Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance

by Margaret Powell

  Then it was time for Odette to go back to France. I would miss her, but she wasn’t sorry to be leaving England, comparing it unfavourably with her native Provençe. I pointed out that she barely knew England; living in London, with a few odd weeks in Bath, Harrogate and Edinburgh, she was hardly familiar with our country. We had lovely old towns and villages that Odette had never heard of, much less seen. But then she didn’t like Englishmen; for either they were too formal, stand-offish, cold as fish – and cod-like too; or they were as crude in their methods of showing affection as a gorilla in the zoo. Leaping to the defence of our males, especially as I was still looking for a permanent beau, I retaliated by saying that Raoul, the Frenchman I’d met at the Palais de Dance, was a pretty poor specimen of humanity. I didn’t so much mind that he was a second-rate dancer, for I was no twinkle-toes; what I did mind was his ineffable conceit in thinking that his ridiculous gyrations on the dance floor made him a marvellous partner. Furthermore, his ideas about kissing were certainly not mine. I strongly objected to being almost swallowed when we said goodnight. Odette explained that Raoul was probably out to prove a Frenchman was more passionate than a cold Englishman. He probably was, but I very soon told him to prove it with some other girl; it wasn’t passion I was looking for, it was marriage lines.

  Rose wrote to Mary and me to say that her parents were thinking of doing the same as Uncle Fred in coming to London to work. The world wide Great Depression was still throwing more and more people out of work; now Rose’s father had lost his job in the mill. Uncle Fred had managed to get work as a lift attendant; the hours were long and the wages small, but it was better than being on the dole. Rose wanted Mary and me to look for a small flat suitable for her ma and pa. Her letter was full of the usual complaints about her husband. Gerald had refused to have ma and pa staying at Greenlands, giving as a reason that her pa disliked him and there would be rows – too true, said Mary. Gerald had offered to pay the rent of a flat, but she, Rose, knew that her pa would flatly refuse to accept charity. Pa’s temper had never been mild at the best of times it was positively dreadful now that he was out of work. That being so, I couldn’t see Mary and me calling on her parents as we had called on Uncle Fred. As I remarked to Mary, Shakespeare’s banished Duke may have thought, ‘sweet are the uses of adversity’, but evidently adversity hadn’t sweetened Rose’s pa.

  After the fiasco of our visit to Greenlands, Mary still felt some animosity towards Rose. She said, satirically, ‘Margaret, isn’t it just like Rose to expect us to wear ourselves out walking around London to find a flat for her parents! Could you see her doing the same for us? Notice too, that she hasn’t enclosed any money so that we could get around in comfort by having a taxi. Oh no! A bus is good enough for us. And why should we give up our free time? I could think of a lot of things I’d rather do. Besides, I start my new job next week and I’ve some shopping to do. I think I’m going to like this new place. There’s only four above stairs; no children, thank heaven, and they don’t have coal fires in the bedrooms, not even for guests. Not that I’d have to lug coal-scuttles up the stairs, there’s an under-housemaid to do that. I have to provide my own uniform and caps, but I’m getting £40 a year. And the butler’s such a nice-looking man; young too, I bet he’s only about thirty-five.’

  ‘Now then, Mary, don’t start off the job with romantic ideas about the menservants. Remember what a disaster that Alf turned out to be – ’ But here Mary interrupted to say that Alf was never a manservant, it was just an extra job for him.

  ‘Maybe so, but if the butler is young and goodlooking, he’s either engaged or married. If he isn’t, considering all the females below stairs, it must be that he doesn’t like women.’

  ‘Oh, Margaret! Why do you have to be such a wet blanket? It could well be that he hasn’t found the right woman yet. Besides, not all men rush into matrimony in their twenties.’

  ‘Well, Mary, in my opinion, any reasonably good-looking man in his thirties, who’s still single, will have very little enthusiasm for walking up the aisle with a bride. Besides, you surely wouldn’t want to marry a butler and be in service for the rest of your life?’

  A butler doesn’t have to stay in service, does he? He can get another kind of job.’

  ‘What! with a million and a half unemployed? What would he do? He’d look fine in the dole queue when they asked him what kind of work could he do! He’d have to say, “I can buttle”.’

  Beating Mary in an argument was a bit pointless when we were spending some hours together, for generally it took her time to recover her equanimity. But now she just laughed, saying, ‘we’ve got time to dash in the pub for a quick one before we start flat-hunting.’ The barman, who was Welsh and a friend of ours, asked us where we were off to.

  ‘We’re looking for a small flat, or rooms of some kind, Morgan. Do you know of anything round this way?’

  ‘Well, I never, sweethearts. Is it that you are going to set up home together now? What a waste of good material.’

  Mary and I blushed a fiery red. We thought that he meant were we setting up a brothel. We knew only of men like that; probably what he meant was, were we a couple of lesbians.

  23

  As a way of spending a pleasant afternoon, I wouldn’t advocate hunting for accommodation. It was much worse a few years later when I had a family and needed rooms, but even now Mary and I had a wearisome time. We’d bought the local newspapers of Kensington, Notting Hill Gate and Earl’s Court, and we started off fairly confident of finding a suitable place.

  At the first house, in Earl’s Court, the door was opened by a young man whose fair curly hair and high-pitched voice made it obvious where his sexual preferences lay. He smiled at us, saying, ‘Come in, my dears, come in, I’ll show you the rooms.’

  We explained that it wasn’t for ourselves we were seeking accommodation, and again he gave us a sweet smile.

  ‘What a pity, my dears, what a pity. I do like to have young people around me.’

  He repeated most of his remarks; whether to emphasise or prolong the conversation, we’d no idea. The house was very clean but it was all furnished accommodation so wouldn’t do for Rose’s parents. Her ma would never be parted from her green plush chairs and china dogs. The amicable young proprietor said that he let furnished rooms because he simply loved to be surrounded by his own things.

  ‘My dears, you’ve no idea. Once, just as a favour, I did let a tenant bring her own things. They were simply hideous, simply hideous; gave me a headache just to look at them.’

  ‘But, Mr Martin, if you let unfurnished rooms, you didn’t have to go into the rooms.’

  ‘Ah, my dears, you don’t understand. Just to know such things were in my house upset me, yes upset me. I must have my own things.’

  I had an hilarious vision of him sitting with Rose’s ma and pa surrounded by the green plush chairs and green plush over-mantel, complete with china dogs. He’d have had the headache of all time. He made tea for us and introduced us to his ‘friend’, Aubrey, a hefty six-foot man. As Mary said, no doubt Aubrey was the ‘chucker-out’ of undesirable tenants. In those days it was possible for a landlord to get rid of them.

  Next on the list was a house in Notting Hill Gate where the landlady, in hair curlers and wearing a sacklike garment – on which it was possible, to discern the remains of many meals – was extremely garrulous. She showed us the dark, empty and cavernous basement flat, which stank of countless previous cave-dwellers; perhaps the midden was in the yard. Oh, yes, she liked people from the North. Her late husband had come from Yorkshire, as hard-working a man as you’d hope to find though suffering something cruel with his ‘waterworks’. He had to hop in and out of bed all night, they could never get down to a bit of the ‘you know what’. It carried him off eventually; thank gawd she had no kids to bring up.

  What with the smell of the basement and the torrent of words, Mary and I were thankful to get out into the fresh air. We collected particulars of some half-dozen
more or less suitable places, and I suggested to Mary that perhaps we should telephone Rose and give her the information.

  ‘What! at our expense?’ Mary exclaimed, ‘you must be mad. It’ll cost us a packet and we’d never get our money back. No, send it through the post.’

  Our chauffeur’s wife had invited us to supper in their mews flat; and as I was short of money – it being still a few days to go before my month’s wages – we called on Mrs Davies as early as etiquette allowed. The supper was a delicious beef stew, which Mrs Davies said she’d made from shin of beef. At the time I doubted her, for in service I used shin of beef only to make beef tea, and I then threw away the meat. It was only about sixpence a pound then. Off duty, Mr Davies was a very entertaining man, with a fund of stories about his childhood in Glamorgan. Every midsummer his grandparents had made mead, ready for a grand gathering of the Davies clan at Christmas, and his mother had cooked a ham, with cider, and made dumplings to go with it – made not with ordinary flour, but with oatmeal.

  Mrs Gwyneth Davies made us a ‘special’ welsh rarebit; she said the recipe had been given to her by her grandmother, who’d worked as a cook in Glamorgan.

  ‘Grandmother worked for a very wealthy ironmaster,’ said Gwyneth Davies, ‘and she was always telling me that being in service then was the natural thing, one wasn’t looked down on, not like now. Grandmother said that her employer, John Lewis, had made his money the hard way. He’d started in the iron-works when he was only ten years old, and sweated fourteen hours a day. Grandmother said that her employer, Mrs Lewis, would come into the kitchen and sit down – just as we are sitting here – and she’d say to Grandmother, “Come on, my gel, what are we eating today?”, just as though Grandma was one of them. Can you imagine Mrs Van Lievden doing that?’

  Well, no, I couldn’t, thank goodness. Nothing would induce me to work for a lady who made herself at home in my kitchen and said ‘gel, what are we eating today?’

  There was much eating going on, as Mr Van Lievden’s mother and two aunts from Schiedam were staying in the house. Madam had asked Mr Kite and me if we minded the guests inspecting the below stairs, as kitchens in Holland were very different from those in England. Our butler wasn’t very pleased, complaining to me that it was not the done thing for employers to poke their noses into our departments. In his usual prim manner, he said:

  ‘I have been in service many more years than you, Cook; and, believe me, I’ve always found it best to stick to correct procedures: they have their domain and we have ours. Would we ever ask them if we could show our relatives the upstairs because it was different from below? Of course we wouldn’t.’

  ‘Well, Mr Kite, it does happen to be their house. Presumably they are entitled to be in any part of it on occasions. What have we got to worry about? There’s nothing in my kitchen or scullery that I don’t want seen by them above stairs.’

  ‘That’s not it, Cook, it’s the principle of the thing.’

  Muttering to myself about where he could stuff his principles, I made sure that Bessie had cleaned and polished everything. Though now that she was leaving, Bessie had suddenly become a quick and willing worker. Like all of us in service, she was thinking about her reference for the next place.

  Mr Van Lievden’s mother and aunts, judging by their substantial girth, looked as though the consuming of large quantities of food was one of their chief occupations. And so it proved; for during the next two weeks I cooked vast quantities. For breakfast, dishes of porridge, sausages, bacon and eggs, kippers and kedgeree went upstairs full and came down empty. There were three-course lunches and six-course dinners. I marvelled that anybody – especially people who didn’t work – could consume such gargantuan meals. One evening we had a dinner party for eighteen people. A woman came in to help with the washing up, and a special iced-pudding was ordered from an outside caterer. I prepared a clear soup; salmon maître d’hôtel; roast quails – silly little birds I thought them, a few mouthfuls and they were eaten – and a main course of roast sirloin served with cauliflower au gratin, glazed carrots, petit pois and duchesse potatoes. The savoury was simple, just cheese straws. I remember that one of the guests was a vegetarian so I had the bother of cooking her a baked aubergine instead of the quails, and haricot bean croquettes instead of roast sirloin. I grumbled to Mr Kite that vegetarians should stay at home but, although he murmured a word of sympathy, I could tell he wasn’t interested. His interests lay elsewhere that evening; Mr Kite was in his element. A retired butler had been engaged to help wait at table, and Mr Kite was surprised and gratified to discover that this Mr Penny had been the butler while our Mr Kite was a first footman. Now the positions were reversed and Mr Kite was in charge. True, he hadn’t a footman under him, but he had Norma and an ex-butler – a staff of three in the butler’s pantry!

  It was around eleven o’clock before we could sit down to our supper of cold ham, potatoes and salad, followed by blackcurrant tart with cream. Off duty, Mr Penny was very good company. He and Mr Kite were soon deep in reminiscences of Lord – who shall be nameless – with a handsome wife and five children who, not content with that, had another ‘lady’ and two more children in the same town. And there was the Honourable Charles, who’d seduced the housemaid and got his come-uppance when the girl’s father and brother set on him in the street and gave him a black eye and a bloody nose.

  I had no such colourful tit-bits to contribute to the conversation, but I made them all laugh with an account of the time I’d gone into Mrs Bishop’s bathroom for the day’s orders and found a naked man standing in the bath; the sight was a terrible shock to me.

  ‘Dear dear, Cook,’ laughed Mr Penny, ‘it was probably only the loofah you saw; in the steamy atmosphere, outlines get blurred. You know, it reminds me of the time when I was young. After five years as second, then first footman, I’d taken my first place as a butler. You wouldn’t think, to see me now, that I used to be quite a good-looking chap.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Penny,’ we chorused, ‘you’re still a fine-looking man, do go on with your story.’

  ‘Well, by the time I’d been there three months, I could tell that the lady of the house had taken quite a shine to me. Big-head that I was, I felt flattered. Although Madam must have been ten years older than me, she was still a pretty woman. I’m telling you, it was Penny this and Penny that, with a sweet smile and a helpless look, from the time her husband left the house in the morning until he returned about six o’clock.’

  ‘What happened, Mr Penny?’

  ‘I’m coming to that. One afternoon, I was soaking myself in a lovely hot bath – our bathroom was in the basement. I hadn’t bothered to lock the door; there was no need, for Cook was having her afternoon nap, the housemaid upstairs was sorting out the linen cupboard and the tweeny was out. You’ll never believe the next bit, but it’s as true as I’m sitting here. There I am in the bath, rubbing my heels with pumice stone – a butler needs to take care of his feet – when suddenly, the bathroom door opens and Madam comes in. I was fit to die with shock, I can tell you; no female has ever seen me unclothed since the time I told my mother I was old enough to bath myself. “Oh, Penny”, she said, with such a look on her face that you’d have thought she was going to eat me – and she’d taken too much of the brandy after lunch – “do let me wash your back. Lovely Penny, you’re not a penny, you’re worth your weight in gold”. And she put her hands right in the water saying, “Let me find the soap”. It wasn’t the soap she was feeling for, that I did know. The shameless woman!’

  Amid the general laughter, I asked what happened after that.

  ‘Well, Cook, I practically threw Madam out, got dressed and left the house. It wasn’t possible to stay as a butler for such a Jezebel. It’s true that her husband was an elderly man, probably Madam married him for his money. Well she’d got that, but it didn’t buy me.’

  ‘But, Mr Penny how did you manage about the reference for your next place?’

  ‘I forged one. Said that my employ
ers had gone to America and left me this written reference. They were satisfied, took me on and I stayed with them for five years. And here I am, like Mr Kite, still a bachelor but fond of the ladies.’

  ‘We were all sorry when the taxi came to take Mr Penny home. I’d hoped that Mr Kite would invite him to call one afternoon and have tea with us, but I expect he was rather envious of the ex-butler, who had obviously led a more interesting life than Kite had.

  It was indeed a pleasant surprise when our Dutch guests thanked us personally for all the extra work – and they tipped us well. As Elsie remarked, we were so lucky. We might have been servants in a house – and there were many such – where those above stairs, employers and guests alike, hardly recognised us as human beings.

  Elsie had another pleasant surprise when her fiancé suddenly presented himself at the basement door. From Elsie’s description of Jack, and the fact that, like Jacob for his Rachel, he had been courting Elsie for seven years, I’d visualised him looking beefy, stolid and quite out of place in a city. Instead, there he was, six-feet tall, slim, brown eyes and curly hair, wearing as smart a suit as any city beau. I couldn’t imagine how Elsie had been content to see her Jack just once a month, apart from holidays, year after year. If he had been my boyfriend, I’d have been afraid of some other girl offering consolation during my absence. But perhaps down on the farm there weren’t many unattached girls around. Jack had come with the good news that he’d been made head stockman. The job paid higher wages and included a house, so there was no reason why he and Elsie should wait any longer to be married. Elsie agreed to give in her notice, but she wasn’t noticeably overwhelmed with excitement – as I would have been.