by Hilda Newman
‘I will show you where everything is tomorrow,’ she continued. ‘But as to your wages: you will be paid five shillings a week. Mr Latter will see to everything.’
Well, five shillings didn’t sound very much at all – though I suppose it was five times what I’d earned at Mrs King’s dressmaking business. But then I realised that, as well as my wages, I’d be fed and watered – I wouldn’t have to pay a penny for my keep – and I’d be living in one of the greatest houses in England. I wouldn’t have minded a few bob more, don’t get me wrong but, as I mentally added things up, I realised that five shillings and all found (as we used to call it) meant that I’d be able to send some money home to Mum and Dad.
‘That will be all, Mulley. Oh – you don’t have to wear a uniform. You are, after all, head staff, but please make sure you wear dark clothes and, when you brush my hair, you must wear a pinny. Ms Sapstead will see to that for you.’
With that, I was dismissed from my mistress’s presence. She turned away from me and picked up a beautiful long evening dress – I didn’t recognise the exact fabric but I knew enough to know that it was worth many times my weekly wages – she was to wear to dinner.
‘Excuse me, Milady, but is there anything else I can do for you?’ I asked in what sounded a very small voice. ‘It’s just that I don’t know what to do when I’m not wanted.’
The Countess turned back to me. She was, as I hope you’ve gathered by now, really quite a frightening figure. How on earth had I plucked up the courage to speak to her?
‘Do?’ she asked, as if tasting and testing an unfamiliar concept. ‘I have no idea what you will do: you are to be my lady’s maid and that means you will do whatever I need you to do, whenever I need it. As for anything else,’ – she waved her hand vaguely at me – ‘well, I imagine your time is your own.’
‘Well, goodness,’ I thought. ‘That’s me told. I won’t make that mistake again in a hurry, that’s for certain.’ I gave my best imitation of a curtsey and fled as fast as decorum would allow. In the relative safety of the steward’s room I flopped down into a chair and went over my first encounter with Her Ladyship in my mind. This was my first taste of service and it was without doubt one of the rummest experiences in my life. Still, I was here, I was employed and I’d better make the best of it: that’s what I told myself, although inside I wanted to curl up into a ball and then roll all the way back to Stamford and Vine Street and Mum, Dad, Joan and Jim.
In the end it was Dorothy Clark who came to my rescue. Although she was really only Second Housemaid – and so was termed one of the under servants – she had been looking after Lady Coventry since her previous lady’s maid had retired after many years of service.
‘Don’t you worry about Her Ladyship,’ Dorothy told me as I sat, still trembling, in the chair. ‘You just treat her with respect and she’ll treat you the same way. Or at least with as much respect as one of the gentry ever treats their servants!’
It was good advice and would, in time, serve me well. But at that moment I was still completely overwhelmed by the whole business. There was never any doubt that I would treat my new mistress with the utmost respect: she was far too frightening a figure to do otherwise. But whether she would ever come to warm enough to me for there to be anything more than the most formal of relationships – well, on that score I definitely had my doubts.
Dorothy, though, was full of comforting information and advice and I quickly sensed that here was someone who could not just teach me the ropes but with whom I could be friends. She was about my own age, pretty and vivacious. I immediately warmed to her and thought, ‘Here’s someone who will be a pal.’ And let me tell you, I had never felt as much in need of a pal as I did that day. But no sooner had the thought entered my head than Dorothy told me something that sent my heart sinking down again.
‘You need to remember that you’re a head servant. There are pretty strict rules about the way things are done here and one of those rules is that head servants aren’t supposed to mix much with us lower ones. You’re expected to keep yourself to yourself – a bit aloof, like. Friendships aren’t really encouraged here and, because you’re one level higher than me, you’ll be expected to socialise only with your equals.’
I’d never come across anything like this in my life. Where I came from, people were people and it didn’t matter who they were or what their station in life was: if they were friendly to you, you were friendly right back at them. But here in this great house the game was played very differently, it seemed. All of us beneath stairs were, of course, expected to know our place when it came to the family: but now I discovered that there were different rungs on our already very limited social ladder.
As I’ve said, the head servants (apart from me) were the butler, the housekeeper-cook and the children’s governess. Well, I’d already seen that Mr Latter was very much top of the tree and he plainly wasn’t going to be a friend I could confide in, much less one with whom I could really socialise. Don’t get me wrong, he was a good man and kind but, to rise to the position of butler, he had learned the hierarchy of service in the days when it was even more strict – he would have had to have spent at least a decade gradually rising through the ranks, from a start as the lowliest of footmen. Now he was the most senior servant in the house and his very position meant that he had to keep a good deal of distance between himself and the rest of us.
Nor was the governess any more promising. Mrs Lovett was her name and, in truth, she kept even more to herself than Mr Latter. In many ways, I suppose, this was inevitable. Her domain was the children’s nursery and the schoolroom and she would often take her meals there with her charges, so I didn’t see terribly much of her.
That left Winnie Sapsford, the housekeeper-cook. Her position in itself was slightly unusual. Most great houses like Croome Court would have employed both a cook and a housekeeper – certainly the 9th Earl did and, since he and the late Countess were great ones for entertaining, the cook would have been kept pretty busy just keeping up with the demands made on the kitchen, let alone supervising all the household staff and managing the daily routine of cleaning, washing, ironing and the like. Although I didn’t quite realise it then, the fact that Winnie was doing both jobs was a sign that the Coventry finances were not in the healthiest of shapes.
I think I liked Winnie from the off: certainly she never did me any harm, nor made my life anything but bearable. She made sure that I always had enough to eat and drink. But I’d sensed something about her on our first meeting: I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but I realised that whilst we would get on just fine, she was never going to be what I could call a friend. All in all, things on that front weren’t looking at all promising.
Looking back, I can see why the servants’ structure – with its rigid demarcations and prohibitions on friendships – was the way it was. In some ways, working below stairs in a great house must be like being in the army: everyone has to know their orders and be prepared both to give or receive them without the possibility of them being questioned. Friendships between the giver of orders and the person to whom they were issued make it less easy for obedience, I suppose. It’s that old idea of familiarity breeding contempt.
‘Hey ho,’ I thought to myself. ‘This is a funny sort of place you’ve come to, and no mistake. Hilda, my girl, you’ll just have to grin and bear it and make the best of everything.’ It’s funny to look back on the way things were then but, in some way, Croome Court was a microcosm of England itself between the two world wars. People grew up knowing their station in life (now there’s a phrase you don’t hear today) and were brought up not just to know their place but to accept it. There’s another phrase that you used to hear all the time in those days: ‘Mustn’t grumble.’ It was the standard answer to anyone – at least anyone of your own class; you’d never dream of saying anything so casual to your ‘betters’ – who might ask you how you were, or how your work day had been. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ we said and we meant
it: we were expected never to grumble about anything because that was all part of the English way. And, like the phrase itself, that’s a way that was blown away by the Second World War.
As my first full day in service came to its somewhat gloomy end, if anyone had asked me how it had gone (of course no one did!), I’d most likely have answered, ‘Mustn’t grumble.’ But when I went to bed that night, I cried and cried until at last I fell asleep.
I was woken the next day at 7am by Miriam, the third housemaid, bearing a cup of tea and telling me she’d run my bath: apparently, yesterday hadn’t been a one-off but was to be the way all of my days would start. Well, I thought, that’s a bit of luck, anyway: no one had ever brought me a cup of tea in bed before and it seemed that, in Miriam, I was to have my very own servant. But the next thing she said made it clear that this was to be the only luxurious part of my daily routine.
‘Please, Miss Mulley, you’re to have your bath and dress and be downstairs at seven-thirty. Mrs Sapstead has done you an egg and some toast but she will have Her Ladyship’s tea ready for you by then, so she says you’ve to be quick about your breakfast. It doesn’t do to be late for Her Ladyship.’
So this was how it was to be. There’s an old saying we used to learn in school: ‘Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them. And little fleas have littler fleas and so on ad infinitum.’ I felt like one of the middle fleas – privileged up to a point but only so long as the ‘big flea’ was happy. Still, I enjoyed my cup of tea, slipped into my dressing gown and padded along the corridor to find that the bath was delightfully piping hot.
I’d hung my clothes up in the wardrobe as soon as I arrived but, when I went to get my dress for my first full morning in service, my heart sank again. The wardrobe was huge and my few garments looked so sparse and lonely that I once again felt a pang of homesickness. Not that I would have had any more clothes but at least they wouldn’t have looked so, well, inadequate.
I’d also been forewarned about what sort of clothes to bring. As a head servant, I didn’t have to wear a uniform like the housemaids or the footmen: instead, I was told that Her Ladyship expected me to wear dark colours. Now, my favourite colours were green and purple – I’ve always loved them and do so still. But at Croome Court such cheerful hues were not allowed and so the dresses hanging in the big mahogany wardrobe looked even more depressing than they might.
By the time I was bathed, clothed and ready to face the day it was almost 7.30am. I rushed down the three flights of stone stairs and positively burst into the kitchen. Everything there seemed to be chaotically busy, with Winnie presiding over her scullery staff as they boiled and grilled amid great clouds of steam and smoke. A tray was set on a table in one corner and no sooner had I arrived than a cup of tea was placed upon it and the whole lot was thrust into my hands with an upward jerk of a thumb to indicate that I needed to get it to Her Ladyship on the double. Back I went up the great stone steps – rather more carefully this time as I juggled the tea, a folded linen napkin and a little flower vase on the slippery tray.
When I got to my mistress’s door, I had a moment of panic: did I just knock and enter? Or wait to be summonsed? And would Her Ladyship be in bed with the Earl? Did they even share a bedroom? I knew from stories I’d read that lots of the gentry slept separately, only ever coming together to go about the business of producing heirs.
Would the Coventrys be like this? And if they weren’t, was I prepared for the sight of His Lordship in bed? You have to remember that life was very much more sheltered in those days and I don’t think I’d ever seen a man in his nightclothes. I knocked on the heavy oak door and tried to stop my heart beating so fast that it seemed likely to jump out of my chest and knock the whole tea tray flying.
In the end, my fears were groundless: I heard the deep rich voice of the Countess – ‘Come’ – and marched in to find her sitting up in bed alone. Now, at this point I should probably tell you a little bit about the arrangement of the family’s quarters on the second floor. If you go to Croome Court today – and since it’s part of the National Trust and open to the public, I really think you should – you’ll see that on either side of the Earl and Countess’s bedroom there are doors leading off into other rooms. In my day these were the Earl’s dressing room on one side and the Countess’s boudoir on the other. As I was to discover, as soon as he heard my knock on the door, the Earl would get up and retreat into his dressing room while I saw to my mistress’s needs alone. I never did know whether he got a cup of tea delivered to him there: I certainly never brought him one and I never saw anyone else with a tray, so I rather think he missed out.
I plumped up the pillows behind Her Ladyship’s elegant shoulders while she adjusted a beautiful silk nightgown. In my dressmaking apprenticeship I’d seen some lovely fabric, even though we weren’t making clothes for the gentry, but I could see straight away that what the Countess was wearing was of a different class all together. Well, I said to myself, if this is what she puts on to go to bed, what will the rest of her outfits be like? Of course, those outfits were one of the main parts of my duties. While her ladyship drank her tea, I first nipped off down the corridor to her private bathroom and began the process of drawing hot water for her to bathe in. When that was done, my mistress got herself up, took the dressing gown (another piece of lovely material) I held out for her and told me what she wanted to wear that day. It was my job to lay all of her clothes out on the bed – every last stitch she would wear – in the order in which she would put them on.
Now, maybe you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like much: after all, everybody wears clothes and surely it couldn’t have been very different back then? But it was: it most certainly was. You see the way we dress now bears very little resemblance to what a lady would wear in 1935. For a start, there was a great deal more in the way of underwear.
The first thing a lady put on would, of course, be her knickers. These were nothing like the sort of panties that you buy today: they were big, baggy silk things you stepped into and which came down to somewhere between the calf and the knee, and what they lacked in being flattering to the figure I suppose they made up for in terms of comfort. In themselves, these garments were a fairly new invention: until the 1920s, ladies’ knickers were open between the legs, which must have made them somewhat draughty.
But it was the next item of under clothing that seems outlandish to people today. The modern bra was only invented in 1913 and, by the time I was tending to Her Ladyship, it was very definitely not in widespread use. Instead, she, like most women, wore a sort of complicated corset known as a girdle: this combined a basic brassiere with an elasticated middle section – to compress the tummy and waist into a slim, narrow shape – to which were attached straps for keeping up stockings. These, like the girdle itself, would be made of rayon. Now, I don’t think most people today have ever heard of rayon – or if they have, they won’t know what it was – but before the Second World War it was used for just about every sort of women’s clothing, and especially underwear. It’s really a sort of halfway house between completely natural fibres like wool or cotton and the synthetic materials we take for granted today. Nylon, for example, wasn’t even invented until 1935 and it wasn’t until American soldiers brought nylon stockings to Britain after 1942 that women here ever saw it. Of course, tights hadn’t even been thought of then, so rayon stockings were what everyone was used to and it was known to common people like me as ‘artificial silk’ because that’s how it felt on the skin.
On top of all this, there would also be a slip and possibly a petticoat before the whole complicated business was hidden from view with a dress. Trousers were, in theory, a possibility but in those inter-war years only what we called ‘fast women’ really wore them: they were seen as something not really respectable and it would take the war – when women were pressed into service in industry, on the land or in the forces – before they lost their rather risqué image.
When Her Ladyship disa
ppeared to bathe, my duties began in earnest. I would first tidy and prepare the various pots of face preparation, powders and other make-up on her dressing table. An aristocratic lady like the Countess would never dream of keeping her own dressing table clean and tidy: that was my job, every morning and evening. Next, I would go into her boudoir to collect up what she had been wearing the day before. Mostly this would be her evening wear – for in those days ladies dressed formally for dinner. The Countess had some truly beautiful evening dresses, made of the most gorgeous and expensive materials but, in the way of things back then, she would simply shed these when she came up for bed, leaving them in a higgledy-piggledy mess on the floor. I bundled up the garments that would need to be washed and carefully folded the rest to take back to my room. Here I would press them to within an inch of their lives so that they looked as good as new (despite their night on the floor), ready to be worn again that evening if Her Ladyship so chose.
And then, once my mistress returned from her bath, I would help dress her in whatever outfit she had chosen for the day. Now, if all of this makes the Countess seem very pernickety, it’s only fair to point out that, by reputation, she was a great deal less fussy about what she wore than most ladies of her station. In fact, I was horrified to hear from Dorothy that it was far from unknown for Milady to wear the same dirty pair of knickers several days in a row: that was not the way I’d been brought up – and the Mulleys of Stamford had a great deal less money (not to mention a rather more basic method of laundry) than the Coventrys of Croome Court. It just goes to show, I told myself, that money isn’t everything in this world.
Then came the part of the morning that I would come to dread: brushing my mistress’s hair. She had, of course, warned me about this but, even so, I found this morning ritual to be terribly tiring and distinctly boring. I wonder, do you ever take the time to calculate how long you spend brushing your hair of a morning? I rather think that most of us won’t spend more than a minute or so – unless we’re using some of those fancy hair tongs or straighteners that young girls seem so keen on today. There weren’t any such things back in the 1930s: the only tool I had at my disposal was Her Ladyship’s silver-backed hairbrush – that and good old elbow grease. So I stood there behind her as she readied herself for the ritual. Brush, brush, brush – and then brush again. Stroke after stroke, minute after minute until the full hour – and believe me, Milady timed me – of brushing had been accomplished. My feet ached from standing still so long and my brushing arm felt ready to drop off by the time I’d finished and my mistress had declared herself satisfied. Then, and only then, was I dismissed from her presence.