‘No!’ he roared with scoffing laughter. ‘Gardener’s boy more like!’
He was tickled to death by my remark, and though obviously disinclined for further conversation, continued to give vent to spasmodic guffaws as we rattled and bumped along the narrow Devonshire lanes, bright with the first green of spring.
Eventually we turned to the left through an open lodge gate and drove up an avenue of oak trees which ran alongside a large park. We came to some iron gates, and I just caught sight of a low grey stone house at the end of a gravel drive before we swung away uphill to the left. We passed a farm and, describing a circle, arrived via the back drive and stables at the kitchen entrance of Chilford House.
‘Here yew be,’ said the gardener’s boy. ‘In yew go.’
I got out, heaving my luggage after me, and he drove away at once, leaving me standing forlornly on the gravel with a tin suit-case at my feet.
The door was open so I stepped inside and advanced apprehensively down the dim red-flagged passage to the unknown regions beyond.
Chapter Nine
MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS of Chilford House were so confused that it took me one or two days to get everything sorted out, days which passed in a whirling panic of new faces, voices, and masses of food. I thought at first that I was going mad, because there seemed to be more to do than I had ever imagined possible. However, when I stopped being hysterical about the whole thing, and the mists cleared a little, I saw that by systematic concentration I might succeed in saving my reason. My work was only cooking, and though it involved coping with the nursery and kitchen meals as well as the dining-room it made it easier to apply some sort of method. I calmed down after a while and was able to take stock of my situation.
Chilford House was divided into two parts by the green baize swing-door which separated the kitchen regions from the abode of the Gentry. My life, of course, was centred on the inferior side of that door, and indeed I hardly went through it all the time I was there. Although I had nothing to do with ‘them’ on the other side, they were the subject of so many intimate and derogatory comments in the servants’ hall that there was not much I didn’t know about them.
My mistress, Lady W—, was a semi-invalid lady of nearly eighty, who had long handed over the reins of government to Mrs Lewis, the housekeeper. She was the mob cap and shawl type of old lady, and spent most of her time sitting in a basket-chair with a high hood back to it, like a Punch and Judy show. I only encountered her after I had been there a week, when I fell off the under-housemaid’s bicycle right under the nose of her Daimler as it turned out of the drive on its way to evening church. She had not the slightest idea who I was, but smiled graciously, and, lowering the window, hoped I wasn’t hurt. Little did she know that it was I who was responsible for those creamed sweetbreads that she loved, or for that matter one or two little errors such as overdone beef, lumpy sauces, and burnt porridge, about which Mrs Lewis had been instructed to ‘speak to me’.
Sir Harold W— was slightly younger than his wife and still quite hale. He ambled about in a tweed jacket with leather patches all over it and a sloppy, slobbering spaniel at his heels. He did himself extremely well, and after the third glass of vintage port had turned him a rare old mulberry colour there would be talk of apoplexy in the servants’ hall.
The house at the moment was filled with their children and grandchildren whom I never got properly sorted out. Their son and two daughters, all married, were staying over Easter with their young in various stages of childhood, pimply adolescence, or maturity. I caught an occasional glimpse of a young man in a racing car, or a buxom girl pounding up the back drive on a huge grey horse with enormous feet. Various children buzzed into the kitchen at odd times during my first few days and said: ‘Where’s Mrs Munny? Who d’you think you are?’ grabbed a cake or anything handy and rushed out again before I could introduce myself.
Much more fascinating than the family was the staff, who were gradually sorting themselves out from a rather terrifying mass of humanity into individuals. Mrs Lewis lived a life apart, suspended as it were permanently in space between the upper and lower regions in a bedroom and sitting-room of her own. She even had her meals carried there on a tray by Nellie, the under-housemaid, and only descended to the kitchen to order the meals and quiz into the larders and store cupboards.
The rest of her life which was not occupied with letter writing and linen cupboards was spent, apparently, in prayer.
‘Locks herself in,’ Nellie was saying one day as we all sat at the table in the servants’ hall over a huge lunch of pork – ‘praying away like nobody’s business – praying to the devil, I should think – the old cow.’
‘Now then, my girl,’ this from Dawkes, the butler, ‘mind your tongue.’
‘You mind your own business,’ retorted Nellie, who had no respect at all for the conventions. Besides Dawkes and Lady W—’s personal maid, Miss Biggs, there were two parlour-maids and a head housemaid who all came above her on the social scale. I wasn’t quite sure where I came in. For some mysterious reason all cooks, whether married or not, like to be addressed as ‘Mrs’, and I was universally known as ‘Mrs Dixon’, which, though it made me feel rather illicit, gave me quite a standing. Dawkes ignored Nellie and offered Miss Biggs another slice of pork. She was a withered old thing, who had grown so grey and wizened in Lady W—’s service that her corsets didn’t fit her as well as they used to and made her high-necked dress of lavender silk stick out like a shelf before and behind. Her two pen-chants were for platitudes and food, and she now attacked a tempting piece of crackling with zest, but it proved too much for her ancient teeth and had to be spat genteelly out behind her hand.
There was certainly no stint of food in this house, and I wondered what Lady W— would say if she had any idea of the waste that went on and the innumerable little newspaper parcels that found their way to village homes under the coats of chars, pantry-maids, and even telegraph boys. Almost every day I cooked a big joint for the kitchen alone, and Dawkes sat at the head of the table and carved it as if he was cutting up bodies.
He had one of those hungry-looking death’s-head sort of faces with deep-set eyes, and was a complete dual personality.
On the farther side of the baize door he was apparently the perfect stage butler, and in spite of his rather criminal appearance was highly prized by his employers for his efficiency and loyalty to the family. In the servants’ hall, however, though he occasionally, for form’s sake, rebuked ‘the girls’ for an indiscretion, he was a perfect sink of slanderous gossip about the entire family, and anyone else who came to the house. He was a good actor, that man, he even had a special voice which he used when he was being a seneschal – I could hear it sometimes floating through from the dining-room. When he was relating a juicy piece of scandal to us, pop-eyed with eager appreciation, his accents would become the lowest of the low, and his expressions not always suitable for the youthful ear of Polly, the kitchen-maid, who, however, was so simple that she didn’t really take it all in. It made me feel very superior to have someone to boss, even such a half-witted creature as she was. She was not much practical use as she would get into a panic if spoken to sharply.
I, being myself in a frenzy to get things done in time, yelled: ‘Hurry up with shelling those peas, for heaven’s sake!’ She would drop everything and rush about wildly with her apron over her head.
‘Lor!’ she would scream, running round the kitchen in small circles. ‘Oh! whatever shall I do? Oh, Mrs Dixon, don’t hustle me, I feel ever so queer!’
I wondered why such a mad creature was kept on, but apparently a kitchen-maid’s life is such hell that no normal girl will take it on.
She cherished a dog-like passion for the chauffeur, whose name, appropriately enough, was Jim Driver. He had a room over the garage, but being a bachelor took his meals with us, and Polly could hardly eat a thing for staring at him. He was a young man of about thirty whose slight tendency to boils on the back of the neck wa
s counteracted by bright blue eyes and a tinge of Irish in his speech. Apart from the embarrassing Polly, whom he ignored, he distributed his favours impartially among the girls, treating me at first with the deference due to my married name and recent arrival. He had no rival as Dawkes was definitely out of the market. He took no interest in women as such, though he was reputed to have at least two wives secreted in different parts of England.
I think it will give a clearer idea of my life in this intriguing household if I run through the events of one particular day, picking one at random from those that stand out in my memory and starting at the chill bleak hour of seven o’clock when the alarm cut shrilly into my dreams.
I had been at Chilford House about a week, and no longer spent a minute or two of semi-consciousness wondering where I was. My little room, with its sloping attic ceiling that stunned you if you sat upright in bed, was by now quite familiar, but this morning as I travelled my eye round the room from where I lay I reflected that it could never really be made a home from home. I had stuck a lot of photographs about, and even stolen some flowers from the garden after dark, but nothing could disguise the blackness of the iron bed or the yellowness of the chest of drawers and vaguely indecent-looking wash-stand. Old-fashioned, cheap wooden furniture has a peculiar smell, a sort of indefinable mixture of acid and old boots, and I had to sprinkle a great deal of lavender water about. In spite of this I got such a mania about the chest of drawers that I thought it was infecting my clothes, so I kept most of them in the tin suit-case under the bed. Its lock now took a piece of skin off my ankle as I put my feet on to the tatty little red mat, and I hopped painfully over the bare boards to take a look at the day. The view from my window was the chief attraction of my Royal suite. I looked out over a long lawn, cut in three terraces, with a lily pond in the middle, and ending in a ha-ha wall which dropped into the park. I could see a few deer grazing among the scattered oaks, which were the only things that broke my vista of green, until the park ended with a jumble of roofs and a steeple that was the village. ‘Very sharp for the time of year,’ I said to myself, shivering, in spite of the sun which was picking out the dew with a dancing sparkle. It was too cold to do more than wash my face before putting on one of my vast aprons over a layer of very unglamorous woollen underwear that was a relic of the Yew Green days. After my usual battle with the mirror – it would swing forwards all the time and present me with its back view – I got my hair and face done – and hurtled down the back stairs to my kitchen. It was warm there, because the huge fire in the range was never allowed to go out; it heated the water and did all the cooking that wasn’t done on the gas stove.
Polly was before me and working away like mad. It was her job to clean the kitchen before breakfast. Nellie, who rose early to lay fires, used to see that she got up, and would chivvy her down to the kitchen. Once started off, she could work like a clockwork train, unless somebody threw a spanner into the works by shouting at her and making her panic.
‘Hullo, Mrs Dixon,’ she said, looking up from her pail and scrubbing-brush on the floor. ‘I’d a lovely dream last night.’
‘Did you, now?’ I said, hurling coal on to the glowing remains of last night’s banked-up fire. ‘What about?’
‘About him – Mr Driver, I mean. ’E come right up to me and kiss me, ever so gentle, and what do you think he says?’
‘Go on, Poll, tell us.’
‘“Polly,” he says, “you are my dream girl, I love you,” he says, just like that – then I come all over faint and sorter melt in his arms. Cor, it was lovely.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Well, I wake up then and take a look at me dream book, and it says, “To dream of a kiss from the beloved one is a sign of impending stomach disorder.” Still, it was a lovely dream.’
She returned to her scrubbing, still wrapped in a reminiscent ecstasy, and I put an enormous kettle on the stove and started to cut bread and butter for the innumerable trays of early morning tea that had to start going upstairs from seven-thirty onwards.
Nellie and Rose, the head housemaid, were responsible for this, and they had a slate which hung in the pantry where the little trays lived on which they wrote down what time everybody had to be called. Rose, who was an unimaginative but conscientious girl with a suet-pudding face, would write the names and times in a laborious script, giving full titles where necessary: ‘Major-General Sir Robert W—, Bart, D.S.O., 8.15. The Right Reverend Bishop of Bradshaw, 8.30 – brown bread and butter,’ were current entries. The flippant Nellie would add comments underneath, such as ‘Sour puss’, ‘Bald as a coot’, or ‘Pot-belly’. She said it helped her to remember who was who.
All I had to do was to fill the teapots from the kettle and plank two or three slices of bread and butter on each tray as they brought it in.
Soon after this I started one of my frenzies. Nursery breakfast was at eight-thirty and the dining-room started at a quarter to nine, not to mention a coddled egg and melba toast for Lady W—, which Miss Biggs would come creaking into the kitchen to collect when the panic was at its height. This morning was worse than usual. I generally tried to give the nursery something that I was going to cook for the dining-room so that I could do it all together, but today Mrs Lewis had ordered kidneys and mushrooms, which the nurses didn’t fancy for the children, and scrambled eggs which couldn’t be cooked before they were wanted. I decided to give them sausages and bacon, so I hoisted Polly from the floor to cut off bacon rinds and discovered that the big frying-pan that I wanted to fry the sausages in had not been washed, and bore traces of yesterday’s smelts. I didn’t dare tick her off in case it should send her queer, and I had no time to clean it myself, so I threw the sausages into the fishy fat and hoped for the best.
Nellie came in with one of her trays and said cheerfully: ‘What a stink,’ but I had no time to talk to anyone as I was trying to core kidneys, grill toast, heat porridge, make coffee, and watch the sausages and bacon all at the same time, as well as keep an eye on Polly, who was now peeling mushrooms with a dangerously sharp knife.
The least pleasant of the children, a smug little beast called Leonora, came prancing in at this point with her round face shining between tight sticking-out pigtails.
‘Good morning, cook,’ she remarked patronizingly. ‘Nanny says she would like you to do some fried tomatoes for breakfast.’
‘Oh, tell Nanny to go to the devil,’ I said, and immediately regretted it, for the brat gave vent to a delighted ‘Ooh!’ and rushed off to repeat the naughty word. An infuriated nurse soon came bustling in, crackling with starch and indignation, saying: ‘I don’t wish to make trouble, cook, and if Leonora was not such a truthful child I could only hope that she had invented what she told me you said to her. I really must ask you to be more careful – such rudeness – a shocking example for children.’ I hastily changed the subject. Banging a loaf of bread about and flourishing the bread-knife to put her off her stroke I said:
‘I can’t do you tomatoes, Nurse, because I haven’t got any. William hasn’t brought them in yet.’
‘Oh, well, that’s a pity I’m sure. What are you giving us? Sausages? I’m not very keen on sausages for growing children, you know.’
She was a college-trained nurse and full of theories about food values, so I got rid of her by telling her that sausages were well known to contain all four vitamins, A, B, C, and D, to which she replied, ‘Tchah!’ and left the room in a fury.
That uniformed body of females, ‘the Nurses’, were always having a feud with someone. There were actually only three of them at Chilford House, but they made up for that by being an infernal nuisance. When they were not up against their employers about some detail of child upbringing they were making our life hell by sending back food from the nursery and demanding absurd delicacies at the most inconvenient times, not to mention flying in a horrified body to Mrs Lewis at the sight of a tiny speck of dust on the nursery floor. They were also incessantly at war with the children,
who conducted a well-organized and admirable campaign for their discomfiture. They would hide in the tops of thick trees and call down mocking personalities as the nurses passed below, and cryptic notes hinting at shady pasts and unbelievable vices were left lying around all over the house.
Separately, these nurses may have been perfectly charming, but as a body antagonism seemed to be a parti pris with them.
Miss Biggs came into the kitchen as I was piling the nursery breakfast on to a huge tray for Rose to take in, snatching the dining-room coffee off the fire with one hand, just as it was boiling over.
‘Good morning, Mrs Dixon,’ she said, arranging Lady W—’s breakfast on her tray with maddening deliberation and accuracy of detail. ‘Quite at sixes and sevens this morning, aren’t we?’ Mildred and Jessie, the parlourmaids, one a pretty local girl and the other a plain but efficient machine, came in for the dining-room breakfast before it was ready, and I pointed righteously to the huge clock which showed twenty minutes to nine.
‘That clock’s slow, always has been,’ said Jessie.
‘Hurry, Mrs Dixon, lovey, us’ll have Mr Dawkes after we else,’ said Mildred anxiously.
Even when they had departed, weighted down by trays heaped with mountains of food and gallons of coffee – why do people eat so much on holiday? – my work wasn’t done. It was now time for the staff to have their breakfast, and, said my stomach, high time too. A mass of sausages had been sizzling on the range, but everybody always fancied a nice bit of fried bread, so that had to be done, and there was still Mrs Lewis’s tray to be sent up. I used to keep something back from the dining-room for her, she couldn’t very well say that it wasn’t good enough, though she was very particular and would often refuse to eat what we were having in the kitchen. At last everything was done, down to the enormous brown pot of tea, and I slid thankfully into my worn plush chair at the servants’ hall table. I used to keep some coffee back for myself, for in my opinion no day is a day that doesn’t start with at least two cups of it. The other servants regarded me askance over this, they felt the same way about their cup o’ tea, and ‘Coffee?’ they said, ‘never touch it. Poison to the kidneys.’ But oh! the joy of those first few mouthfuls, bringing comfort to the aching void created by rising early and working feverishly on an empty stomach.
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