The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  By Vanessa’s sixty-sixth birthday at the end of the month, Grace had been twenty-five years with Mrs Bell. A general election was called that July, the first for ten years. Election posters were stuck up in the porch: ‘Vote Labour’ for Vanessa, Duncan and Quentin, ‘Vote Liberal’ for Clive. Remarkably, Walter was also allowed space by this egalitarian household: he pinned up ‘Vote Conservative’. Grace professed herself to be ‘in between’. The house newspapers were similarly divided: The Times for Clive, The Daily Worker for Quentin and the Express for Walter. Vanessa’s investigations into working-class ‘specimens’ had gathered pace during the war. She had taken a businesslike interest in pig breeding and joined the local Pig Keepers’ Council–unlike sentimental Grace, who treated the pigs like pets and hated them being killed, though she jointed and salted them down herself on the scrubbed kitchen table. ‘The curious thing’, Vanessa wrote to her daughter, ‘is that though these rustics can really hardly read or write…they are in some ways very sharp indeed–too sharp, you may think.’

  On 5 July 1945 Clement Attlee’s Labour Party won a landslide victory, their first majority government. Post-war reforms were pushed through with determination. Labour Party membership had risen fourfold between the wars (the Rodmell branch was hosted monthly by Leonard Woolf at Monk’s House). Labour promised full employment, a National Health Service and a ‘cradle-to-grave’ Welfare State. Its campaign message ‘Let’s Face the Future’ had tapped into the nation’s impatient mood for change.

  In 1949 Grace suffered a series of headaches, but, like so many women used to putting up with complaints because medicine cost money, she did nothing about it. Vanessa Bell insisted she saw a doctor at the new NHS surgery in Lewes, all upholstered waiting-room chairs and free magazines. On her return Grace was found in tears in the hall: in a desperate voice, she announced she had just shut a toad in the door. Vanessa got the charlady, Mrs Stevens, to remove the corpse and asked what the doctor had said. Grace had asked for new glasses but had not mentioned the headaches, as she’d heard that Mrs Carter, the cook at Tilton, was going stone deaf, and she thought by comparison her headaches could not be mentioned. ‘I very nearly made Grace go straight back to tell the doctor her own symptoms’, wrote Vanessa to Angelica with fond exasperation. ‘I suppose Grace will just go on being Grace.’

  How did Vanessa, now an austere, silver-haired 70-year-old, view her housekeeper? Though Grace was 46, Vanessa still instinctively thought of her as the willing, flustered girl from decades back. She had never become ‘Mrs Higgens’ in her mistress’s mind; never taken on that dignified mantle of the upper servant. Grace had kept the same hairstyle she’d worn to her job interview–bobbed, held with a side clip–and its girlishness made her look slightly batty, grey as she now was.

  Forty-six: this was properly middle-aged in 1949. Grace was in the autumn of her life, and her character was not going to change. She was who she was: easily startled, prone to inappropriate shrieks of laughter, soft-hearted. She was the sort who would pull the babies’ pram into the kitchen (‘Poor little darlings’), when Angelica left her twins out in the cold for their nap: the sort who would give George the postman a daily cup of tea and a bun and listen to his news. Grace found it hard to sleep and would lie in bed reading–‘all kinds of books, as many books as she could’ said her son–well into the small hours. She was garrulous, sociable and tactile, throwing out her hand and giving you a push when something made her laugh. She had a horror of grubbiness, loved neat and cheerful flowerbeds, spoke passable French–and was quietly ambitious for her only son.

  Her pocket diary for June 1947 notes that ‘Peter John sat for exams’. This was the all-important Eleven-Plus, the exam that would see him go either to grammar school or to Lewes County Modern. He passed, and Grace got bolder still. She settled on Christ’s Hospital, a boys’ public school in Horsham some twenty miles away, with a tradition of funding pupils from poorer backgrounds. It is an ancient school with an esoteric uniform (belted long blue coats, knee breeches, yellow stockings); the sort of school her employers might have chosen for their own children. Perhaps she was told about it by Duncan, Clive or Vanessa–or perhaps not, as they seem to have lumped Peter John together with Walter as another dolt. I imagine Grace catching the cross-country train from Lewes, her beanpole son in slightly too short grey flannel trousers with his hair smarmed down. Grace would have been in her customary hat (she never went on a journey without a hat), gloves and clip-on earrings. She always wore earrings. Outwardly, she would have been calm and confident, but her hands clasped tightly on her handbag would have hinted at her anxiety.

  Peter John did not get into Christ’s Hospital. He failed the interview. ‘So, young man, are you looking forward to joining our historic school?’ asked the patrician headmaster, leaning back in his chair and fixing Peter John with a kindly yet unwavering stare. ‘No, sir,’ Grace’s son had replied. ‘Actually, I’m not. I’m happy just where I am. I don’t want to move at all.’15 And Grace had her ambition for him crushed in one sentence. It had all been her own idea–but he was her husband’s son.

  John dropped the ‘Peter’ from his name, went to Lewes County Modern and became head boy, for though he wasn’t the brightest, he was the best at sport. ‘John 36 runs against Ringmer’ reads Grace’s diary one summer’s day after that fated interview. ‘John’s lip split by cricket ball’ a couple of years later. Sport was his salvation–in a way that it had never been for Quentin Bell, overweight, uncoordinated and miserable at public school. For all Grace’s fierce ambition, perhaps John had known instinctively what was right for him.

  XII

  Modern Milestones

  Grace wrote an exclamatory sentence in biro in her new Women’s Institute diary on 11 January 1953: ‘John out to tea with Diana Piper!’ Her 17-year-old son was out on another date with the girl he would eventually marry. Diana Piper–rosy-cheeked, outgoing, vivacious–blew into the closed world of Charleston in that Coronation year and shook things up. She brought with her an outsider’s perspective on the whole ménage, questioning Grace’s unthinking loyalty to the family and prompting John to ask if his mother was being taken for granted. Diana Piper was the granddaughter of a servant: her grandfather had been a groom for Lord Gage at nearby Firle Place. She had left school at 15 to work with horses, felt beholden to nobody and was surprised to discover that somewhere like Charleston still functioned the way it did. ‘I didn’t like the way they spoke to Grace,’ Diana remembered. ‘It was very formal. All Victorian standards.’

  That spring John walked her up the long cart track, ‘puddles and all sorts’, to the farmhouse. First she was greeted by Blotto, Grace’s hairy sheepdog, who slept in a half-barrel kennel outside the back door. John led Diana past the clutter of coats and boots into the kitchen. ‘Grace was there, as she always was–it wasn’t very often you went to Charleston and didn’t find her there, either at the sink or at the table, cooking,’ she said. The first thing that hit her was ‘this awful concrete floor’. Grace had long waged a campaign to replace it with linoleum, but Vanessa Bell had a prejudice against lino. Diana remembered too the comforting smells of the kitchen–percolating coffee, home-made soup simmering on the Aga. She took note of the one-gallon geyser over the kitchen sink for washing up (with no washing-up liquid, though ‘Fairy’ had been around since 1950); and the fact that all the Higgens family laundry was done there by hand. The four squeezed into their tiny sitting room and played card games with much talk and laughter (‘they both liked to talk a lot’), while Grace kept an ear cocked for the call from the dining room. Diana watched with wonder the ritual of serving another family.

  ‘It was different to my own home,’ she said. ‘We were just a family, two brothers and a sister.’ At Charleston there was this other parallel but subtly different world through an interconnecting door. ‘You would feel you were shut in this little sitting room, in case the family came out while Grace was doing her cooking. After a while I would come into the
kitchen and talk to her, and I could see how hard she worked.’ Diana would watch Mr Bell enter to get his gin and tonic from the old Frigidaire, acknowledging her with a gentlemanly nod. Mrs Bell would also nod and say ‘good evening’, very formal. But if Duncan Grant came in, ‘his face would light up if he saw people–he’d ask you questions, he was just interested’. Diana soon learnt, like her boyfriend John before her, to ‘pop back into the sitting room quick’ if it was anyone other than Mr Grant.

  On 2 April 1953, Grace and Walter took delivery of a black-and-white television set at a cost of £60–around £1,200 in today’s money–paid for in instalments on the new ‘hire purchase’ scheme (£6 down payment). That year, over a million televisions would be bought in Britain, bringing the total to 2.7 million. It was a hefty object boxed in teak veneer, duly admired by visiting guests; an object that would come to dominate the little sitting room, enhancing their cut-off life at Charleston. From this point, Grace began to record world news in her diaries. On 2 June, a cold day of sheeting rain, the Coronation of Elizabeth II was watched by the Higgenses and their friends the Ramsays. ‘Beautiful reception on Television from abbey’, wrote Grace that night. Vanessa Bell and Mr Grant, neither of them royalists, marked the day in London with plover’s eggs and champagne.

  It was a rare occasion that got Vanessa to London these days. After the war Clive returned there, Duncan shuttled between the two and Vanessa stayed on at Charleston. She had become weary of socialising, dreaded London parties and succumbed apparently happily to her contracting horizons. Her style of painting had fallen out of fashion; now her young granddaughters gave her her greatest pleasure: Amaryllis, Henrietta, and twins Frances and Nerissa. Angelica’s marriage–at 24, to a man twenty-six years her senior–was not a happy one. Her husband Bunny Garnett (an ex-lover of Duncan Grant’s, by a classic Bloomsbury twist), played the field while she was stuck in Huntingdonshire in a big house with very little help. ‘It’s really terrible that all your possible servants have fallen through’, Vanessa wrote to her in 1952. ‘It seemed more hopeful when I was with you.’

  While Vanessa’s world shrank, her housekeeper’s began to expand. The modern milestones of the post-war era are ticked off one by one in Grace’s diaries. In 1948 she gets a Vactric, which runs about polishing floors ‘as if by itself’; in 1953 she buys the television, has her hair permed (‘not too bad’), acquires her own passport and flies off on her first package holiday to Paris with a crocodile-skin travelling case and her friend Ruby Weller (‘Horrible room in Hotel’). In 1954 she pays her first instalment on the Encyclopedia Britannica; in 1958 she’s travelling again, this time on a week’s package holiday by coach to Venice with Ruby and Mrs Harland (‘lovely place’); and in 1961, aged 58, is the proud owner of a ‘wonderful Hoover-Matic’ washing machine (costing £90, a present from Mr Bell).

  Grace also took to visiting country houses now open to the public, thanks to the fledgling National Trust and the Historic Buildings and Monuments Act of 1953, which ruled that in return for repair grants, the public should get a measure of access. Grace would join her WI friends on motorbus expeditions to Wakehurst Place, Haremere Hall, Alfriston Clergy House and Polesden Lacey, running her practised servant’s eye over the interiors (‘very grubby’ was her verdict on one). If Grace saw any irony in herself, a housekeeper, visiting such houses as a tourist, she didn’t comment on it. She was a working lady on her weekly day off, enjoying the scenery, nail scissors at the ready for furtive plant cuttings.

  There was a price to pay for breaking her bounds. Time and again Grace records getting back from a holiday to find the sink full of dirty dishes, or the fridge full of stinking meat. There was the occasion when she found her big cauldron of soup, left expressly on the Aga for the family, still bubbling foully on her return. ‘Spent day scrubbing & cleaning’, Grace recorded on her return from Paris. ‘Took six buckets of water to scrub kitchen, it was filthy.’ Going to the Paris ballet, riding down the Grand Canal on a Venetian gondola–well, it cast something of a grey pall over daily life. John began to take note of the small disrespects paid to his mother, such as Quentin walking through from his pottery with his ‘clodhopper boots covered in clay’ just after Grace had scrubbed the tiled passageway from front to back door; or the last-minute announcements that there would be eight to dinner, requiring a bus journey into Lewes to buy more food. Few suppliers would deliver to Charleston now; the long, potholed track was too much for the delivery vans.

  Grace wasn’t a moaner. She might exclaim, ‘What a waste of time!’ but she seemed outwardly content. There were signs, though, that she wanted something more from life. When the war ended, the women of Britain desired only to put their energies into home–their own home. Home was what the men had been fighting for, symbol of so much hope and pride. For many women it was more than a simple wish for privacy. Home was who they were, their ‘creative power base’, a projection of their very identity. ‘Four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition’, wrote one Mass Observation diarist after the war.16 Charleston was home to the Higgenses, but it was not their home. When Diana Piper met the family in the early 1950s, Grace was already on a housing list to get a council bungalow. She had started thinking about a life beyond Charleston.

  But there were few houses to be had. After the war, prices had quadrupled. While Grace had been salting away her tips, her earnings and the Bell Christmas presents of crisp five-pound notes, she and Walter did not yet have enough to buy a home in East Sussex. When Angelica’s old nurse Nellie Brittain visited, boasting a husband in the police force, a son in the civil service and general prosperity, Grace was made uncomfortably aware of how comparatively poorly off she was. Walter was fed up too. ‘He thought they put on her too much,’ said John, ‘especially in the evenings, when she’d like to watch a television programme or listen to the radio, and she’d be called on–“Grace?”–and she’d have to come out of the sitting room and go and see to their needs.’

  Or they’d be discussing something at dinner and decide to get their housekeeper’s point of view,

  and she’d readily give it; talk it over in the kitchen. Duncan, or Quentin, would come back into the dining room and say, ‘Grace thinks so-and-so’–and they’d laugh, and think maybe she did have a point…very often this would occur.

  It was flattering, this dependency on her. They wanted her not just for her cooking but for her opinions. Yet this summoning of Grace might go on up to ten or eleven o’clock at night, and the couple began to crave more privacy.

  Her solution was to buy the old family house in Banham, Norfolk; two farm cottages knocked together, bought cheaply from her parents in 1958 and in need of modernisation. Grace had kept in constant touch with her family, writing home weekly, visiting every summer and sending her son off for the school holidays. She harboured a dream of retiring there now that John, who had a steady job with a television repair company, looked set to marry Diana. She and Walter could live among her extended family and contribute to the smallholding. But the dream was just that: a dream. For, as the years went by, Grace found it harder and harder to contemplate leaving her ageing charges at Charleston. Gradually, they had come to depend upon her for everything.

  XIII

  A Circle Closing

  John Higgens married Diana Piper on Cup Final day, 2 May 1959. As Nottingham Forest played Luton Town at Wembley, televised live on Grandstand, Grace and Walter hosted a crowded reception at the brick and flint Trevor Arms in Glynde following a traditional church wedding. Diana wore ‘a white ballerina length lace & nylon dress’, while bridesmaid Sally looked ‘very sweet in a pink embossed nylon dress’. Grace was every inch the proud mother in grey suit and hat, still with faint social ambitions (‘the Champagne was a great success’), and annoyed that Walter had forgotten his braces so he didn’t look as smart as he could for the photos. The Bells were not there, though they sent a generous cheque. Four days later Vanessa took to her bed, dangerously ill. ‘Mrs Bell’s heart v
ery bad’, wrote Grace in her diary. ‘Doctor said she must stay in bed & have no salt. Very worried.’ Her mistress was three weeks short of her eightieth birthday.

  Grace was now 56, a matronly figure in a flowered overall straining over her bosom and tied tightly round the waist, a rigid iron-grey permanent ‘set’ and rheumatic joints. Now that her son had left home, she began to use her diary to make sense of the life she had chosen for herself. It was too late now to change its course.

  There was a mood of reckoning, of taking stock. ‘Walter & I have been married 25 years & we have been very happy & very lucky’, she wrote. ‘We have a son, whom any mother or father would be proud of, & we have our health…we are indeed fortunate people.’ Grace did not appeal to God to get her through; she’d go and eat a cream bun and get her hair permed (‘looks very nice’). Events beyond her small world were beamed into the sitting room each evening on the six o’clock news, recorded in her diaries as they happened: student riots in Paris, first man on the moon, the Vietnam War, Cliff Richard singing ‘Congratulations’ in the ‘Song for Europe’ contest.

  To the Bloomsbury set she was now known as ‘The Angel of Charleston’, a name coined by Duncan Grant. It was no longer Vanessa, famous hostess, but Grace who was the mainstay of the house. She had become indispensable. As ‘the backbone of Bloomsbury’ she held enormous power, but there is no sense of this in her diaries. Rather, she seems still helplessly beholden to the family and its needs. In the winter of 1960 Vanessa Bell took Grace back to the South of France for an open-ended sojourn, leaving the now retired Walter to fend for himself and Diana heavily pregnant with the Higgenses’ first grandchild. ‘They collared her,’ Diana told me, ‘and although Grace was quite outspoken she always felt she had to be there for them. She had to look after them.’