And Fred Keatings, he sat there quiet all the time. Never a glimmer of a smile while Jack told his story. He was such a sober, respectable young man. He sort of oozed sobriety from every pore and I could see that he took a very poor view of Jack.
Mind you, Jack knew that Fred Keatings didn’t like him. He couldn’t resist making sarcastic remarks to Fred. One thing that used to annoy Fred particularly was old Jack asking if he was related to The Keatings, the makers of the famous powder that killed bugs, fleas, and beetles.
For my part I wouldn’t have minded a bit being related to The Keatings or having some shares in their concern because they must have sold gallons of their powder. I know in my own home, owing to the slummy places that my dad had to go, doing his painting and decorating, we always had enough fleas to fill a dozen circuses. My mother used to wage a perpetual war on them. She used to powder the bed with Keatings so that every time you made it a miniature sand storm went up.
Perhaps Fred had an aversion to fleas. But one look at Fred and you knew that no self-respecting flea would ever bite him. He was such a poor specimen of humanity that he’d never provide a happy hunting ground. He was a wet, phlegmatic kind of person. You could never visualize him showing any kind of emotion let alone a passionate one. Yet Philomena used to say that he was very passionate, that she had to fight to keep him on the straight and narrow. But he certainly never showed any signs of that in the servants’ hall.
He used to sit there drinking a cup of tea with his little finger sticking out at right angles and his hands were so pale they looked like white slugs to me. He used to make me shudder. And then there was the nicety of his speech and his obsequious manners. I suppose these were the result of his job. He was a shop assistant in a very large draper’s stores and he’d been doing this kind of work from the time he left school. He started to work in a gentlemen’s hatters as errand boy and he gradually worked his way up till he was a sort of chief shop assistant. His greatest ambition was to become a floor walker. Personally I thought it was a terrible ambition.
They don’t seem to have floor walkers these days. I suppose the aisles are so full of people there wouldn’t be enough room for a floor walker to manoeuvre. But in those days with less people around and less money around, it was more the well-to-do who patronized these kind of shops and I well remember the floor walkers in their frock coats – snootiest people imaginable, they seemed. But they were very discerning.
They could size up a customer the minute they saw one. The deference in their manner when greeting somebody who looked as though they hadn’t a ha’penny to their name but they sensed came from a titled family! Whereas someone smart with probably a lot of money would only get slight attention. They graded their civility according to the aristocratic position of their customers.
To listen to Fred’s conversation you would have thought that all the nobility and gentry came up to Fred’s counter in preference to anybody else. He’d say, ‘Who do you think I served this morning?’ Nobody cared of course but you knew that you were going to hear just the same. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘Lady Betty – now there’s a real lady for you.’ What an unreal one was I never did find out. ‘She gave me such a sweet smile.’ What were you supposed to say to that? Then he’d say, ‘The Duke of Walton was in trouble over a tie for his young nephew, the Honourable Peter. The Duke is elderly, you know, and he doesn’t know what young men like today.’
Well, I thought poor old Philomena.
Personally I felt that if he was the last man in the world I would never have married him though the time was to come, believe me, when if I could have got a Fred Keatings I would have been glad. I thought I’d had it. Once or twice I thought I was going to be on the shelf – for ever.
But nevertheless at that time when I was only sixteen I was full of hopes. I wasn’t going to marry anyone like Fred Keatings. I could see Philomena, slippers all ready for him. ‘Well, dear, what kind of day did you have today?’ And there she’d have him trotting out about who he’d served and what they’d said and the sweet smiles they’d given him. Day after day and year after year it would go on till he got to be a floor walker. Then it would be ten times worse. That’s what I thought at the time.
But alas for Philomena it wasn’t to happen.
There they were, all set, introduced in the proper way – no picking up – making all her trousseau with her bottom drawer ready, and Fred Keatings with his eyes upon becoming a floor walker and a model of propriety. Yet they were never to marry.
A few days after our kitchen party Fred Keatings, that model of rectitude, was arrested for indecent exposure. And that was a heinous crime in those days.
Mind you, it happened to me once or twice and I always laughed. I just couldn’t help it. It looked so funny. Nowadays they are given medical treatment but they didn’t do things like that then. They just got put in prison. Fred was sent down for two years because it was discovered that it was his third offence.
And poor Philomena. She went right round the bend – off her head – and she had to be put into a mental home. Talk about losing your head for a man. Today people would probably take the thing in their stride and the wedding would have happened. But then of course it was a disgrace and anyone who was disgraced became a social outcast, an untouchable. It shows too the importance a girl attached to getting married, so that losing a boyfriend could send her out of her wits.
10
THE NANNIES I particularly remember were from the time when I was a kitchenmaid in London. The people I worked for had a married daughter with three children living with them, which meant having both a nanny and an under-nurse. We disliked all nannies, nurses and under-nurses because they were neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herrings as you might say. They were not the kind of people you worked for and they were not of the kind of us. They were sort of out in limbo. Perhaps this wasn’t true of the under-nurse. She got the worst of both worlds – not rated by the nanny and we classed her as if she were, as she had to be with the nanny. Yet even nanny wasn’t one of them because she had to work for her living. I suppose in fact nannies didn’t have much of a life, but we thought they did, and we disliked them intensely in the kitchen because we had to prepare different meals for them.
The nurse would come down and tell the cook what menu she wanted, and cook would be awkward and bloody-minded because as far as the cook was concerned only one person should give orders and that was the madam. But if the nurse thought that the day’s meals were unsuitable for the children she’d come down and say so and others would have to be cooked specially for them. Then when the nurse went upstairs cook would explode and I got the blast. No, we didn’t like nannies.
But as I say the under-nurse really had a horrible time of it because she was stuck up there with only that nurse for company and she had to work hard. There was a day nursery and a night nursery; the under-nurse had to scrub both these out each day and when I say scrub I mean scrub, because in those days there was linoleum on the floor. She had to do the washing for the children, the napkins and the rougher stuff, while the nurse did the dainty things.
I hadn’t been at that job long when another baby was due, which made it four children. Never in all my life had I seen such a carry-on about somebody having a baby. I wouldn’t have believed people could have made all that fuss. To begin with there was a shuffling round of rooms because our nurse didn’t take children from birth – so another nurse arrived, took her room, and ours had to sleep in with the under-nurse. And the room had to be redecorated which was another thing that annoyed our nurse because, as she said, it hadn’t been redecorated for her who had been with the family for three years, so why should it be redecorated for someone who was only going to come for a month or two. I said to the cook, ‘She’ll reap the benefit when the nurse has gone, she’ll go back into it.’ I should have kept my mouth shut. The cook picked up the carving knife and made a gesture and uttered something too horrible to repeat.
Anyway two weeks
before the baby was expected this nurse who took babies from birth was installed – so you can just imagine what it was like in the household: two nurses and an under-nurse, three kids and one on the way. That was when I made up my mind never to go to another place where they had children. With the hostility that there was between this new nurse and the old one, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Yet they had to be outwardly polite. It was ‘Good morning, Nurse’ and ‘What do you think of this, Nurse?’ But the old nurse wouldn’t let the new one do anything so she just sat around getting in the way, waiting for the baby to be born. And what with the fact that the baby was a week late as well – she was left hovering for three weeks. The only one that benefited was the under-nurse because our nurse joined forces with her against the other one, so for once in her life everything that she said and did was right. This changed of course as soon as the other nurse went.
Then after the baby was born, yet another nurse came – a wet nurse to feed the baby, you see. She had a month-old baby of her own but she came in several times a day to feed ours as well. I must say I found this procedure most peculiar at the time, but I didn’t after I’d had my first baby because I had so much milk I used to chuck the stuff down the sink although I was feeding my baby. People talk now about how good these cans of food are. They start ramming them down the baby’s neck when they’re two months old and they say how much healthier babies are for it. I had so much milk that I fed my first child until he was eleven months old and he never had anything else. It was so cheap and we were hard up, and it was clean and hygienic. I never had to bother about washing out bottles and as I say I had so much of it I often wished I knew another baby that I could have given it to. I didn’t realize then that you could go up to a hospital with it and that they’re always glad to accept it.
But this woman got paid for it. I used to wonder, did her own baby suffer? If somebody had to go short it obviously wasn’t going to be the baby that she was being paid to feed. She only came for a month though – after that the baby was put on to one of these patent foods.
But during those weeks what with two nurses and an under-nurse and a wet nurse, absolute pandemonium reigned. I didn’t help matters because one day I had to tell our nurse that the wet nurse had arrived.
So I said, ‘Daisy’s here.’
She said, ‘Daisy?’
I said, ‘Yes, you know, Daisy the cow, who comes to feed the baby.’
Talk about lese-majesty. She drew herself up to her full height. ‘How dare you,’ she said. ‘Associating the sacred rights of motherhood with being a cow. It’s nothing like being a cow at all. It’s giving life to someone.’
She went on like that for about five minutes. I went down to the kitchen and told the cook, looking for sympathy.
‘Serves you bloody well right,’ she said.
I suppose it did.
Nowadays, as I say, mothers don’t like feeding their babies. They think there’s something distasteful about it. It’s these damned little cans of food – that’s what it is. If they had to do what we had to – put stuff through the sieve and mash it all up once we put the baby on solids, they’d feed them. I used to sigh for the days when I fed them myself and had no bother at all.
Then of course well-to-do ladies didn’t feed their babies because it ruined their figures. It spoiled the shape of their bosoms. Perhaps it doesn’t nowadays because of the bras they’ve invented. But I really don’t believe that anyone can feed a baby, not for any length of time, and still have the same-shaped breasts afterwards.
And again at that time no well-to-do lady who went to a lot of social functions was going to be pestered with having to feed her baby every three to four hours. Why did they pay out money for nurses and under-nurses if they were going to be tied to the baby themselves?
The whole paraphernalia of their way of having a baby simply amazed me and Gladys. Her mother had had swarms of kids. Madam stayed in bed a whole fortnight. A fortnight! My mother used to stay in six days and Gladys said her mother used only to stay three days. Who was going to look after the other mob? Her mum used to come down and start scrubbing and it never did her any harm. And then she fed the babies as well as doing all this work in the house.
They say once you start work you can’t feed the babies, but it’s all my eye and Betty Martin. Of course you can – especially if you drink a lot of beer like Gladys’s mum did. And I don’t blame her for drinking it either. If I was living in Stepney and had had swarms of kids I would be drinking beer all the time too.
Having a working-class baby was a very casual thing. You never made many preparations beforehand. Naturally you got a few clothes in for it and the midwife would call some time near the date. Nowadays too you get all this talk about new psychological methods and a husband being in the room at the time of birth because it’s good for him – it gives him a kind of feeling of oneness with the mother and baby. They talk this high-faluting rubbish as though it was a new thing. In working-class households the husband always was there. My dad was – there was only him and the midwife. And he was kept running in and out with kettles of hot water because we didn’t have any hot water laid on. We only had an old sink and an outside lavatory. So Dad was in the room nearly the whole time. And so were other working-class husbands.
The way they talk now as though that’s why all babies are wonderful and that’s why there’s such a feeling of affinity between parents because the father was in the room when the baby was born – it’s all rubbish. There was no psychology as far as Dad was concerned – it was sheer necessity – lack of money. And as soon as the baby was delivered Dad did everything, the washing – and there’s a whole lot of washing after you’ve had a baby – and clearing up. He took over and the next day Mother would do as much as she could from the bed. Like preparing the vegetables. Anything she could do with her hands.
So when Gladys and I saw all this paraphernalia of having a baby as though it was something out of the ordinary, we wanted to spit. People had kids like a bet on the Derby – once a year. Well, why not if you can? And why was there all this fuss? It’s not as if having children was going to alter their lives. Where I was in service the mothers upstairs had nothing to do with their children. They saw them once a day. They never had the pleasure of them.
Surely to have the pleasure of children is to be with them when they’re young and to give them the love and security that they can only get by knowing that their parents care about them. It’s only then that you get something in return. It’s nothing to do with money. I don’t think these children were lucky – only in as much as they had all the food, the clothes and the toys that they wanted. But they weren’t lucky in having the kind of things that we had in our home without money.
I often think, looking back, and because of the letters I’ve had since I wrote Below Stairs, that we were the fortunate ones. I’ve had letters from people who were children in these opulent homes. They say, ‘We never had such a good time. You think because you were down there slaving away that you were the only ones that suffered, but you weren’t.’ One person wrote and said that she only saw her parents once a day when she went in the drawing-room at five o’clock after tea and that she had a cruel nurse, but felt so divorced from her parents that she was frightened to tell them how unkind she was, because she was sure that her parents wouldn’t have done anything about it except to tell the nurse what she’d said, and that she would be even more ill-treated. So you see, she wasn’t any better off than children in an orphanage who are given every material comfort but haven’t got some one person who really cares about them.
But the nurse where I was working – in spite of the fact that we didn’t like her – wasn’t like that. The children thought the world of her – so she must have been kind to them and given them love. I could tell by the way they used to run after her and climb over her. So although to us she seemed stand-offish and snooty she couldn’t have been so bad.
But what sort of life di
d she have to look forward to? They just lived for a time on borrowed affection. Then the children they had taken care of went away to boarding schools and they’d have to take another job and start all over again. What sort of existence was that? Although life below stairs was rough and ready, at least it was life. The rigid social divisions in any of the houses I worked in were generally carefully defined. You knew your place and you kept in it. You worked and played within certain limits and under certain terms and rules and it was seldom that these were ever broken.
I only remember one place where this happened. The goings-on there would have interested even Mr Sigmund Freud.
11
IT WAS AFTER I’d been in service in London for some years, I thought I’d like to be a bit nearer home for a change, so I came back to Hove and I worked for a Mr and Mrs Bishop.
It was a very peculiar kind of house in many ways. No one could say that they belonged to the gentry.
Mrs Bishop was a woman of about sixty who made herself up to look about thirty-five to forty and she did it extremely well. She led her own life – at the weekends at any rate, which was the only time they were in Hove. The house was filled with young men – young in comparison to her that is – and it was a very lively forty-eight hours indeed, though for most of the time Mr Bishop wandered around looking like a lost soul. But then he had his own little bit of fun during the week.
He would come down on his own to satisfy his particular aberration. And that was to inveigle one of the maids into his bedroom late at night when they were wearing their hair curlers. Then she’d sit on his bed while he fingered her curlers. That’s how he got his pleasure. He was what I believe they nowadays call kinky.
Another expression you hear today is ‘permissive society’ as though it’s something new. But the only difference from when I was young is that now this permissiveness applies to everybody – not just the rich. There’s always been a permissive society for the well-to-do because if you’d got rank or wealth it excused a multitude of evils. Also rank and wealth gave you the opportunities and the facilities to be permissive.
Climbing the Stairs Page 8