We've Come to Take You Home (8 page)

NINETEEN

‘Y
OU PICK UP THE
receiver and you say, “The Osborne household.”'

Jess had heard about telephones. She knew they existed, like she knew India and elephants and tigers existed in some far distant land, but she had never expected to find herself living in a house that actually had one.

‘We have gas down in the kitchen, but in the main part of the house, where the family live…'

The Major's wife clicked a switch. The hallway was flooded with light.

‘We also have electricity, whenever we want, day or night.'

Her father had called her mother his ‘Little Sparrow'. She had brown hair and brown eyes, was shorter than most women, and used to be, what her father described with a wicked smile and a glint in the eye, well-rounded. She also never stopped moving, hopping and pecking, from one job to the next: washing, cleaning, cooking, working hard, day and night, to look after her family.

But if Jess' mother had been her father's ‘Little Sparrow' then the Major's wife would have to be her husband's ‘Big, Fat Chicken'. Or even ‘Big, Fat Turkey'. Jess had never seen a woman so large. And it wasn't just her body. It was the clothes, the yards and yards of heavy black material trimmed with lace, the skirts and underskirts and petticoats, and who knows what else, sweeping up the staircase behind her.

‘In other houses, it is usual for maids to turn and face the
wall whenever a member of the family passes by. But here, in our smaller, more relaxed household, keeping your eyes down and not speaking unless spoken to will be perfectly acceptable.'

The first landing was lit by a narrow stained-glass window. An enormous pot, containing a small tree, stood to the left of a table covered with a tapestry rug. A heavy, carved wooden chair sat on either side.

‘The main bedroom, the Major's dressing room and this…'

The Major's wife opened a third door. A trough, as wide as it was tall, stood on what looked like clawed feet in the centre of a large, white tiled room.

‘You put the plug in the hole, like this, carefully, so you don't scratch the enamel, and then you turn on the taps. The right hand one is for hot water. The left one is for cold water.'

When her father had been at home, and there had been enough money to buy coal to light a really good fire, they'd had a bath every month. Her father would draw up four or five buckets of water from the well. Her mother would heat it in a large, black metal cooking pot over the fire. When it was hot, but not boiling, her mother and father would lift the pot off the range and pour the water into the hipbath. Her father would be the first in, then her mother, then Jess and, finally, her baby brother. It had to be in and out, really fast, if the last person into the bath was to get any hot water.

The Major's wife opened a fourth door. It was another white-tiled room. But this one was much smaller and it contained a throne-like seat.

‘You lift up the lid and you sit down. And when you have finished you pull this.'

The Major's wife tugged on the chain hanging from the metal box high up on the wall.

‘Not too hard – you don't want to break it.'

There was a loud clanking. Water gushed and swirled down into the toilet.

‘Don't forget to put down the lid. The Major is very particular about his lid.'

At home, they'd had a privy at the bottom of the garden. Outside it looked pretty, all covered with honeysuckle and roses. But, inside, however often her mother swept and however hard she scrubbed, and however often the waste was emptied, it always smelt. But here, at Eaton Villa, there were no smells; all the waste was washed away, in pipes going down, through and then underneath the house.

At home, they'd had to clean themselves up with whatever they could get hold of, scraps of old newspaper, sometimes handfuls of hay. But here there was a special box, attached to the tiles on the wall, containing sheets of hard, shiny paper.

‘You buy it at the shops – Bronco – we must never run out.'

They were now on the top floor of the main part of the house.

‘This was Peter's bedroom. And this was William's.'

The drawing room, the dining room, even the main bedroom, were all crammed with pictures and ornaments. She'd never seen so many bits and pieces. There was not an inch of space that wasn't covered with some bit of china or glass. But these two rooms, at the top of the house, were empty except for a bed, unmade, a wardrobe and a chair. Anything that could possibly hold a memory had been stripped out.

‘And this is Tom's…'

The third and smallest bedroom was different. It had pictures and books and there was a pile of shirts, ironed and neatly folded, lying on a bed made up with sheets, blankets and pillows.

‘And this is the nursery…'

White walls, a table, four chairs, three of them child-sized, two cupboards, a guard in front of the fire and bars securely fixed at the windows.

‘When Tom, our youngest son is back from France, he'll get married and start a family and the house will go back to being the happy home it used to be…'

Hills she was used to climbing but not stairs. And the next flight was very narrow and very steep. Another door and they were standing in a low-ceilinged, narrow corridor running under the length of the roof.

‘This is where all the servants slept. As well as your mother we had a cook, Mrs Johnson, and a scullery maid, Mary, and a nursemaid, Lucy.'

They stopped outside a door at the end of the attic corridor.

‘This was your mother's room.'

It had a sloping ceiling and a window tucked away under the eaves. There was a narrow, iron bed with a cotton coverlet, a wardrobe, a wooden chest and a washstand with a bowl and jug. A strip of carpet partly covered the black-painted wooden floorboards.

‘Put on this brown working dress and apron when you get up in the morning. You wear it when you're doing the dirty work. You will need to get most of that done, lighting the range, laying the fires, before you serve breakfast. You put on the black dress and the white cap and apron before serving lunch. There's two of each, one on and one for the wash, and there's another black dress for best. You will find some underwear, two vests, two pairs of knickers, two pairs of stockings and a corset, in the chest.'

She'd only had one dress at home although you could hardly call it that. It had two sleeves and a hole for her neck and it was made up of patches taken from her mother's old clothes all sewn together. And now she had five dresses, all clean and new and crisp, hanging up on hangers in her very own wardrobe. They'd never had money for underclothes, vests or knickers, you just went without, but now she had both, two of each, and two pairs of stockings and a corset.

A book lay on the bed.

‘Study this carefully, in detail, in the evenings once your work is done. Mrs Beeton will tell you everything you need to know in order to fulfil your duties efficiently.'

It was nearly as thick as the family bible her mother kept on the mantelpiece at home.

‘Unpack and change and then come straight down to the kitchen. The Major likes dinner to be served prompt at eight o'clock. Not a minute later.'

The door closed. Jess sat on the edge of the bed. She bounced up and down. She turned back the coverlet. A pillow, a lower sheet, an upper sheet and not one but two blankets, both clean.

She opened the book:

“
Chapter One
. As with the commander of an army, or the leader of an enterprise, so is it with the mistress of the house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all those acquirements, which more particularly belong to the feminine character, there are none which take a higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are perpetually dependent the happiness, comfort and well-being of a family…”

And so it went on for over five hundred pages.

She knelt up on the bed, unlocked, and then slid open the window. Seeing the towers, steeples, roofs and chimney pots disappearing off into the distance, the same view her mother must have seen when she slept in the same room, perhaps in the same bed, she allowed herself to believe that she did have some chance of happiness in this new and better life.

‘I'm Ellie. Who are you?'

A snub-nosed girl, wearing a maid's black dress, a white cap perched on top of a mop of frizzy, black hair, was leaning out of the attic window of the next-door house.

‘I'm Jess.'

‘So what are you – stupid or desperate? You've got to be one or the other to be a maid-of-all-work…'

A deep thump vibrated across the rooftops. The glass in the window above Jess' head rattled. Clouds of pigeons flew up into the air. A second and a third thump followed. There was silence and then it started up again, repeating itself, on and on, until the individual thumps had joined up to become one, long, continuous, moaning roar. Whether it was coming from down inside the earth or from up in the sky, it was impossible to tell – it was everywhere.

‘What's that?'

Ellie snorted.

‘Needs must when the devil drives.'

Her head disappeared back inside. The window slammed shut.

TWENTY

June 1917

“T
HE GENERAL SERVANT OR
maid-of-all-work, is perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration: her life is a solitary one, and, in some places, her work is never done.”

She'd got up at five o'clock, but already, just two hours into her day, she was running out of time. She'd only been at Eaton Villa for six weeks but each night, when she finally crawled up the stairs to her bed, her back ached so much she thought it would break. Her cracked and bleeding hands were so bruised from carrying coal, cleaning grates, turning mattresses, washing windows, wiping down floors, sweeping carpets, dusting china, polishing glass and scrubbing sheets that she could no longer feel them. Her new home was nothing more than a prison. And she, its only servant, the maid-of-all-work, slaving eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, was its prisoner.

“The general servant's duties commence by opening the shutters (and windows, if the weather permits) of all the lower apartments in the house; she should then brush up her kitchen-range, light the fire, clear away the ashes, clean the hearth, and polish with a leather the bright parts of the range, doing all as rapidly and as vigorously as possible, that no more time be wasted than is necessary. After putting on the kettle, she should then proceed to the dining room to get it in order for breakfast.”

Upstairs, the Major's wife enjoyed showing off the house's newly-installed electricity to her guests. But downstairs nothing had changed. The Improved Leamington Kitchener had always been a monster – and still was a monster. Jess stepped forward.

‘If you want a fight, I'll give you a fight,'

The monster glowered at her.

‘Close this one down…'

It belched out a huge cloud of soot black smoke.

‘Open this one up.'

It gave out a long, deep, angry whistle.

‘A bit more coal.'

A jet of blisteringly hot steam narrowly missed hitting Jess in the eye.

However hard she tried to obey the Major's wife's instructions, however much or however little coal she put in, whatever valve she closed or opened, somehow she never quite got it right. The range had been there when Jess' mother had first arrived to work at the house. That was well over twenty years ago. The hot plate; the roaster with moveable shelves, which could be turned into an oven; the double dripping-pan; the flat grid irons for cooking chops and steaks; the ash-pan; the meat-stand; and the large metal boiler with a brass tap and a steam-pipe had been the Major's wife's pride and joy. Right now it looked and sounded as if it was about to explode.

Jess took the plate down off the pantry shelf. There were two rashers of bacon and two eggs leftover from yesterday. The cheese soufflé that forgot to rise, the mayonnaise that curdled, the blancmange that collapsed into a heap; the list of her culinary failures went on and on. The first time she made salad cream, following Mrs Beeton word for word, the Major's wife had called her away from the kitchen, to help sort out the laundry. When she returned she put in sugar, double the amount, instead of salt. The Major had sent back her mushroom soup saying it was lumpy. Yes, she'd sieved it, but she'd used the wrong sieve – the one made out of metal rather than hair. Whose hair she didn't know, she didn't even want to think about it. But, unlike the salad cream, the mushroom soup had been edible.

Jess shivered. The dining room was a cold and depressing place even on a June morning but this was where the Major and his wife ate their breakfast, an egg or a rasher of bacon, sometimes a mushroom or even a tomato, on a slice of toast, so it was always the first room to be cleaned.

“Nothing annoys a particular mistress so much as to find, when she comes downstairs, different articles of furniture looking as if they had never been dusted.”

She laid out an old sheet on the floor in front of the fireplace. Back, at home, the same leaves were used to make tea, again and again, for over a week. At Eaton Villa, leaves, even ones that were just a day old, were kept, but not to make tea. Instead, they were scattered over the contents of a fireplace before brushing the ash out of the grate.

On her first morning she'd followed all the instructions on Mrs Beeton's long list – except this one. Three hours later, when the Major and his wife came down to breakfast, they had found every mirror, picture frame, ornament, trinket and box – and there were hundreds of them scattered over every available surface – covered in coal dust. It had taken Jess most of the rest of the day to wash, dust and polish the room and all its contents back to normal. She had never made the same mistake again.

She'd buffed the marble fireplace, laid the fire, and rubbed and rubbed the grate, over and over again, until it was gleaming. Now it was time to sweep over the Major's beloved Indian carpet. The first time she'd crawled underneath the dining room table, she'd knelt there, dustpan and brush in hand, entranced by the richly robed huntsmen on their long-legged horses galloping across the carpet's jewel-coloured plain.

But the huntsmen and the horses, which she had so loved and admired and had found so beautiful, had quickly, within just days, become things to be dreaded, even hated. Because however long and hard she brushed, however badly
her back ached, however bruised her knees, the Major would always find, each and every morning, a speck of dust that had been missed. And if a single strand of the silk fringe, which edged all four sides of the carpet, hadn't been combed out and wasn't lying straight, there would be all hell to pay. An almost impossible task given the wooden parquet floor was so slippery.

The brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour. She crawled out from under the table. There was always one, often two, sometimes three clocks in every room, and, hour after hour, upon the hour, the half hour and the quarter hour, they chimed out their orders. And as the day got longer, and she became slower, the faster the clocks chimed.

“The hall must now be swept, the mats shaken, the door-step cleaned, and any brass knockers or handles polished with leather.”

She picked up the hearthrug in front of the fireplace and carried it out into the hall. She threw it down beside the front door. The mats and rugs in the hallway would have to wait until after she'd taken the Major and his wife up their morning tea.

Jess slid the heavy bolts back off the front door. She opened it and stepped outside. She'd polished the brass knocker a couple of days ago but it had already begun to tarnish. It would have to be cleaned again or the Major would have something to say. The mix of linseed oil and brick dust was hard on the hands but not as hard as the cleaning soda she had to use for scrubbing out the lead-lined sink down in the kitchen. And the steps leading up to the front door would have to be washed and then rubbed down with the block of hearthstone cleaner. White wasn't enough. They had to be whiter than white. If the Major and his wife had their way she would be spending the rest of her life down on her knees.

The two cotton pads, which were now stitched into the insides of her stockings, had helped. But there was no such
protection for her hands. At the end of her first day at Eaton Villa, she'd collapsed down, exhausted, on her bed in the room at the top of the house, and had woken up, five hours later, lying there, fully clothed, the coverlet stained with blood from her bleeding hands.

She shook out the hearthrug and then paused. She stood there, eyes closed, face upturned, breathing in the air, dragging it into her body, lungful by lungful. She couldn't hear the guns out in France, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, but she could still sense them. The same way you could sense a storm coming. A quiver in the air, a gust of wind, a flash of lightning and then thunder would crack through the sky.

But, if you could hear the guns here in London, what must it be like in France? Serving as a soldier out there on the Western Front, as her own father had done, having to live with the thunder of those guns, day after day, night after night; a continuous barrage of sound right over your head, the earth shuddering under your feet, seeing your friends and colleagues being blown apart? It was too terrible to imagine.

A clock chimed, then another, calling her back into the house. Jess stepped inside. She pulled the heavy front door shut behind her. She went back down the hall and into the dining room. She laid the hearthrug out on the wooden parquet floor in front of the fireplace.

She was working unpaid, just for her bed and board with one afternoon off a month, as she had no previous experience. But the Major and his wife had promised her mother that they would give her a reference. And a reference was what she needed in order to apply for a paid job. But for how long, how many days and hours would she have to work, to slave, before she got that reference?

Her mother had been in service but that didn't mean she had to be. Once she was sixteen there was nothing to stop her handing in her notice. With the men gone, it was the women
who were now working on the land and in the factories: jobs that paid well. No one wanted to be a servant, the hours were too long and the pay was too bad. Which was why the Major and his wife had taken her on; they had been desperate.

But she knew what her mother would say. She was lucky. She wasn't cold and she wasn't starving. What more could she, or should she, want? And her mother would have been right. So she would stay where she was – at least for the moment.

“The servant should now wash her hands and face, put on a clean white apron, and be ready for her mistress when she comes downstairs…”

She froze. A loud and insistent knock hammered into her head like a nail being hammered into the lid of a coffin. It was too early for a delivery but not too early for a telegram.

‘Jess. Open the door.'

The Major was standing on the landing, his wife clinging to his arm. Both were still in their nightclothes.

‘But…'

‘Do as I say. Open the door.'

She willed whoever was standing out there to go away, to find another house, another family to rip apart. It had happened to her family, to herself and her mother. And it had already happened to this family, twice, and it couldn't happen again. The pain would be too great. They had no more men to give.

She opened the door. A blonde-haired young man, dressed in military uniform, turned to face her. His eyes were the same piercing, bright blue as the cornflowers in her mother's patch of garden.