Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance

by Margaret Powell

  We waved Elsie and Jack off to their honeymoon in Bournemouth, the bride’s mother wept as every mother seems to do when her daughter becomes a wife. Though, now I recollect it, my mother didn’t weep when I got married. Perhaps Mum went along with ‘Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail or knock the breast’.

  Our new head housemaid, Connie as she liked to be called, was long past the age of matrimony, being about fifty-five years old. She was forty-five before she went into domestic service, having then, as she put it, ‘fallen on hard times’. The youngest of five children, it was Connie’s lot in life to look after her aged parents with no help from the other four. The one and only possible husband had rapidly cooled off when he discovered that marrying Connie meant having her aged parents to live with them. Her mother died at seventy-five, followed five years later by her exceedingly cantankerous father. When he died, his civil service pension ended. Without a trace of self-pity in her voice, Connie said to us:

  ‘There was I, fair, fat and nearly forty-five, with no money, a rented house and no assets save the furniture. My married brothers and sisters descended on the home like vultures, saying that as they had children they needed extra things, that mother had promised them this and that; regardless of the fact that it was I who’d looked after the home all through the years. Oh! they offered me a home with them, but I found I was an unpaid drudge and baby-minder. Suddenly, I said to myself, don’t be a stupid woman, for years you’ve done housework for nothing but pocket-money, why not go into service, get your board and lodge and earn a wage as well? So, with a good reference from the vicar, I got a lovely job. Stayed there ten years until my Madam died. Now I’m here.’

  ‘Did she leave you anything in her will?’ asked Ada.

  ‘Yes, dear, she left me a brooch and three months’ wages. Not enough to retire on as the brooch is only worth £50. But I don’t want to retire, I like being in serivice. This Madam isn’t quite as nice as my old Madam, she took a personal interest in us, but it’s very comfortable here. I shall stay as long as possible.’

  Mr Kite fully approved of such sentiments, as he too intended to be a butler as long as his age and health allowed.

  Now that Mrs Van Lievden had her eighteen-year-old niece staying in the house, a lot more entertaining was done. I quite enjoyed the extra cooking and trying out new recipes. It’s very pleasant being a cook when one doesn’t have housework and shopping to do as well. I could telephone the tradesmen for all I needed, and I had a kitchenmaid to clean, wash-up and do all the vegetables. Bessie’s successor was named Miriam, she said all her family had biblical names; her brothers were Joshua and Samuel, her sisters Ruth and Abigail. I asked Miriam if her mother was always reading the Bible, and Miriam laughed at this, saying. ‘Poor Mum’s never had time to read anything. She’s had to work to keep us. My dad drank like a fish, spent all his wages on the stuff whenever he was in work – which wasn’t often. When he was drunk, he knocked Mum about and us kids too. One night, as drunk as a lord, he fell in the Thames and got drowned; Mum wept a bit but none of us kids did.’

  I thought perhaps Miriam’s mother gave all her children biblical names as an oblation to the Lord, hoping he would provide as it was certain her husband wouldn’t.

  For a fifteen-year-old, Miriam was far more sophisticated and confident than I had been when I started as a kitchenmaid, and she wasn’t in the least in awe of the butler. In fact, far from protecting her from Mr Kite’s reprimands, as Mrs Buller had protected me from Mr Hall’s sarcastic wit, I sometimes had to tell Miriam, in private, that she really mustn’t argue and disagree so often with Mr Kite. It made for discord in the servants hall.

  ‘Cook, I’ll willingly do anything you ask me to do in the way of work, because that’s my job. But my mum was in service and she warned me about butlers, said that some of them, especially if they were old family retainers, thought they were God Almighty below stairs and that they ran the staff. Mum said butlers can’t tell housemaids and the kitchen staff what to do, only their footmen and parlourmaids. So I’m not having Mr Kite coming the great “I am”. You don’t do it, Cook.’

  Such opinions from a lowly kitchenmaid were calculated to upset the rigid hierarchy of servants below stairs. I sharply told Miriam that all under servants were expected to keep quiet in the servants’ hall; that because the upper servants monopolised the conversation, they weren’t ‘putting on’ the under servants.

  But Miriam was far more helpful to me than Bessie had been. She was quick, willing and eager to learn how to cook vegetables and make sauces. Her one drawback was a tendency to laugh immoderately at anything remotely resembling a joke. Strangely, Connie became very fond of Miriam and was almost like a mother to her. Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites. Connie had had too much home life and Miriam far too little. Miriam, in her first place of domestic service, was surprised at our standard of comfort. She’d heard from her mother that in the servants’ sparse leisure time, they sat in a dark and dingy servants’ hall and slept in freezing cold or sweltering hot attic bedrooms; nothing whatever was done to make servants comfortable. I warned Miriam that not all situations were as good as this one; that when I’d worked for a Mrs Hunter-Jones, we hadn’t even a servants’ hall, we sat on hard chairs in a miserable kitchen, used chipped crockery and our bedroom was just as spartan. Miriam reckoned she could stay in a place like this for ever, she’d never get married and have a life like her mum’s. I had no desire to stay in the place for ever, probably Miriam would change her opinion when she’d had ten years of being below stairs. Gladys had once irreverently compared our life to being in a nunnery, with a few castrated monks to add to our frustrations. Mary and I had protested it wasn’t as bad as that; look what happened to Rose, we’d added.

  Both Mary and I had had a letter from Rose, asking us to come and see her again as soon as we had a whole day free. So we wrote and carefully arranged a day this time; Mary remarked caustically that she didn’t want a repetition of our first visit.

  26

  This time, having no kind Mr Davies to drive us, we had to make the journey by train. I was amused to discover that Mary had brought an ample supply of sandwiches and bars of chocolate, as though we were setting out on a hazardous mission where no sustenance would be provided. But it was only too true, as Mary pointed out, that on none of the occasions we’d visited Rose in Hampstead, had we ever sat down to a banquet. Not that we arrived at our destination well-laden with supplies, because in our compartment were two young men – Mary having walked the length of the train in an endeavour to find what she called, ‘somebody lively’ for us to talk to. For sure Sid and Joe were lively enough, if a disclosure of all the pictures they’d seen, dances they’d been to and the girls they’d known constituted liveliness, but I disliked both of them, especially the one who kept saying apropos of some girl he’d taken home from a dance, ‘Cor, she wasn’t ’alf a bit of orl right’. Conversation aside, they certainly had voracious appetites, consuming Mary’s sandwiches as though their next meal wouldn’t be until sometime in the dim and distant future. When we were in the bus on our way to Rose’s home, I mocked Sid and Joe’s appalling English: ‘This bus ain’t ’alf slow’, I said. Mary accused me of being a snob, which perhaps I was; but although being in domestic service didn’t give one a public school accent, it did teach one to speak correctly. Which was why I got so annoyed when servants were portrayed on the stage as figures of fun dropping their aitches even oftener than the male lead dropped his trousers.

  Mary and I were extremely surprised, and certainly not very pleased, to find that Rose’s mother and aunt were also in the house, having arrived an hour earlier. We recollected the occasion when we had called on Mrs Lawton in Kensington one afternoon, to see she had everything she needed. Our reception was not such as to encourage us to repeat the occasion. She did make us a cup of tea, yes. But then we sat on the edge of the green plush chairs, sipping the hot and over-sweet stuff, while she told us that Mr. Lawton was o
ut searching for work, that she disliked people arriving without warning, and that she was sure she’d never like London or Londoners, they seemed an ungodly lot; the only decent person she’d met was the curate from the Presbyterian church. In view of all the time we’d given up, and the work we’d done to make her rooms comfortable, I thought Mary and I were justified in feeling annoyed by such a lukewarm welcome.

  So now, while we were in the bathroom tidying-up, I said to Mary that we were not to let ourselves be intimidated by Rose’s mother, we weren’t unexpected visitors, we’d been invited. Though, I whispered, ‘I don’t know why we’re here. Rose looks much as usual, no great calamity seems to have happened. I don’t know about you, Mary, but I wouldn’t have come if I’d known those two would be here. Well, I don’t mind the aunt, but her ma gives me the creeps. All she talks about is sinners and righteousness and nobody is perfect in the sight of the Lord; if that’s what religion does for you, I’ll stay an agnostic.’

  We found them sitting round the table in Rose’s own small sitting-room as though they were waiting for a seance to begin. Uncle Fred’s wife, Amelia Green, although better-dressed than when we had last seen her, still looked lack-lustre and timid, especially in comparison with Mrs Lawton. And Mrs Lawton was saying, in an angry voice, that Rose never brought Victoria Helen to see her; and that even now she couldn’t see her only grandchild because Rose had sent her away.

  ‘I didn’t send her away,’ protested Rose, ‘her Aunt Helen fetched her over a week ago. She loves having Victoria to stay with her and I get such headaches having the child around, she’s so noisy.’

  Gerald’s sister, Helen, had inherited enough money from an old great-aunt to enable her to become independent of her father, Mr Wardham. She’d promptly left Redlands and was now living in the country with a woman friend. Nowadays, two women living together for economy and companionship risk being labelled as lesbians but, from the little I knew of Miss Helen I’m sure it was a perfectly innocent relationship; her friend was a painter and Miss Helen was trying to write. According to Rose, Mr Wardham was furious that his daughter had left home; now he’d only got his wife to bully. He’d ranted at her, saying a fine couple of children she’d brought up; her son married to a slut and her daughter, no man being a fool enough to marry her, had got a woman instead. I thought, that’s just like a man. If his family follow what he considers the right pattern in life, then he will proudly boast of ‘my son, my daughter’, But if they rebel, then his wife learns that the children are hers.

  When Rose told us we were having an early lunch, I had difficulty in suppressing a laugh as I thought of Mary’s parcel of sandwiches. How fortunate they’d been eaten on the train.

  Rose’s mother snapped ‘Lunch, what d’you mean, lunch? You were brought up to call the midday meal, dinner. It’s always dinner to your father and me.’

  To Mary and me that lunch – or dinner – was an hilarious experience; we’d have liked to have heard what Rose’s cook and parlourmaid were saying in the kitchen. It was easy to see that Mrs Lawton and Aunt Amelia felt extremely uncomfortable being waited on by a servant, and the meal was enlivened by both of them bobbing up and down collecting the plates, serving the vegetables and generally taking over the duties of Maud, the house-parlourmaid. If only I could have photographed the expression on Maud’s face as she surveyed this new kind of guest. Mary and I still had no idea why we’d been invited and, from the way her mother avoided speaking to us, we could sense that she found our presence unwelcome. I heard her mutter to Rose that it was a family matter and outsiders, meaning Mary and me, shouldn’t be brought into it. Rose said we weren’t outsiders; we were her best and only friends. And she added sharply, that we’d run all over London looking for a decent place for her parents to live in.

  During the meal, Aunt Amelia complained that Fred didn’t like his job as a lift man; going up and down all day made him feel giddy when he got home. Mary put her foot in it by saying surely he was used to going up and down in a coal mine.

  ‘That shows you Southerners know nothing about the North,’ snapped Mrs. Lawton, ‘Men are not constantly going up and down in a coal mine. They go down and stay down until their shift is over. Anyway,’ she added, to Aunt Amelia, ‘your Fred’s got a better job than my Joe’s in the factory. He’s doing the same thing all day over and over again and there’s no skill in the work like there was in the mill.’

  Considering her Joe’s weeks of unemployent in Manchester and the fact that he had found work within two weeks of being in London, I reckon he’d no cause to complain.

  Mrs Lawton refused to drink coffee after the meal, saying she didn’t hold with such outlandish notions; a cup of good strong tea was what she wanted. We retired to the sitting-room, sat round the table again and Rose told us, quite calmly, without any tears or histrionics, that Gerald wanted a divorce. If she had said that her husband wanted to murder her, the news couldn’t have been more calamitous as far as her mother was concerned. For a few minutes that formidable woman was speechless. Then, not bothering to ask Rose any questions, she burst out:

  ‘Divorce? Never! Whoever heard of such a thing! The disgrace of it. I’d never dare show my face in the old street. There’s never been such a thing in our family, we’ve always been respectable hard-working people. What will the Reverend think when he knows? You was married all proper, Rose, and “those whom God had joined together, let no man put asunder”.’

  ‘It’s a woman who wants to put it asunder, Ma, as well as a man.’

  ‘That I should live to hear my daughter, who was brought up in as God-fearing a home as any in the street, talk about marriage in that light way. And what about Victoria Helen, what’s going to happen to her? Marriage is for life, through good times and bad, it can’t be broken just because one of the partner’s wants to break it. Young people today have no morals, marriage means nothing sacred to them,’ and she looked at Mary and me with accusing eyes, as though it was our fault. I resented this silent accusation, especially so as we were two single girls trying our hardest to enter into the matrimonial state. Our first question to Rose was, why did her husband want a divorce, did he want to marry some other woman?

  ‘Yes, he does,’ said Rose, bitterly, ‘And you’d never guess who he’s fallen for. To think that I welcomed her here so many times and she made out to be my friend, helping me with the guests and all. Yet all the time her and Gerald were carrying on behind my back. But she’ll never be able to marry my husband because I won’t give him a divorce. Why should I? I’ve done nothing wrong, not even so much as kissed another man since I married.’

  ‘Who is she, Rose, who is she?’ we asked impatiently.

  ‘She’s Sheila Frost, the wife of Gerald’s partner Ron. That’s who she is. I never liked Ron, he was always making stupid jokes, and if he was anything of a man he’d punch Gerald on the nose. But they’re not even breaking the partnership, they’re both away up North on a business trip. If you ask me, Ron’s glad to be rid of his wife.’

  ‘My advice to you, Rose,’ said her ma, not waiting to be asked to give her opinion, ‘is to ignore the whole thing; it will blow over. Men always have been stupid creatures who don’t know their own minds. In six months’ time, your Gerald will have got tired of that woman.’

  ‘I don’t care whether he has or not, Ma, I’m going to get a legal separation. I’m going back to London. I’ll get a nice little house where me and Vicky can live; Gerald will have to support us.’

  Roses’s voice changed from its unaccustomed calmness to shrill denunciation, she said she was sick to death of her husband trying to make her into a lady. She never again wanted to hear that her accent was an assault on his ears; that her ignorance of what went on in the world regarding politics, music and the arts, could only be equalled by a native of darkest Africa. She was fed up living in the country, where county people looked down on her and, although the village people were ever so nice, she could never invite them to the house. She, Rose, ne
ver had, and never would get used to servants waiting on her. In her own little house, she could look after herself and Vicky and have peace and quiet. She and Gerald had endless quarrels, and when he’d had too much to drink which happened often, he’d taunt her by saying that he could have made a better wife out of the black girl who worked for him in Rhodesia.

  ‘He probably seduced her too,’ Rose added rancorously.

  Here her mother interrupted to say, sharply, ‘What d’you mean, “seduced her too”? He never took advantage of you, you was married all right and proper, your pa saw to that. I warned you, you should have stuck to Len.’

  ‘Perhaps Rose didn’t love Len,’ interposed Aunt Amelia, in a deprecating voice.

  ‘You be quiet, Melia. What’s love got to do with it? That’s not what marriage is all about. Marriage is leaving your parents’ home to look after your man, have his kids, make one shilling go as far as five, and keep a clean, respectable and God-fearing home.’

  Mary and I looked at each other and I knew the same thought was in her mind; that such a description of marriage was far removed from our ideas on the subject.

  In spite of another hour listening to her mother’s admonitions on it being Rose’s duty, if only for the sake of Victoria Helen, to remain with her husband – how could she if he wanted a divorce? – Rose was firm in her determination to seek a legal separation. When it was time to leave, we found to our consternation that Rose had ordered a car to take us to the station, we were all travelling on the same train. So much did Mrs Lawton overawe us that we hadn’t the nerve to sit in a different compartment. The journey back to London was certainly different from our journey down when Mary had been looking for ‘somebody lively’. Neither Rose’s ma nor Aunt Amelia even remotely resembled lively people. In fact, judging by Mrs Lawton’s dour expression and few grudging remarks, she held us personally responsible for her daughter’s misfortune.