Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance Page 2

  ‘I’ll thank you, Mr Hall, not to admonish my staff, if you have any complaints, come to me.’

  Mary said that because the cook had known the family for years – she had worked for Mr Wardham’s mother and, incidentally, seemed to be the only person in the house that Mr Wardham had a pleasant word for – the butler felt that she had an advantage over him, as he had only been there for five years.

  Up in our bedroom we four younger servants settled down for a good gossip about the family. Mary remarked that Gerald, the son, although he’d been home only a few weeks, had taken quite a shine to Rose, his eyes were always following her around the dining-room. Rose, though blushing a deep red, denied that he took any more interest in her than he did in any of the staff, for how could one of the gentry be interested in the likes of her. Her mum would be horrified at the very idea, because her mum had been in one place only in service all her life until she married, and she still started her letters to this lady with ‘Dear Madam’, never Mrs Paine. Like Kipling’s ‘East is East’, I said, but the allusion was lost on Rose.

  ‘What does one do on one’s free afternoon and evening in this benighted place? I can’t see any kind of social life around here and I’m not addicted to country walks. I have always had this feeling that farm animals take an instinctive dislike to me; and they know that I have no rapport with the country.’

  ‘Cor, Margaret, can’t you use long words, you are clever,’ and Doris gazed at me admiringly.

  ‘She always could,’ said Mary; then she added, slightly maliciously, ‘trouble is, Margaret can’t pronounce them like they do upstairs.’

  I pretended to be indignant, but of course Mary was right. An extensive vocabulary was in no way comparable with the right accent.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mary went on, ‘you have Wednesday off, same as me. We could go to the village hop, it’s only three miles away and the buses run every thirty minutes. The dance finishes at ten o’clock so it’s not as though we’d have to leave while it’s in full swing. Course, it’s not like a proper dance hall; rough floor and just a piano and drums, but at least there’s nearly as many males as females so you don’t have to lay on the flattery knee deep to get a partner.’

  ‘Don’t expect any high-toned conversation,’ interrupted Rose. ‘The last time I was there, my partner talked all the time about muck-raking, horses and all the gory things that went on when cows calved.’

  She was right too, as I found on my first evening there. Most of the young men worked on farms and were wearing great clod-hopping boots. They reeked to high heaven of brilliantine which didn’t mix well with the farm odours. My perspiring partner – I made allowances for the perspiration as I was a bit hefty to propel around the floor – kept pigs. Although I like pigs in the abstract, an evening devoted to the idiosyncrasies of these animals was not my idea of conversation. When I, never loth to show off, murmured, ‘… and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings’, he looked blank. I added, impatiently, ‘You know, “through the looking-glass”.’ But if it were possible, he looked even more vacant. Once we were outside the hall, I was somewhat surprised when I found that his porcine preoccupation was the prelude to being held in a rock-hard embrace, with slobbery kisses and grunts that would have done credit to his charges. I hasten to add that not all the village swains were like him.

  Doris had to be up by six o’clock, and Mary, Rose and I at six-thirty. At first I wished Doris had slept in our room so that I could actually witness, from the warmth of my bed, somebody having to start work before me, who up to now had always been the first to rise. I’d never have wanted to be a between-maid; it’s a hard job having to help the cook in the early mornings and then, after breakfast, having to help the housemaid. My mother had three months at that job and she told me that forever the cook would be blowing the whistle for her to come down, and the housemaid blowing down for her to come up. Doris didn’t seem to mind, and neither Mrs Buller nor Annie were tyrants. Nevertheless, it meant she had two bosses.

  By the time I came down there was already a roaring fire in the kitchen-range so the bathwater was getting hot. I put a kettle on the gas stove and made tea for us under servants, then a fresh pot at seven o’clock for those august personages, the upper servants. I took a cup upstairs for the cook; Mary took one to Agnes, and Rose left one outside the butler’s bedroom. He’d have liked her to bring it in to his room, but Rose had told him her mother would never let her stay in a place where she had to enter a male servant’s bedroom. Presumably, as those above stairs were almost sacrosanct, it would have been all right to take a cup into the son’s room. At seven-thirty Annie took tea upstairs for Mr and Mrs Wardham, Miss Helen, the daughter, and Miss Sarah, the niece. The valet, Mr Burrows, did the same for the son.

  By seven-thirty I’d laid up the cook’s table with all the things she needed for cooking breakfast for us and upstairs, and Doris had laid the table in the servants’ hall. We had a good breakfast of porridge, which had been cooked overnight and left to keep warm on the stove, and bacon and eggs. Doris and I had to dish everything out on to the plates, so there wasn’t the same formality as there was for midday lunch, when the butler solemnly carved the joint and the vegetables were passed up and down the table in strict pecking order. Our official breakfast time was from eight o’clock until eight forty-five. Upstairs, it was at nine-fifteen. I was pleased to discover that the servants didn’t have to assemble upstairs for prayers. And later on, when I caught sight of Mr Wardham’s sour-looking face and heard his harsh and overbearing voice, I could tell that it would have been incongruous for him to orate about how we were loved by the One above when it was obvious that the one above, who paid us our wages, didn’t even like us.

  It rather grieved Mrs Buller that no prayers were said in that house. She considered that to have fifteen minutes of spiritual communion was to start the day well; though as Doris and I said – only to each other of course – as we’d already been up for a couple of hours of hard work without spiritual communion, we could continue to manage without it. But Mrs Buller appeared to be on almost familiar terms with God. Casting her eyes upward, she always spoke of Him as the ‘Master’. I got extremely confused about this owing to the fact that when she was working for Mr Wardham’s mother, Mr Wardham was always known to her as Master Edward. Now that she worked for him, she referred to him as the Master. Once, when Mrs Buller admonished Doris to hurry with stoking up the range for dinner, the Master didn’t like to be kept waiting, I whispered to her that he’d been waiting for hundreds of years so a bit longer wouldn’t matter. And besides, I thought, one stoked up for ‘him below’. Doris giggled so much that Mrs Buller enquired sarcastically whether we thought we were in training to be cooks or a couple of comics on the stage; and Mr Hall, a balding man of fifty who occasionally tried to be avuncular with the young servants, said, ‘Ah, Mrs Buller, when they get to our age they’ll realise that “life is real, life is earnest”, which drew no response from Cook, who disliked any mention of age. I thought that Mr Hall was being very tactful for Cook must have been ten years older than he was. The only person allowed to be jokey with Mrs Buller was young Fred, the under gardener.

  4

  On my first morning at Redlands – the name of the house – I realised that Mary had spoken the truth about Madam. Mrs Wardham was a rather sad-looking lady, but so very pleasant. She actually called me Margaret and thanked me for helping them out at such short notice. Mrs Buller sniffed audibly on hearing this but I didn’t let that detract from my pleasure. I really felt for a few moments that I was just as important in the scheme of things as the upper servants. Subsequent remarks from Cook and the butler soon dispelled such ideas. Not that Mrs Buller was ever really unkind. For one thing, an experienced kitchenmaid such as I was could lighten a cook’s load of work considerably. After reading the menu, I knew just what utensils she would require on the kitchen table. And I knew just what was within my capacity to cook. As Mr Wardham was only in to lunch
at weekends, the meal for them upstairs, unless there were guests was a simple affair of two courses and cheese. But a lot of food had to be cooked for our dinner, which was our main meal at two o’clock, for as well as the nine servants in the house, both gardeners and the chauffeur sat down with us. Proper ritual it was too. The cook and butler were ensconced at each end of the table, Agnes and Violetta each side of Cook, Mr Burrows, the valet, and Jack, the chauffeur, each side of the butler, and the rest of us in between. It was my job to lay the table with a huge white cloth, and we all had serviettes rolled up in different coloured rings. It was difficult at first remembering the right places at table to put them – not that it mattered with Fred, the gardener or the chauffeur, as they never bothered to use theirs. Doris and I had to bring in the hot plates, vegetables, gravy and sauce. By the time we all sat down it was quite an impressive sight. Once, young Fred whispered to me, ‘You’d think we were in training for the State Banquet,’ which caused me to giggle and Mr Hall to frown. If I forgot some item for the table, such as the salt, or enough tablespoons, Mr Hall, as was the way with most butlers, would not address me directly but, looking very grave, and as though he’d just been given private information on some impending catastrophe, would say to the cook:

  ‘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 proba
bly 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.