Servants’ Hall (5 page)

We found Mary’s Aunt Elly in the middle of packing. Her appearance certainly was a surprise to me. We were wearing dresses that came just below our knees but Aunt Elly’s dress was not only form-fitting, but ended just
above
the knees. Her hair wasn’t merely bobbed, it was cut in a very short style that was to become fashionable about two years later – known as the Eton Crop.

She welcomed us into her large bedsitter and offered us tea or sherry. We chose the latter. We could drink tea anytime but sherry was really something.

‘You moving, Aunt Elly?’ asked Mary.

‘Yes, ducky. I’m getting married.’

‘Getting married?’ We both uttered this in startled voices as though it was an unheard of event. I suppose Aunt Elly was only about thirty-five, but to us that seemed far too old for anybody to want to marry her.

She laughed at our astonishment, saying, ‘And why shouldn’t I? I’m pretty easy on the eye’ And that was true, she was very attractive.

‘I’m marrying one of the regular customers at my tables. He’s a widower of sixty, retired and no children, fortunately. He’s lonely and I’m fed up working for miserable wages and always expected to be nice and smiling to the customers. Eric’s nothing to look at, and his idea of witty conversation is seaside postcard jokes, but he’s got money and is kind and generous. We’re going to travel abroad for a year and then settle down in his house in Bournemouth, where he says his wife made love on a strictly descending scale. When first they were married it was a weekly occasion, then a monthly one; and during their last few years together they made love only once a year – and if she could have made it every leap year that would have suited her fine.’ Here, Aunt Elly looked really wicked as she added, ‘He’s got a few surprises in store when he gets into bed with me. I’ll soon have him in good condition.’

Mary and I thought her aunt was really quite somebody and wished that we too could be so lucky. Though, as Mary remarked on the way back, one would need to drink a lot of sherry to feel like getting into bed with an old man of sixty. Still, at that, he might have in quality what he lacked in quantity, and in any case a lot of money does enable one to suffer in comfort.

Jack, the chauffeur, had asked Madam if he could use the car to pick us up at the station. He knew it was no use asking Mr Wardham, who disliked his own family and certainly wouldn’t have done a kindness to the servants. So we drove back to Redlands in great style, sucking our cachous in case our breath smelt of the sherry. But we found the upper servants too preoccupied and uneasy to worry about us, and Rose and Doris had gone to bed. Cook gave us our supper and hurried us upstairs. She was the only one to ask us if we’d enjoyed our day.

7

Cook was sensible enough to refrain from saying we were not to gossip in our bedroom, though we generally spoke very quietly as she slept on the same floor. The butler and valet had their bedrooms in the basement. Sensing that some untoward event had happened in our absence, Mary and I were all agog to hear the news. We found Doris sitting on Rose’s bed and both waiting for us.

‘Oh, Margaret!’ burst out Doris, ‘you should have been here today, you’d have loved it. If you’d seen Mr Hall’s and Mr Burrows’ faces, cor it was a real treat, better than the pictures.’

‘Don’t sit there babbling, tell us what happened. You tell us, Rose,’ said Mary impatiently.

So Rose told us that the first event had taken place while they were having their tea. Miss Helen, as nice and kind a person as her mother, had knocked on the door of the servants’ hall and asked if she might come in. She was collecting information on old country houses and wanted to know if any of them had worked in notable places and had any stories or incidents to relate. Agnes said that her mother had been a housemaid in a place called Marston Manor, and that it was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a lady who’d been murdered by her husband. And Cook said that she didn’t think any of the houses where she’d been in service were notable, but that when she started as scullery maid around 1885 in Kensington, she always got the shivers when she went into the coal-cellar – as though a cold wind was blowing on her.

‘Probably the draught coming through the coal-hole cover in the pavement,’ I interrupted, but then Doris hastened to continue.

‘Oh, Margaret, if you’d been there. You know how Mr Hall and Mr Burrows are always on about the posh houses they’ve worked in, “highest in the land”, Mr Hall is always telling us. Well, when Miss Helen asked them, they went red in the face and Mr Hall said he’d worked for Sir William Price, who was now living in America – and I’ve never heard of him, have you? – and the house was called Longton Hall and had a tower built on the end and, would you believe it, Margaret, that was the only place he could think of.’

‘As for Mr Burrows,’ Rose added, ‘he couldn’t think of any notable place at all except some old Colonel’s who was now in India, and he thought the country mansion had been destroyed by fire.’

‘Serve them right,’ laughed Mary. ‘Perhaps we won’t have to listen again to all their boring tales of past situations. But what else happened?’

Rose blushed and looked embarrassed, but also as though she was secretly pleased. And we heard that Mr Gerald had come down into the basement around nine o’clock, just as dinner was over. He was wearing a dinner-jacket, and had a button in his hand which he said had just come of the jacket – Mr Hall reckoned he’d pulled it off. He’d wanted Rose to sew it on, but Mr Hall had intervened saying it was Burrows’ job to take care of Mr Gerald’s clothes; Rose was a parlour maid. Mr Gerald had insisted that he wanted Rose to do it and had told Mr Hall that rigid spheres of work were outdated, and in Rhodesia all the whites were equal and there was none of this Sir and Madam. White people weren’t servants, he’d said, they had the blacks for that. Despite Mr Hall’s disapproval, Rose had sewn the button on; and Mr Gerald said what nice slender fingers she had, and where did she live and was she engaged. All of this enraged Mr Hall exceedingly, and when they were having supper he actually swore – and he’d never done that before in front of the female servants.

‘Who’s he?’ Mr Hall had said, red with anger, ‘to come down into our place talking about what he did in Rhodesia. Course they don’t have white servants when they’ve got all those bloody blacks who work for next to nothing. Who does he think he is coming down here and expecting my Rose’ – as though Rose was Mr Hall’s property – ‘to do a job that it’s not her place to do? I’ve never seen the like. I reckon being out there three years he’s forgotten what an English gentleman’s like. They’ve got their place upstairs and we’ve got ours down here, and that’s how it should be.’

‘Lord help us,’ said Cook, ‘If it happens again, my advice to you, Mr Hall, is to mention the matter to the Master.’

She meant Mr Wardham, not the Master up in heaven. I don’t think the butler did much communing with the One above.

‘Did anybody say anything to you Rose?’ asked Mary.

‘Only Violette, and you know how she talks in her own language when she’s excited. She gabbled on and all we understood was the bit at the end,
Rose est une belle jeune fille.
And that didn’t please our Mr Hall. Pompously he quoted, “Handsome is as handsome does,” and Rose had no call to go against me. I really felt awful when he said that.’

I was just about to say that I reckoned Mr Hall was jealous that an under servant should be personally noticed by one of them above stairs, when Mrs Buller knocked on our door and told us to get off to sleep.

The subject wasn’t mentioned at our breakfast the next morning; but that meal was seldom enlivened by conversation, the butler and cook being particularly sharp-tongued early in the day. I generally woke in a cheerful mood and, knowing Mrs Buller’s religious tendencies, I used to sing hymns. One morning I was singing ‘Awake my soul and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run’, when Cook interrupted me saying there was a time and place for everything and personally she preferred to listen to hymns in the proper surroundings. I’d have liked to answer that I thought hymns could be sung anywhere, but after one look at Cook’s face I knew it wouldn’t be politic.

In any case, Cook hurried with the breakfast as there was to be a lunch party upstairs for ten people. I remember seeing Mrs Wardham coming into the kitchen to give the orders for the day; she looked so tired and sad and yet she managed a smile and a kind word for Doris and me. Mrs Buller cooked a braised saddle of veal and delicious it was too served with a rich gravy flavoured with claret. Naturally the redcurrant jelly was home-made. It was my job to cook the vegetables, one of which was creamed spinach. This involved cooking about four pounds of the stuff, rubbing it through a wire sieve – a very tedious task – and then reheating the spinach with butter and cream; I must say it did taste good. For the sweet, cook had made a gateau St Honoré. Awful lot of work to make and decorate, but she said that the finished result was worth the trouble. I suppose it was, but I thought of all that time and trouble being consumed in a matter of minutes.

Having a luncheon party upstairs meant that our dinner was late; much to the annoyance of Fred who’s only interest in life seemed to be his gardening and his food. Young Fred told us that his uncle, as a young man, had been a great one for the girls, a proper village Lothario. One needed a very vivid imagination to picture toothless old Fred in that role, and certainly I reckoned he was long past it now – his bent back alone presenting certain difficulties in bed. Mrs Buller had warned Doris and me not to mention the subject of Rose and Mr Gerald; but it was just an ordinary remark by me that sparked off dissension at the dinnertable. Mrs Buller had roasted a leg of mutton for us with all the trimmings, roast potatoes, peas, onion sauce and mint sauce. I whispered to Mary how nice it was to have as good food as they had upstairs, so different from my last place where conditions had been so bad it was enough to turn all the servants socialist. Mr Hall, and one had only to look at his face to see that yesterday’s event was still rankling, overheard me and said to Cook, in a very sour voice.

‘Did you hear that, Mrs Buller? Margaret likes the Socialists. No doubt she sees herself as another Margaret Bondfield in a Labour Government – and they didn’t last long, did they? Maybe Margaret would like to fraternise with Mr Gerald who seems to have the same ideas. Perhaps she could do his washing.’

‘What’s all that about?’ asked young Fred.

So then it all came out about Mr Gerald and Rose. Young Fred said why shouldn’t Mr. Gerald talk to Rose if he wanted to. People like him had fallen for working-class girls before now. And then young Fred turned to Cook and said what about King Cophetua and the beggarmaid and Cook replied that that had happened in biblical times when people lived the simple life. All right, then, went on Fred, what about King Charles and Nell Gwyn, didn’t the king say on his death-bed, ‘Don’t let poor Nelly starve?’ The valet answered, with what I considered irrefutable logic, that he couldn’t see the connection, nobody here was contemplating the starving of Rose. Young Fred got really irritated then and pointed out all the actresses that had actually married into the nobility.

Although I didn’t much care for the butler, I inwardly agreed with him when he said that was different affair entirely. Actresses were a race apart, extremely glamous and always in the public eye. Lords and Dukes liked to be seen in their company. But the Wardhams were of very old and aristocratic lineage who’d always married with equally blue blood. Besides, how on earth could a girl like Rose mix with them above stairs? She wasn’t well-educated, couldn’t tell the difference between a Rembrandt and the picture on a calendar, couldn’t speak like them. ‘Anyway,’ said young Fred, ‘Rose is as pretty as any actress.’

All this was going on about Rose just as though she wasn’t sitting at the table. But she said never a word one way or the other. I suppose that was the best policy really. It certainly was a policy calculated to annoy Mr Hall who I believe, though not having any amorous inclinations for Rose himself, resented the fact that other men should. Still, as Mary and I agreed later on in our bedroom, we were seeing life in our servants’ hall, and learning a bit too.

8

For the next few weeks life was comparatively calm. There was a fair amount of entertaining above stairs and I helped quite a bit in the cooking of sauces and vegetables – the latter always prepared by Doris, fortunately. I actually made a shepherd’s pie for our dinner which Mr Hall graciously condescended to tell me direct, was almost as good as Mrs Buller’s. I don’t think Cook was altogether pleased to hear this, but she did tell me that I was a great help to her – rare praise from any cook.

Mr Gerald came down early one evening – a legitimate reason this time. His father had asked him to go into the wine cellar with Mr Hall to get a bottle of the old port. Even then he lingered in the butler’s pantry, though he said nothing directly to Rose. He spoke about the Labour government; that although they’d held office for such a short time, he knew they weren’t finished, their time would come again. He was sure that we servants must be proud to know that the son of a Scots farm labourer could rise to be a Prime Minister. It showed that we were all equal – which statement was manifestly untrue; if he’d worked below stairs he’d never have made such an inane remark.

The following day, while we were having dinner, Mr Hall brought up the subject again, saying to Mr Burrows, apropos of the Labour government; ‘As for that Ramsay Macdonald, I don’t hold with people rising above their station. No good comes of it. It stands to reason he couldn’t run the country, he don’t know the right kind of people. I’ve been a Conservative all my life and I’m not putting no working-class man in Westminster to tell me what to do. Besides, from what I’ve heard the Master say, they’ve got Communists in their Party and you know what they’re like. Look what happened in Russia.’

‘What did happen?’ asked Doris, but Mr Hall just ignored her.