by Hilda Newman
I learned at my parents’ knees to respect my elders, to listen to what they told me and never to answer back. And if that instruction was sometimes re-enforced with a clip to a youthful ear, I wonder really whether it did more good than harm. I see how family life has changed today – and not for the better – and struggle to understand how we got here in such a short passage of time.
Family life for people of my generation and of my class was all-important. It was the glue that held the nation together and, if it curtailed freedom, we at least learned that with rights come responsibilities and by the time you’re ready to claim the former, well, you’d better be old and wise enough to accept the latter.
We learned, too, the value of thrift in an unforgiving world. We learned not to leave food on our plates because that was a waste which none of us could afford. We learned, in that famous wartime phrase, to make do and mend. And we learned to say – at least in public – ‘mustn’t grumble’, even in times that gave us every excuse to do just that.
The land itself was different too. Britain was still much more in tune with the old, rural ways and the seasons were marked, as they had been for generations, with church services and an understanding of what each meant. It is, I know, a cliché but, in my little corner of England at least, crime was all but non-existent. Doors were never locked – I can’t remember bolting up my house at night until at least the early 1970s – even in the grandest of mansions. Going back to Croome, I noticed the little door underneath the big stone steps leading up to the house itself: on those occasions when I – often accompanied by Dorothy Clarke – had been out late, we would sneak back in though this entrance. It was never locked, no matter what the hour – although on more than one occasion Mr Latter might be patrolling the long echoing corridor that ran off it to the staircases at either end.
Why was this, I wonder? I think the answer must be that we had values then. Now, that, I’m sure, isn’t a fashionable idea these days when there seems to be little agreement on what’s wrong and what’s right. Perhaps we saw things too much in black and white back then but today I fear we have lost sight even of the varying shades of grey, until everything is just a sort of white that’s got indelibly grubby. When we saw wrong, we said so and called it what it was: today people seem just to wring their hands and say, ‘We must talk about this or debate that,’ and nothing gets done. Maybe it was our faith – and Lord knows as a nation we needed that during the war. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we should all start going to church again as we once did but maybe we could once again learn to live faithfully?
By contrast, I wonder how many of these lessons – and how much of this code of behaviour – was either accepted or learned by those set above us in the social order. They, like us, knew their place and knew, as they knew that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that they were our ‘betters’; that they were placed on this earth to lead and we to serve.
But we learned from our earliest years that life was a test and what mattered was the choices you made, never knowing whether you’d made the right one until it was too late: you might be right, you might be wrong but you had no option but to choose and, when all was said and done, you’d better be prepared to take the consequences. Did our masters and mistresses know that? I wonder.
The 1930s were, I know now, the dying embers of the once-glowing fires of the aristocracy. Generations upon generations had reaped the rewards from the social system of Britain but now the price of those rewards was being called in just as sure as the tallyman would call for the weekly instalments for purchases made on tick by the working classes. Death duties, the rising cost of maintaining vast 18th-century mansions and the willingness of each new generation to play more than it worked. Clogs to clogs in three generations was an old saying among my class of people and, if it took the gentry that I came to know a few more generations than that, well, it came to them in the end.
Only two of the Coventrys ever really came home to Croome after the war. In 1948 the Countess – my mistress – left the estate and I never heard a word from her ever again. Shortly afterwards the National Trust took over the house and the estate, and maintains its fading splendour as best as funds allow to this day. If you can, then do as I did recently: stand in the long, cold tunnel of the main servants’ corridor, close your eyes and listen to the ghosts of those who served there. My eyes are old now and tired and my memory fades but, somehow, these walls and floors speak to me of days gone by: harder days, it is true, but better ones, I think. Days when, for all its faults, the country was a nation and the people who lived here knew that they were a part of it.
And when you have finished there – and heard, I hope, Mr Latter scolding a footman or teasing Winnie Sapstead about the quality of her cooking – follow my footsteps up the path that leads away from Croome Court and to the quiet church, set on a gentle rise where every Sunday I gave thanks for all that I received and prayed for the health and safety of all those I held dear.
Here on the wall you will find the evidence that the 10th Earl of Coventry came home, at least in spirit: a marble plaque bearing his name and the date of his death in service adding to the tombs and catafalques of his once-mighty predecessors. Stop a while here and breathe in the air of an age which is long past, a time which is now history, a people who – but for me – are gone (I hope) to a better place.
Then step out and, negotiating the little bushes and briars which surround the church walls now, look beyond the wooden fence and the stile that mark the boundaries of consecrated ground. There, resting quietly and unremarked, you will find the grave of Lady Joan Coventry. Perhaps here, above all else, is the most telling symbol of what once was and how all things change.
This has been my story, one of the rich and powerful and the ordinary folk who served them; it has been the story of a mansion but also that of the smaller, meaner homes of ordinary people. I am old now and tired. I need, I think, to ponder a little on the memories that telling this little tale has stirred. If my words and my life have served any purpose, perhaps it had been to remind you who we once were and how we once lived. And if it does, then, if I may say so, that is all to the good, for, if we forget these, we will lose sight of who we are now – rich or poor, high born or working class, the servant or the served. Then I, at last, can rest easy.
A portrait of me taken in 1937.
Me, my sister Joan, my brother Jim and our dog, Jock.
Here I am at the age of 20, a year after starting at Croome Court.
The Servants’ Ball was an exciting occasion for us in the household, and I made my own dress for it, trimmed with white ‘fur’.
In the grounds at Croome Court, relaxing by the fishing lake.
Nesta Donne Phillips, the Countess and my mistress.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
I’m very proud of this picture – it is not often that a servant was allowed to take a picture of the family, and Mr Latter was quite shocked by it!
One of the wonderful results of my time at Croome Court was meeting Roland. We were married in Stamford on 15 June 1940 and although we were in the midst of war we were so happy just to be together.
Lady Coventry and I volunteered to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service together and, for the first time in five years, we were separated in order to ‘do our bit’.
Roland – my Roll.
Lord and Lady Coventry at the United Counties Show in Camarthen, Wales.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
The two youngest children, Maria and George, with their mother a few years after I joined the household.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
This is a picture from the previous Lord and Lady Coventry’s Diamond Wedding anniversary, as I described in chapter two.
© Associated Newspapers/Rex Features
Croome Court as it stands today. It is now being wonderfully managed by the National Trust which is currently undertaking an
extensive restoration programme on the property.
© David Bagnall/Rex Features
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