Climbing the Stairs Read online

  But you couldn’t make George see that. He said we were all riddled with bloody class here. He’s like a lot of people who’ve lived abroad and come back. The places they’ve left are always better. Everywhere’s marvellous where they’re not.

  Between George and Mr Wade, the butler, there was always a sort of a feud going on. I think it was partly jealousy because being the only two men in the house they vied for attention from the servants.

  Mr Wade used to think that George’s manner and his speech were crude and vulgar while George thought that Mr Wade with his soft voice and his lily-white hands was no sort of a man at all. He used to say, ‘Fancy having to bath and dress that old bugger upstairs. What kind of job is that for a man?’

  I’d defend Mr Wade. ‘Well, you drive him around don’t you?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s different.’ ‘And I’ve seen you tuck him in the back like you were tucking up a baby.’ I couldn’t say too much as I was only a kitchenmaid.

  Then he’d say, ‘Wade’s no kind of a man at all. No wonder he never got married. He probably could never have performed if he had.’

  I wasn’t really sure what performed meant, but everybody laughed so I presumed it was something a bit on the obscene side.

  George’s idea of being a man was to swear and spit and intersperse words with ‘bloody this’ and ‘bloody that’ and make dirty jokes out of anything. And between him and Mr Wade there was a gulf that could never be crossed.

  After one of these ‘I love Australia’ conversations Mr Wade asked George in a very lofty tone of voice why, if he liked Australia so much, did he ever leave it? George then gave us some long yarn about that he never would have left it but that the boss’s daughter fell in love with him and as he didn’t want to settle down at that time he thought he’d better leave and so he went to Sydney.

  Of course the truth of the matter probably was that he started pestering the boss’s daughter and the boss didn’t like it, because no matter how democratic the boss was, if he was as wealthy as George made out he was, I daresay he had other ideas for his daughter than that she should marry one of his sheep men.

  But anyway that was George’s story. So he lit out for Sydney. Then he went off delirious about Sydney and what a marvellous place it was. He said, ‘That’s the place for men. They keep women in their place in Sydney. None of this bloody taking them out to the pub with you like they do over here. There aren’t any pubs where bloody women can go.’ And that suited George down to the ground.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘the pubs are only open till six o’clock in the evening so you all knock off work at five and you make a bee-line for the pub. You swill all you can, and then you stagger home or if you can’t get home you stagger to the gutter and you lie down there.’ George thought it was a marvellous life.

  Then he told us that while he was in Sydney he married a widow about ten years older than he was and that her late husband had left her a lot of money. And I’m not even guessing when I say that he married her for her money. Then he persuaded her to come back to England with him.

  Now he hadn’t got a picture of this wife of his – we never did know her name. In fact he said very little about her. He used to go off at great length about the other women he could have married out in Australia; when he did speak about her he never had a kind word to say for her except that the only good thing she ever did in the world was to leave it.

  He’d say, ‘She was such a cold-hearted old bitch. She used to dole out her favours as though they were diamonds.’ And he’d add, ‘She was no bloody good in bed anyway and before she’d let me in with her I always had to wash and shave and clean my teeth. And what the hell’s that got to do with * * * * * * *.’ I use asterisks to denote my meaning because people make such a fuss about that word as though it was a new sort of vice, but the word and the deed were in use when I was young, I can assure you. In fact I never heard it called anything else.

  Then he went on, ‘And she made me do all the bloody work in bed. Wore me out she did.’ So cook said, ‘Is it still worn out, George?’ She could say things like that, you see. She had a nerve. So he said, ‘Oh no, I reckon I could bring it up to scratch if the occasion arose.’

  Then Mr Wade said, ‘I shouldn’t think the occasion will ever arise.’ George got so furious over this that he said, ‘I’m still a man, you know. I bet if it were a contest I could beat you any day of the week.’ And an argument started. But neither of them was given the opportunity to prove it. This was the vain kind of boasting you get from men.

  The real reason why George used to get so livid about his wife was because when she died instead of him getting the money – the money he’d married her for – it went to her two grown-up sons. It was in trust for them and he never got a penny. So for the most part of the time George had a grieving hatred of his wife.

  But once a month on his weekend off he used to go on a real bender. He’d go to the local pub and he’d order a half-pint of cider to be served in a pint glass and into this he used to tip two double whiskies and two white ports. And this was his starter. Then he would steadily drink white ports for the whole weekend.

  He’d come back in on the Sunday night reeling about, and he would get maudlin.

  All drinkers vary. Some people get very merry. I do. It’s always worth anybody’s while to buy me alcohol because they get good value for their money. I get livelier and livelier. My husband gets very quiet. Others get aggressive, which is no good at all. But old George used to get maudlin.

  He’d come in, walking on the balls of his feet to keep his balance, and the tears would be streaming down his cheeks. And then he’d start a long monologue about his dear departed wife. He’d say, ‘Oh, she was a lovely woman, a lovely woman. I should never have persuaded her to come back to this bloody country. She would still have been alive now if we’d stayed in Australia. This bloody country is enough to kill anybody. Do you know when she was ill I looked after her like a mother. I waited on her hand and foot. And I could have saved her if they hadn’t carted her off to hospital. They killed her. They killed her in that bloody hospital. All of them bloody bed baths – that’s what did it. Removing the natural juices that covered her body. Bloody water.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I tried to save her. That last few days before she died when they had the screens around her I used to go up with a bottle of whisky. And when the nurses weren’t looking I’d pull back the covers and rub her all over with it. To try and put back some of the warmth that bloody water had taken away.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I worshipped every hair on that woman’s body.’

  Then he’d burst out crying and he’d sob himself to sleep while we tiptoed upstairs wondering how many hairs she had and how much worship George would have to have done on them.

  3

  GEORGE MAY HAVE loved Australia, but it wasn’t until many years later that I finally went abroad myself, with my husband Albert.

  The day that I heard we’d won fifty pounds on the football pools I thought that the millennium had arrived. We’d never seen fifty pounds in our lives before nor even anything like that amount.

  Well, of course, straight away we started talking about what we were going to do with it. When you suddenly realize you’ve got fifty pounds and the largest sum you’ve ever had before is about ten pounds then you think that it’s going to do a wonderful lot of things. First of all we thought we’d refurnish the house. We settled on things that would have come to five hundred pounds at least.

  Then I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I like the place as it is.’

  Then we decided we’d all have new clothes and then that idea faded out.

  And then I said, ‘We haven’t had a holiday in years. Let’s have a holiday with it.’

  A holiday to me and my husband meant going somewhere in England. So we started to consider places. We didn’t want to go to another seaside place, living as we did at Hove. And we didn’t want to go to the country because I can’t bear the country.r />
  I don’t like all those static things – the trees and fields and I don’t really like animals. I wouldn’t walk through a field if there was even one cow in it, never mind a herd. Have you ever noticed the way cows look at you – as if they can see right through and they don’t like what they see? Scornful-like. And then they start ambling towards you. They might be going to be friendly but it’s a bit too late if they get right up and you find they’re not, isn’t it? I don’t dislike pigs, but with these factory farms it’s not like the days when farmers used to let you walk around and scratch the pigs. Nowadays farming’s done on such a big scale that they don’t want strangers walking around.

  There there are the country pubs. Everyone makes such a thing about country pubs. When you go into one every face looks up at you and you get a vista of blank faces turning towards you. They know you’re a stranger to the place and they want to keep you feeling that way. You walk to the bar thinking you’re a kind of leper.

  The country’s very nice if you like being next to nature but I hate nature.

  Some people say what interesting faces country people have got; what thinkers they must be. But I know what they’re thinking. You’ve only got to look at the expression on their faces to know what they’re thinking – bugger all. Or nothing worth thinking about, like the crops, the farm and is it going to rain and looking up at the sky and musing about it. Of course it’s going to rain. It always does in the country. At any rate it does when I’m there. And another thing they’re thinking is – what the devil are you doing down there? What are you after? Thoroughly suspicious they are. And even if I don’t know what they’re thinking I don’t want to know. I don’t go for a holiday to sit and wonder what people are thinking. I go to enjoy myself.

  The alternative was to go to a big town like Bristol, London, or Edinburgh.

  I like big towns because you’re anonymous there. I like to be anonymous. I don’t want the spotlight on me. Well, I didn’t then; I don’t mind it so much now. In any case I hadn’t got many clothes to wear and not much money so I wanted to be anonymous.

  I like to be in a crowd so that nobody notices you from the rest. I feel at home in a crowd and I feel at home amongst all the things that are made by man. I like everything that’s machine made and man made. I like shops. I like cars. I like the new lighting that they’ve installed. I like everything that’s mechanically made. I like things that have all been made with somebody’s brain, by man’s ingenuity, and it increases the stature of man to me – because after all’s said and done we’re only midgets here and we’ve only got a very short tenure of life on earth, so I think that anything that anyone’s done to enhance life here is interesting and worthwhile. People keep saying that in spite of all these inventions people are no happier, but how can they tell? They don’t know how happy people were that are dead and gone.

  Anyway, while we were still wondering about what town to go to I had the marvellous idea of going abroad.

  Of course Albert wasn’t keen because he doesn’t like changes. He likes things to go on in the same old way, and the very thought of going abroad, different food, different people and you can’t speak a word of the language – and no country’s like England. I could see these thoughts going round in his mind. I mean there’s not another country in the world that’s as good as ours.

  It was the same when he joined the RAF during the war. He didn’t fancy travelling all over the world. As it turned out he didn’t have to. All the time he was in the Service he only saw one aeroplane – and that was on a scrap heap. He was in the RAF for four years – never got off the ground, and never got any farther than Yorkshire.

  He had a marvellous job there. He used to go out and pick up matchsticks and barely did a stroke in the whole of the four years. Four years’ rest it was. When they got tired of doing nothing they used to shovel the coal from one heap and put it in another heap.

  But he’d heard about abroad – that it was the land of vice and the food was terrible. That they ate snails and slugs. That it was uncivilized and that the people all wore little grass skirts. He wasn’t at all happy about the idea.

  Anyway I sent to several travel companies for their brochures – you know the sort of things. They’d pictures of glamorous people in the most beautiful clothes and others lying about on the beaches with a lovely sun tan. It never rains in any of those brochures and there’s never a word about what you do if it does.

  One or two of the holidays we thought were marvellous but then we found out that they wanted about five hundred pounds for those. There really wasn’t a lot of choice. We only had the fifty pounds from the pools though we thought we might scrape up another ten pounds – that was as much as we could do in the time available to us. So after we’d got through the brochures about three times we finally settled on a holiday that was twenty-four pounds each for ten days.

  For that we would have five days in a place on the very tip of Holland so that we could make trips into Germany and Luxembourg and Belgium and we would have four days in Paris. This sounded a good bargain so we paid the deposit and then we tried to save up as much as we could.

  We didn’t go out anywhere. We became practically teetotallers. Believe me I wouldn’t want a holiday every year if you’d got to be a teetotaller to have it. A lot of people do that. They save up their money so that they can have one big fling. I daresay we could have had a much better holiday that way, but just imagine being miserable for fifty weeks so that you can have two weeks’ holiday. Then perhaps it rains all the time or the holiday doesn’t go, like jelly that never sets.

  In any case I think that if you’ve had a miserable fifty weeks you’ve probably lost the capacity to enjoy yourself. But we didn’t mind too much because we’d got this lump sum and we felt it wasn’t too long to wait and that we were going to do something entirely different.

  We felt really adventurous. Talk about Captain Cook and his voyage round the world or Christopher Columbus discovering America – the thought of Mr and Mrs Powell going abroad knocked them into a cocked hat. We were quite the big noises in our neighbourhood.

  On the great day we had to be at Liverpool Street Station at eight o’clock in the morning. This meant we had to put up for the night in London and that was nearly disastrous. It cost three pounds ten for the two of us. We thought it was ruinous – absolute robbery. We had to do it because we couldn’t get to Liverpool Street at eight o’clock otherwise.

  We got there about quarter past seven – all eager and agog. We had a terrible job finding our party. We thought our party would be the only party. We didn’t realize that we were a very small cog in a large wheel and that there were lots of other parties – much bigger parties – parties going on things with names like The Hook Continental. We didn’t do anything like that. We had just an ordinary old train down to Harwich.

  Finally we found our party and we got on the train. And then we met the courier. Oh, what a charming man that courier was! Of course we didn’t realize then that charm was his stock-in-trade, that it was a facade and there was nothing behind it, just all charm.

  He spoke to us individually and held my hand. He was a very handsome man – I felt quite thrilled. I felt more thrilled too because incidentally the others were rather elderly – I think I was about the youngest, or looked the youngest anyway. And I was certainly the liveliest. And he sat down and held my hand. (It was a long time since any man had held my hand apart from my husband and that was old hat.) He gazed into my eyes and I felt he really cared about me. I didn’t intend to throw my cap over the windmill or anything – not that the opportunity ever arose. He told us various funny little anecdotes about other trips he’d been on and things like that. You know how charming people can talk. If you try to analyse it it’s all so light that it just goes away in a puff of smoke but when they’re telling it to you it seems so interesting. And he was good-looking, too, which made all the difference because after all if he’d had a face like the back of a bus charm wou
ldn’t have got him anywhere. But with charm and good looks and that lovely public-school accent . . .

  Now there’s a swindle for you – that public-school accent that takes you in to start with. It gets you anywhere – if you haven’t got two pennies to rub together that public-school accent sees you through.

  As he moved from table to table on the train everybody was saying, ‘Oh, isn’t he a charming man!’ We were properly taken in by him.

  Then he told us not to buy anything on the Continent without telling him.

  ‘You’re bound to want to bring back a piece of jewellery or some perfume,’ he said. ‘If you want anything just let me know and I’ll tell you the shops to go to and mention my name and you’ll get it cheaper.’

  We swallowed this because you think, what would he tell you it for if it wasn’t true? We found out later.

  We eventually reached Harwich and got on the boat to go across to the Hook of Holland. The sea was rough and it was a terrible boat. There was nowhere to sit and you couldn’t even get a place to hang over the side and be sick. At last I found somewhere and just lay there hoping to die.

  Albert was fine – never turned a hair. And what particularly grieved me was him coming back from the bar saying, ‘Do you know how much whiskies cost in there? About a third of what we pay at home and it’s a bigger measure.’

  What a time to choose to say a thing like that when I was calling for the angel of death. I felt so ill and every time I went to the lavatory to be sick they’d just let me be sick and then turfed me out again.

  It was a horrible boat – not enough room, no chairs, no nothing. Mind you, even if it had been comfortable I couldn’t have enjoyed it.