by Tessa Boase
Mrs Wells carried her personal tragedies closely within her: it wasn’t done to rail against fate, and it was, after all, the Lord’s will. But she had had more than her dose of sorrow. At the age of 26, she lost her sister. At 30, both her mother and father died within weeks of each other. Her black moods are recorded in her diary. ‘Dull day spirits sadly depressed’, she writes, with frequency. ‘What a dream I seem in!!!’ In 1864 her beloved nine-year-old daughter died suddenly. She recorded the anniversary of Fanny’s death in every diary thereafter, along with her daughter’s birthday (and burial) a few days later.
As a young mother, Sarah Wells visited relatives on a Sussex farm for a short summer holiday with babies Fanny and Frank. Her diary sings briefly with joy, against its more usual monotonous litany, for the green fields and wild flowers, the fresh air and sunshine. For most of her adult life this woman, so keenly alert to the natural world, was shut up in a dark basement. Eventually, her body and mind started to disintegrate.
XI
Queer How Altered
The final diary Mrs Wells kept at Uppark, covering 1892–3, is written in The Englishwoman’s Pocket Diary. This book allows more room for her entries–a week over two pages–but still no space for Sunday. Down the right-hand side of each page is a ledger column for personal housekeeping, which Mrs Wells–not keeping her own house–ignores. She has her big black housekeeper’s ledger, and this is enough.
It is written in ink this time, in a flowing but shaky hand, and the same well-worn phrases fill its pages. But this year something is different. There is a growing sense of claustrophobia; a certain desperation in her situation.
Oh! So tired. Longing to get out, how can people shut themselves up indoors.
Mr Thompson & wife with Mrs J Legge [the gamekeeper’s wife] & Miss Tigg [the plumber, painter and glazier’s wife] came to tea. Shut up all day waiting on them.
Physically, she is falling apart. Mrs Wells is now nearly seventy years old, with no prospect of retirement.
Began the [annual] house cleaning. My feet so tender what can it be?
After tea my last poor old double tooth came out.
Did not go out today. Suffering with pain and stiffness I fear it is rheumatism.
Her relationship with Miss Fetherstonhaugh is also degenerating. A new uneasiness is recorded–she even asks permission to go to church: ‘Spoke to Miss F about the Evening service–gave her notice to leave.’ It is hard, for this elderly woman, still to be owned by another and prey to capricious mood changes and querulous demands. ‘Miss F more kind. I long to get away.’ She feels increasingly ambivalent towards her employer–and the feeling is mutual.
‘I think Miss Fetherstonhaugh was very forbearing that my mother held on so long’, H. G. Wells wrote in his autobiography.
Because among other things she grew deaf. She grew deafer and deafer and she would not admit her deafness, but guessed at what was said to her and made wild shots in reply. She was deteriorating mentally. Her religious consolations were becoming more and more trite and mechanical. Miss Fetherstonhaugh was a still older woman and evidently found dealing with her more and more tiresome. They were two deaf old women at cross purposes. The rather sentimental affection between them evaporated in mutual irritation and left not a rack behind.
There are hints in this diary that Mrs Wells’s mind is indeed beginning to falter. These entries might be veiled references to staff spats, but she appears confused and paranoid.
26 March 1892: ‘Busy all day as usual. I do not feel comfortable. Such strange things one hears and sees!!’
28 May: ‘Unpleasant answer from the Cook who seems to act very queer.’
On 2 June she has a chat with ‘dear Freddy’, her eldest son, ‘in my bedroom’–an odd place to receive guests, and perhaps significant enough to be noted. Is this the only safe place to talk? A fortnight later she is ‘Greatly worried about servants’. By full summer comes a sense that the housekeeper of Uppark is finally reaching the end of her tether.
2 August: ‘Numerous disagreeables, what I have to contend with.’
4 August: ‘12 years today I came here and left Bromley. What anxious years they have been to me. What rude insulting people I have had to live with and it is worse now.’
12 August: ‘Worried with Head Dairy Maid’s tales.’
13 August: ‘Carried to Miss F the tales in circulation.’
On 22 August she sweeps her own bedroom (something was seriously amiss with the housemaids’ regime if the housekeeper was reduced to cleaning her own room–but perhaps her growing paranoia insisted she do it herself), and the following day feels ‘very poorly’. She doses herself with cod liver oil, but it’s not enough to fortify her against Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s bruising brush-off.
25 August: ‘Miss F returned. Unpacked her boxes, but not required to dress her. Felt my deafness very much but I must be thankful for good health.’
As Mrs Wells’s hearing gets worse, so her catalogue of staff upsets increases. By the summer’s end she is permanently aggrieved. The girls are, no doubt, exasperated by their ailing, deaf housekeeper.
29 August: ‘Cook as usual not a word that is kind.’ (Mrs Keeble, barely there a fortnight, was a disaster. She was to leave in two weeks.)
2 September: ‘That horrid woman upset me again. Oh how hard to be obliged to stay in such a place.’
27 September: ‘Miss F–queer how altered! It must be my deafness.’
In November, Mrs Wells is told there is to be an important house party, the first in a very long time, and Miss Fetherstonhaugh (now 73) is in a terrible fret about it. She tries to impress upon her hapless, deaf housekeeper what is expected.
On 2 November Mrs Wells is found ‘Busy airing sheets. I dread this party.’ The dust! The bed making! The cleaning of all that silver! Three days later she is ‘Busy writing for all the wants of the house’–as if the house were some voracious, potentially troublesome person. Two days later she is still ‘Busy thinking of all I wanted’. The kitchen is in uproar, Mrs Harrison producing great wobbling jellies and syllabubs, pie crusts and consommés, her kitchen maids barred from false errands to the stables. Upstairs the dust sheets are being pulled off the furniture one by one, revealing the shrouded splendours of the grand Saloon and Red Drawing Room.
The guests arrive on Wednesday, 9 November: ‘Got on better than I expected’, writes Mrs Wells in her diary; ‘so thankful. Miss F very quiet’, which makes her uneasy. Has she pleased her mistress? All the ‘folks’ leave before lunch on Friday. ‘Oh! So tired.’
But it is not over yet. A spate of pre-Christmas sociability leaves Mrs Wells peevish and exhausted. Her inbuilt reverence towards the aristocracy has, it seems, evaporated–even her feelings towards royalty. Their comings and goings are reduced to a fuss and a bother. Likewise, her deference towards Miss Fetherstonhaugh has soured. After a lifetime of putting herself second, suddenly she can take no more. On 21 November, the 83-year-old Lady Clanwilliam and her stout-waisted daughters come to lunch. Three days later the Duchess of Connaught (German-born wife of Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s seventh child), icily correct, descends on Uppark for tea. With her is Lady Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire (Britain’s largest country house). ‘No time to go out’, writes Mrs Wells.
After this marathon, there are no thanks from her mistress. Instead, ‘Miss F always finding fault.’ On Friday, 2 December, she unpacks a large delivery for the basement stores, sorting goods into the right cupboards, listing everything in her dog-eared housekeeping books. Her work, as ever, goes unnoticed: ‘No thought of me if tired or not.’ Instead, there is a distinct frostiness from upstairs.
3 December: ‘Miss F very strange, resolved to have an understanding soon.’
On 6 December it’s the turn of the Duke of Connaught (Prince Arthur) to arrive with his demanding retinue of valets and coachmen from Bagshot Park in Surrey. Mrs Wells is not impressed. ‘Oh! Such fuss & work, how I wish I was out of it–what ig
norant people as a rule servants are. Busy all day early & late. Poor Legge in disgrace.’ (Legge was the head gamekeeper.) A couple of days later she is ‘worn out with worry’. Worry has become a reflex, a modus vivendi. The worry makes her tired, and her tiredness makes her worry.
9 December: ‘Miss F never asks if I am tired.’
Mid-December sees the annual ritual of handing over charitable Christmas gifts (cast-offs, in reality) to the poor of Harting village. It was a habit started by Frances’s sister Mary Ann, and had been continued assiduously after her death in a custom shared by both mistress and housekeeper. One woman gets all the gratitude; the other sees to the detail. But this year things are altered.
14 December: ‘Miss F refused my helping her with her charity clothes. What a comfort the blessed Sabbath day.’
Still, out they head in the chill of Friday, 19 December, distributing goods in the wagonette, and Mrs Wells succumbs to her usual knee-jerk subservience: ‘How good Miss F is!!!’ Two days later the reality sinks in when crowds of villagers are received at the house. Following in Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s gracious wake is her housekeeper, dishing out tea and giving her ear to health and housing grumbles. ‘Miss F gave her presents away to the poor people…I had to wait on them all.’
As the year draws to a close, Mrs Wells’s diaries show her to be dog-tired. On Christmas Eve she sends up eight large mince pies; on Boxing Day she prepares for and waits on company while nursing a ‘severe cold & cough’. On the twenty-eighth the water pipes at Uppark freeze solid. Two days later she travels seven miles by open trap with Mrs Harrison the cook to buy cough mixture in Petersfield. The journey, she writes, is ‘very very cold’.
The year 1893 starts with no new diary. She crams her entries into the back of last year’s: ‘Slippery weather afraid to go out.’ The elements conspire against her…and so does her mistress. Mrs Wells asks for a few days’ leave in early January, catches the train to Clapham Junction and stays with her youngest son Bertie and his new wife Isabel, ‘thankful to be at rest’. She sees the sights, spends time with her family and recovers her flagging spirits.
On her return she is summoned upstairs to the Little Parlour. Here the fire is lit and the dogs are slumbering, but today the mistress of Uppark is unusually stiff-backed and alert. Miss Fetherstonhaugh is glad of her companion Miss Sutherland’s pale, sandy-lashed presence, as she has an invidious task on her hands. There is a hesitant knock at the door, and at once the dogs are brushed from black velvet laps. Her old friend Mrs Wells–cherished lady’s maid, housekeeper at Uppark for twelve years–is given a month’s notice to pack up her belongings and leave.
The coup de grâce from Miss Fetherstonhaugh is not written up in the housekeeper’s diary. Just one line, bewildered and frightened: ‘What shall we do for a living? Please God find me work to do. How cruel of that woman.’ She cannot name her mistress, the friend who turned against her. But she need no longer celebrate her munificence, or bob her head and take orders. The social wrongs of the past twelve years are righted. Frances Fetherstonhaugh is merely, and rightly, reduced to ‘that woman’.
XII
I May Still Earn A Trifle
Mrs Wells might reasonably have expected a pension, perhaps an estate cottage, after her time served at Uppark. Many housekeepers worked up to their death, but if they became frail were usually looked after by the family. Uppark, however, had a different regime, with no sense of noblesse oblige. To the socially insecure Frances Fetherstonhaugh, what mattered beyond all else was loyalty. In the end, she left the great house to a middle-aged colonel, the son of her friends the 4th Earl and Countess Winterton. To Mrs Wells she gave nothing. The housekeeper departed as she arrived, in a carriage bound for Petersfield station with her old travelling trunk.
‘A poor little stunned woman she must have been then, on Petersfield platform’, H. G. Wells imagined, long after the event:
a little black figure in a large black bonnet curiously suggestive now of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. I can imagine her as she wound mournfully down the Petersfield road looking back towards Harting Hill with tears in her blue eyes, not quite clear about why it had all occurred in this fashion, though no doubt God had arranged it ‘for some good purpose.’ Why had Miss F been so unkind?
Her fault, according to H. G. Wells, was that she gossiped about ‘some imaginary incidents’ in her mistress’s former life, which had come back to Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s ears. If this was true, it is revealing. It shows that Mrs Wells, the underdog, was increasingly beset with thoughts of injustice: slaving away for ‘that woman’ who was no more than the sister of a dairymaid. It also implies that Fanny Bullock/ Fetherstonhaugh took to her grave a prickly sense of social alienation from the country-house world she inhabited. She carried a chip on her shoulder to the end.
In future decades, the injustice felt by Mrs Wells was gradually to consume the minds of household staff. ‘Servants are looked upon as a part of the furniture of the house: live furniture, nothing more’, wrote former butler Eric Horne in 1932, railing against the ‘vast abyss’ that separated master and servant. ‘If the live furniture is in the town house and is wanted in the country house, or vice versa, it is simply moved there. If a piece of the live furniture gets broken in body and health, the gentry simply say: “chuck it out and get another”.’20
Most women in Mrs Wells’s position would now have been in dire straits. How would she work again, given her age? Who would support her impecunious family? If the housekeeper was a spinster, who would look after her? Mrs Wells’s savings were small: for the past decade she had been paying her husband’s rent and bailing out three struggling boys. There passed some extremely anxious months (not helped by Bertie abandoning his wife and moving in with a student, Amy Catherine Robbins, in January 1893). Her deafness grew steadily worse; she could no longer hear the sermon in church. She wrote to an employment bureau and every contact she could muster after her years in service, but no one was interested in the elderly ex-housekeeper of Uppark.
Felt depressed. I hope soon to get employed.
Please God I could get some little house where I could be earning my living.
Miss Curtis called and said no replies. I fear I never shall get another situation.
She lived with her husband in the nearby hamlet of Nyewood, paying the rent out of her savings. It was not, in all likelihood, a harmonious time for husband and wife, reunited after a dozen years of separation. ‘Wrote for £5 more of my hard-earned savings!!!’ she records with agitation.
Meat went off quickly in the pantry, and her daily errand was no more exciting than ‘Went to Rogate for Butter & biscuits’, a hard hour’s walk away. Shopping in Harting was demeaning–she was reduced to hunting for scraps and paying with coins, where once she ordered the best for the big house and handed out banknotes.
But Mrs Wells, devoted mother, was lucky with her sons. Freddy was now working in commerce in South Africa, and Bertie was beginning to make a decent living from his writing. The sons rallied round, stumping up a monthly sum to keep their parents. Middle brother Frank, a fledgling watchmaker, lived with his parents.
Initially Mrs Wells fretted. Two years into her retirement, she could not see it as such. She was still, at 72, fooling herself that she would find some work–‘I pray I may still earn a trifle.’ The dismissal from her post rankled, its anniversary recorded in her diary.
16 February 1895: ‘2 years ago I left Uppark.’
The big house continued to exert a pull; it was still her compass point, and she was curious as to what was going on: ‘Heard Mrs Legge was at Uppark’–the gamekeeper’s wife. But did she dare show her face again, after her shaming departure?
On 8 March, two years after her fall from grace, Mrs Wells finally achieved a kind of closure. We learn this from an entry, sweet in its brevity, where she reduces her ex-mistress to her origins: ‘Called on Miss Bullock.’ Three months later Miss Fetherstonhaugh–or Fanny Bullock, dairymaid’s sister, to some�
��died.
Sarah Wells went on to enjoy an Indian summer after her lifetime of toil. She was moved by Bertie to a ‘pretty little house’ at Liss, not ten miles from Uppark, with ‘seven decent rooms and a garden’. Here she lived to the age of 83 with Joe and Frank. Money still preoccupied her, but things did not turn out so badly. In the back of her diary for 1899 she writes a tally of pounds received: Freddy sends £5 and Bertie £15 to £20 every two to three months. Her annual income for the year is £105, around £11,000 in today’s money. ‘The little old lady is rosy and active’, wrote Bertie to Frank on New Year’s Eve 1896, ‘ –fit for twenty years I shouldn’t wonder.’
One century after Mrs Wells returned to Uppark to act as its housekeeper, a terrible fire broke out in the roof, consuming much of what Miss Fetherstonhaugh had striven to pass on. In 1989 the great house was gutted, the upper floors collapsing onto the ground floor with many archives and treasures damaged or destroyed. After long and painstaking repair, Uppark reopened to the public in 1995–one of the most rigorous restoration projects ever undertaken by the National Trust. As for the servants’ basement rooms, their dank, underground nature proved to be the perfect protection from the flames. They needed little renovation.
Mrs Wells’s diaries–which travelled in her black trunk from Uppark to Nyewood, then from Nyewood to Liss–have ended up in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois, on loan from the National Trust. How this would have puzzled, not to say worried their author, had she been able to imagine such an end.