Below Stairs Read online

  To Leigh (Reggie) Crutchley

  with gratitude and affection

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  1

  I WAS BORN in 1907 in Hove, the second child of a family of seven. My earliest recollection is that other children seemed to be better off than we were. But our parents cared so much for us. One particular thing that I always remember was that every Sunday morning my father used to bring us a comic and a bag of sweets. You used to be able to get a comic for a halfpenny plain and a penny coloured. Sometimes now when I look back at it, I wonder how he managed to do it when he was out of work and there was no money at all coming in.

  My father was a painter and decorator. Sort of general odd-job man. He could do almost anything: repair roofs, or do a bit of plastering; but painting and paper-hanging were his main work. Yet in the neighbourhood where we lived, there was hardly any work in the winter. People didn’t want their houses done up then; they couldn’t be painted outside and they didn’t want the bother of having it all done up inside. So the winters were the hardest times.

  My mother used to go out charring from about eight in the morning till six in the evening for two shillings a day. Sometimes she used to bring home little treasures: a basin of dripping, half a loaf of bread, a little bit of butter or a bowl of soup. She used to hate accepting anything. She hated charity. But we were so glad of them that, when she came home and we saw that she was carrying something, we used to make a dive to see what she’d got.

  It seems funny today, I suppose, that there was this hatred of charity, but when my parents brought us up there was no unemployment money. Anything you got was a charity.

  I remember my mother, when we only had one pair of shoes each and they all needed mending, she went down to the council to try to get more for us. She had to answer every question under the sun and she was made to feel that there was something distasteful about her because she hadn’t got enough money to live on.

  It was very different getting somewhere to live in those days. You just walked through the streets, and there were notices up, ‘Rooms to let’.

  When we were extra hard up, we only had one room or two rooms in somebody else’s house. But when Dad was working, we would go around looking for half a house. We never had a house to ourselves. Not many people could afford a house in those days, not to themselves. As for buying a house, why, such things were never even dreamed of!

  I know I used to wonder why, when things were so hard, Mum kept having babies, and I remember how angry she used to get when a couple of elderly spinsters at a house where she worked kept telling her not to have any more children, that she couldn’t afford to keep them. I remember saying to my mother, ‘Why do you have so many children? Is it hard to have children?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no. It’s as easy as falling off a log.’

  You see that was the only pleasure poor people could afford. It cost nothing – at least at the time when you were actually making the children. You could have babies forever-more. Nobody bothered about doctors. You had a midwife who came for almost next to nothing. The fact that it would cost you something later on, well, the working-class people never looked ahead in those days. They didn’t dare. It was enough to live for the present.

  But, apart from that, people didn’t think about regulating families. The whole idea was to have families, a relic of Victorian times perhaps. The more children you had, in some ways, the more you were looked upon as fulfilling your duties as a Christian citizen. Not that the Church played much part in my mother’s and father’s lives. I don’t think they had much time for it or, perhaps it’s truer to say, they had time but no inclination. Some of us weren’t even christened. I wasn’t, and never have been. But we all had to go to Sunday School, not because my parents were religious, but because it kept us out of the way.

  Sunday afternoons were devoted to lovemaking because there was not much privacy in working-class families. When you lived in two or three rooms, you had to have some of the children in the same room with you. If you had any sense of decency, and my parents did because I never, during the whole time of my childhood, knew that they ever made love, you waited till they were fast asleep or out of the way. The fact is I never even saw them kissing each other because my father was a rather austere man outwardly, and I was amazed when only lately my mother told me what a passionate man he really was. So, you see, it was only when the children were out of the way that they could really let themselves go.

  So, Sunday afternoon, after a mighty big dinner (and everybody tried to have a big dinner on Sunday), was the time spent lying on the bed, making love and having a good old doze. Because, as my Mum said later, if you make love, you might as well do it in comfort. When you’re getting middle-aged, there isn’t much fun in having it in odd corners. So that’s why Sunday School was so popular then. I don’t know about now.

  My brother and I began proper school together. They let you start at the age of four in those days. My mother sent me there as well because she had another baby coming along and she thought that would be two of us out of the way.

  We had to come home for dinner. There were no such things as school meals and school milk. You took a piece of bread and butter with you, wrapped in a piece of paper, and gave it to the teacher to mind, because many of us children were so hungry that we used to nibble it during the course of the morning when we should have been doing whatever we did have to do. It was then doled out to us at eleven o’clock.

  My early school days don’t stand out much in my mind. It was when I got to the age of about seven that I, as it were, took my place in life. You see, with my mother going off early in the morning to do her charring and me being the eldest girl, I used to have to give the children their breakfast. Mind you, giving them their breakfast wasn’t a matter of cooking anything. We never had eggs or bacon, and things like cereals weren’t heard of. We had porridge in the winter, and just bread and margarine, and a scraping of jam, if Mum had any, in the summer. Three pieces were all we were allowed.

  I always loved going to the baker and buying those round loaves with four corners on top. (I think they were called Coburg loaves.) We used to fight to get the corners because that counted as one piece of bread but it was far more filling than just a slice.

  Then I would make the tea, very weak tea known as sweepings – the cheapest that there was – clear away and wash up, and then get ready for school.

  The two youngest I took along to the day nursery. It cost sixpence a day each and for that the children got a midday meal as well. I took them just before school time and collected them the moment I came out of school in the afternoon.

  At midday, I would run home, get the potatoes and the greens on, lay up the dinner and do everything I could so that when my mother rushed over from work, she just had to serve the dinner.

  Generally it was stews because they were the most filling. Sometimes Mother would make a meat pudding. It’s funny now when I look back on it, this meat pudding. I would go along to the butcher’s and ask
for sixpennyworth of ‘Block ornaments’. Hygiene was nothing like it is now and butchers used to have big wooden slabs outside the shop with all the meat displayed for the public and the flies. As they cut up the joints, they always had odd lumps of meat left which they scattered around. These were known as ‘Block ornaments’.

  I used to get sixpennyworth of them and a pennyworth of suet. Then my mother would make the most marvellous meat pudding with it. That tasted far better than those I make now when I pay four or five shillings for the meat.

  Directly she’d eaten her dinner, she’d have to rush back to work because she was only allowed half an hour. So I had to do the washing-up before I went back to school again. Right after I came out of school in the afternoon, I would collect the two children from the day nursery, take them back home, and then set to and clear up the place and make the beds.

  I never used to feel that I was suffering in any sense from ill-usage. It was just the thing. When you were the eldest girl in a working-class family, it was expected of you.

  Of course, Mum took over in the evenings. She came back about six and got us our tea which was the same as breakfast – bread and margarine.

  Being a girl, I never went out at night and my parents were very strict about this. But I used to read a lot. We had a free library even then. We also managed to amuse ourselves.

  My oldest brother used to give magic shows. He was really very good. Then somebody gave us a magic lantern with slides, of course not moving, and my brother would make up a story about them. We were never bored with an evening. There was always something to do.

  Unlike so many people I’ve met, I didn’t really make any lasting friends in my school days. I suppose it’s easy to look back and say my mother and father weren’t sociable because we weren’t allowed to have friends in. Mum had enough children of her own. I never had birthday parties, of course; things like that were undreamt of.

  I had two girls at school who were friends but you know what it’s like when you’re three together, someone is the odd one out and that was always me. I think these two girls came from homes where things were talked about, things like sex, because they used to have a sort of code between them which would make them screech with mirth, and I never understood a word. I remember when I was nearly thirteen years old, one of them, her name was Bertha, wouldn’t run around and play with us. And I asked ‘Why? Why can’t you run about?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I had a bicycle out yesterday and it hurt me, and I can’t do anything now.’ And they both went off into screams of mirth.

  But, being a member of a family, I wasn’t worried and, you see, we had the town itself.

  2

  HOVE WAS a wonderful place, especially for children, and particularly for children with no money. It wasn’t built up as it is now.

  Take the seafront and the lawns. Each lawn is laid out for people with money now. There are clock golf, putting, tennis, bowls; but there’s nowhere for children at all. But then, every one of those lawns was free; there was nothing on them but grass and a shelter, and all around the lawns there were shrubs where you could have the most marvellous games of hide-and-seek. You could take your tea down there, spread it all over the clean grass. There were no park keepers to come and chivvy you.

  And immediately behind the town was the country. We only had to walk a matter of minutes from where we lived and there was the country and the farms.

  The farmers were so friendly to you; they let you walk around; hang over the pigsty, scratch the pigs, cluck at the chickens and watch them milking the cows. Often the farmer’s wife would come out with a glass of lemonade for us.

  There were trees to climb, marvellous trees which seemed to have grown just for children.

  Back on the beach, there were the seaside shows, the Pierrot shows. It was sixpence or a shilling to sit down in a deckchair and watch it, but, needless to say, we never had money like that. So we used to stand at the back.

  Looking back, I think the shows were good. Not in the least smutty because it was meant as a family show.

  A soprano would come on and sing a soulful song about lost love, how she once had a lover and the lover had departed through some misunderstanding and she hoped with all her heart they would come together again. Half the audience were in tears, and so were we kids at the back. People believed in things like that then; dying for love, feeling soulful about it, regret, lost opportunities and all that kind of thing. None of this ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. Then there was the baritone. He would sing songs about friendship, England, and ‘Hands Across the Sea’.

  All this would be considered very small beer nowadays but we thought it was wonderful and so did the audience.

  Then there were the donkeys, and the donkey man who looked after them. Now I’ve heard it said that people who have much to do with animals get like them both in appearance and mannerisms. So the donkey man resembled his charges. He was old, small, bowed down, grey, and very hairy. He didn’t exactly have a beard. Hair seemed to be sprouting out all over him. I thought to myself many a time, if he got down on all fours you could have got on his back and you wouldn’t have known you were not on a donkey.

  What a poor sorry lot those donkeys were! I suppose they had enough to eat, but donkeys always look such pathetic creatures unless they are well looked after, and these presumably weren’t. But the well-to-do children never had to sit on the back of a donkey like the common children. Certainly not! They might get polluted. They sat in a little dogcart, all done up in red leather. It held two. These children with nannies to look after them used to come down in style in large prams.

  Not only did the man who owned the dogcart have to walk along the one side, but the nanny had to walk along the other. Because no harm must come to those darlings. Though it didn’t matter about us jogging along on the back of the old donkeys getting saddle sores.

  Wealthy children were never allowed to play with low-class children like us. They were never allowed to play with anyone but similarly wealthy children. They never went anywhere on their own without their nannies. Some of them had two, a nurse and an under-nurse. The lawns were open to everybody, and they couldn’t keep us away from them, but if any child wandered up to us, its nurse would say, ‘Come away! Come away this instant! Come over here.’ They’d never let them speak to us.

  Mind you, we had a kind of contempt for them. They couldn’t do the things that we could do. They weren’t allowed to dirty their clothes like we were. They weren’t allowed to run in and out of the bushes. They weren’t allowed to climb all over the seats and walk along the very narrow tops of them. They weren’t allowed to do anything exciting. It wasn’t their fault.

  So we never mixed, never. They played their dainty little games with large coloured balls. They pushed their dolls’ prams around and rode on their scooters.

  We had nothing except perhaps an old tennis ball, but still we used to have the most marvellous games with absolutely nothing at all.

  Perhaps if we had been allowed to mix, we would have become quite friendly but I don’t think so because they were brought up with an ingrained idea that they were a different class of people from us altogether.

  For instance, I remember one occasion when I was playing on the lawns, I had a coat on which had originally been my grandmother’s. It was a plush affair. One of these children came over and started making remarks about my coat. The nanny said to her, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t say things like that, dear, after all they’re poor children. Their mummy hasn’t got any money.’ And the child said, ‘Haw, haw, but doesn’t she look funny? I wonder if Mummy has got anything she could give her to wear.’ I was simply furious because I hadn’t minded the coat. I hadn’t felt that because it was my grandmother’s coat there was something wrong about wearing it. But although this incident has stuck in my mind I soon got over my feelings of resentment because there was always something to do or something to look forward to, like the yearly visit to the circus.

  3

&
nbsp; THE BEST circus we ever had was Lord George Sanger’s. I suppose his name was George Lord and he turned it around, but we used to think he was a real lord. He dressed up so well we thought he was marvellous, in a leather jacket with fringes hanging all around, a huge Stetson hat and a sort of riding trousers, with shiny boots that came up to his knees in a point with metal studs up the side. We thought that was how a lord should dress. It was something out of this world. We couldn’t always afford to go to his circus, but we would do our utmost. Still, you could always walk around and look at all the animals – the elephants, the lions, and tigers. That was all free.

  One particular year they came down, I remember, and billed as a marvellous attraction was a man who was shot from a cannon, right across the tent, and landed in a net. Every night we could hear the tremendous ‘Boom!’ as the cannon went off. This made our longing to go even stronger but it was during one of my father’s out-of-work periods. He just couldn’t give us the money. It was sixpence each for children to go in. That is for sitting right at the back. So we set about getting the money. We went along the streets knocking on people’s doors asking for old jam jars they didn’t want. We didn’t have any jam jars in our house. When we bought jam it was by the pennyworth in a cup, doled out from seven-pound jars. The grocer was a friend of mine, and used to make a fuss of me. After he’d doled out my pennyworth of jam in a great big wooden spoon, he always used to give me the spoon to lick. It was marvellous.

  So we got all the jam jars we could and took them to the rag-and-bone shop. You had to get six, I think, for a penny. Then we went out getting manure. Threepence a barrow we got for it. It was easy because there used to be the corporation cart horses. Every day the cart came around with a sprinkler on the back and watered the roads. When it got to our house, it was the end of the round. The driver used to go into a nearby café and leave his two horses outside. Whether it was because it was the end of the round or whether they were tired, they always used to oblige by dropping a large load of manure. Before the man went into the café, he used to put nosebags on the horses to feed them and tremendous flocks of pigeons would come around to pick up the bits that fell from the bags. We used to run under the horses’ legs to shovel up the manure, and the pigeons would fly into the air startling the horses. How we never got kicked to death I don’t know.