by Hilda Newman
Somehow – I don’t know to this day how he did it – Roland managed to slide the bike over and we slipped sidewise underneath the lorry and shot out the other side. But we didn’t emerge unscathed: as the motorbike hit the ground, we were dragged along on our backs and sides, the rough road surface tearing into us with a vengeance. When we came to rest in a ditch on the other side our leather coats were in taters – and Roland had broken several bones.
People poured out of the surrounding cottages and rushed to our aid. The good news was that we were alive: the less good news was that many of those who were patching up our wounds worked at the Court. There was, we realised glumly, no chance of keeping our romance secret any longer.
Roland was more seriously injured than I and had to be excused his duties until he mended. As for me, it was time to face the music. The next morning I took Milady her morning cup of tea, knowing that she couldn’t fail to notice the very visible evidence of my accident.
‘Gracious, Mulley, what have you been up to? You look like you’ve been in the wars!’
I started to stammer out an explanation, involving Roland’s parents, the Sunday lunch and the ill-fated motorbike journey. ‘Here it comes,’ I thought. ‘You’ll be on the next train to Stamford, Hilda Mulley, and serve you right.’ But it didn’t turn out like that at all. There was – I swear it – a twinkle in my mistress’s eye.
‘Ah, yes – the dashing chauffeur. Someone rather close to your heart, I think, Mulley. Well, do tell him to be a little more careful with you next time, please. I should not like to lose you now that you are so good at your duties.’
I couldn’t believe my ears: the Countess had known all along that I was being romanced by the family chauffeur! And what’s more, she didn’t seem to mind – or, at least, didn’t mind as long as it didn’t stop me attending to her. I wasn’t going to get the sack after all. Neither, by the sound of it, was Roland. I couldn’t wait to tell him what a lucky escape we’d had all round!
When I look back at this – and at other aspects of life at Croome – I realise that, in many ways, the Earl and the Countess were very modern in their thinking. This was to be seen in little things – the fact that Roland didn’t have to wear a traditional chauffeur’s uniform or the care with which they ensured that we were kept warm in the depths of winter at the Court – as well as the much more surprising moments, such as Milady’s acceptance of the love affair between two of her servants. When I compare this to the accounts of life at other great houses – which I would hear from visiting staff or when we, in turn, went to stay in the mansion’s of other gentry – I realise how fortunate we were. The 10th Earl had plainly decided to take up where his grandfather had left off and to win the affection of those who served the family by mixing firmness with kindness.
But then, too, I wonder if there wasn’t also a bit of the cold blasts of a wind from the world outside that had crept into Croome Court and which the master and my mistress had heeded. For, as 1938 wore on, the clouds began to darken over England and perhaps the aristocracy knew that their time was coming to an end.
As the months of 1938 wore on, the news coming from Europe grew ever more disturbing. We read it every day in the newspapers: His Lordship took The Times and every morning Mr Latter would iron this carefully so as to ensure that the Earl had a pristine paper, with no folds or creases, to open after his breakfast. By the end of the day this, along with any other newspapers which the household might have ordered, had made its way down to the servants’ quarters. And each day the news seemed worse and the clouds of war that had hung in the air for so long grew darker.
In March Hitler had marched German troops – Nazi troops, as we had learned to call them – into neighbouring Austria. Five months later came the first official confirmation that he was intent on persecuting all Jews living inside the greater German borders, ordering that they must now add a Jewish first name to their existing names – for ‘ease of identification’, it was said.
Opinion in England was divided and the servants’ quarters were no different to anywhere else in the country. Some said that Hitler was only restoring pride in the German nation after the harsh conditions imposed on it at the end of the Great War. Others saw in him a dark and dangerous figure who was slowly dragging the world towards a new war. But there was also a strain of thought that this was all happening a long way away and that, anyway, Hitler looked a funny little man, what with his comic toothbrush moustache and all that swaggering about in absurd uniforms.
Perhaps its seems odd now, with the benefit of knowing what followed and the terrible carnage the Nazis wreaked on their own people, on the Jews and on the world, but England had its fascists too – and people turned out to listen to them. The most prominent was Sir Oswald Mosley and he was as aristocratic as the Coventrys. He was the sixth baronet Mosley – a baronet, for those of you who haven’t been immersed in the various layers of the gentry as I was at Croome, is the holder of an hereditary peerage awarded by the King himself. Mosley was young, good looking and as haughty and imperious as any aristocrat could be. His father was a cousin (once removed) of the new Queen and he had been in and out of governments of various political hues by the time he formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932.
Mosley’s followers were – to my mind and that of many of my fellow servants – a pretty bad lot: they were a motley crew of the worst type of aristocrat and groups of violent thugs, who wore a black uniform and had a nasty habit of beating up anyone who didn’t conform to their idea of what Englishmen should be. If you’ve seen the series of Upstairs Downstairs set in the 1930s, you will have seen that the chauffeur was an active blackshirt. Well, I can tell you that nothing would have persuaded our chauffeur – or ‘my Roland’ as I now thought of him – to be part of anything so obviously nasty as Mosley’s fascists. And if truth be told, I don’t think the Earl would have allowed it: politics wasn’t exactly forbidden at Croome and, provided our opinions and loyalties – whatever they might be – stayed below stairs and didn’t disturb the smooth running of the Coventrys’ lives, we were pretty much free to think what we liked. But I’m as sure as I can be that, had one of the male servants started marching about in a silly black uniform on his days off, Mr Latter would have come down on him like a ton of bricks.
Mosley himself stomped up and down the country holding melodramatic mass meetings in a pale imitation of his hero, Adolf Hitler. He turned up in Worcester several times in the years that I was at Croome, holding big – and well-attended – events, in which he shouted and postured and his bully boys in black kept order in the most brutal of ways. Not a single one of the staff at Croome went to hear him, I’m proud to say. And whilst it would have been common in earlier years for a baronet like Mosley to stay at the house of one of his fellow aristocrats, he never crossed the threshold at Croome. I’m not sure that we would have been able to hold our tongues if he had!
In any event, the Earl and the Countess seemed to be doing much less in the way of entertaining that year. In part, I think this was down to a general and increasing shortage of money and, in part, because, as the fears of a coming war increased, the gentry seemed to retreat into itself a little and visits to one another’s houses grew less frequent. But there was another reason too and it was the answer to the mystery of why the Earl so often missed riding to hounds or left the Countess to go out to dinner with his brother as chaperone. His Lordship, it appeared, had a little bit of a problem with drink.
Now, of course, nothing was ever said officially about this: it would have been literally unthinkable for it to be spoken of openly above stairs. Even in those moments when my mistress seemed closest to me and, as I brushed and rebrushed all that long lustrous hair, shared a few small intimacies, she never once came close to confiding in me about the master’s health. Instead, and as I look back and remember our conversations, she would refer to it obliquely.
‘His Lordship is unwell again today, Mulley.’ Or, ‘His Lordship is suffering a li
ttle with his nerves and so I shall be riding alone in the morning.’
But in the servants’ hall, when Mr Latter’s back was turned or he wasn’t around to hear, there would be whispers about the Earl’s drinking and the effect this was having on his health. I had occasion to see for myself what those effects were when, one morning, Milady told me we were to go away for a few days.
‘We are to motor down to Wales tomorrow, Mulley. We shall be staying with friends and I want you to pack clothes suitable for hunting as well as my usual wardrobe.’
It seemed a long way to go just to chase a few different foxes across the countryside: after all, the Countess seemed to have little trouble in finding quarry here at home and did so several days every week in the season. Still, it wasn’t my place to question and so I assured her that black jacket, jodhpurs and stock would be packed and ready.
‘Oh, Mulley, I shan’t be riding to hounds.’ She said this as if the idea was the most foolish thing she’d ever heard. ‘Otter hunting, Mulley: otters. That is what we shall be doing.’
I’d never heard of hunting otters (although my mistress seemed to think I should have done). But in the 1930s it was a great favourite of the landed gentry and Britain supported 12 full hunts, each as important in their field as the Croome Hunt was in its. You’ll know by now that I wasn’t a great one for any sort of hunting and kept as far away from the whole business as possible. I certainly didn’t intend being any part of what my mistress had planned in Wales. While writing this book I’ve had to look up just what an otter hunt involved. And I have to say that it hasn’t changed my opinion one little bit.
The sport (if that’s what you could call it) goes back to the days of King Henry II. He appointed a King’s Otterhunter in 1170 and all the monarchs who came after him kept up royal packs of otterhounds until 1689. This possibly explains why there was so much pomp and sporting ceremony involved in the business: each hunt wore different ‘colours’ and the gentry who belonged to them would travel hundreds of miles to be involved.
The day began at first light when the hunters, carrying long poles to feel their way across rivers and ditches, set off in search of their quarry. They would be accompanied by packs of specially bred hounds, trained to follow the otter even in the long periods when it submerged from sight and tried to get away under water. These hounds were taught to follow the scent of the otter as it rose to the surface of the water and then ‘swim’ him for as long as six hours until they forced the exhausted creature to land. At this point the hounds would move in for the kill and the master of the hunt would sound the death knell on his hunting horn. Then the master would cut trophies off the otter: first the rudder, or tail; then the mask, or head; and finally the four pads, or paws. These were distributed to followers of the hunt.
Now I don’t know about you but, to me, that sounds barbaric and, even by the time I was in service to the Countess, there was strong feeling in the country that it should be stopped. Sadly, it wasn’t and, by the time someone got round to making the poor otter a protected species in the 1970s, it had been hunted to near extinction.
This, then, was what Milady had planned for the trip to Wales. And, after explaining what breeches and oilskins would be needed, she gave me further unwelcome news: His Lordship was to drive us down.
It was the first time I had been in the car with the Earl at the wheel. Rumour had it below stairs that this was not an experience to be looked forward to – and that’s exactly how it turned out. I had never felt so frightened as His Lordship drove – at speed and somewhat erratically – down the narrow country roads with their sharp bends. Perhaps because of the accident I’d had on Roland’s motorbike, I imagined death waiting for us around every blind corner and wished we could slow down. You have to remember that roads then were far less well-constructed than they are now and that, whilst a 30mph speed limit had been (rather reluctantly) introduced a few years before, most police forces had made very public promises that they wouldn’t be enforcing it. I suppose that, since only the gentry could afford cars, the police were reluctant to stop those whom they regarded as their betters.
So we swerved and speeded all the way to Wales, stopping, I think, for a bite to eat and a drink (no laws against drink-driving, much less breathalysers, back then) somewhere en route. I sat in the back and wished fervently that it was my Roland at the wheel, not His Lordship. By the time we came back – otter hunts would often last as long as nine whole days – I was very glad indeed to see Croome Court. But no sooner was I feeling safe again than the world changed and we inched closer to war.
It is hard to explain to a generation – or rather at least two generations – which has grown up largely free of the fear of war just how terribly each and every one of us felt the crisis, each and every day. I was born during the last world war and my little brother was now approaching an age where he might be called up to fight. For the rest of the servants, all had lost relatives in the mechanised carnage of the Great War – losses that left deep and indelible mental scars. So we followed each new development with mounting alarm.
The crisis had begun a few months earlier when Hitler began provoking trouble in another country on Germany’s borders – Czechoslovakia. Now, I doubt that any of us in the servants’ quarters could have told you where that was – don’t forget our schooling had been pretty basic and geography tended to concentrate on the great expanse of the British Empire – but I think we all knew something dangerous was afoot. The British government certainly did and, as the crisis worsened, on 22 September the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, took the then unusual step of flying out for a conference with Hitler: his sole aim, he said, was to find a way to stop another war. I really don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that almost every British citizen held his or her breath for the next eight days. Finally, Chamberlain flew back, arriving at Heston Aerodrome (this was long before the days when London had a proper airport). As his little plane landed, the waiting press pushed forward to discover whether we were to have peace – or war. Standing beside the tailplane, Chamberlain held aloft a little piece of paper.
The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper, which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains but I would just like to read it to you: ‘… We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’
Later the same day, the Prime Minister stood outside Number 10 Downing Street and repeated the very welcome reassurance. ‘My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.’
I cannot describe how wonderful that news felt. I think there was cheering in the servants’ hall – although in the steward’s room I think there was a more refined expression of relief. Chamberlain’s most famous phrase, repeated on the wireless and in all the newspapers, was ‘peace for our time’. And goodness knows we were desperate for that peace.
The very next day, Hitler went back on the promises he had given. German troops marched into the northern part of Czechoslovakia called Sudetenland (another place we had to look up in an atlas). It seemed the little piece of paper on which we had placed such store meant absolutely nothing to the Fuhrer. This was followed by reports the next month of two nights of terror in which Nazi-led mobs smashed, burned and looted Jewish shops and synagogues across Germany and Austria. We were now glued to the wireless each evening to hear the BBC’s increasingly grave news bulletins. As Christmas approached, the prospects for the New Year looked, if that were possible, even bleaker than in 1938.
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sp; Still, we were determined that, whatever the storms slowly gathering, below stairs at Croome Coourt would see the Christmas in with our traditional party. Now, in all honesty, this was very little different to the servants’ ball but the Christmas Party – held on the great day itself – was a time solely for the staff: the Earl and the Countess didn’t grace us with their presence and for this we were all rather grateful. Now matter how modern our master and mistress might be, the fact is that having them downstairs felt like a bit of an intrusion. We wouldn’t dream of being upstairs in their quarters unless there was work to do, so them coming down to our halls rather emphasised that this was work, not pleasure.
But, as I say, the Christmas party didn’t involve the gentry and – despite Mr Latter’s teasing of Winnie about her cooking – it was something we all looked forward to. We all of us mixed in and helped out: it wouldn’t do to leave all the work to Winnie and even Mr Latter rolled up his sleeves and got stuck in.
The meal itself was the traditional Christmas fare – roast turkey with the full trimmings. I have to tip my hat to the Earl and the Countess, they did us proud and Winnie and Mr Latter were told to spare no expense on provisions. In previous years we had sometimes been joined for the meal by the servants from Pirton Court – the home of His Lordship’s mother a few miles away across the fields. And from what they let slip, our master and mistress were a good deal more generous when it came to Christmas lunch below stairs than they were used to. But both Mr Latter and Winnie had been around long enough to know what the score was: although there were a few more treats than we would have through the rest of the year, they never went over the top or pushed our luck.