The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  To reach the kitchen they must take to the service tunnels. These are, at first sight, rather quaint: underground vaulted passages punctuated by light wells, leading in one direction to stables and dairy, in the other to kitchen and laundry. They are not quite long enough to be claustrophobic, nor dark enough (at least in daylight) to be macabre. They run directly beneath the gravelled entrance court to the big house, their light wells hidden around a central flowerbed planted with lavender. As servants make their swift and invisible way below, the well-shod feet of guests might crunch on gravel up above and the staccato strains of small talk float down the air vents.

  The arched brick roofs and walls of the tunnels have been whitewashed–some years ago, thinks Mrs Wells, judging by the dank and mossy walls. Water pools on the flagstone floor, and the air is damp and chill. Better take a lamp, says Old Anne–there are bats here at night. A shrew skitters out of sight as the two walk the fifty yards to the kitchen, their footsteps and voices echoing. They hitch their skirts up out of the puddles as they go. How intimately Mrs Wells is to get to know these underground passages–and how she will come to curse them.

  VI

  What A Party Of Women

  There were ten women working under the housekeeper at Uppark; ten women plus a cook. Mrs Wells was to oversee one lady’s maid, three housemaids, two laundry maids and one each of still-room, scullery, kitchen and dairymaid.

  Back in the 1850s, as Mrs Wells remembered, the servants were drawn from Harting village with a handful from Petersfield and Chichester. By 1881 the census return tells us that they came from all over the country. There was the cook, Scottish, aged 26. There was her mistress’s maid, Emily Dyson, 29, from Suffolk. The young dairymaid, Mary Drinkwater, came from Cheshire and talked broad, as did the footmen Frederick Dunnett and Walter Larner, one from Norfolk, the other from Gloucester.6 The girls were mostly very young–17, 18, 19–and they left after a few months, a year at most. No one really wanted to settle, it seemed to Mrs Wells; they were always imagining the grass was greener at some other big house, or wanted to try some of this new shop-girl or factory work. A thoroughly modern ‘International Stores’ had just opened in Chichester, where Shippam’s meat-paste factory was also recruiting. As soon as you’d broken them in, they were off. By December of her first year, two of the young maids had gone and three more had been appointed. It was all very wearing.

  With half an eye on the young housemaid who cleaned her bedroom up in the eaves, Mrs Wells managed to keep up her daily diary entry over the years that followed. She alluded warily to the hothouse of warring females she now found herself in.

  Oh how I long for a quiet house.

  The Cook disagreeable to Miss F.

  No peace with servants here.

  E & D most disagreeable. What a party.

  Engaged kitchenmaid. Mrs Holmes gave warning.

  To the Dairy. What passionate women, I never can think the end of it all.

  The Poor Cook kept under by that horrid woman in the Dairy who can Pass it over!!!

  What a party of women I am surrounded with.

  ‘Women’ is thrice underlined. Uppark was a house full of women. Mrs Wells’s closest colleague, the one she might expect to share confidences with, was the butler, Mr Lambert. But Edward Lambert (on £40 a year) lived in a flat over the laundry with two young babies and Frances, his wife. Even when in his pantry, his mind was elsewhere; he was his own agent. Grooms, coachmen and gardeners likewise, all lived out.

  Sarah Wells was used to male company: she had three grown sons and a husband. To start with, she might have fancied herself on holiday from all their noise and need and mess. She wrote daily to her sons, yet was surprised to discover she didn’t pine for her husband quite as much as she felt she should. But once she had fitted out her private quarters and arranged her books on the dresser just so–an old Peerage, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, her yellow Bradshaw railway timetable, the Whitaker’s Almanack, Old Moore’s Almanack, an eighteenth-century dictionary and her well-thumbed Bible–the novelty soon wore off and she found that she missed them.

  She had kept her own house for twenty-seven years. Now she must keep another’s, without any of the satisfactions of ownership. Neither the preserving jars of strawberry jam laid down on the shelves, nor the fine towels hand-hemmed and monogrammed, were her own. All her activity was directed towards the comforts of another. And, proudly independent woman that she once was, a certain sense of resentment began to grow.

  Did not move out, busy all day, supposed to do nothing.

  Busy cutting out fine towels.

  Busy with goods from the stores, did not go out. Busy making up wages book.

  Busy put Red Currant Wine in Cask about 5 gal.

  Strawberries sent in for preserving. Busy all day did not venture out. Lovely day.

  Not even the lovely day was hers to enjoy. However well she performed her duties, Mrs Wells could not break through the glass ceiling. There was no further promotion for a housekeeper, and none that would pluck her permanently from the basement.

  Mrs Beeton’s description of the ideal housekeeper in her Book of Household Management (1861) has a poignant resonance for women such as Mrs Wells who had kept their own house. ‘The Housekeeper must consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress, and bring to the management of the household all those qualities of honesty, industry, and vigilance in the same degree as if she were the head of her own family. Constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any domestics, she will overlook all that goes on in the house.’7 For a woman who had been her own mistress, no matter how shabby her domain, this sudden lack of any real autonomy must have been both demeaning and frustrating.

  The respectable, much-sought-after position of housekeeper might well have seemed the answer to a certain sort of woman down on her luck–but the reality could be unexpectedly crushing. The Times carried dozens of advertisements placed by needy middle-class women, often widowed, seeking the job of housekeeper. 1850: ‘Wanted, by a highly respectable middle-aged country person, a situation as housekeeper in a tradesman’s family, or in any capacity of trust and confidence. She would prove a great acquisition. The advertiser is a widow, truly domesticated, and, having a small independence, salary is not so much an object as a comfortable situation.’ Here is another from 1870: ‘A widow lady, age 38, well educated, musical, with a good knowledge of French, domesticated, and fond of children, seeks an engagement as housekeeper to a gentleman.’

  Innkeeper’s daughter Sarah Wells, with her finishing-school education and her long-buried aspirations to learn French, was of perplexingly similar social standing to Miss Fetherstonhaugh, daughter of a dairy farmer. The housekeeper occupied Uppark like a troubling mirror image, or understudy, to her mistress–reminding her how far the one had travelled and how far the other had sunk. The relationship was never straightforward, and was frequently fractious.

  VII

  How Dull I Am!

  Sarah Wells desperately needed this job: her family needed it, and she took from it what she could. She used Miss Fetherstonhaugh just as Miss Fetherstonhaugh was using her. Within days of arriving at Uppark, she parcelled up and sent off a great quantity of broken chinaware to be mended by one Joseph Wells of Bromley, ‘Dealer in China, Glass, Earthenware, & Cricketing Goods’. A receipt duly came back from her husband, rather smudged and stained, dated 3 September 1880, for £1 14s 9d8 (around £85 in today’s money). In a musty box of accounts for Uppark in the West Sussex Record Office–twenty-six bundles for the year 1880–I found several more such receipts from Mrs Wells’s husband. This opportunism continued until Joe’s business was finally wound down in 1888, despite the one-shilling carriage fee from London–and the glaring fact that Petersfield had china dealers of its own.

  Then there were her children to consider. ‘We infested the house’, remembered H. G. Wells. During school holidays and periods of unemployment, unless mistress and housekeeper had fall
en out, Frank, Freddy and Bertie used Uppark like a free boarding house. At the start of her tenure they were 23, 18 and 13 years old. Like cockroaches or black beetles, the trio of male Wellses entered at basement level to undermine subtly the great house and its social pretensions.

  This is the closest any of the boys had got to the gentry, and it came to them at one remove. ‘There came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the Company’, wrote H. G. Wells. ‘People I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper’s room and the steward’s room.’9 Like a sponge, the teenage Bertie soaked it all up–and some twenty years later put his observations to comic effect in the novel Tono-Bungay (1909). Here, Uppark was reimagined as ‘Bladesover’, his mother as housekeeper Mrs Ponderevo and himself as George, her unruly only son. ‘George’ is as tickled by the servants’ politics as he is by the goings-on upstairs: ‘After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state of physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts.’

  Each side of Uppark’s red baize door seemed equally ludicrous to young Bertie. In the face of her young son’s ridicule, Mrs Wells was required to take sides, and she sided with her mistress–if she didn’t, after all, her life would be lived in vain. She absorbed the snobberies, became expert in ‘the ranks and places of the Olympians’ and deft in placing people’s servants about her tea table, where the etiquette was strict. ‘I can see and hear her saying now’, wrote H. G. Wells of her fictional counterpart in Tono-Bungay: ‘“No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom”.’

  Mrs Wells was goaded by her son, who found the upper servants at Uppark ‘intolerably dull’ with their ‘fifteen remarks’ that got them through each mealtime (‘The days draw out nicely’; ‘The frost continues’; ‘The poor souls without coals must suffer’)–and he told her so with teasing mimicry. She would invariably burst into ‘agitated tears’ at having this hollow charade–her life!–driven home. ‘O God how dull I am!’ cried Mrs Wells. ‘O God how dull!’10

  Young Bertie Wells was particularly needled by the absurd self-importance of the upper servants–and Tono-Bungay is deliciously, mordantly witty on this point. There come annually to ‘Bladesover’ three pensioned-off servants, invited as a reward (with pointed reference to the housekeeper and her cronies) for their years of loyal service. They sit about in the housekeeper’s room in their ‘black and shiny and flouncy clothing adorned with gimp and beads, eating great quantities of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner and reverberating remarks’. Also at the housekeeper’s table is Miss Fison (Miss Dyson was Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s lady’s maid at the time), and the butler ‘Rabbits’ (Mr Lambert?)–‘large, with side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and little’. He has ‘acquired from some clerical model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same time the aspirates that would have graced it’. For all his morning coat and black tie with blue spots, Rabbits drops his aitches.

  H. G. Wells serves them up as a comic vignette, but there is also something pathetic about these people, aping their superiors but having nothing really to say; people ill at ease, as if wearing ill-fitting suits, grasping after the cadences of refined conversation.

  Upstairs, Frances Fetherstonhaugh was equally obsessed with class and hierarchy. She must find an heir for Uppark before her death, and the estate dangled like a ripe peach before dozens of speculative friends and distant relatives. At lunch one day Lady Leconfield, of nearby Petworth, was asked what she would do with the silver, should she be given Uppark. Her reply did not please: ‘Take it to Petworth, of course.’11 She had become a genealogy bore, and spent time poring over the Fetherstonhaugh family tree in an attempt to discover an appropriate heir. In the basement, meanwhile, the housekeeper debated the fine degrees of precedence between visiting servants so that they should go into dinner in the right order. Both upstairs and downstairs were caught up in an elaborate charade with no true personal relevance. The only thing to give it sustenance, to make it real, was the house.

  From the moment she put on her lace cap, lace apron and black silk dress, Mrs Wells reabsorbed the hierarchies of below stairs and became institutionalised. For her, the house was a kind of prison she must make the best of. Her life of apparent busyness was a vicious circle, a dead end. She was trapped. But for her son, Uppark was a springboard. H. G. Wells depicts George at Bladesover ‘routing’ among the books and treasures of the house while the rain beats down outside. ‘Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much of Hogarth in a big portfolio…with Raphael…and with most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means of several big iron-moulded books of views.’

  Gravely ill, aged 21, Bertie spent four months convalescing at Uppark (an ill-tempered ban on the Wells offspring was temporarily lifted by Miss Fetherstonhaugh on hearing the dread word ‘consumption’), and he worked his way through Shelley, Keats, Lamb and Hawthorne; books bound in leather and embossed in gold. At times he felt desperate, shut up ‘in this accursed land of winds, wet ways and old women’.12 But his sunny, chintz-decorated bedroom in the eaves and Uppark’s ‘beech-woods and bracken-dells’ worked their cure. Bertie Wells absorbed the lesson that Uppark represented ‘all that is distinctively British’, and he took this nuanced, privileged knowledge out into the world, first as pupil, then teacher, then writer.

  VIII

  For Fear Of Spending It

  How far should we trust H. G. Wells’s portrait of his mother? He wrote An Experiment in Autobiography in 1934, nearly thirty years after her death. He tries, so he says, to see into her mind–‘I began to wonder what went on in her brain when I was in my early teens and I have wondered ever since.’ But he can only guess, speculating that ‘innocent reverie’ takes up her rare moments of leisure, saving her from more acute unhappiness.

  How far can a teenage boy, or young man, understand an older woman’s inner life? ‘Poor little woman!’ is a typical exclamation. He pities her, ‘dear little mother’, but she seems, looking back, rather like a peg doll; a worn caricature in a black silk dress–‘the bothered little housekeeper in the white-panelled room below’. H. G. Wells’s summing up of her time at Uppark–‘perhaps the worst housekeeper that was ever thought of’–has since become her public epitaph.

  It is true that Sarah Wells was unprepared for the work involved, and the position did not seem to bring her satisfaction. According to her son she started off ‘frightened, perhaps, but resolute’, believing that ‘with prayer and effort anything can be achieved’. But with an inexperienced and disinterested mistress there was no one to show the housekeeper how to do her work. She was expected to have absorbed it on her way up the ladder.

  ‘She did not know how to plan work, control servants, buy stores or economise in any way’, wrote her son. ‘She did not know clearly what was wanted upstairs. She could not even add up her accounts with assurance and kept them for me to do for her.’ (Though who would not encourage their clever, numerate son to have a stab at the housekeeping accounts on his rare visits? Mrs Wells was both intensely proud of, and anxious about, Bertie’s on-off scholarship.)

  Was she, perhaps, an adequate housekeeper, coping with unusually trying circumstances?

  The surviving diaries of Mrs Wells document two phases of her life. First, her early years in service as lady’s maid, then motherhood: twenty years of life (1848–68) squeezed into an old, ‘extra enlarged edition’ desk diary for 1835 (price 7s, half-bound).

  Between 1868 and 1890 there is a gap, the diaries lost or destroyed. For her last decade of toil at Atlas House in Bromley, and first decade as housekeeper of Uppark, we have just her son’s description to go by, served up both as autobiography and fiction. But a box of accounts survives for Mrs Wells’s
first few years at the big house, neatly folded lengthways into fortnightly bundles, tied tightly with string and sent off to Sir William King in Portsmouth, agent to Miss Fetherstonhaugh and architect of Uppark’s great economy drive. There are also her mistress’s banking books in which all payments are recorded (including £10 sent to one ‘Bullock’–a poor relation?–every two months).13

  In the year before Mrs Wells’s arrival, somebody called ‘Smith’ received regular, hefty lumps of cash from Miss Fetherstonhaugh–up to £180 at a time. Smith, whatever his or her role, got through £350 to £400 a month (£17,000 to £22,000 in today’s money). For the first five months of Mrs Wells’s new job, Smith and the housekeeper overlapped, and Smith held the purse strings. Then from January 1881, ‘Wells’ was the only recipient of the cash handouts–and they were rather small in comparison.

  She was not initially trusted with large sums of money, receiving £30 in January, £20 then £50 in February, and £50 then £80 in March. Soon, though, she was being handed £100 to £200 at a time (£5,000 to £10,000). These are phenomenal amounts of money for a woman who for thirteen years couldn’t afford to replace her own bed linen, and it made Mrs Wells very anxious. She handled around £10,000 a year (£500,000 in today’s money), her weekly accounts running along the lines of ‘Coffee, lemons, sugar, pipkin & seeds, malt & hops’ plus casual labour, as well as settling the various bills with tradesmen in Harting and Petersfield.14

  The next chapter of Mrs Wells’s diary keeping picks up her life ten years into her job at the big house. It was 1890: she was 67 years old, and money still made her nervous.

  Went to Petersfield Miss F–Bank £150.

  Sent Miss Pink the remainder of bills 9/ leaving only £1-00 in hand which is due to Joe!!!

  Showery day sent to Petersfield £60-00. Put away £5-00 for fear of spending it.