Climbing the Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  I hated saying it because we never mentioned things like that.

  He said, ‘All right then.’

  I said, ‘You wait at the top of the steps. Don’t move, will you? I shan’t be long.’

  So I went down – bought a ticket home and left him standing there. Just like his other girlfriend waiting. And I kept laughing in the train just as he had. Men!

  8

  THE ONLY TIME I nearly lost a girlfriend over a boyfriend was when Gladys and I shared one between us. We picked him up one Sunday afternoon in a Lyons’ teashop; the place was so crowded that the only empty seat was next to us and he came up and said with a rather attractive accent, ‘Could I please sit down at your table? It is the only place available.’ From the way he spoke we could tell he was a foreigner.

  Gladys, who was never at a loss where the opposite sex was concerned, got into conversation with him. We found out that his name was Jan de Beers and that he came from Amsterdam. He assured us that he was no relation to the diamond people of that name. He needn’t have bothered, because what with his appearance, which was by no means smart, and the fact that all he was having was one bun and a cup of tea, we knew that already.

  We were rather wary of foreigners, particularly Italians and Spanish, because we knew they came from very hot countries and the passion and heat went together. We felt they wouldn’t respect English girls. I know it sounds trite now, the word Respect, but it was a word that was continually drummed into us so we took notice of it then. If we met foreigners from the more temperate climates like America, New Zealand, or Australia these were quite all right because obviously they were more affiliated to us. They had the same colour of skin as we had. In those days, as far as we were concerned, anyone who had got the same colour skin as we had got must be all right. Mind you, we thought Indians were all right because they had lovely coffee-coloured skins and there was always the chance that they might be sons of rajahs or princes or things.

  Opposite the place where we were working the house had been taken over by the Government for Indian students; we never got any further than waving to them at night because of the caste system. They were educated enough to know that we were only servants and that it wasn’t going to do their prestige any good to be seen out with people like us. Apart from his bun and cup of tea Gladys and I weren’t surprised to find that this young man was no relation to the diamond people because we never found any young men who had got any money and we never expected to. For us it was enough that he was good-looking. He said he had been a steward on a ship that had gone backwards and forwards to and from South Africa but that the last time it had docked in Southampton he decided not to sign on again but to work in England for a while. I was a bit sceptical about this explanation because he seemed young to be a steward. I assumed that by the time you got to be a steward you would be at least twenty-five to thirty.

  Anyway he went on to say that he was working in a factory on night shift, the nature of his work he was unable to explain for some reason or another. Gladys said, ‘Is it secret work?’

  ‘Well, no,’ he said, ‘it’s not secret.’ But he wouldn’t explain what it was. He said his English wasn’t good enough. Later on I suggested to Gladys that he was probably only a night watchman. She got annoyed with me when I said that so I knew that she had already begun to like him – she always got annoyed if you made any detrimental remarks about a fellow whom she had begun to like. Even if he had a face like the back of a bus and no money or education this meant nothing to Gladys if she took to him.

  The moment Gladys met a young man she never failed to start weaving a romance around him. This I found strange considering how hard-headed she was and the fact that she came from Stepney; maybe Stepney was a place where you have got to weave romances and have a strong imagination because it was the only thing that enabled you to live there.

  Anyway this Jan de Beers took us to the pictures that night. He sat in the middle and bought us identical boxes of chocolates and after that the three of us went out together about half a dozen times.

  The occasion of the rift between Gladys and me was when she said that she was going to meet this Jan on her own one night. This meant I was to go out by myself. I was up in arms immediately, not because I had fallen for him but because I felt she was assuming that he would prefer to go out with her rather than me. And I couldn’t see that he’d shown any inclination to do this.

  Mind you there were the intervals when we each had to dive off to the loo and when I was gone he may have said something to her. I’ll agree he never said anything to me when she had gone to the loo, but that doesn’t mean to say he hadn’t said anything to her to the effect that a twosome might be better than a threesome.

  As regards looks there really wasn’t much to choose between Gladys and me, as neither of us was particularly good-looking. The only thing was with Gladys coming from Stepney as she did she could usually produce some very colourful stories about her life down there. This Jan was a very sober and sedate young man; he neither drank nor smoked and he told us he was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, which meant nothing to us, in fact Gladys shocked him because she said if the Church needed reforming there wasn’t much hope for the congregation. But perhaps because he was such a very moral young man he used to lap up all these lurid tales that Gladys would tell about life in Stepney.

  I used to think he was a spy compiling a book in secret about the social life of the working-class people in England: telling of the seamy side of life, and showing it wasn’t such a land fit for heroes as everyone was led to believe.

  However the funny thing about this fellow was that he didn’t really understand what Gladys was saying. Although he thought her tales were dreadful and immoral they didn’t have the same implications for him as they did for Gladys. For instance she used to tell about a woman who lived next door to where she did. This woman’s husband was a deck hand and whenever he came home it seems he got her in the family way, but while he was away she took on another man and they used to sleep together in the same room as the children. Jan said, ‘Oh, how awful,’ and you could tell he was shocked. Gladys said, ‘Yes, wasn’t it, but you see they had no other rooms.’ Jan thought it was awful them being immoral but Gladys thought it was only immoral because they were doing it in the same room as the children.

  Anyway I reckon I must have made my feelings pretty plain about Gladys and him going out without me, because on our very next evening out she told me he was bringing a blind date for me.

  I wasn’t very pleased about that because my experience of blind dates was that you really needed to be blind to be seen out with one. With all the surplus females about any young man who couldn’t get a girl by himself had something wrong with him. But I was wrong, for when we did meet my blind date he wasn’t too bad. Charley his name was and he was an under-steward with the P&O line. This Jan was lodging in this Charley’s house and Charley’s mother was Jan’s landlady.

  When we met, Charley said we were all invited to a party because his mother had just got married again, the third time this was, and the party was in a large room in a pub. I wasn’t too keen on parties as not only did you meet a lot of people you’d never met before and you fervently hoped you were never going to meet again, but whenever we went to a party we’d got to leave by nine-thirty just when things were warming up, which killed everything stone dead. Still we agreed to go. When we got there it was like all other parties, the usual seething mob of people meeting for the first time in what they think is a convivial atmosphere and feeling they’ve got to add their quota to it by drinking, laughing, singing, and talking, and putting on a complete change of personality from what they have in their own homes.

  Anyway we were taken up and introduced to this Charley’s mum and her third husband. I was astounded that she had ever been able to get one husband never mind three. I’d never in all my life seen such a fat woman; she must have weighed fully twenty stone. She’d got arms like legs of mutton, sever
al double chins and great mounds of flesh in front. The appendages that nature had endowed her with were resting somewhere down on her waist. This was mainly because she wore nothing to stop them. In those days bras were never heard of for the working class; you wore a thing called a liberty bodice which was very much like a strait jacket. All it did was suppress the mass of flesh and make it flat, but if you didn’t wear one at all, which she didn’t, anything you had was left hanging around in all directions.

  And yet all this massive weight was supported on the most slender pair of legs you have ever seen. She had lovely legs and she only took size four and a half in shoes so really if you just looked at her feet and legs, which was maybe all her husband intended to do, it wasn’t too bad.

  The new husband wasn’t at all a bad-looking specimen. You couldn’t help wondering what he saw in her, whatever induced him to marry this mountain of flesh. Leaving aside the physical difficulties of any amorous interludes, there was the fact that she had already got through two husbands. I’d be very suspicious of anyone who had got through two husbands.

  The first one had succumbed to an attack of influenza and the second fell off a ladder. He was a window cleaner. Later on, after I had got to know Charley’s mother a bit better, she showed me photos of her first two husbands. Unlike her third, they were certainly no oil paintings – a fact that she freely admitted.

  The first one, Henry, had a very short upper lip like a rabbit. I’ve seen children like that and it looks quite attractive on them but when they’re grown up it looks ludicrous. She said to me, ‘Henry not only looked like a rabbit; he was like one in bed, too. Our first night together could have been a fiasco because on our honeymoon when we got to the boarding-house they were full up and the only way they could make room for us was to turn their children out and give us their room. Unfortunately the beds were bunk beds.’ ‘Still,’ I said, innocently, ‘even from bunk beds you could hold hands.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Nature had endowed him so generously that I held a lot more than that. Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘and we managed. Of course I wasn’t as fat as I am now but I weighed all of fourteen stone even then.’

  I decided it was time to change the subject. ‘How did you meet your second husband?’

  ‘It was very soon after Henry died, in fact I met Frank at the funeral. He was a friend of Henry’s and he came round several times to console me for my loss. I’ve always been the sort of woman who must have a man around to cook and clean for; I’m lost without one. So we got married after four months. But then,’ she added, ‘I know that Henry would have wished it.’

  You know, it’s peculiar to me how many widows always seem to know just what their departed husbands would have wished for them. I knew a woman once who never listened to a word her husband said nor ever took his advice when he was alive, but once he had removed himself from this world (via a rapid descent from a cliff) based the rest of her life on what he would have said or thought. Being as she never gave him a chance to express any thoughts in life I wondered how she knew what his wishes were now he was dead. Anyway to get back to Charley’s mum.

  ‘How did you get on with Frank, your second husband?’ I asked her. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘he was a sad disappointment to me. No go in him at all, no stamina. He was always on about what a friend Henry had been to him, how much he missed him and the comfort he felt in being in Henry’s home amongst all the things he’d loved. I don’t know whether he included me amongst the things Henry had loved. If he did, perhaps he felt he shouldn’t show any enjoyment at using Henry’s property. No,’ she said, ‘Frank was always so mournful, in some ways it was a happy release when he fell off that ladder cleaning windows.’

  I don’t know if she meant a happy release for her or for Frank. I was interested to know how she would make out with her third husband but I got fed-up with waiting around for Charley to come back from his trips at sea. And so did Gladys because her Jan and my Charley teamed up on the same boat together and calmly sailed out of our lives. I mean it’s all very well saying absence makes the heart grow fonder but it’s got to be given a chance to get fond to start with. Otherwise it just makes the heart grow accustomed.

  9

  PHILOMENA KEMP WAS the parlourmaid in my first job in London. She was engaged to be married and her young man was named Fred Keatings.

  One Sunday, on Philomena’s afternoon off, it was raining cats and dogs so Mrs Bowchard, the cook, asked her what she was going to do. Philomena said, ‘Well, I’m meeting Fred but I don’t know what we shall do, it’s raining so hard.’ Neither of them wanted to spend money by going to the pictures or suchlike because they were saving up to get married. So Mrs Bowchard said, ‘Well, bring him in, that’ll pass the afternoon away and by the time you’ve had tea maybe the weather will have cleared up and you can go for a walk. That way it won’t cost you anything.’

  So in Fred came and we all sat down to tea. There were six of us altogether. Gladys the under-housemaid, Jack, our sort of handyman, the cook and me, and Philomena and her intended.

  Philomena was busy making her trousseau. Everybody made a trousseau in those days and you tried to have as many of everything as you possibly could. Philomena had bought no end of linen for her bottom drawer. Six of everything, sheets, pillowcases, towels, and she was making three of everything for underclothes. I don’t know why three – one on, one off and one in the wash I suppose. Mind you, if you were well-to-do you had far more than three of everything.

  Still, not only the rich had. I remember my mother telling me that when she was in service one of the maids had a dozen of everything. Calico of course they wore in those days. But, mind you, she’d been engaged for seven years, so I presume she had the time to make them. Philomena hadn’t, so she was making do with three.

  Crêpe de Chine was all the go in those days. There weren’t things like nylon or tricel or any of the man-made fibres that there are today. Crêpe de Chine was a lovely silky material, and at this particular time Philomena was making a nightdress of it. It was an eau-de-nil colour – a very pale green – with a low neck. I remember how daring we thought it was. None of us except Jack, who was a widower, had ever been married and we didn’t know anything about that kind of thing. She was sewing bows all down the back of it at intervals of about four inches which I thought was rather daft.

  Philomena was the youngest of sixteen children. Her mother had worked through the alphabet and that’s why she got such a peculiar name.

  She had a photo of her mother in the bedroom that she shared with the housemaid, and she was such a primlooking little woman. You wouldn’t have thought she’d had one child, let alone sixteen.

  Mind you, people did look more prim in those days. No make-up, your hair done up in a bun and your clothes covering almost every portion of your anatomy. You were bound to look prim. Nowadays so much shows that almost everybody knows what they’re buying before they even sample the goods in the marriage market.

  Once I said to Philomena, ‘Fancy your mother having sixteen children. She doesn’t look the type.’ She said her mother was so fertile that if she’d only kissed her father sixteen times in sixteen years she would have had sixteen children. I suppose she knew what she was talking about. She said her mother was a very religious woman and that she always read the Bible every night before she went to bed. She certainly needed to get strength from somewhere I reckon.

  Anyway back to the kitchen.

  After tea Philomena got on with her sewing while we sat around making ribald remarks about the low-necked nightdress. And then we chanted that little rhyme, ‘Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better.’ Her name was Kemp and his was Keatings so she wasn’t changing the letter; she was embroidering the initial K on everything. It’s one of those ridiculous, old wives’ tales but I partly believed it. When you are that age you believe anything.

  While we were going on in this way Jack, the handyman, suddenly said, ‘I well remember my wedding night.’ So we al
l pricked our ears up expecting either some very sentimental recollection or some very erotic one, preferably the latter as far as I was concerned. And the others were, too, I expect because we didn’t go much on sentiment in the servants’ hall.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we got married in a registry office. We had very little money and we couldn’t afford a proper reception. We hadn’t anywhere to live or any furniture, so we stayed on at my mum’s. We had a bit of a “do” in Mum’s front room and all the neighbours came in with crates of beer and bottles of wine and there was dancing and whatnot and about midnight I was blind drunk. I took my boots off and got into bed. I woke at about six and I suppose I was still fuddled from all the booze I’d had. I got out of bed, felt under it for my boots, put them on, crept downstairs in the dark the same as I’d done every morning, put the kettle on, made myself a cup of tea, picked up my sandwiches and went off to work. It wasn’t until I’d been at work about an hour or two and saw all my mates grinning at me and then kept on hearing them say, “Old Jack he looks tired today, doesn’t he? I wonder why Jackie looks so tired? He must be working too hard. You should take a holiday, Jack.” Then it came to me that I’d got spliced the night before. Well, when dinnertime came I ran all the way home. I’d never got there so quick in my life and I had three lovely courses for my dinner.’

  Well I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It bore absolutely no resemblance to the lovely bridal nights that I read about in Peg’s Paper, where the husband is so chivalrous to his bride that he carries her over the threshold and then they have a lovely candlelit dinner together. And then they go upstairs and the blushing bride goes into the bedroom, undresses on her own, puts on a lovely chiffon nightdress and sits up in bed with a bow in her hair and then a sort of veil is drawn over the rest of the proceedings. So old Jack’s account of his wedding night was like nothing I’d ever heard before.