Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance

by Margaret Powell

  We answered that we’d no idea and endeavoured to give the impression that we were consumed with curioisity to know with whom his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin, Molly, had departed.

  ‘Well, one day,’ said Mr Davies dramatically, ‘a circus came to Ruthin, and Molly couldn’t do a thing for excitement over this circus; she’d never seen the like. She went every night and sat bang in the front row. The circus stayed a week and when it was gone, so was Molly. She left a note saying that she and Carlo – the elephant trainer – were going to be married. And Carlo was teaching her to ride on the elephants. To think,’ he added, ‘that Molly, who could have been Mrs Hyde, is now riding around on the back of an elephant, and at her age too. As I said, it never does to marry out of your station.’

  Mary and I kept our sentiments to ourselves and merely murmured agreement.

  As though not enough had gone wrong, when I got back I found sixteen-year-old Bessie weeping copiously because the butcher boy hadn’t turned up to meet her and she was sure he’d found another girl. Having so recently lost my own boyfriend, I felt sympathy for Bessie; though, as I told her, she was only sixteen and had plenty of time to find herself another beau. But she was inconsolable and was going to give in her notice as she couldn’t face seeing the butcher boy again. She wasn’t a very competent kitchenmaid, but I didn’t want to work with a stranger so I told her not to worry; I’d open the door to him.

  Mr Kite looked disapproving as he remarked that, when he was young, servants had to work too hard to have the time, or inclination for imagining themselves in love. But then I don’t suppose he’d ever felt desire and passion. Although he occasionally said that all a man needed in life was comfort and love, I think he visualised a maternal kind. I’m sure that the other kind would have frightened him to death.

  21

  Shortly after our employers return from Holland, an incident occurred that almost led to the butler and I giving in our notice, though for different reasons. Madam was pleased with the results of our spring-cleaning – though none of us received any pecuniary reward for our hard work. I expect Madam knew we had not worked in the evenings, so the freedom was our reward. Even in as good a situation as ours, it was considered quite the normal thing that servants should rise early in the morning and be on call at any time up to an hour before midnight; even later than that if there were guests in the house. The incident referred to was that Mr Van Lievden had invited two Russian emigrés – man and wife who lived in Paris – to be his guests for a few weeks. The man was a Count Kylev, and on the day that they arrived the butler came down to tell us that they looked just the same as we did. I think Mr Kite expected to see the Count wearing a shirt outside his trousers and the trouser legs tucked into high boots. The following morning Madam asked me if I knew any Russian cooking, and I promptly answered that I had absolutely no idea what kind of food they ate in Russia, let alone knowing how to cook it. I had gone through my 1887 edition of Mrs Beeton, but the only recipe I could find there was Russian salad. This involved making an aspic jelly as a border mould, and filling the centre with cold flaked turbot, anchovies, olives and mayonnaise. When I showed the recipe to Madam she said that there was nothing typically Russian about it, and asked if I would let Count Kylov come down into the kitchen occasionally to make a Russian dish, as he was a good cook. I should have had the sense to be cautious in agreeing but, not knowing what it entailed and feeling that it would be an unusual and exciting event to have a Russian count in my kitchen, I said that I didn’t mind. Two mornings later he came down to make bortsch, a soup I’d never heard of then, and things called viziga patties, to be served with the soup. My kitchen was occupied by him the entire morning while I was trying to cook the lunch for upstairs and dinner for us, and the chaos on my kitchen table was indescribable. There wasn’t even any pleasure in having him there, for the Count, a man about fifty years old, never once smiled; and apart from saying good morning to me, the only other words he spoke were to ask for various utensils. He also complained to Madam that bortsch couldn’t be made properly with ordinary beetroot; in his native Russia they used kvass – whatever that was. The viziga he’d bought in Paris; I had to soak it overnight, then it was cooked in boiling salted water until soft. It looked like boiled tapioca – and was about as thick. The work involved in making these patties hardly seemed worth the bother. This tapioca stuff had to be mixed with chopped hard-boiled eggs and onions. Then Count Kylov made some special pastry, using plain flour, milk, egg yolks and yeast. I particularly remember the yeast because he had to wait for the dough to rise, which was why it took so long to make the stuff. Then it had to be rolled out, cut into small round pieces, a spoonful of the viziga mixture put on one half and the other half turned over it to make a patty. Then the patties had to be baked in the oven. All that work and messing around just to eat them as an accompaniment! It was never worth the effort. When the Count finally left my kitchen, he never even said thank you. Bessie complained about the mounds of washing-up he’d made and I felt equally disgruntled about the mess on my kitchen table. The following morning, when Madam came down to give the orders for the day, she said that the soup and the viziga patties were delicious, didn’t I think so? I didn’t, but I thought it politic to agree with her in case she imagined I was envious because I couldn’t have made them myself.

  At dinner that same evening, while the butler was serving the famous soup and patties, the talk was all about how different things had been in Russia before the revolution, and what a lavish household the Count and Countess had run in those days. Now I look back it was really very funny, for Mr Kite, our normally very placid butler, came into my kitchen between each course to express his annoyance at the conversation going on upstairs. After he and Norma had served the first course, Mr Kite said, ‘Would you credit it, Cook, that Russian spoke about his grandfather’s serfs. Not servants, mark you, Cook, but serfs. You know what they are don’t you? Little better than slaves.’ Then, after he’d served the jugged hare, he came in again, still complaining:

  ‘Cook, I don’t wonder that they had a revolution in Russia if all the wealthy people were like that man. After I’d served the salmon with your lovely mayonnaise sauce, all he said was that he’d give Madam a recipe for salmon cooked in bouillon, and when he tasted the jugged hare he said that in Russia they cooked it with red wine instead of port. What kind of a guest is that to criticise the food? Mr Van Lievden took no notice, but Madam didn’t look too pleased, I can tell you, Cook. And the way he treated Norma and me, just as though we weren’t real flesh and blood. Well, we’ve never had serfs in this country and I very nearly told him so.’

  Of course Mr Kite’s remark was not to be taken seriously. In the privacy of our servants’ hall we all, at one time or another – if we thought we’d been ‘put upon’ – avowed we’d say this or that to Sir or Madam, but it was just a way of letting off steam. So when that same evening Mr Kite stated pontifically what he would say to the Count, we all knew it was just bravado, he never would – not unless he wanted instant dismissal. Odette, unusually for her, actually sympathised with our butler, saying that she disliked the Russians; all the so-called aristocracy were arrogant and overbearing. At her age, and never having worked for a Russian family, how could she know what they were like? Odette also disliked the Dutch and wasn’t keen on the English; it seemed to me that she considered the French only were the right kind of people. Young Norma, the parlourmaid, had taken little notice or interest in what had been discussed above stairs; I think she was too bemused by waiting on a real live count and countess.

  Count Kylov came down again two days later to make another dish which I’d never heard of. It was beef stroganoff. His recipe required two pounds of fillet beef, sour cream, butter, mushrooms, onion, Worcester sauce and seasoning. It took some time to make, but I must admit the finished result was extremely good. I really didn’t mind the work this entailed in clearing-up after him; but what I did object to was the haughty and high-h
anded manner in which he asked for things. He ordered me about as though I was some menial doing the lowest kind of job – instead of a skilled cook with a kitchenmaid to help. Towards the end I was so choked with fury that I didn’t even call him Sir; I just got what he asked for and said nothing. At our midday dinner, the butler and I decided we’d had enough. Mr Kite was even more unnerved than I was, because the Count expected to be valeted. The only personal service that our butler had to do for Mr Van Lievden was to brush his suits, Mr Van Lievden preferred to look after himself. Now here was this Russian ringing his bedroom bell at any time in the evening and expecting the butler to wait on him.

  ‘Who does he think I am?’ Mr Kite exclaimed, indignantly, ‘one of his peasants, one of the serfs his grandfather used to own, body and soul?’

  ‘No, no, Mr Kite,’ said Odette, soothingly, ‘not a peasant, more like a kulak.’

  But as our butler had no knowledge of kulaks, and was determined not to ask Odette, he wasn’t soothed.

  Both Elsie, and Ada, the under-housemaid, said that the Countess was a very nice person indeed. She had taken a personal interest in them, and expressed commiseration at Elsie’s long engagement – unaware that Elsie didn’t really mind. I thought then that the Countess must assume Englishmen to be very cold-blooded if Elsie’s Jack could wait seven years for her; though personally, I doubted Jack would be a very ardent husband anyway, well, ardent in the physical sense. Being so accustomed to dealing with cows, he’d probably pat Elsie’s flanks and say, ‘Come along, old gal, get over there’.

  My friends, Gladys and Mary, came to tea that day so naturally they had to hear about our visitors; especially from Mr Kite, who rather liked Gladys, though he was often shocked at her rather crude remarks. Gladys was one of those people who, whenever you told her some incident about a particular person or mentioned that you’d once visited a certain place, she knew somebody exactly the same; and if she had never visited the place herself, she always knew somebody who had. So Gladys proceeded to tell us that her sister-in-law had a friend, Clara, who’d married a Russian, and what a grief he’d turned out to be. I thought it odd that Gladys, whom I’d known for some considerable time, had never before mentioned this Alexander Chakmar – a name like that wouldn’t be easy to forget.

  ‘Clara met Alex one Saturday evening at the Palais de Dance,’ said Gladys, ‘and she was up in the clouds when he offered to escort her home; such a good-looking chap as he was didn’t often come her way, as Clara’s a bit on the plain side. Well, to be honest, her figure’s not so bad but her face is a bit puddeny. Mind you, Clara’s not like us, she never left school until she was sixteen. She can take shorthand and type so she works in an office. Lucky for her that she can earn her living, for that Alex is bone idle. He earns about a couple of pounds a week entertaining pub customers by a bit of singing and doing imitations – he does Maurice Chevalier. He’s as vain as a turkey-cock and tries to make out that he’s a somebody; says that his ancestors came from the Steppes – whatever they are. I ask you, how would that Alex know? He was born in this country.’

  ‘There must be more to him than you know of, Gladys,’ I said, ‘otherwise Clara wouldn’t have married him, surely?’

  ‘Well, Margaret,’ and Gladys giggled madly, ‘there’s only one thing that he works overtime at and that’s why Clara’s been in the family way three times in as many years. If it was me, I’d soon tell him where he got off. In fact,’ added Gladys, smiling at our butler, ‘I’d darn well make sure that he never “got on”.’

  Poor Mr Kite looked scandalised as well he might. Though he’d never experienced ‘le grande passion’ himself, it was to be presumed that he was aware of the mechanics involved. With the others, I laughed at Gladys’s story – she was my friend – but really I failed to see the connection between our Russian visitors and Clara’s Alex. His shortcomings in the matrimonial stakes were not exclusive to his Russian ancestry; plenty of Englishmen have shattered love’s young dream.

  Later on that day, Mr Kite asked me if I really intended to tell Madam that I didn’t want Count Kylov in my kitchen.

  ‘Yes, Mr Kite, I shall mention it. It’s no part of my job to have one of the guests below stairs. I take orders only from Mrs Van Lievden, she pays me.’

  ‘Well, I’ll not stand for it either, Cook. I’ve been in the best service, I can get another job at any time. Just you read this reference from one of my situations. The gentleman wrote it for me just before he went abroad. With a reference like that, I don’t need to stay in a place where I’m put upon.’

  I wasn’t so much interested in reading the reference as I was amused to discover what his Christian names were: Algernon Rufus. Somehow Mr Kite didn’t look like an Algernon Rufus. With initials, ARK, I wondered if he’d been known as Noah’s Ark at school; though as Mr Kite wasn’t noted for a sense of humour, I decided not to ask.

  ‘What do you think of that, Cook? Doesn’t that show you I know my job? I started at the bottom and worked my way to the top. Why, I could have gone to America with one of my gentlemen. And he told me that he was sure his American friends would try to bribe me with offers of much higher wages to get a perfect English butler. Good menservants are worth their weight in gold over there. Not that I need to leave England to find another post,’ Mr Kite added, very much on his dignity. ‘Employers don’t mind paying the tax if they can get a good manservant.’

  I felt slightly peeved that he should put such stress on the value of butlers and menservants in general, as opposed to us women – after all, I thought, hadn’t somebody once written: ‘We may live without friends; we may live without books; but civilised man cannot live without cooks’. I quoted this to Mr Kite, adding, perhaps with some malice, that the only verse I knew about butlers was from Hilaire Belloc; ‘In my opinion Butlers ought to know their place, and not to play The Old Retainer night and day’. In any case it wasn’t strictly true that employers didn’t mind paying the tax on menservants. I used to read the newspapers that came down from upstairs, especially the readers’ letters in The Times. I had visions of writing to the paper and getting a letter published; though on what subject, I’d no idea. But in some of the letters, employers were complaining about having to pay this domestic tax. Considering that it was only 15/-, I couldn’t imagine why they made such a fuss. To people who could afford a large staff of domestic servants, what was an extra 15/-?

  As it transpired, neither the butler nor I need have worried about ‘speaking to Madam’. Before we had a chance to complain, the Russian visitors had departed. Naturally, none of us servants were told the reason why their visit had been cut short.

  22

  Two days elapsed before I saw Mrs Van Lievden, for Odette gave me a message that Madam was indisposed and I was to plan the menus; she was sure I could cope. It was on the second day of Madam’s indisposition that the Count and Countess left the house. None of us regretted his departure, though he did provide me with an original topic of conversation; after all, not every cook can talk about the count in her kitchen – what a good title for a book. When speaking about his culinary achievements in my kitchen, I naturally always omitted to mention that Count Kylov spoke to me only when he required some kitchen utensil – it would have detracted from my glory. Working below stairs, I’d never spoke to the Countess, but Odette and Elsie agreed that she was a very sweet person; quiet, timid and apparently much in awe of her husband, who frequently spoke to her in a harsh manner.

  The following morning, Mrs Van Lievden came down as usual to give the orders for the day. Now although the servants were interested in, and discussed every facet of life above stairs – or what little we knew of it – this interest was certainly not reciprocated. Madam was concerned to know that her servants had everything they needed in the way of uniforms, household equipment, comfortable bedrooms and servants’ hall, but that was the extent of her interest in us as persons. But this morning, for the first and only time, Mrs Van Lievden spoke to me of matters
not appertaining to working out the menu. She asked if Count Kylov had been rude to me or to Mr Kite; and she went on to explain that the Count had suffered great hardships in that he had lost his beautiful home, money and possessions – it certainly hadn’t made him feel compassion for those who’d never had those assets in the first place, I thought. Madam seemed concerned that I should understand how hard life was for the Russian emigrés, now that the Bolshevists had driven them from their own country.

  ‘But of course, Cook,’ she said, ‘you were far too young to remember anything about the Russian Revolution of 1917. I’m sure you are not in the least interested in Russia, and there’s no reason why you should be.’

  ‘I do know something about pre-revolution Russia, Madam. I borrowed Tolstoy’s War and Peace from our public library, and I’ve also read The Possessed by Dostoievsky, and a volume of short stories by Anton Chekhov. I enjoyed reading the books, Madam.’

  Madam was so taken aback that she could only utter, and somewhat feebly, ‘Did you, Cook?’

  Everything was just settling down into the usual routine when Bessie, the kitchenmaid, decided to give in her notice. Not only was she still lamenting the faithlessness of the butcher-boy, but she’d discovered she didn’t like being a kitchenmaid. The work was too hard; she’d get a place as an under-housemaid. It was my opinion, and the butcher’s also that in comparison with what we had to do when we started in domestic service, Bessie was in clover. She didn’t have to get up in the morning until six-thirty, and a whole hour later on Sundays, and she’d no kitchen range to light, just an Ideal boiler to rake out. In my first job, there was a list of the kitchenmaid’s duties pinned on to the dresser, and what I had to do before eight o’clock: RISE AT 5.30AM, ON SUNDAYS 6.00AM. LIGHT THE RANGE, CLEAN THE FLUES, POLISH THE RANGE AND EMERY-PAPER THE FENDER AND FIRE-IRONS. CLEAN THE BRASS ON THE FRONT DOOR, THE TILES IN THE FRONT HALL AND HEARTHSTONE THE STEPS. POLISH THE BOOTS AND SHOES FOR THE FOUR PERSONS ABOVE STAIRS, LAY UP THE SERVANTS’ BREAKFAST AND SET OUT THE KITCHEN TABLE WITH ALL THAT THE COOK WILL NEED. When I first saw this list my mind boggled. I thought that I’d never be able to do it all in the time. But I managed. Mr Kite and I agreed that we didn’t know what the younger generation were coming to – which is of course, precisely what people say today.