Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance

by Margaret Powell

  Mr Kite, irritable as usual when Miriam gave an unasked for opinion, said, sarcastically, ‘Is there any incident that occurred in the East End of London when one of your numerous relations wasn’t around to record it?’

  I hid a smile; it was true that Miriam often related lurid stories of long ago events in London’s East End.

  Somehow I couldn’t see my kitchenmaid remaining in domestic service, she wasn’t the type; she’d no idea of respecting the upper servants, of keeping to the rigid hierarchy below stairs. Her mother had told her that life below stairs was lively, that high jinks went on between the servants when they were off duty. Miriam complained that it wasn’t like that where we were, it was dull.

  ‘The only kind of place where you would see “high jinks”, as you call it,’ I said, impatiently, ‘is where there is a huge staff that includes several men servants. Not in a place like this where there are only seven living in, and only one of them a male; you can’t expect Mr Kite at his age to indulge in high jinks. Miriam, you’ve no idea what service could be like, this place is the cream. If you had worked under some of the cooks I’ve had over me, harsh tyrannical slave-drivers, and had to sit at table in the servants’ hall with upper servants that demoralised you, then you might have cause to complain. It’s because I’m young and remember those days, that I’m easygoing with a kitchenmaid. Why, even when the cook came back from her free evening I’d have to wait on her; take off her shoes, carry hot water along to her bedroom, make her a cup of tea. The only personal chore you do for me is to bring me a cup of tea in the morning. As we have a bathroom, none of you under servants have to bring us hot water. I know that you don’t like Mr Kite; but, let me tell you, that in spite of his being prim, prosy and oracular, he’s a sight better than some butlers I’ve known who seemed to imagine that below stairs was a Principality and they the rulers of it.’

  Miriam had to listen to this long speech, but I could tell from her expression that none of it really registered. All right, my girl, you just wait, I thought, it won’t be long before I leave to get married, you might not be so lucky with the next cook.

  Of course domestic service was changing. What with income tax, the cost of living and domestics demanding higher wages, far fewer households could afford to employ a staff of twelve to fifteen. My mother told me that in some of the very large establishments a butler could easily increase his wages by perks. Money on the empty bottles, commission from the shop where he ordered the cigars and, of course, tips from the guests at dinner parties. Mother was a cook in a house where the butler, in addition to the usual perks, had permission to buy necessities for his pantry such as green baize, chamois leathers, rouge and plate-powder for cleaning the silver, and soft cloths for wiping the glasses. As he was never asked to show the bills for these things, quite a bit extra was added.

  About two weeks before I finally left domestic service to get married, we three, Rose, Mary and I had an evening in the West End, but it wasn’t an unqualified success, mainly because of the absence of the usual reason for going there, to have fun with the opposite sex. Rose had insisted that we do the evening in style, by taking a taxi to Piccadilly and having a dinner at Lyons Corner House there. The food, wine and service were excellent, the band played melodious and romantic airs and, with Rose being so pretty several admiring glances came our way. But we didn’t consider ourselves free to take advantage of the ‘come-on’; Rose because she was married, I because I very soon would be and Mary because she was faithful to her Conrad. Most of our male conquests were measured by the degree of generosity they showed in buying us chocolates, a decent seat in the cinema and a drink afterwards. But in return for this they expected, and we were prepared to give, a certain amount of petting such as kissing and hugging in dark corners; certainly nothing more than that, though occasionally more was attempted. No doubt the daughters above stairs were not required to give anything in exchange for an evening’s entertainment, but then their escorts had not needed to work long and arduous hours to acquire enough money to take a girl out. Still, although three females on their own inevitably lacked the sparkle that male company provided, we enjoyed the evening in our own way. It was the last such evening for me for many years; a milkman’s wages allowing only for a beer and a bag of crisps at the local.

  * * *

  Yes, I married. Such a plain and dull statement it seems now, but at the time I was so grateful to get my marriage lines that I nearly framed them. Like a fairy-tale prince who’d roamed the world searching for a bride, only to return to his own home and fall in love with the wood-cutter’s daughter – who invariably proved to be a princess in disguise – so did I search for a husband only to find him in the milkman who called every day. I’d assumed he was already married so had not bothered to practise any blandishments on him. Of course he wasn’t a prince nor I a princess; but then real life is no fairy-tale.

  29

  And so I got married and commenced a way of life completely different from the life I’d known since I’d left school at thirteen. It was rather ironical that having just left ‘below stairs’, our first home happened to be rooms in a basement. In marriage, I tried to put into effect those principles of equality and partnership that to me were the basis of a happy marriage. I thought that the marriage ceremony itself was biased towards the husband with the injunction to ‘obey’, and the fact that he is not expected to wear a gold ring proclaiming to an army of women searching for husbands, ‘I am a married man, hands off’. Having myself a strong antipathy to wearing rings of any kind, I very soon left off wearing a wedding ring. In those days, that was a far greater step forward towards liberty and equality than was – in recent years – the ceasing to wear a bra. A bra-less woman who is wearing a wedding ring is still publicly a married woman, and it’s also patently true that over a certain age most women look better wearing a support, whereas not wearing a ring makes no difference to one’s appearance. Then I went to free educational classes one afternoon and one evening every week, without my husband; though when the babies arrived I had to give up the afternoon class, my husband not getting in from his milk-round until three o’clock. Later on, when the children went to school, I tried to get up a kind of social and, I was hoping, partly intellectual gathering with some of the mothers, meeting in our own homes; only to discover that most women – working-class wives at least – were as subservient to their husbands’ needs as ever we had been to our employers’ in domestic service.

  Inevitably, I saw much less of Mary and Rose. Mary occasionally came to tea but she preferred, as I would have done, to go as far as Streatham on her free afternoon; not only was it more of an outing, but the food was considerably more sumptuous. With three children in five years, I literally couldn’t afford the fare to see Rose. About a year before the outbreak of war, she called on us one evening – we were living in three rooms in Kilburn at that time. She brought Victoria Helen with her and I was surprised to see that now the child was older, she was also prettier. I could sense that Rose was simply bursting with news of some kind, and so it proved. She had, as she put it, that very day set foot in Redlands for the first and only time since she and the son of the house, had departed in the night.

  ‘Oh, Margaret, it was so strange seeing the place after all this time, I thought I’d never have the courage to go up the drive. And what do you think, Mr Hall opened the door. Who’d have thought he’d still be there? And afterwards I went downstairs, and Mrs Buller is still there and Mr Burrows.’

  Interrupting this seemingly nonstop flow, I asked the important question: why did she go there?

  ‘Well, Margaret, I had a letter from Vicky’s Aunt Helen, to say that Mrs Wardham – I can never get used to saying my mother-in-law – was very ill indeed, and that she’d like to see me and her only grandchild again. And I cried when I saw her, she looked so thin and white and could only whisper, and yet she tried to smile at Vicky. Oh, she was always such a nice lady. And, what do you think, Margaret, Gerald’s f
ather was in the hall and he looked as mean and hateful as ever. He wouldn’t even look at Vicky and never spoke a word to me. Miss Helen – ’ ‘your sister-in-law’ I interjected – ‘said that her father had never spoken to her since she left home, just the same as with Gerald.’

  Mary and I seldom mentioned Gerald’s name to Rose because she herself never spoke about him. We knew that she still refused to divorce him, but we’d no idea whether or not he was living with his partner’s wife. Now suddenly, Rose, perhaps under the stress of revisiting Redlands, said, ‘I’m sure that you and Mary think I’m mean and pig-headed because I won’t give my husband a divorce. You think what have I got to lose, he’d still support me and Vicky. You don’t see it my way. Why should I be an ex-wife? I’ve done nothing wrong. Why should Vicky, through no fault of hers, or mine, have a divorced father and another woman where her own mother ought to be. Weren’t we joined together in holy matrimony in a church? We’re legally married not only in the eyes of the law, but we are one in the eyes of the church.’

  In all this self-justification I could hear echoes of her mother’s sectarianism, her unloving and far from Christian attitude to anybody who strayed from the path of moral rectitude.

  * * *

  Towards the end of the second year of the war my husband was called-up; and then I, with our three sons, left London to live in Hove, my home town. I received an occasional letter from Mary and Rose, which dwindled eventually to a card at Christmas from Mary and nothing at all from Rose, who’d moved down to Devon with her daughter. Then quite suddenly, some months ago, I heard from Mary that Rose had died. It seems incredible to me that so many of that period have gone while I, who nearly died with a massive haemorrhage when I had a gastric ulcer, was knocked down by a car in the middle of the Fulham Road and have had cancer, am still alive and well. I must be, as my sister and I used to say about our mother, indestructible – though I don’t really want to live to ninety-four. Even Mary, though only a year or so older than I, has had two heart attacks and lives a very quiet life. Death through old age has taken some of the principal protagonists: the Wardhams, Van Lievdens, Rose’s parents and the older servants I knew. Gerald was killed in the last year of the war, and Miss Helen while driving an ambulance. Poor little Vicky, living in Devon to be safe from the air raids, was run over by an army lorry as she ran out of school. Mary never did marry, her Conrad, like his namesake, deciding he preferred to roam the high seas.

  When we met again after so many years, there was a great deal of ‘do you remember?’ We talked of many things; of a life that seems now so remote and alien it is as though it never existed. Like me, Mary is not afraid to talk of death; as she says, it is a journey that one starts upon from the moment of birth. And surely it must be the only journey that the older one gets, the more the speed towards journey’s end accelerates? If taken in time, as with mine, doctors can cure some forms of cancer; but for death they can only offer halts on the way. Three years from our golden wedding, my husband and I make jokes that perhaps sound macabre, though to us they are not. Sunday mornings, on the way to our ‘local’, we pass two cemeteries, the old one on the left, the new on the right. One Sunday he remarked that the new was filling-up rapidly – as is only natural in a town to which old people retire.

  ‘Don’t you worry, my love,’ I said, ‘there’ll be room for you. I’ll have you buried near to the road so that on the way to the local on my own, I can just throw the flowers over the wall to save me getting out of the taxi.’

  ‘What d’you mean, bury me? I thought we had equality in our marriage?’

  ‘That is equality, love. You’re five years older than me.’ And we laugh and hope we go together.

  Also by Margaret Powell

  Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey”

  Margaret Powell’s Cookery Book: 500 Upstairs Recipes from Everyone’s Favorite Downstairs Kitchen Maid and Cook

  About the Author

  MARGARET POWELL was born in 1907 in Hove, and left school at the age of thirteen to start working. At fourteen, she got a job in a hotel laundry room, and a year later went into service as a kitchen maid, eventually progressing to the position of cook, before marrying a milkman called Albert. In 1968 the first volume of her memoirs, Below Stairs, was published to instant success and turned her into a celebrity. She died in 1984.

  SERVANTS’ HALL. Copyright © 1979 by Margaret Powell. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN 978-1-250-02929-4 (hardcover)

  e-ISBN 9781250029287

  Previously published in London by Michael Joseph

  First U.S. Edition: January 2013