Climbing the Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  Take the kinky Mr Bishop. If he hadn’t had a house of his own and servants and hadn’t been able to come down and live alone with us in the week, he wouldn’t have been able to indulge in his peculiar habit of wanting to feel the servants’ hair curlers.

  The working classes couldn’t have done it. Well we didn’t have that peculiar taste. I suppose some of us had peculiar tastes but how, when, or where they could be satisfied is beyond me.

  And although the maids used to profit by this peculiarity of Mr Bishop’s by gifts of chocolates, stockings, and theatre tickets, we were contemptuous of him. We thought that somebody with his money and education shouldn’t indulge in these footling pursuits. That they should be above such things. We weren’t to know, as people do now, that this kind of obsession couldn’t be helped.

  Among ourselves we used to make fun of him and, when Mrs Bishop wasn’t around, wouldn’t give him the respect that we would a normal employer. We never used to call him Sir and we would grin like hyenas when we met him. Well, what more could he expect? But we liked him because he was pleasant, gentle, and kind.

  Yet after I’d been there about six months something happened that made me change my opinion of him completely. And it will show you how much I respected him when I tell you I never said a word of what I found out to another soul. And this at a time when precious little of interest or excitement came into our lives, so that we had to embroider the more mundane things to make them dramatic.

  It happened one night when I was coming home from a dance. I’d been with a boyfriend who didn’t bother to escort me home when he found that there wasn’t going to be anything on the end of it. After an evening out I always believed in making the position clear. You might just as well be friends when all’s said and done because some of them used to get very annoyed when they had taken me home and all they got for it was a goodnight kiss. I learnt this early on when one night I was being escorted back from another dance by a fellow. I didn’t take him right to the door – fortunately. We stood in a turning parallel to it and he began to get extremely frisky. He was about twice my size too. Well, I got very nervous – matters were getting out of hand — so I said to him I needed to go to the loo. So he said, ‘Where?’

  ‘I live the next turning to this. I won’t be long.’

  He said, ‘You won’t come back.’

  ‘Won’t come back?’ I echoed, making as though I was simply dying to come back. ‘Of course I’ll come back.’ I said, ‘You’ll wait here for me, won’t you?’

  So I dashed to the house, bolted the door and got out of that awkward situation. The excuse of going to the loo has been very useful to me on occasions. Perhaps that’s why they called it a convenience. That’s a bit of a deviation from my story but it accounts for me coming home from the dance alone.

  As I was saying, I was walking by the Hotel Metropole on the seafront, when who should be coming out of the hotel but Mr Bishop and a woman. She looked about forty – nothing particular about her – quite plain – and plainly dressed, too. It was all very embarrassing because I didn’t know what to do. I’d almost bumped into them. Mr Bishop said, ‘Good evening,’ and she looked a bit odd. I muttered something and that was that.

  But the strange part was that in the normal way when I’d got in I would have come out with it about seeing Mr Bishop with another woman. But I didn’t. I don’t know what restrained me then because I was quite young and hadn’t got much sympathy for anyone who deviated from the norm.

  I’d almost forgotten the episode when two or three days later I received a letter from a stranger and on reading it, it transpired it was from this woman. She asked me if I would go and see her at her flat in Brighton. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it can’t do any harm to see her.’ So I went on my day out.

  The first thing she asked me was, ‘Have you said anything about seeing me with Mr Bishop?’

  I said, ‘No, I haven’t said a word. It’s strange really because we do talk about him.’

  So she begged me not to either to the other maids or to Mrs Bishop. I told her of course that I wouldn’t. She didn’t have to implore me – I wasn’t going to say anything anyway. Now of course I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to spoil things for other people. Then she went on to tell me a story that could have come straight out of a novelette.

  Her name was Dora and she’d been a housemaid with Mr and Mrs Bishop many years ago. There was a son of the house who seduced her, got her into trouble and landed her with a baby. As soon as Mrs Bishop heard of it, although she knew it was her son who was responsible, she dismissed Dora without a reference. So as well as the stigma of an illegitimate child, she had no money and no chance to get another job. I asked her why she didn’t sue the son.

  She said, ‘Well how could I? By the time I’d had the baby he’d been sent to Australia as a ticket of leave man for forging his father’s cheques. In any case it would only have been my word against his and I wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

  It was always the same then. It was always the girl’s fault if she got into trouble. Nobody ever blamed the man. It was considered natural for a man to pursue and to get everything he could and if he could find a girl that was muggins enough to give it him – well, she deserved what she got.

  She went on, ‘I knew he was a bit of a ne’er-do-well but he told me he was emigrating to Australia and that he’d take me with him. But it was the old story. He didn’t care about me any more when I told him I was pregnant. And the next thing I knew was that he’d gone.’

  So I said, ‘What did you do then?’

  She’d written to Mrs Bishop asking her to help out with money but she never got a reply. She’d managed to borrow a bit but when the baby, a boy, was two months old she was at her wits’ end. There seemed to be no hope at all. And then out of the blue Mr Bishop wrote to her and suggested that they meet.

  She said, ‘He came to see me and was marvellous. He paid off my debts and set me up in this flat. And he’s looked after us both and paid for the child’s education. But the reason you saw us together is that now my son is married and I’m on my own Mr Bishop comes to see me once a week on a Wednesday night.’

  Well I couldn’t help grinning thinking about what might be happening.

  So she laughed, too, this Dora, and she said, ‘I know what you’re laughing at.’

  I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t really have asked you outright – but it’s the hair curlers.’

  We both went off into fits of laughter about this.

  Anyway it transpired that half of every Wednesday night was spent fixing and playing with hair curlers. They used them on each other – not only on their heads but in other places as well.

  ‘Don’t you get fed up with that sort of queerness?’ I said. ‘After all, it’s hardly the kind of thing that you expect to find in normal society, is it?’

  So she said, ‘Well, if normal society means that when you take a wrong step people treat you like dirt as I was treated, give me abnormality every time. Apart from this oddness Mr Bishop has always been kind and generous to me. He knows I’ve got another man friend and he doesn’t mind in the least so long as he can come here Wednesday nights.

  ‘For him,’ she said, ‘it’s an oasis of quietness after the racketty life that his wife leads.’

  I never saw her again after that, and although I never mentioned it to a soul I used to wake up at nights and roar with laughter thinking about an elderly man and a middle-aged woman experimenting half the night with hair curlers.

  But it showed, didn’t it, that it couldn’t really pay you to step outside your own social circle. If you did it was a near-certainty that you would be the one to get hurt.

  Mind you, even flirting with the trades people could have its dangers as I was to find out.

  12

  WHEN I WAS in domestic service we didn’t have any supermarkets but we certainly had super service and super food. No shopping had to be done by the cook. Occasionally if she went out in the afternoon s
he would look round the shops to see what new things were in. But she didn’t have to. The tradesmen called every morning. By tradesmen I mean the owners or managers or their assistants. They would take the orders, talk about any special things they’d got in and then later the errand boys arrived and delivered. The cook would make them come right into the kitchen and she’d examine what they’d brought and if it wasn’t right there would be no question of making do – she sent it back. For instance if you ordered a particular slice of rump steak or fillet steak or fillet veal and the cook thought that it wasn’t up to standard, she wouldn’t keep it; the errand boy would have to take it away and come back with something that she thought was.

  Incidentally Albert my husband was a butcher boy at one time; he said that often when they took something back all the butcher did was chop a lump off the end and return it again and it was always accepted.

  When the tradesmen called all the under-servants, the under-housemaid, under-parlourmaid and me, we used to try to make ourselves look as nice as possible. I noticed that the under-housemaid and under-parlourmaid always seemed to be below stairs at these times. The under-parlourmaid had a legitimate excuse to be down because of the butler’s pantry being there, but the under-housemaid’s work was upstairs.

  The under-parlourmaid used the butler’s pantry for washing up all the silver – none of it was washed up in the scullery. The silver and the afternoon tea things were washed up in the pantry. Then there were cupboards to put silver away in and green baize covers to fit everything into. There were shammy leathers galore for polishing and special cloths and papier-mâché bowls so that the silver didn’t get scratched. All very different from the stinking old sinks I had out in the kitchen.

  But back to our hovering around the tradesmen. It was really an absolute waste of time because the ones who called for orders were either already married or, if not, were far too old, and the errand boys that came with the things were always much too young.

  The butcher’s boy at my first place in London was the only errand boy I really fancied but unfortunately it was all too obvious that he didn’t fancy me. He was tall and handsome like an Adonis and he had wavy hair. He was a real heart-throb. Agnes the under-parlourmaid used to vie with me for his favours. She was a sentimental girl and had a real crush on him, but like me she was wasting her time. All her sweet words and languishing looks were repeated ad infinitum by the servants wherever he went. He had marvellous opportunities so you can be sure that he shopped around for the best and the easiest. I adopted a sort of a hard-to-get attitude, completely ignoring this Adonis – I thought that this might intrigue him enough to make him become interested in me. But what a hope! I might have been empty air for all the notice he took of me. When I think about it now it’s obvious that if you want to intrigue somebody you’ve got to look intriguing yourself and I certainly looked far from intriguing. Not many kitchenmaids could look intriguing, especially just after they’ve done the kitchen range.

  When I later became a cook I acquired a position of authority over the tradesmen and at one time I did contemplate a life of bliss with a fishmonger. Well, not a life of bliss exactly but life with a fairly substantial income. I know that sounds a materialistic approach to matrimony, divorced from the sort of romantic ideals, but unless you’re so violently in love that time and motion cease to exist, money does count. I mean, in exchange for a nice home, nice clothes, and good food you can look at any man through rose-coloured glasses. Well, I thought I could.

  This fishmonger, Mr Hailsham, certainly needed looking at through rose-coloured glasses. He resembled nothing so much as one of the large cod fish that he used to bring – considered very suitable for servants’ meals, being very nourishing, you know. His flesh was dead white and it was always cold, and he had tiny little expressionless eyes. But he had a very flourishing business. He used to supply far larger establishments than ours was and, according to Mr Hailsham, his father and his grandfather supplied the gentry and nobility. He showed me photos – so I suppose there must have been some truth in what he said.

  The only time Mr Hailsham showed any sign of animation was when we were talking about fish. You might think it was difficult to wax poetical over a salmon or a turbot but Mr Hailsham could. He used to go to the market every morning and he’d start off on a great rigmarole about looking into their mouths, studying their scales and their tails – ecstatic he used to get. And that’s why he got to look like his fish. You see, he lived, thought and breathed fish.

  He was about twenty years older than me so not unnaturally I assumed that he was married. One really cold morning I invited him in for a cup of coffee – what with the fish being so cold and him looking so cold I took pity on him. And he got a bit forthcoming. I found he lived with a brother and a sister and none of them was married. I kept on with the recipe of a cup of coffee and after a few weeks he thawed out even more and became quite friendly towards me. Then I commented on the fact that all three of them were still single.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my dear mother, God bless her, made us promise before she died to keep together and always help each other.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘she didn’t mean that you’d got to look after each other to the extent that you couldn’t ever get married? She couldn’t have meant that. After all the name’s going to die out if you don’t get married and with your business so long established you don’t want that to happen.’

  So he said, ‘Well, we’ve never had any inclination to get married up to now.’ And he looked at me in a meaningful way.

  At least I thought he looked at me in a meaningful way. I suppose it was a meaningful way – it was difficult to tell with his eyes. He certainly looked at me. So I continued to cultivate him, to sort of get closer to him, though the all-pervading odour of fish that hung around him was hardly an inducement for closer proximity.

  Then the other servants said, ‘You’ll never get him, you know. He’s been a bachelor far too long and his sister looks after them both too well.’

  This was a bit of a challenge. It’s amazing what a determined woman can do. I find even the most rigid and intractable of men lose their powers of resistance where a woman’s concerned. You’ve only got to look at Adam and Eve, haven’t you? – going back to Biblical days. Adam could have refused to bite the apple, couldn’t he? The reason he didn’t refuse it was because he knew that Eve had already had a large bite out of it and that she’d be banished from the Garden of Eden in any case and he didn’t want to stop there without her, so he thought he might as well have a bite too and then they’d both have to go. That’s the reason. Not because she really tempted him but because he thought what was the good of the Garden of Eden if he was living in it on his own?

  Mind you, I had to put in an awful lot of spadework to bring this Mr Hailsham up to scratch. Cups of tea and homemade cakes, and listening to long dreary anecdotes about the fish business and Mr Hailsham’s acumen and judgement and that he’d made it such a flourishing concern – not his brother. You see Mr Hailsham did the buying and the orders and the brother did the selling in the shop, and according to Mr Hailsham it was the buying that was the main thing because if you didn’t buy well you wouldn’t sell well. There was something in that, I think. Then when his sister was ill I made nourishing dishes for her – egg custards and things like that. It paid off eventually because there came the fateful morning when Mr Hailsham said to me, ‘Don’t call me Mr Hailsham, call me Cyril.’ Cyril – I ask you – anyone less like a Cyril I’ve never met in my life. And this was the prelude to Cyril asking me to go out with him on my next evening off. I agreed, though with some trepidation. I wondered what he’d look like when he was dressed up. But never in my wildest imaginings did I visualize the figure that I saw waiting for me at the end of the street when I went out. Talk about Beau Brummell and Beau Nash rolled into one. He was wearing spats and he had a flyaway bow, yellow shammy-leather gloves and a silver-topped cane, and he was holding a bouquet of flow
ers. Well, I nearly died of mirth. Talk about seeing Mr Hailsham the fishmonger turned to Cyril the fop. And yet despite this he still had the odour of fish pervading him and it was hard to associate this sort of Beau Brummell with the fishy smell.

  Anyway I went out with him on several occasions and eventually it led to an invitation to tea with his brother and sister. His sister was something of an invalid – she enjoyed bad health. They lived over the fish shop – quite a lot of rooms they had because there were two floors, but they were the kind of rooms that gave me claustrophobia. They were so heavy, crowded, and ornate. They had flock wallpaper in a dark red colour and I felt as though the walls were pressing in on me all the time. And they were full of things that had belonged to ‘dear Mother’ and were kept for sentimental reasons. ‘Dear Mother’ had collected these little small pieces of china from wherever she went on holiday. There were things from Margate and Ramsgate and Broadstairs, little bits of crest china, a whole cabinet full of them, with antimacassars on every chair and stuffed birds in cages. And wherever you sat the beady eyes of these things followed you.

  I must say though that they were all very nice to me. I’d been a bit scared about meeting the sister. After all, everyone had said she wouldn’t let any female get her claws into either of her brothers. She was charm itself. ‘Miss Langley – or may I call you Margaret?’ That sort of thing. And she showed me over the flat. No, I was welcomed with open arms. It wasn’t until a bit later that I realized the full Machiavellian plot that was being hatched over me. It was only disclosed when Cyril and his brother had gone out to get a drink and to bring in a bottle of port for her and me. She was drinking it for medicinal purposes and I would be drinking it for never you mind what. They hadn’t been gone five minutes before his sister came over and put her arms round me, and if there’s anything I hate it’s a woman mauling me around. I’m not that keen on some men mauling me around, but a woman – never.