary, Rose, Doris and I, would like to go to the village dance. Although it was Madam who’d suggested it, we all had to be suitably grateful to the upper servants for their graciousness in letting us have an extra evening off. Agnes, a spinster of about forty-five, told Mary that no such treats had ever come her way when she was an under-housemaid; and Mr Hall told Rose that he’d planned to check the silver room and clean any tarnished pieces but, and he patted her on the shoulder with his white lardy hands, he’d do the work on his own.

The dance started at seven o’clock and we began to get ready about two hours before that. For, unlike town dances, at the village hops everybody arrived almost as soon as the musicians; they made sure of getting their money’s worth. With Rose’s natural advantages, it didn’t take her long to get ready. Her lovely glossy golden hair never needed curling, whereas we tortured ours with ‘dinky’ curlers and then proceeded to comb it into a mass of frizz. Make-up consisted of a liberal layer of pink powder. We never dared to use coloured lipstick, only ‘that sort of a woman’ would use it, so we rubbed our lips with a lip salve to make them shiny. Several dabs of 4711 eau de Cologne completed our toilet. Although Rose made us look plainer by comparison, having her with us did ensure that we got some partners. While the village youths were waiting their turn to be her partner, they’d take us round the floor just so they could be attached to our party. We weren’t quite accepted by the older generation because none of us were locals. I suppose for some twenty-five miles around, the large houses were mostly staffed by village girls whose mothers and grandmothers had also been in service there. But, according to Cook, Mr Wardham refused to employ any local girls who’d go home and gossip about his household all over the village. So, as he wasn’t popular, we too were regarded as outsiders.

Young Fred was at the dance, Jack, the chauffeur, and his wife, and Jack’s father who, when he’d had a few beers – which happened frequently – would bitterly inveigh against ‘this new-fangled transport’, the motor car. He was an ’orses man and his father had been an ’orses man. There wasn’t nothing to beat an ’orse. It didn’t make ’orrible noises and stink up the roads with smoke so that decent country folk got poisoned with the fumes, God’s clean air had gone and all the flowers had died. Give ’im an ’orse any time. One could easily tell that Jack’s father had been an ’orse man. His legs were so bowed one could have driven a pig to market through them.

Young Fred seldom danced with Rose; he said that she ‘hadn’t got what it takes upstairs’. That didn’t mean, as it would nowadays, that she wasn’t any good in bed, but that she wasn’t very intelligent. I protested that Rose was merely quiet. As an only child, she’d been very suppressed by her parents, allowed to be seen but not heard, and she was naturally shy. I wondered if young Fred was jealous of Rose, when he laughed and said rather cynically:

‘Shy! She’s not exactly blushing unseen and wasting her sweetness on the desert air.’

‘Why should she? And you’re no village Hampden, defying some little tyrant either.’

‘
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
’ we said simultaneously, and spent some time quoting extracts; much to the annoyance of the village girls who wanted to dance with him. Young Fred and two other swains escorted us back; poor Doris was the odd one out but she didn’t seem to mind in the least. At the beginning of the drive we all said goodbye to our young men and I could hear giggling and ‘don’t you dare’ from Mary and Rose. Young Fred said he had liked talking to me, but personally I’d have derived far more pleasure and satisfaction if he had seized me in a violent embrace and kissed me passionately. A good brain was something but a lovely face would have earned more in dividends. We’d nearly reached the path leading to the servants’ entrance when, all of a sudden, we saw Gerald coming down the drive towards us. We stopped, surprised and embarrassed. He asked if we’d enjoyed the evening and then, looking at Rose, said, ‘I’m sure that you were the belle of the ball’. None of us spoke, we were too dumbfounded, and he walked on towards the end of the drive. We waited for a few minutes, then whispered to each other that we’d not mention the episode to the upper servants, they’d be sure to blame us.