Below Stairs Read online

  Mind you, what Mr Ambrose Datchet saw with his own eyes must have meant he had eyes at the back of his head, because if I heard him say, ‘I saw it with my own eyes’ once, I must have heard him say it a hundred times.

  I remember a story he told me once about a raw country girl who went into service – it was her very first place – and the lady said to her, ‘Elsie, I like my breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning.’ So Elsie said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, Madam. If I’m not down, don’t wait for me.’

  When Ambrose Datchet came back from these outings with Mr Clydesdale he used to be allowed to come down in the kitchen. If it was the summer he’d have a glass of lemonade, if it was the winter he would have a cup of cocoa. He would sit there and jaw to Mrs McIlroy and sometimes to Mr Wade, the butler.

  When it was time to go, he used to walk right through the kitchen into a sort of yard place at the back. I thought at first he was going to talk to our gardener/chauffeur, but when he came back Mrs McIlroy used to say, ‘Hello, Ambrose. Been to shake hands with your best friend?’ I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were laughing at, but the fact that they looked at me made me go as red as a beetroot. After it was explained to me, I used to laugh too. Mrs McIlroy, although she looked a bit prim, she could say things with the best of them.

  Most mornings Mrs Clydesdale went out for her constitutional. I used to dread it when she came back because she used to scrutinize the front door. The brass on that front door was something too terrible for words. The door handle was all convoluted and the Brasso would get into the cracks of it, and there was a tremendous knocker, the shape of a big gargoyle. That was all nooks and crannies, and there was a big brass letterbox too. The doorstep was also all brass. Some mornings when it was bitterly cold and my hands were covered in chilblains, I used to skip a bit. I didn’t leave anything showing as far as I knew, but she could usually find something.

  If the bell used to ring two minutes after she came in, I knew what it was for. The parlourmaid would come down and say to me, ‘Madam has sent down a message that she wants to speak to Langley’ (that was me) ‘in the morning room.’

  My legs used to feel like rubber at the very thought of going up there, because I knew what she was going to say; I knew it was about the front door. She would start off with a very ambiguous remark, ‘Langley, whatever happened to the front door this morning?’ Well, she could have equally meant that it looked a picture as that it wasn’t done very well, but I knew perfectly well what she meant. Then she would go on to say, ‘Langley, you have a good home here, you have good food and you have comfortable lodgings and you’re being taught a trade, and in return I expect the work to be done well.’ By this time I was in tears, what with feeling so inferior. I was only fifteen years old; by the time I’d been in service a bit longer, I got much harder, and it never used to make me turn a hair when they said these kind of things to me.

  When I got back downstairs, even Mrs McIlroy used to be sympathetic. She’d say, ‘Oh well, never mind, girl, just remember their bodies have to function the same way as ours do.’ I couldn’t see what difference that made, and in any case their bodies could function in comfort. All we had was a lavatory in the basement which was the haunt of all the fauna, hairy spiders, blackbeetles, and every other kind of insect.

  Many a night Mary, who used to share the attic bedroom with me, used to wake up and want to go to the lavatory. She was frightened of going down all those stairs alone, so she used to wake me up to go with her. We used to creep down, trying to avoid the stairs that creaked – just like criminals. As a matter of fact, I reckon Mrs Clydesdale would have thought we were criminals, because she would have said that servants should be as regular in their habits as they were in anything else, and not go to the lavatory in the night.

  One morning when Mr and Mrs Clydesdale were out, Mr Wade came down and asked Mrs McIlroy if she could spare me for a bit.

  Mrs McIlroy and Mr Wade were quite friendly, although Mrs McIlroy always thought Mr Wade had a secret in life. Later on, when I had been there some months, he came home ‘drunk to the wide’, and he was found wearing one of the Reverend’s suits. He got the sack there and then. When we went into his bedroom at the back of the butler’s pantry, we found a cupboardful of empty whisky bottles. Maybe that was his secret.

  Anyway, this particular morning, when Mr Wade came down and asked if she could spare me, Mrs McIlroy said, ‘Why?’ ‘To see the ten o’clock totterers,’ he said. ‘The ten o’clock totterers, Mr Wade?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. Mrs McIlroy said, ‘All right, I can spare her for half an hour,’ so we went upstairs, opened the front door and looked.

  Up and down Adelaide Crescent were the cars with the smartly uniformed chauffeurs. They wore knee breeches and shiny boots, peak caps, and white gloves. Some of the uniforms were grey, some green, some blue. The chauffeurs stood rigidly to attention beside their cars, ready for when their employers came out.

  Almost on the stroke of ten the Crescent sort of sprang into action. It started at the house next but one to ours. The door opened and out came an old gentleman. He was helped down the steps by the butler, then came the old lady on the arm of the housemaid, the under-housemaid carrying a footstool and a horrible old-looking lap dog. The pair were ushered into the car, the footstool was arranged under the old gentleman’s feet, and the dog was tenderly placed on the old lady’s lap. The chauffeur leaned in and carefully wrapped a rug around both of them. No wind must blow upon them (though goodness knows, some years after that the bitter winds of adversity blew all around them), and off they went. This scene was repeated all around the Crescent. These were the ten o’clock totterers.

  Then Mr Wade said he would show me over the house, because, being a kitchen maid, during all the months I had been there, I had seen nothing except the back stairs. All I had done was to go from the basement to the attic.

  What a contrast it was to our domain. Beautiful thick carpets everywhere, all colours, Turkey carpets and Chinese carpets in the morning room, the drawing-room, the dining-room, and the bedrooms. Lovely massive armchairs, great big thick velvet curtains, lovely beds with mattresses so thick that no princess would have felt a pea if she had slept on them, like she did in the fairy tale. Everything reflected the life of ease and comfort.

  I thought of our bedroom that was so tropical in the summer, and so freezing cold in the winter, that when we left the water in our wash jugs at night, a layer of ice formed on it, and we had to break that to wash in the morning. We couldn’t even have a bath in comfort, all we had was a hip bath. For that we had to carry up every drop of water from the bathroom, two flights below, and carry it down to the lavatory when we wanted to empty it. And with a hip bath, I never knew what to do, whether to get right in, sit in it with my bottom down and my knees up under my chin, or to sit in it with my legs hanging outside. Either way I got stone-cold.

  Then I thought about the so-called servants’ hall, which was our sitting-room, really. They had lamps, beautiful reading lamps with lovely shades. The only light we had in our servants’ hall was one bulb with a white china shade. The floor was covered in old brown lino, with horrible misshapen wicker chairs which had once graced their conservatory and weren’t even considered good enough for that now. Depressing walls that were shiny brown paint halfway up, and a most bilious green distemper for the top half, the barred windows and one table with an old cloth; that was our sitting-room.

  Mary and I had the worst bedroom, it’s true, because we were the two lowest – but even Mrs McIlroy’s was only furnished with the cast-offs from upstairs. The bed was one Leonora had at one time or another and wasn’t considered good enough for her now. The bits of rugs were once in their bedrooms. Wherever you looked the difference was accentuated. If only they had made some attempt to furnish ours with a few new things. Why did we always have to have the cast-offs?

  One job I particularly hated was when it was the gardener/ chauffeur’s day off, and I had to take out the horrible little
dog of Mrs Clydesdale. It was a pug dog and it was so fat and overfed that it was almost square. It was called Elaine, but I couldn’t imagine any Lancelot taking a fancy to that Elaine. I used to walk it up and down Adelaide Crescent, and of course it kept hanging round the trees. All the errand boys – there were hundreds of errand boys in those days – used to whistle after me and say, ‘I see you’ve got your monkey with you, where’s your organ?’ I loathed that job.

  14

  IN MY FIRST months there I made one mistake after another. I particularly remember one day when I was doing the front door – I was a bit late this particular morning – the newsboy came with the papers. As I went to put them on the hall table, Mrs Clydesdale came down the stairs. I went to hand her the papers. She looked at me as if I were something subhuman. She didn’t speak a word, she just stood there looking at me as though she could hardly believe that someone like me could be walking and breathing. I thought, what’s the matter? I’ve got my cap on, I’ve got my apron on, I’ve got my black stockings and shoes; I couldn’t think what was wrong. Then at last she spoke. She said, ‘Langley, never, never on any occasion ever hand anything to me in your bare hands, always use a silver salver. Surely you know better than that. Your mother was in service, didn’t she teach you anything?’ I thought it was terrible. Tears started to trickle down my cheeks; that someone could think that you were so low that you couldn’t even hand them anything out of your hands without it first being placed on a silver salver.

  I was so miserable about this that I wanted to go home; it seemed the last straw. I thought, I can’t stand domestic service. I don’t think I ever felt so wretched before or after that. But I knew I couldn’t go home, because we had only three rooms – we lived in the bottom half of a house, two rooms on the ground floor and one in the middle – and since I had come into service, my mother’s father had died, and my grandmother had to come and live with us. So now there just wasn’t room. I didn’t even say anything to my mother about it. What was the good of making them unhappy as well? In any case I think she’d just have said, ‘Take no notice.’ She’d have been right. That’s what you had to do if you wanted to keep any pride at all – just take no notice.

  Although we weren’t forced to attend church, it was taken for granted that we went at least once on Sunday, preferably in the evening. It interfered less with their comfort if we went in the evening. One day the Reverend asked me if I had been confirmed. I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ He wanted to know why; so I said, ‘Well, my mother didn’t bother about it, she never mentioned it to me, and now I’m fifteen I don’t think it’s worth bothering about.’ After all I couldn’t see what it had to do with being a kitchen maid whether I was confirmed or not, I mean it made no difference to my work; but of course the Reverend was greatly concerned with my religion and with my moral affairs.

  In fact, all my life in domestic service I’ve found that employers were always greatly concerned with your moral welfare. They couldn’t have cared less about your physical welfare; so long as you were able to do the work, it didn’t matter in the least to them whether you had back-ache, stomach-ache, or what ache, but anything to do with your morals they considered was their concern. That way they called it ‘looking after the servants’, taking an interest in those below. They didn’t worry about the long hours you put in, the lack of freedom and the poor wages, so long as you worked hard and knew that God was in Heaven and that He’d arranged for it that you lived down below and laboured, and that they lived upstairs in comfort and luxury, that was all right with them. I used to think how incongruous it was when the Reverend used to say morning prayers and just before they were over he’d say, ‘Now let us all count our blessings’. I thought, well, it would take a lot longer to count yours than it would ours.

  For ever below stairs we were making fun of the Reverend. At the time most of it went way over my head. It must have been because of my parents – bad dirty jokes and things like that had never come into my life. I remember when I was cleaning the vegetables, turnips, and salad, one of the maids looked at what I was doing and said, ‘Oh! Turn up and let us.’ Everybody went into screams of laughter – but I didn’t know what it was all about.

  They used to go on about the Reverend and the eight children he had by his first wife. They’d compare him with Catholic clergy who don’t get married; and say that they wondered how he could ever get up in the pulpit and talk about the sins of the flesh, with a lot more innuendoes that I didn’t really understand at all. I wasn’t naïve; I mean I could see very well that for a clergyman who is supposed to preach about spiritual life, and life hereafter, then to have a tremendous family of eight daughters – well, it wasn’t really on, although I suppose in those days eight wasn’t such a lot. It was just that he was a clergyman, and then him getting married again in an effort to get a son and heir, and having another daughter, well, you couldn’t help laughing. You really felt it served the old thing right. I know now I should have given up the ghost after eight daughters and all that went with it. When I got further on in service, of course, and understood what they were talking about, I used to add my quota to it.

  One lacks moral courage, because I did stand for lots of the things I didn’t like later on when I was in service. If you didn’t do them they thought you were stuck up, and after all you had to work with the servants. Not only work with them, you had to live with them, and almost sleep with them. You shared rooms, so it was up to you to keep on good terms with them. They were your whole life.

  15

  I STAYED FOR a year in Adelaide Crescent. Then I decided that I’d try my luck in London. I’d always heard that it was a marvellous place, and that fortunes were to be made there. Not that I believed the streets were paved with gold, or all that baloney of course, but that there was more opportunity in London than there was in a small provincial town.

  When I announced this idea at home, the consternation that reigned with my parents, you’d have thought I’d said I was going to Timbuktu. My mother immediately remembered that she’d read an article in a newspaper about how all young girls disappeared as soon as they got to London and were never heard of again. It was well known, she said, that those women, and by ‘those women’ of course she meant prostitutes, originally were innocent young girls who’d gone to London in the same way that I was suggesting, and been lured away by promises of easy money and a life of luxury. I remember saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mum. I’ll tell them when I’m standing on the corner that I’m only waiting for a bus.’ That didn’t console my mother. My father never made much fuss about anything. I can’t think why Mum did because I wasn’t such a wildly attractive girl that any young man was going to take one look at me and decide that he needed me to decorate his harem. I suppose she thought it was a sort of disintegration of the family. People were much keener on families in those days than they are now.

  Anyway, in spite of all her protestations and prognostications, I decided I was fed up with living in Hove, so I got the Morning Post, and answered an advertisement for a kitchen maid at a place in Thurloe Square, Knightsbridge.

  The wages were an advance on what I had been getting, four pounds a year more. I know it doesn’t sound very much now, but of course money did go further in those days.

  My mother wanted to come to London with me. ‘You’ll get lost, you won’t find the place.’ ‘But Mum,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a tongue and a voice and two legs, I can talk, I can walk, there’s buses and undergrounds.’ I’d never been to London before, I didn’t know a soul there.

  I said, ‘I’m sixteen now, and I’m going to do it all on my own.’ It made me feel very much superior to my brothers and sisters, especially to my older brother because elder brothers always lord it over you.

  The size and dignity of the houses in Thurloe Square frightened me at first. And the interview with the lady of the house, Mrs Cutler, was even more intimidating than the house itself. When I told her my name was Margaret Langley I could see she cons
idered it a highly unsuitable name for a kitchen maid. It was more like the sort of name you’d have if you were going on the stage, not one to work down in the basement with. I could see she thought it should have been Elsie Smith or Mary Jones. They were the sort of names that kitchen maids had. Margaret Langley would be flighty.

  That was always the bugbear of people that employed you. They were always so afraid that you were going to be flighty. The parlourmaids often used to tell us that when they were waiting on people at the ladies’ ‘at homes’ which they had once a month, they heard them talking about their servants. That was one of their main topics of conversation. Then they’d say, ‘Yes, I had to get rid of her. She was flighty.’ You were flighty if you used the slightest little bit of makeup. People didn’t use a lot of make-up in those days, but if you used any, or if you had your hair waved, or if you wore coloured silk stockings; brown silk stockings were all right, but if you wore coloured ones, and I mean on your off-duty periods not when you were on, you were flighty, and flighty girls came to bad ends.

  I’ve never been able to understand why, and I still can’t. A bad end meant that we, the so-called lower classes, would get ourselves into the family way. I would have thought we were the last people to go in for illegitimate babies, because we had no means of supporting them, and there were not the homes to go to then. Nowadays you’re almost encouraged to have them, with the facilities for girls going into homes and having them looked after when they leave there. Things are made so easy and there is no publicity. In those days you were an outcast if you had a baby outside marriage. So why they should have thought we were so ready to kick over the traces I don’t know. Perhaps it was because in their heart of hearts they realized our life was so dreary that any young man that would take you out, regardless of what he wanted in exchange for it, was a treat.