Below Stairs Read online

  During the year that I’d worked there I don’t think that I’d seen Madam more than a dozen times, because when Mrs Bowchard knew that she was coming down to the kitchen, if I looked particularly scruffy which of course I often did, she’d just shoo me out until Madam had gone. No one considered that the reason why the kitchen looked so clean, the table white as snow, and the copper saucepans as burnished gold, was the reason you were so scruffy. So, as I say, I really only saw Madam about a dozen times and even then I don’t think she saw me. She didn’t appear to because she looked right through me.

  Anyway, through the parlourmaid Madam graciously gave me an audience at ten o’clock the next morning and I gave her a month’s notice. She naturally wanted to know the reason, ‘Aren’t you happy here?’, with the slightly indignant air that meant how could anyone work in her house and not be happy? And, ‘You wouldn’t find a better place anywhere’, and she was sure I must have learnt a lot. I said that the work was too hard and the hours were too long. Well, much to my astonishment she said she’d get help for me, that if would stay on she would get an odd-job man to help out. I would still have preferred to leave, but I was so overcome anyone really wanting me that I couldn’t get over it. I found myself agreeing to stay, and I even said that I liked the job.

  I must have been stark raving mad. But you see no one had ever wanted me to stay before except one boyfriend, and I knew what he wanted me to stay for.

  Even Mrs Bowchard, that old harridan of a cook, looked slightly less grim when I told her that Madam had asked me to stay on. She said, ‘Is she giving you more money?’ I’ll bet if I’d said yes she’d have been up there herself the following day. So I said, ‘No, she isn’t giving me any more money but I’m going to have an odd-job man to help out.’ Of course, she had to say, ‘Girls aren’t what they used to be in my days, you all want pampering now. But never mind,’ she went on, ‘it’s better than having to train another girl. I’d sooner you stayed than have to start all over again. When you’ve had one kitchen maid you’ve had them all.’ On she went. I’d heard it all before. I didn’t take any notice.

  Anyway, every morning except Sunday we used to have a man called Old Tom. I don’t know if he had a surname, we only knew him as Old Tom. He used to come in at six o’clock and he worked for an hour and a half, and I can’t tell you what bliss it was not to have to go out and do those front steps. It didn’t matter Old Tom doing them. Nobody throws ribald remarks at a man scrubbing with his rear sticking up to high heaven. He used to do the boots and shoes, and get all the coal in as well, it was absolute heaven. I stayed there another year after that, I didn’t find it nearly so hard. It was too good to be true.

  18

  EVERYTHING NOW went on very much the same in the house – the same routine broken by dinner parties and ‘at homes’.

  The ‘at homes’ didn’t really affect me, not workwise, but they interested me. Everybody used to have them once a month – Mrs Cutler’s used to be on the first Thursday, and there’d be a constant procession from half past three to about five. Mostly women, but a few gentlemen – they’d just come in, say, ‘How do you do?’, have a cup of tea, and rush off again, presumably to someone else’s ‘at home’. ‘Keeping in the swim’ I suppose they called it.

  In the swim! The parlourmaids I know would have liked to have pushed their heads under and drowned them. The parlourmaids had to do all the work; cutting platefuls of thin bread and butter and anointing them with some stuff called Gentlemen’s Relish. I don’t know if you can still get it, or why it was called that. I didn’t like the nasty salty stuff. I suppose it gave gentlemen a thirst for the drinks they had at around half past five.

  Madam was always on the look-out for new ideas for these ‘at homes’, and used to badger the cook and parlourmaids. Sort of putting one over on the Joneses. I suppose they still do it today at debs’ dances – trying to get the latest beat band, and things like that.

  But it didn’t affect me like the dinner parties. Although it meant a lot of extra work and a bad-tempered Mrs Bowchard, there was always a sense of ‘occasion’ about these dinner parties. You could feel it in the kitchen, but you could see it upstairs.

  I always used to try and pop up to the dining-room before dinner. The table would be laid out with a lace cloth that was a family heirloom, it was a wonderful thing, all handmade, and you can imagine the size it was to stretch out on to a dining-room table that had two more leaves put in it. It was the most marvellous one of its kind I’ve ever seen. In the centre was a crystal epergne, the silver was all Georgian. With that, and the two crystal chandeliers with the candles lit, it used to look like a scene from the Arabian nights.

  I do think that when you had a cloth on, even if it wasn’t a lace cloth but a snowy white damask, it looked a lot better than all these bits and dabs of mats do today, stuck all over the table.

  Mrs Bowchard was never the soul of amiability, but on a dinner party day she was something too terrible for words. A sort of aura of grimness and unapproachability enveloped her. You would have thought she was cooking for Buckingham Palace and a regiment of Guards all at once. It used to make the work that much harder. But the most exciting part about these dinner parties was the chauffeurs who used to bring the guests. They would stay and sit in our servants’ hall while their employers were upstairs.

  You never saw such a fluttering in the dovecote as there used to be on these occasions. There we were, six or seven of us women who hardly ever spoke to a man and whose femininity was so suppressed that we got to be like female eunuchs. We would suddenly realize that we’d got a sex, that we were real females. So noses would be powdered, hair all fripped up, and waists pulled in. People had waists in those days, there were none of these shifts. Bosoms were stuck out, and rears stuck out, so if you pulled the waist in, you looked like an hourglass, but it was fashionable then. Even Flora, the head parlourmaid, and Annie, the head housemaid, both well over forty and resigned to a life of spinsterhood, would become one of the girls for the night. Our servants’ hall would be a sort of magnet for the females, even the sewing-maid and the nursemaid would find some excuse or other to come down. And all because of these chauffeurs in their uniforms.

  Probably they were the most nondescript collection of men in private life. It’s like the soldiers in the war, isn’t it? They all looked so handsome when they were wandering around in uniform, but if you met them in civvies you wouldn’t cross the road to speak to them, well half of them anyway, especially the American ones.

  To Gladys and me these chauffeurs looked simply wonderful, and to be actually able to speak to these hundred-percent men in leggings was something too glorious for words.

  It’s a sad fact that uniform does nothing for a woman at all, it just accentuates all the wrong bulges, but even the most insignificant male seems to look masculine when he’s got a uniform on. Maybe because it’s cut to show off whatever points he has got (I’m not being vulgar), I mean to accentuate them.

  They were, of course, delighted to be the centre of interest. What man wouldn’t be if he had five or six females fluttering around him, plying him with biscuits, and cups of tea, and hanging on to his words with bated breath. Men are very susceptible to flattery. Even a man with a face like the back of a bus, if you tell him he doesn’t look too bad, believes you. You can stuff men up with any old yarn. They believe anything. You’ve only got to gaze into their eyes, and sound as though you mean what you say. I’ve tried it so I know it’s true.

  They used to tell scandalous stories about the gentry. Anybody upstairs was called the gentry in those days. We would hear all about their employers. The good, the bad, the spicy. They used to talk about their affairs. A lot of the male gentry had what was known in those days as a love nest, a flat they’d set up for some woman, and the chauffeurs used to drive them to it. That was really the extent of their knowledge. They never went into the flat, they never actually knew what went on. But to listen to them you would have thought th
at they’d partaken of the love feast. Using the royal ‘we’ like Mrs Bowchard’s brother-in-law, they would take us through the whole ceremony in all its amorous detail. They couldn’t have known it but, I suppose, it wasn’t hard to surmise.

  In any case some of them were chauffeur/valets and I’ve no doubt were looked upon as a sort of respository of secrets by their employers. They knew that they were never likely to talk on social terms to anyone that mattered, and it probably got it off their conscience if they had one. Anyway, men like to talk about that sort of thing.

  I used to work for a man myself who had a little place on the seafront. And when the rest of the family were in London he often used to pop down and go round to this little love nest.

  People used to expect it of men. Mind you, if it was a woman doing it . . . Now there’s the unfairness of life, you couldn’t set up a love nest for a man, and yet maybe you would like to. It’s like those ‘red light’ districts, isn’t it? Why should men have the advantages in their sexual life? When all’s said and done women can have husbands who don’t supply enough, and I think there should be places where they can go where all the men have been vetted and are ready to oblige for a small fee. We are the underprivileged sex, really and truly, in every way of life.

  But to come back to the chauffeurs – it may seem a nasty kind of conversation for them to have had, but it was the same with all the upper servants. Their own lives were so devoid of excitement that they had to find all their life vicariously. Sexual life, social life, every sort of life.

  Employers constantly, by the things they talked about in front of servants, left themselves open to blackmail. But we would never have known how to set about it. That sort of thing has come with more education, with the greater freedom of the press. We had the feeling that what they upstairs did, although it was a subject of scandal and gossip and laughter, was their privilege. Not because they were better than us, but because they had money and it was no good having money if you couldn’t deviate from the norm.

  It was shortly after I had agreed to stay on with Mrs Cutler that something happened which still stands out in my mind like a scene from a Victorian melodrama. It was discovered that Agnes, the under-parlourmaid, was going to have a baby.

  Nowadays it’s all so vastly different; so much do they want you now in domestic service that I’m sure that if your employers found you were going to have a baby they’d say,‘Yes, well bad luck. But you’ll be sure and come back when you’ve had it, won’t you?’ You see them advertising, saying one child not objected to. They’re as good as saying all right, you’ve got an illegitimate baby, we’re quite prepared to accept the child as well.

  In those days it was slam the door, dismissal with no money, your own home probably closed to you, nothing left but the streets or the workhouse.

  Gladys and I shared a bedroom with Agnes and although I’d seen her being sick as soon as she got out of bed, I didn’t realize that it was one of the symptoms of having a baby. I just thought she had sudden bilious attacks. It did seem strange that as soon as she got on her feet it happened, and that she was all right during the day, but that’s what I put it down to.

  Eventually Gladys, who was far more versed in all these things than I was, asked her outright if she was pregnant. It sounded a terrible word that ‘pregnant’. Agnes admitted that she was and implored us to keep it a secret. It hadn’t gone very long and it didn’t show yet.

  But clothes in those days weren’t designed to conceal your tummy. You had a waistline with a belt and it was very difficult indeed. I wished with all my heart that I could help Agnes but I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. It was Gladys who knew a bit, and she did try.

  She bought bottles of pennyroyal pills which were supposed to be very good at getting rid of it, Beecham’s pills, and quinine. But all they did for Agnes was to make her spend half the day in the lavatory. Then on Gladys’ instructions we used to lug hot water up the stairs to fill the hip bath for her. Then we’d tip tins of mustard in it, until it was absolutely yellow. That was supposed to be another good thing, hot mustard baths. Maybe it would have been if Agnes could have got her waist in it, but she couldn’t. Then she tried carrying all the heavy weights she could, and when it was her day off she used to go in the park, climb on to the park benches and then keep jumping off. It sounds amusing, but it was a terrible thing for her. She tried shifting furniture. She would pick up a massive armchair, they were huge in those days, and move it from one part of the room to the other. But none of it did any good.

  Eventually, of course, she couldn’t hide it from Mrs Cutler, and poor Agnes was told to leave at the end of week.

  It’s impossible nowadays to imagine what it must have been like for her. Although Gladys and I were terribly sorry about it, it was like when you go into hospital and somebody’s dying of something, you’ve got that faint feeling of rejoicing that it isn’t you, and Gladys and I both felt that; above our sympathy we were thankful it wasn’t us that were in this predicament.

  Although Madam told her to leave at the end of the week she did give her a month’s wages. But the very fact that she did this convinced me in my suspicions as to who the father was. Agnes would never tell. I didn’t expect her to tell Madam, but she wouldn’t tell Gladys and me who it was, and I knew she knew, because she wasn’t the sort of girl that would have gone with any Tom, Dick, and Harry; it just had to be one man and one man alone. I suspected it was a nephew of Mrs Cutler’s. He was very young, probably in his early twenties, and a very handsome man. He had such an attractive voice that even to hear him say good morning used to make you feel frivolous. It sent shivers all up and down you. I suspected him because on several occasions I discovered him on the back staircase, which was our staircase, a place where he certainly had no right to be at all. He used to say good morning or good afternoon to me in this marvellous, attractive voice of his. Some of the Americans have voices like that I have since discovered.

  I think Mrs Cutler was worried, because I think she knew, or she was nearly certain it was this nephew. She questioned Gladys and me closely and though we said we didn’t know, she didn’t believe us.

  Even though she thought it was her own flesh and blood that was responsible I had to listen to such a long lecture on the evils of such wanton behaviour. No nice young man would ever suggest such a thing to a girl he hoped to marry. Have you ever heard such drivel because that’s one of the things they always suggested. Whether they’re likely to marry you or not, they like to try their goods out first. I’ve never been out with a man that didn’t suggest it, believe me. And Mrs Cutler went on that no decent girl would ever let a man take advantage of her.

  Well now, that’s another ridiculous remark, because the ratio of girls to young men was so high that if you had a young man and you cared about him and he suggested this, it seemed to be the only way to keep him. You had a hard job not to do it if you were not going to be stuck without a young man at all, and if you were dying to get out of domestic service, which most of us were. What did Mrs Cutler know about human nature in the basement? The only thing that kept me and those like me from straying off the straight and narrow was ignorance and fear. Ignorance of how not to have a baby, and fear of catching a disease. We were always told that you only had to go with a young man and you’d catch venereal disease. That’s why so many deviate now because those two fears have gone, haven’t they? The disease can be cured, and the baby can be taken care of, even if you have it. Now they encourage you to get rid of it before it gets to anything.

  But Agnes wasn’t like Gladys or me; Gladys came from an enormous family, had a very hard life, and was a realist; I was just frightened of what might happen. And ignorant. I did know roughly what you had to do to have a baby, but I didn’t know what you could do and not have one. But Agnes was a soft girl, very sentimental, starry-eyed, and when she went to the films she would come back with all dreams and things.

  I remember she used to have a crush on Cesar R
omero. Gladys and I got turned out of the cinema when we went to see Cesar Romero because I said to Gladys, ‘Hasn’t he got lovely teeth?’ and she said, ‘Yes, and I bet he’s got another set at home.’ And we laughed so much they made us leave. But to poor Agnes, Cesar Romero was a god.

  So you can imagine if it was Mrs Cutler’s nephew with that marvellous voice of his, he would know how to treat a girl, and make her feel she was really something, not just an under-parlourmaid with no money and no position. And Agnes was a pretty girl too, and her prettiness was natural, she never used any artificial aids. I can quite see how she was overcome. And he bought her presents, I know because she had some silk underwear. She said it came from her home, but I don’t think it could have.

  All right, it may not have been him, but I have a very strong suspicion that it was, and Mrs Cutler did too. Anyway what was he doing on our back stairs? They didn’t lead anywhere except to the maids’ bedrooms.

  But going back to ignorance, fear, and straying off the straight and narrow, the whole idea of lovemaking was tied up with the idea it was sinful and revolting. Even the married relationship was often ruined because of this way of thinking.

  I remember about a year after I was married I chanced to meet a girl I’d known in service and we went into a tea shop to talk about old times. She told me she’d been married for five years, and when I made an inquiry into whether she had any family she burst out, ‘Oh, I hate all that side of married life. I can’t bear George even to kiss me because I know he’s leading up to “that”.’ She would never put it into words, it was ‘that’. Well, I remarked that her mother couldn’t have felt like that, she’d had twelve children, the mother had. She said, ‘Oh, it was my Dad, he’d never leave her alone. Even when she was hanging the washing on the line he would creep up behind her, and in the daylight too!’ I was thrown half-mast at this! Laugh? Her ‘in the daylight too’, it sounded so funny. And when I said to her, ‘Well, it was a blessed interlude on a wash day,’ she was so incensed that she stalked out and I had to finish my tea on my own. But I couldn’t help bursting out, could I? It was a pleasant interlude.