Below Stairs Page 3

  That was when the town opened the soup kitchen. It was in Sheridan Terrace, Hove. A covered stone building with two coal-burning coppers. You queued up for your helping at midday – that was the only time they served it. The soup was terrible. Thin, watery pea soup. I’m sure it was the kind of stuff they doled out to Oliver Twist. I had to go up there with a washstand jug to get it. Mum never knew what shame that washstand jug caused me. It was a white one covered in pink roses. Other children had enamel jugs which seemed to me a far more suitable thing. And to walk through the streets, carrying a large washstand jug full of pea soup pretending you hadn’t been up there and got it for nothing, that you’ve not been accepting charity, well, then you’ve got to be very clever indeed. I wouldn’t let Mother know how it made me feel because there was no one else to do it.

  When my father got called up in 1916 the separation allowance was terrible. It really was. Starvation money. That’s all you could call it.

  Then the coal got in short supply. You couldn’t have even half a hundredweight of coal if you had a gas stove. So I used to have to go down to the Town Hall, young as I was, to get a permit. I swore ‘black’s blue’ that we hadn’t got a gas stove, that we’d never had a gas stove, that we did all our cooking on the fire, and I never turned a hair. Can you wonder that you grow up with all your wits around you? Then when I’d got this permit, I had to go right up to the depot where the trains came in and wait there in a queue. It was winter, it was freezing cold and my stomach was empty. I pushed the coal back in an old pram and I fainted with the cold. Somebody picked me up and took me into their house. They gave me something to eat and a sixpence but I still had to push the coal back home.

  With my father gone, it was a harrowing time. I remember Mother used to confide in me, the eldest girl. I remember when we hadn’t anything left to use for warmth and no money to get coal. I said to Mum, ‘Get all the wood down. Let’s have a fire with wood.’ She took every single shelf there was in the rooms and she even took the banisters from the stairs. Things like this make you hard.

  I had also adopted a kind of grown-up manner with all the shops. The butcher in particular, he was a great favourite of mine. I used to go along there on a weekend and say, ‘I want the biggest joint you’ve got for a shilling.’ He used to say, ‘Well, I hope you’ve brought your own paper.’ So I would say, ‘Oh, yes, I have. I’ve brought this bus ticket to wrap it in. That’s large enough for your joints.’

  Every other morning, Mum got my brother and me up at six o’clock. She gave us sixpence and a pillowcase and we went to the baker’s – Forfar’s in Church Road. They didn’t open till eight o’clock but the earlier you got there, the better bread you got. It took us about twenty minutes to walk it so we had a long wait outside.

  If we were first in the queue, we used to look through the letterbox and see just what sort of bread they had. Mostly it was large flat brown loaves. We used to call them cow cakes because they resembled the cow-dung that we saw in the fields. Especially when people had trodden on it.

  Sometimes we’d see a currant loaf. It was marvellous if we got a currant loaf.

  For our sixpence they used almost to fill a pillowcase with bread.

  Best of all were the rolls. If there were any rolls put in, we used to eat them on the way home and never say a word to Mum. We were so ravenous, getting up at six, queuing outside in all that cold, so just eating those odd rolls was absolute heaven.

  The best thing that happened around our street during the war was when they billeted the soldiers on us.

  My mother had three. An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman. She had to ask to have the Irishman removed. He made such uproars and all that.

  I don’t know what the money was, but I noticed there was a change in our standard of living. Mum said my father wasn’t too keen about the idea. You see she was an attractive woman and he was in France at the time and couldn’t do anything about it.

  It made a big difference. All of a sudden everybody sprouted out with new things. Even the tally-man got paid. The tally-man was a door-to-door salesman. He came around and sold sheets and pillowcases, and boots and shoes, and things like that, carrying them in a large case. You paid him so much a week for the goods and a little bit over the odds because he had to wait for his money. You never signed agreements, it was just written down in a book. Selling the goods was easy. Anyone could buy them but when it came to collecting the money it was a different story indeed. When Mother had no money I used to stand at the top of the steps watching for the tally-man. When I saw him coming I used to rush in and bawl out, ‘He’s here, Mum!’ and she used to go and hide. When he came to the door I would answer and say, ‘Mum’s out.’ He never used to believe me and he used to get very abusive, but of course he couldn’t do anything. The same with the rent collector. There just wasn’t the money.

  I would have nightmares about this rent collector and the fact that he might turn us out. Everything got paid eventually but that was the trouble, you see, running up debts so that when your husband got work again, you were still as hard up in a way because you were paying off what had accumulated while he was out of work.

  8

  I STARTED WORK the first week after I left school. It was a housework job in a bungalow, with a married couple. The wife was an old lady, a semi-invalid, paralysed from the waist down. I worked from seven in the morning until one, Sundays included, for ten shillings a week. I didn’t get any dinner because that was the idea of leaving at one o’clock just as they were starting their dinner, but I did get breakfast.

  The funny part about this breakfast, although I didn’t think so then, was that it was anything that was left from the night before. Sometimes I had milk pudding, sometimes I had macaroni cheese, sometimes I had cottage pie. But I didn’t worry. I ate everything there was because the more I ate down there the less my Mum had to give me. Food was getting to be a constant problem with me because although I was only thirteen, I was a huge girl and I had an enormous appetite. And of course the harder I worked, the hungrier I got. My mother used to get so indignant about this breakfast. She said it was such a cheat giving me things like that. I should have eggs and bacon, and not the old left-overs. But I never used to worry, I couldn’t care less what I ate so long as I did.

  I didn’t stay at that job very long mainly because I began to develop pains in my legs. I presume it was because I was beginning to mature. I remember one morning I had such pains in my legs, I said to the man of the house, ‘I can’t work any more today. My legs hurt me so much.’ He gave me a bottle of liniment to rub them with and said it would do them extra good because it was horse liniment. I was furious. I could hardly walk. So that finished that job.

  That first year I had a dozen jobs altogether. These little daily jobs were all the same. I was very young so they paid me a microscopic wage, but at the same time I looked so hefty that they expected a lot out of me.

  One job which I had lasted only a week. It was to push a cantankerous old lady around in a bathchair. She had once been somebody by the aristocratic way in which she spoke, but she was reduced to one old retainer to look after her and a large-sized house.

  Every morning it was my job to go there and help this old lady into her bathchair. And that was a business, believe me, what with the bonnets, the capes, and the button boots. All the time I was doing this for her she was nagging at me. When I got her ensconced in this bathchair I had to push her round to the shops, and then go and say, ‘Mrs Graham is outside. Will you please come out for orders?’ Can you imagine nowadays going into a shop and asking the shopkeeper to come out for orders? But in those days, although she was as poor as a church mouse, with her aristocratic manner, the shop keepers would come out, very obsequiously bow and scrape and later send everything that she ordered.

  Nothing I did was right for her. Either I hadn’t got her into the right position outside the shop or the sun was in her eyes or I’d jolted her back.

  One particular
day, it was a lovely summer morning and she wanted me to push her along the seafront. We went down to the West Pier, about a mile and a half. Then she wanted me to arrange her chair so that the wind was at the back of her and yet so she could still see the people. She was at her worst that day, and she moaned the whole journey, so that after I tried to get her into position about six times and still it wasn’t right, I just gave up. I didn’t say anything. I just walked away and left her. I never did know what happened to her or how she got back or anything.

  When I told Mother she was taken aback at first, but when she told Dad he saw the funny side of it and all through the week he kept saying, ‘I wonder if that old girl is still stuck at the West Pier?’

  After that, as a change from housework, I got a job in a sweet shop. Every child’s delight. I was allowed to eat as many sweets as I wanted. I was soon sick of them. The reason I got the sack from there was that all my brothers and sisters and their friends used to come in with their halfpennies and farthings. I used to dole them out sweets ad lib and the owner saw all her profit going.

  The job I was really waiting for was to work at the local laundry, but you had to be fourteen before they would start you there. I went at thirteen and a half, thinking that, as I was such a big person, they would take me on, but they asked to see my birth certificate so that was that.

  As soon as I was fourteen I went there and got taken on as a sorter. I was put in a room on my own and had to sort the linen from the Hotel Metropole, the biggest hotel in Brighton. That was my job for the first six months. Afterwards I got to running around for everybody, a bit in the ironing room and a bit in the washroom.

  I worked from eight o’clock until six for twelve and sixpence a week. Not a lot of money and no meals. But it was lively, far livelier than doing housework, especially the ironing room. The language and the atmosphere there reminded me of Dante’s Inferno.

  It was one of my jobs to go into this room with a watering-can to sprinkle the floor, because there were no mechanical means of removing the dust and with the clothes being continually moved around the floor used to get covered with a fine white powder. If by chance you sprinkled the water on the feet of the ironing women instead of on the floor, they used to swear like Billingsgate fishwives. I’d never heard anything like it in my life, even on a Saturday night along our street, and they used to tell the foulest jokes and screech with mirth at my incomprehension.

  What a sight I must have looked. It was the time when girls were wearing boots that came up to the knees but I had a pair that came just above my ankles like my father’s boots. I was already taking size eights although I was only fourteen. In the morning I never knew whether they were Dad’s or mine until I had examined them well. So what with that and the jumper my mother had knitted me (she had run out of the wool when she got to the back so it was a different colour from the front) and my hair straight back, and the goitre from which I was suffering, I must have looked like a drawing by Boz.

  When I got to be fifteen and was due for a half a crown rise, I got the sack. They had no need to pay you fifteen shillings a week. Girls of fourteen could do what I was doing. So that any excuse they found to get rid of you, they did.

  9

  WHEN I CAME home from the laundry and told my mother I’d got the sack she was very annoyed. I expect she was a bit fed up, with all the various jobs I’d had since I left school, and she said, ‘I did think you were settled at the laundry. You were mad keen to go there at fourteen, and now you’ve got the sack at fifteen. Oh well, there’s nothing else for it, you’ll have to go into domestic service, that’s all.’

  I hated the idea but I never even thought of moaning about it. I dare say I could have appealed to my father because he always made a big fuss of me; although Mum was the guiding light in our house – Dad left everything to her. We’ve always done as my mother told us to do. Children did at that time.

  So I said, ‘All right, then.’ I didn’t know that much about it – and my mother told me what a good job it was; all the benefits that accrue from going into service; good food and lodgings and that. The money you do get is all your own.

  Of course, like a lot of things seen in retrospect, my mother looked at her years in domestic service through a vista of married life, with a husband always out of work in the winter, with seven children and never enough money for food, never mind about clothes. Her years in domestic service seemed a time when at least she did have a certain amount of money that she could call her own.

  She forgot the tales she used to tell us – how she went into it when she was fourteen years old in 1895, and how she had to work like a galley slave; an object of derision to the other servants.

  So when I reminded Mum of all this, ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘life is different in service now; the work’s not so hard, you get more free time, and the outings and money are better.’

  So I said, ‘Well, what could I be in service, then?’ and she said, ‘Well, as you hate needlework’ (and I always did hate needlework) ‘there’s only one place you can go and that is into the kitchen. If you’re a parlourmaid you’ve got to mend all the table linen, and if you’re a housemaid you’ve got to mend all the house linen, and if you’re in the nursery you’ve got to mend, and even make, the children’s clothes. But if you’re a kitchen maid, then you don’t have any needlework to do at all.’ So I said, ‘All right, then, I’ll be a kitchen maid.’

  I went down to a domestic agency, of which there were a great many at that time; and many posts for kitchen maids, because it was the lowest position in the house for a servant. Yet it’s funny, you know, if you wanted to be a cook and you had no money to pay for training, the only way you could learn to be one was by starting as a kitchen maid.

  I was offered various posts and eventually I settled on one in Adelaide Crescent in Hove, because it was fairly near to where we lived. It was the home of the Reverend Clydesdale and his wife. My mother came with me for the interview.

  They were tremendous houses in Adelaide Crescent; they started off with a basement and went right up to an attic, there were a hundred and thirty-two stairs in all, and the basements were dark and like dungeons. The front of the basement, with iron bars all down the bay windows, was the servants’ hall. When you were sitting in there all you saw going by was people’s legs, and when you were on the other side of the basement hall, which was the kitchen, a big conservatory overhung that, so you saw nothing at all. It had one tiny window high up in the wall which you couldn’t see through unless you got a ladder. The light had to be on all day long.

  The Crescent is one of the most imposing in Hove. The houses were Regency style, and even now, although they are all flats, they haven’t altered the façade, and it still looks very much as it did with gardens right down the centre. Of course, at that time only the residents had keys and were allowed to use the gardens, but that certainly didn’t apply to the servants, I can assure you.

  When my mother and I arrived at this house for the interview we went to the front door. In all the time I worked there, that was the only time I ever went in by the front door. But the front door it was on this particular day. We were ushered into a hall that I thought was the last word in opulence. There was a lovely carpet on the floor, and tremendously wide stairs carpeted right across, not like the tiny little bit of lino in the middle we had on our stairs. There was a great mahogany table in the hall and a mahogany hallstand, and huge mirrors with gilt frames. The whole thing breathed an aura of wealth to me. I thought they must be millionaires. I’d never seen anything like it.

  A butler opened the door to us and my mother said that this was Margaret Langley who had come for the interview as a kitchen maid. A very tiny little butler he was. I’d always thought that butlers were tall, imposing men. In the hall we saw a rather elderly gentleman and the lady who was to interview us. We were shown into what was obviously a nursery – a day nursery.

  My mother did all the talking because I was overcome with wonder at
this room, for although it was only a nursery, you could have put all the three rooms that we lived in into it. Also I was overcome with shyness; I suffered agonies of self-consciousness in those days. And the lady, Mrs Clydesdale, looked me up and down as though I was something at one of those markets, you know, one of those slave markets. She seemed to be weighing up all my points.

  My mother told her that I had been doing daily jobs. She didn’t mention the laundry because she didn’t think that was any recommendation. People thought that laundries were hotbeds of vice in those days because of the obscene language of the girls who worked there.

  Mrs Clydesdale decided that because I was strong and healthy I would do. I was to have twenty-four pounds a year, paid monthly. I was to have one afternoon and evening off from four o’clock to ten o’clock, and alternate Sundays off the same hours, and I was never to be in later than ten o’clock under any circumstances. I was to have three print dresses, blue or green; four white aprons with bibs, and four caps; stockings, and black strapped shoes. I was always to say ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ if I was spoken to by Mr and Mrs Clydesdale, and I was to treat the upper servants with great respect and do everything the cook asked me to do. To all these things my mother said, ‘Yes, Madam, no, Madam’, and all these things she promised on my behalf that I would do. My spirits sank lower and lower. I felt I was in jail at the finish.

  When we got outside I told Mum how I felt but she’d decided that the job would do for me. So that was that.

  The trouble was the uniform. My mother worked it out that it couldn’t be done – all these things that had to be bought for me – under two pounds. I know that it sounds a ridiculously small sum now, but two pounds was untold wealth to us then. We hadn’t got two pounds but anyway she managed to borrow it and she fitted me out.