Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance

by Margaret Powell

  Master Gerald knocked on the door, came right in and said, ‘The dinner was splendid. You all worked so hard and I’m sure must be very tired.’ Then, turning to the valet, he added, ‘Burrows, you needn’t do anything for me tomorrow morning, I’ll look after myself. Goodnight to you all.’

  Far from being gratified at hearing this praise, there was an uneasy silence after the son had gone. Then Mr Hall spoke, to nods of agreement from Cook, Agnes and Mr Burrows.

  ‘Why should he come into our place without so much as a ‘by your leave’. If anyone is going to say thank you, it should be Master or Madam, not that Gerald. And I don’t know if you noticed it Mrs Buller, but I didn’t like the way that he looked at Rose. It’s not the way a gentleman should look at a young servant girl.’

  Rose blushed a vivid red and kept silent. Mr Burrows, who should have been pleased that he’d only Mr Wardham to valet, said, in an aggrieved voice, ‘Mr Hall, did you ever hear the like? Look after himself indeed. To say that to me, who’s valeted the best in the land.’

  When we were in our bedroom Mary and I agreed that Mr Hall was really annoyed because Gerald – we dropped the ‘master’ when nobody was around – had looked at Rose instead of at him. Though, come to that, we were secretly a bit chagrined that he’d ignored us and we lost no time in telling Rose that Gerald would have forgotten about her in the morning.

  I think everybody must have liked Mrs Wardham as she was really kind and thoughtful. Talking to Cook the following morning, she said that they would all be out to dinner so perhaps the young girls, that was Mary, Rose, Doris and I, would like to go to the village dance. Although it was Madam who’d suggested it, we all had to be suitably grateful to the upper servants for their graciousness in letting us have an extra evening off. Agnes, a spinster of about forty-five, told Mary that no such treats had ever come her way when she was an under-housemaid; and Mr Hall told Rose that he’d planned to check the silver room and clean any tarnished pieces but, and he patted her on the shoulder with his white lardy hands, he’d do the work on his own.

  The dance started at seven o’clock and we began to get ready about two hours before that. For, unlike town dances, at the village hops everybody arrived almost as soon as the musicians; they made sure of getting their money’s worth. With Rose’s natural advantages, it didn’t take her long to get ready. Her lovely glossy golden hair never needed curling, whereas we tortured ours with ‘dinky’ curlers and then proceeded to comb it into a mass of frizz. Make-up consisted of a liberal layer of pink powder. We never dared to use coloured lipstick, only ‘that sort of a woman’ would use it, so we rubbed our lips with a lip salve to make them shiny. Several dabs of 4711 eau de Cologne completed our toilet. Although Rose made us look plainer by comparison, having her with us did ensure that we got some partners. While the village youths were waiting their turn to be her partner, they’d take us round the floor just so they could be attached to our party. We weren’t quite accepted by the older generation because none of us were locals. I suppose for some twenty-five miles around, the large houses were mostly staffed by village girls whose mothers and grandmothers had also been in service there. But, according to Cook, Mr Wardham refused to employ any local girls who’d go home and gossip about his household all over the village. So, as he wasn’t popular, we too were regarded as outsiders.

  Young Fred was at the dance, Jack, the chauffeur, and his wife, and Jack’s father who, when he’d had a few beers – which happened frequently – would bitterly inveigh against ‘this new-fangled transport’, the motor car. He was an ’orses man and his father had been an ’orses man. There wasn’t nothing to beat an ’orse. It didn’t make ’orrible noises and stink up the roads with smoke so that decent country folk got poisoned with the fumes, God’s clean air had gone and all the flowers had died. Give ’im an ’orse any time. One could easily tell that Jack’s father had been an ’orse man. His legs were so bowed one could have driven a pig to market through them.

  Young Fred seldom danced with Rose; he said that she ‘hadn’t got what it takes upstairs’. That didn’t mean, as it would nowadays, that she wasn’t any good in bed, but that she wasn’t very intelligent. I protested that Rose was merely quiet. As an only child, she’d been very suppressed by her parents, allowed to be seen but not heard, and she was naturally shy. I wondered if young Fred was jealous of Rose, when he laughed and said rather cynically:

  ‘Shy! She’s not exactly blushing unseen and wasting her sweetness on the desert air.’

  ‘Why should she? And you’re no village Hampden, defying some little tyrant either.’

  ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ we said simultaneously, and spent some time quoting extracts; much to the annoyance of the village girls who wanted to dance with him. Young Fred and two other swains escorted us back; poor Doris was the odd one out but she didn’t seem to mind in the least. At the beginning of the drive we all said goodbye to our young men and I could hear giggling and ‘don’t you dare’ from Mary and Rose. Young Fred said he had liked talking to me, but personally I’d have derived far more pleasure and satisfaction if he had seized me in a violent embrace and kissed me passionately. A good brain was something but a lovely face would have earned more in dividends. We’d nearly reached the path leading to the servants’ entrance when, all of a sudden, we saw Gerald coming down the drive towards us. We stopped, surprised and embarrassed. He asked if we’d enjoyed the evening and then, looking at Rose, said, ‘I’m sure that you were the belle of the ball’. None of us spoke, we were too dumbfounded, and he walked on towards the end of the drive. We waited for a few minutes, then whispered to each other that we’d not mention the episode to the upper servants, they’d be sure to blame us.

  We still looked flustered when we went into our servants’ hall, but I suppose Cook and the butler put it down to the heat of the dance. We had to listen to Cook telling us that she was twenty-five before she went to a dance. Dear Mr Buller – one of nature’s gentlemen – had taken her; and when he’d brought her home he’d stood on her mother’s doorstep, bowed, and kissed her hand ‘just as though I was a real lady’. In fact, they’d been courting for three months before he asked permission to kiss her. We endeavoured to suppress our smiles, but in our bedroom we agreed that the late Mr Buller must have been a pretty poor specimen of a male. Then, thinking that Mrs Buller’s moustache might even then have been incipient, we invented various reasons why dear Mr Buller wouldn’t have been madly inclined to kiss her. Doris made us laugh even more by saying there was a seventeen-year-old girl at the orphanage who hadn’t any hair at all; not on her head, under her arms or down below. But it wasn’t the poor girl’s bald head that the matron cared about, it was the baldness down below; matron said it was indecent. Poor Doris, who’d been sent to the orphanage when she was only four years old, had received very little in the way of love and care as a child. In her last two years at the orphanage she worked long hours in the laundry. She still worked hard but at least she always had enough to eat; and Cook, although sharp-tongued occasionally, was never really unkind.

  5

  Cook was certainly in a bad mood on the morning following our dance. This was partly caused by the master wanting an early breakfast, eight o’clock instead of nine. Cook disliked having breakfast time altered, she said it threw her out for the rest of the day. Besides, how could she get the servants’ breakfast and cook for upstairs at the same time. Breakfast for upstairs was no simple matter of bacon and eggs. As well as the porridge, which had kept warm on the stove overnight, there were sausages, kidneys, bacon, eggs and often kedgeree as well. I used to wonder how it was that our employers never become inordinately fat on such a diet, but they seemed to keep their figures. Mrs Buller was also put out because of the upheaval in the scullery. The old smelly cement sink was being knocked out and a lovely deep, yellow glazed one put in. Needless to say, Doris and I were delighted for it was we who’d had to use the foul-smelling grey sink. Two plumbers from the village came,
early in the morning, and promised to get it finished that day. Unfortunately, as the only other sink was in the butler’s pantry, we had to use it for all the washing-up. The fuss that Mr Hall made about having his pantry invaded by kitchen servants, you’d have thought we were suffering from some contagious disease. He refused to have Doris in there as well as me so I had to do all the washing-up. What was more, I had to wait to do it until he and Rose had done all the cutlery and glasses. Relations were quite strained between him and Cook, especially after he complained about me ‘splashing-up his draining-boards.’

  ‘Mr Hall,’ said Cook, ultra politely, ‘I’m sure I have no wish to inconvenience you in any way, but do you expect my girls to wash up in buckets of water in the yard? We are all on this earth to help one another, and live by the good Book.’

  Mr Hall walked out of the kitchen without saying a word but, if the expression on his face was anything to go by, he certainly wasn’t living by the ‘good Book.’ Actually, the only books he ever read were lurid detective stories. He’d got most of Sax Rohmer’s; Dr Fu Manchu, The Yellow Claw and others. I suppose those tales of the mysterious orient compensated for his own somewhat dull existence. Apart from the Bible, Cook had only four books which she read over and over again. A book called, Stepping Stones to Bible History; then there was East Lynne, Little Women and Little Lord Fauntleroy. This last one, carefully covered in brown paper, she lent to me, and Rose, and Mary and I giggled at that impossible youth calling his mother ‘Dearest’. Rose said she couldn’t imagine what her mum would say if Rose called her Dearest. Why, she’d never even heard her father say ‘Dear’, let alone Dearest.

  Cook was very pious but, as Mary and I agreed, for a pious person she seemed to know of a great many girls who were now ‘living in sin’. All because they had left their quiet village homes for the lights of London. According to Mrs Buller, there were always harpies waiting at the railway stations ready to lure away innocent girls if they were at all pretty. This fate could never have happened to Cook – come to that, nor to me either. I’d never seen anybody remotely resembling a harpy hanging around Victoria Station. Doris asked what a harpy was, and Mr Hall was just about to give his version of a harpy when, ever eager to show off, I interrupted to say that a harpy was a monster, half bird, half woman. That a kitchenmaid should interrupt the butler was a heinous offence.

  Mr Hall gave me a freezing look and, in his ‘upstairs’ voice, said; ‘Perhaps Miss Know-all would care to regale us with some further information about monsters? I’m sure she must have met many in the course of her long life.’

  I’d have liked to have retorted, ‘Yes, and some of them were butlers too,’ but of course I didn’t dare.

  Fortunately, by the time we sat down to our midday dinner, Cook and the butler were friendly again. Mr Burrows was still displeased about Master Gerald not requiring his services, he felt this as a slight on his profession.

  ‘Man and boy, I’ve been in service and valeted some of the highest aristocracy in the land. Why, in my last place, my gentleman consulted me every morning about what suit and tie he should wear. “Burrows”, he’d say, “today I’m lunching with Lord…”, and when I’d laid out the appropriate clothes, hat, shoes and umbrella, my gentleman said, “Burrows, you are indeed a gentleman’s gentleman”.’

  Young Fred hooted with laughter, and it did sound a highly improbable remark. The butler, not to be outdone in reminiscences of above stairs benevolence related how, in his last place, an American guest had been so overcome with admiration at the way Mr Hall carried out his butlering duties, he’d tried to entice him to go back to America with him; and he’d pay twice the money his present gentleman was paying.

  ‘But, needless to say,’ Mr Hall went on loftily, ‘I just wouldn’t serve in an American household. They’ve no idea of how to behave with servants. You may not belive this, but that American kept on calling me “old chap”. I ask you, what kind of a gentleman is that?’

  Probably a very nice one, I thought to myself.…

  6

  By the time I’d been at Redlands a month there was still no sign of Mrs Buller’s niece taking over as kitchen maid, so I had my day off. It really was a marvellous surprise to find that one got the whole day free, and did not even have to do the breakfast. Doris, who had no relatives and nowhere to go, hadn’t taken her day off; and though I’d urged her to stay in her room she preferred to work.

  As it was Mary’s free day too, we decided to go to London. We had to listen to solemn advice from Cook about not talking to strange men, but I had no men friends so if I didn’t talk to strange ones I’d never talk to any. Cook seemed to forget that I’d worked in London, or perhaps she thought a month of rustic life had lulled my sense of the dangers in a city.

  We got an early bus into Southampton and found it was full of men on their way to work, so that in itself was an adventure; very seldom had we ever found ourselves in a situation where men outnumbered the females. Mary and I made the most of this rare occurrence; by the time the bus journey ended, we’d promised to meet two of them on our next free evening. We felt quite safe for we knew they’d have forgotten all about us by then – and probably they were already married.

  There were only females in the No Smoking compartments so we gave them a miss. As Mary said, better to be smoke-dried with the men than bored to death with the Aunt Agatha’s. In 1925 very few women smoked, and almost none at all in public. It was a well-known fact that if a woman did such a thing, decent men avoided her like the plague – though considering the scarcity of men who showed any desire for us, we might as well have smoked ourselves to death.

  We looked around for harpies at Waterloo station but nobody approached us, even though we were dressed in our best clothes. We decided it was too early in the day; harpies were probably sleeping off the previous evening’s orgy.

  We went into a Lyons teashop and had bacon and sausages; what a treat to be waited on by a smart and pleasant nippy instead of us having to do the waiting. We left her twopence for a tip and thought we were really big spenders. Selfridge’s was the next treat, and we wandered around working out just what we’d buy if we had £50 to spend. As Mary had only £5, and I even less, such flights of fancy got us nowhere. We bought Doris a necklace of gaudy glass beads, and Agnes a small remnant of material so that she could continue to make useless knick-knacks, such as ‘hair tidies’ and pin-cushions. For Rose we bought a hair-slide, and for cook a religious bookmarker with the proverb, ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath, but a grievous word stirreth up anger’. Hopefully, whenever Doris and I made a mistake, she’d remember those words and take a deep breath instead of getting irate. In the chemist’s we bought some Phul-Nana violet cachous so that we could breathe romantically over any young man, should an opportunity to do so arise. And on the chemist’s counter we saw bottles of tablets labelled REVITALISERS. I’d have liked to have bought a bottle for the butler but knew he’d be highly affronted. Besides, as Mary pointed out, the result of any revitalising wouldn’t reveal itself in our direction, even if we could overlook the corporation and bald head. Mr Hall seemed to be totally indifferent to females, even to Rose. His free evenings were generally spent in the saloon bar of the local with two or three other butlers from the manor houses in other villages. There, according to young Fred from his vantage point in the public bar, they’d talk gravely about the fads and foibles of their employers, how the running of the house would be a shambles if it wasn’t for their butlering, what high class guests they’d served at dinner – and what tips they’d been handed out. Quite a few of the guests, though high in blue blood, were low in money; and as they did the rounds of being guests at country houses, their style of tipping was known in advance to the butlers and valets. As none of these tips, whether high or low, were ever distributed to the kitchen staff, we had no interest in the matter.

  I managed to get Mary into the British Museum – one of my favourite haunts when in London – but she quickly got bored
with the place. I just couldn’t see how anybody could be bored with the variety of wonderful and beautiful objects to see there.

  ‘It’s all free,’ I told Mary, ‘We could spend hours in here and it wouldn’t cost us a penny. Where else could you do that, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Free, Margaret! Sure, it’s free on your pocket but that’s about the lot. Half an hour wandering about and my feet are killing me; if you raise your voice or laugh people look at you as though you’ve crawled out from under a stone; and the attendants watch you as though you and the treasures will disappear together. Free! I wouldn’t cross the road and pay twopence to see the place.’

  So that finished the British Museum for us. And it was a good job we didn’t have to pay for with Mary I’d never have got my money’s worth. Portobello Road was more to Mary’s taste. In those days the stalls were full of tattered and torn books with obscure titles that I’d never heard of – any pictures in them had long since been torn out. There were old clothes that looked as though they’d been shot at, and stalls filled with junk such as chipped and cracked china, rusty fire-irons and old door-handles. There was not the same craze for antiques then as there is now; one which has crowded the markets, sent prices soaring and brought a bonanza to stall holders. I bought for threepence a large chipped mug painted with a scene of Margate Pier and the words A PRESENT FROM MARGATE. It could be a shaving mug for my father, though Mary said what on earth would he want with a present from Margate when he lived in Hove. Not that Dad ever did get it as I broke it before I went home. Mary bought a small coloured picture of a gold-braided bearded naval officer; she said it reminded her of her absent Tom. Thought as her young man was only an AB, and clean-shaven, I’d have thought the likeness purely imaginary. Still, anything that reminded her she had an ‘understanding’ could only be a good thing. For ninepence in the cinema, ordinary dull life vanished while we watched handsome and dashing Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers – I think he was D’Artagnan. When we came out, Mary sighed and said wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were men like that now, and in England. She sighed even more when I said that even if there were, we certainly wouldn’t find them in domestic service; even the wildest flights of fancy could never see the butler and valet as dashing swordsmen. The only implement that Mr Hall flashed around was a silver salver, and Mr Burrows the clothes-brush.