At the next place she got twelve pounds a year, paid monthly, with a Lord Jisson, VC. He lived outside Chichester at a place called Bosham. It was a much larger grander place, and he kept a pack of hounds. But it was run on military lines and everybody’s task was allotted to them. There was a housekeeper there who kept tabs on the women and a butler who kept tabs on the menservants, and for everyone a list of duties was laid down. Whereas in the other places she was at the beck and call of all and sundry, here she had to stick rigorously to the duties. And the housekeeper saw to the standing orders.
All the servants had beer supplied twice a day, even the under-servants. Mother didn’t drink hers, she used to save it for the organ-grinder. Apparently an organ-grinder used to come twice a week with his monkey and this monkey had developed a taste for beer. So the organ-grinder used to drink what he could and give the rest to the monkey. After which, Mother said, that monkey used to cut the most unusual capers and this would be a talking point and an enjoyment for the servants for days.
Of course today it sounds trite and shows a lack of education. But those were the kind of events that you had to look forward to. Some form of variety to relieve from the humdrum. You had no education and little hope of advancement in position or in money, and no security at all of course.
As for the advanced education, that was still a pipe-dream. And it wasn’t until the poor did get an advanced education that they were able to speak up for themselves, that they became, as you might say, powerful advocates for their own class. Left to the upper class nothing was going to be done. Why should they kill the goose that laid their golden eggs.
But things were improving even then, compared to my grandmother’s days, because when my grandmother was in service there was a sort of feudal system.
She worked in a large manor house and the man who owned it owned the entire village; all the land for miles around and every cottage were owned by him too and he was very particular indeed about how they were kept. Nobody from outside could come and live in his village. He made sure that nothing and nobody changed. As Grandmother said, this system had its advantages because when the villagers were ill, medicines and food were sent down from the big house. But, she said, even so the villagers weren’t grateful. They used to detest having to doff their caps to the squire who they felt was rude and arrogant to them. Still Grandmother reckoned that the villagers then had a better life than when things became freer for the working class. Because then nobody really cared at all.
This was always a point of disagreement between my mother and grandmother. Mother was a stickler for her rights, not women’s rights but her rights, and as far as she could she fought for them. Of course she couldn’t break the system, but occasionally she bent it.
One thing she couldn’t bend however was the business of waking up in the morning. It always had been a servant’s nightmare. At one place, though, she came to a good arrangement with one of the gardeners. Every night she would tie a piece of string to her big toe and throw the string out of the window. When the gardener used to come round at five o’clock in the morning he’d give it a mighty yank and so wake Mother up. Apparently she was never late, though on more than one occasion she hobbled round her work for the rest of the day.
The saying ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’ I’ve always thought a stupid one. Yet there must be something in it since at any rate for much of our lives my mother, Albert and I have had to get up very early. It hasn’t made us wealthy or necessarily wise but we’ve certainly been healthy. Albert and I are both now drawing the old-age pension. So I suppose that proves something.
19
WHEN I SEE the words Retirement and Old Age I ask myself why are the two coupled together? Why does retirement suddenly and automatically mean old age? Retirement shouldn’t make a radical change in life. But it does, especially for men. When they retire their life changes completely but a woman’s doesn’t because she still goes on doing more or less the same things, particularly if she’s a woman who hasn’t gone out to work. She still does the housework, the shopping, the cooking, and the laundry.
Before a man retires he should start thinking what it’s going to mean. But he doesn’t so when the time comes the conditions take him unawares and he’s not able to adapt himself to them. What he often mistakenly thinks is that when he retires it’s going to be a marvellous existence. All the things he’s not had time to do when he was working he’s going to be able to do then. Perhaps he’s got a hobby. Perhaps he likes to make things at home or collect things or look after the garden. But what he doesn’t realize is that these things that fitted in nicely in his spare time are nothing like sufficient as full-time occupations.
I think men become so apathetic and that’s why life seems to hold so much less happiness for them in retirement than it does for a woman. I’m going by the old people where I live and where my mother lives. I do quite a bit for them and there’s hardly any men left there now. Amongst all the families, in about forty houses, there can’t be more than six men. And it’s not because the women were so much younger than the men, it’s just that the men didn’t adapt themselves to a life of leisure, didn’t know what to do with themselves and so like the old soldiers in the song they just faded away. Men are not as resourceful as women, nor do they adapt to new circumstances.
A man leaves school, he gets his job and he plods along till he’s sixty, sixty-five, or seventy and when work ends he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He feels he’s got no place; he’s in limbo. The wife doesn’t want him at home. She loves her husband, of course she does, but she loves him to go off to work at eight or nine in the morning and come home at five or six at night. She doesn’t want him under her feet all day long. She likes her life, a life whereby he’s not in the home all day and she can go out and visit her cronies and do her shopping. All of a sudden he wants to join in with these things, he wants to go shopping with her; he wants to know where she’s been and what she’s been talking about, and very soon acrimonious discussions start between people who have lived as Darby and Joan all their lives. It’s only because the man doesn’t think and doesn’t try to make a place for himself in the world of retirement. Mind you, the wife can help. Together they can plan his life – make some sort of timetable. They don’t have to stick to it religiously but it will give them something to go by until the man has worked out a definite way of life for himself.
I often think it’s a great pity that a man can’t retire gradually, doing half a day for a time while he sorts himself out. The trouble is he believes that all the week life will be just like it was at weekends. And while he’s enjoyed his weekends when he was working all the week, he hasn’t realized that it’s because he’s working that he enjoyed them. He doesn’t understand that it was the change he enjoyed and that there’s no longer going to be any change.
Another thing, most councils like ours run courses on retirement but they don’t get the people they should. They don’t get the working-class person, the man who has done a physical job and is going to find it harder to use time than a person whose work has employed his brain. A man who does a hard physical job all week doesn’t come home at night and pick up a book and read, he probably just turns the telly on. He doesn’t think about using his brains. He probably thinks he hasn’t got any. I’ve heard many old men say, ‘Oh no, I’ve never done anything like that and I’m too old to start now.’ But they’re not too old. It’s the middle class who go to these courses but the others need them even more. And the things that you can learn to do now! Every occupation, every hobby is covered so you don’t have to be intellectual if you don’t want to. This is something to think about and to do that will make for a happy life in retirement.
But no, these men don’t. Then I hear them say they’ve got time to go and visit their children, and see more of them. They don’t realize that their children have got a life of their own by now, a life in which their parents have not played a
part before; and you can’t expect them and their families automatically to alter their way of life because you have leisure time on your hands. Married children have got their own work and their own friends and they haven’t much place for you in their life and there’s no reason why they should have, because if they’re relying on the companionship of their aged parents, their own lives must be very barren, indeed. But the parents won’t realize this. They get disgruntled and say, ‘Ah, there you are. You get old and even your own children don’t want you. You might as well be on the scrap heap.’
I don’t see why you should expect your children to devote their lives to you. When your family get married you’ve given them up. You’ve done your duty in life. You’ve brought them into the world, you’ve fed them, clothed them and educated them to the best of your ability. Let them lead their own lives, I say. Don’t make them feel that their mother and father are sitting stewing over in their minds about what they do or don’t do for them. Everybody should be complete in themselves and you shouldn’t have to rely on other people to provide a purpose or to make you feel that you’re important in life.
I think nowadays that old people are lucky. There’s never been so much done and thought about for them as there is today, but they must help as well.
Those I feel really sorry for are the ones who live on their own and who have no one to visit them or care for them. Perhaps they’ve driven people away by their cantankerousness but to be old, poor, and cantankerous is the last word in a lonely existence.
Another sad thing to see is those people who’ve lived in council houses and who have to move to a small flat. You can’t blame the council because they’ve got a long waiting list of young people with families who need houses. Obviously it’s only right that one or perhaps two people living in a three-bedroomed house should move out but they’re taken away from everyone that they know. Some of the council flats for old people in Brighton for instance are sited in a road where they are isolated. No one goes up that road unless they live there or unless they have to deliver there. So sometimes from morning to night the old people, particularly those who can’t get out, never see anything of life at all. It’s a terrible existence for them, a kind of apartheid. Then they start to realize that they’re in a kind of a special category. They’re a race apart. They’re no longer Mr and Mrs Smith, a couple with a grown-up family, but two people who’ve joined the ranks of the drop-outs, the problem people, the ‘senior citizens’ as they choose to call them. But the old people don’t call themselves the senior citizens – they call themselves the second-class citizens.
How can they be other than second-class citizens surrounded as they are by people all like themselves, all old, all living in the same road or block and all with the same problems and the same incomes? How much better it would be if the old were mixed up with the young. Most neighbours feel kindly towards elderly people, especially elderly people who are not capable of getting out themselves. They’d help in so many small ways. Carry coal, do a bit of shopping and explain the forms that they get sent and that simply plague them.
Another thing that neighbours could do is to persuade some of those who are living on a pittance to accept social security. It’s amazing the number of old people that won’t take social security. They look on it as their parents looked on the old parish relief. My mother remembers it well – when the authority used to come round, open all your cupboards to see how much food you had and tell you what they thought you could do without. Then any furniture that they didn’t consider you needed they told you to sell it before you asked for money. It isn’t anything like that now. They help old people as unobtrusively as they can. They make you feel that it’s not a charity but a right.
Another type of old person I feel particularly sorry for is what I think they call ‘distressed gentlefolk’. Mind you, I suffered at the hands of gentlefolk when I was in service, but that’s forgotten now. One of these ladies said to me, ‘It’s the cold winters I worry about – you see I can’t afford much coal and it makes all the difference to being up and around or staying in bed all the time.’ When I asked her what she missed most from the comfortable life that she used to have she said, ‘Most of all I miss not being able to afford a private doctor.’ And I felt a fellow feeling with her because that is one of the things I would like. She said, ‘I never go to the doctor now unless I’ve really got to. There’s four doctors in a group practice where I am registered and I hardly ever get the same one twice so I’ve got to explain my symptoms each time I go. While I’m doing this he’s writing on a pad and when I’ve finished he just hands me a prescription without a word and out I go. I’m sure all the doctors in that group favour contraceptives for the unmarried, abortions for the married and euthanasia for the unwanted like me.’
She herself believed in euthanasia.
She said, ‘I consider that when we become a misery to ourselves and our relations we should have the privilege of removing ourselves from life if we want to.’
I think I agree with her. Old age can be, and should be, a time of gracious living and companionship. But it can also be a time of loneliness and wretchedness. There’s precious little dignity about coming into the world so let us at least leave it in the best possible way that we can.
20
DIGNITY WAS SOMETHING that in my early life the working classes were not supposed to be able to afford.
As a kitchenmaid I was at everyone’s beck and call and the kind of work I was doing meant that I always looked scruffy. So I felt what I was called, a skivvy, and feeling like this gave me an inferiority complex, or what we call today a chip on my shoulder.
When I was going out I would make what I thought was the best of myself but that was only my opinion at the time, and looking back on it my opinion must often have been wrong. Of privacy we had none. Working and sharing a bedroom as I did meant I was never alone; my life was what you would call an open book. I don’t think I resented this at the time – open book it might have been but it wasn’t a very interesting one.
But dignity and privacy are two things that I have since thought go side by side. So when I saw how more and more country houses were being opened to the general public I wondered how their owners felt about this invasion into their lives.
I knew of course that their education had prepared them to meet any situation but I wondered – if they showed any emotion – whether their feelings were the same as mine.
It was with a very strange sensation and a not altogether agreeable one that I went to Woburn Abbey to interview the Duke of Bedford for the BBC. Although during my years in domestic service I’d never worked in such a grand establishment, nevertheless for me to go in at the front door instead of the basement and talk to the owner – well, it was something I never thought would happen, not in my wildest dreams. In domestic service the only time you ever went in by the front door was when you went after the job, never for the rest of your time there did you ever sully it except by cleaning it.
I had read about the Duke, how he was sociable and happy-go-lucky, but that didn’t mean a thing to me because people that are sociable and happy-go-lucky were, in my experience, only sociable and happy-go-lucky to people of their own class. The sociability and affability got shed like a snake skin when they were dealing with what they designated the lower classes. So I thought, maybe he is all they crack him up to be but if he knows what I was originally he won’t be the same to me. So I felt a bit nervous at the thought of the coming interview.
But I must say His Grace surprised me. He was not a bit like I expected. On the contrary he made me feel as though I was really welcome. He chatted me up over a glass of sherry. And his comments on his ancestors were witty and often far from flattering. I mean describing some he said ‘the only sensible thing they’d ever done was to marry money’. And then he went on to describe the things that some of the others had done which were unprintable. So I felt at my ease from the start instead of feeling that I’d got to be on t
he defensive all the time. By defensive I mean I went there all tensed up, ready to be aggressive if I felt that he was going to talk down at me. I thought: ‘Never mind, just because I’ve been in domestic service, I’m not working for him so I haven’t got to be feeling as though he’s “Sir” to me. Naturally I’ll give him his title. But he needn’t think that I’m going to be subservient. Jack’s as good as his master.’ I know he isn’t really but then I always sort of build myself up with the fact that he is, you see.
But he took the wind right out of my sails and so did his house – it was absolutely wonderful. I still think about it now, that marvellous place. It was full of the most beautiful things, and as he took me around I realized the deep feelings the Duke had in owning them. I’ve never felt any desire to own things, even valuable things, but I sensed that he looked at them as something in trust from his family. He hadn’t actually bought them for himself and he was honouring that trust by his determination to keep them.
I began to realize more how one does feel towards really beautiful though inanimate things. We’ve got nothing in our house that the dustman would give us twopence for – it’s all utility stuff, stuff you can’t really feel a pride in, and the house is just a place where we live and that’s all you can say about it. But that house was where other people had lived and the things in it were things they’d used and loved and it needed very little imagination to visualize what it must have been like when they were used to the full, when it wasn’t just a place where a small part was used by the family and the rest had to be thrown open for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who cared to fork out half a crown to come round and stare at. I could visualize, having been in domestic service, the large parties and balls that were given there and the rank and nobility that attended them.
Climbing the Stairs Page 15