The Great Silence

by Juliet Nicolson

  Liberal-minded members of a class a rung or two below the aristocracy applauded the emancipation of the servant class, while persisting in making use of the old system. Leonard Woolf, a committed socialist who felt ‘the class war and the conflict of class interests’ to be ‘the greatest of curses’, still employed a cha lady at the lowest of low wages impervious to any suggestion of hypocrisy.

  Eric’s own circumstances had become even more distressing in the spring of 1919. His wife Emma, or Aunt Em as the family knew her, had been gradually losing her sight over the years, and when she became blind the whole family, including Eric and Emily’s son, daughter-in-law and grandson, had moved to Coronation Villas in Sutton and Cheam. Eric had taken the job with the snuffling cook and visited his wife whenever possible. But one snowy cold evening after an outing to the pantomime, Eric’s son and his wife and child were unable to find an indoor seat on the bus home and were forced to take outside seats in the freezing night air. They all caught Spanish flu and passed it on to the weakened Emily. Within a day she had died, her daughter-in-law barely clinging to life.

  The expenses for Eric and his family that first winter of peace were horrifying. Only one butler in a hundred had a pension and many, especially the married ones who had an extra drain on their reduced resources, ended up in the poorhouse. A special nurse had been called in to care for Eric’s family through the worst of the crisis, as on top of the flu the young grandson had caught measles. Then there were the extra cylinders of hydrogen brought in to hydrate the sickroom and finally the most costly and saddest expense of all, Emily’s funeral. Eric had saved £100 in the Prudential that covered it and he thanked the Lord for his own foresight.

  After Emily’s death Eric had stayed in London, partly to be near his brother Frank, whose taxi-driving skills had served him well during the war. Eric’s flat in Bessborough Place, Victoria, was not much to write home about, being a stuffy garret at the top of the building, and on the long climb to the top Eric could feel his heart thumping in an alarmingly irregular manner. He was still writing his memoirs, his own safeguard against state poverty. He had been keeping the diary throughout his fifty years of service and thought he would end the book with an advertisement for a vacancy for a butler valet. Eric himself would be the ideal employee. The wording was specific and accurate. ‘First class, life experience, strong, healthy, active worker, excellent references.’ He thought he would add that any position would be considered ‘where honesty and integrity would be appreciated’ – a rare combination of qualities these days, Eric thought.

  Living in the city, Eric also noticed how the pace of life, so leisurely and civilised before the war, had changed. The motor car, suddenly affordable to countless thousands, seemed to be in large part responsible for the change of speed. A year earlier, on the day the Peace Conference had begun in Paris, W.O. Bentley or W.O. to his friends, known for his manufacture of rotary aero-engines in the war, had announced the opening of a factory at Cricklewood, north London, where he planned to produce the most elegant car on the roads. ‘Gentry need not leave their houses to go out to dinner until within a few minutes before dinner should be on the table,’ Eric observed with a critical note in his voice. ‘They dart up in a stinking car that sends out noxious fumes; offensive to everyone but themselves.’

  But Eric had a still deeper anxiety concerning the moral laxity and fragmentation of society that went beyond inconvenience and selfishness. ‘English home life is all broken up,’ he observed. ‘At any given meal time or at any entertainment, the chances are that the gentleman will be found dining with a “lady” not his wife and the lady dining with some gentleman, not her husband; and the chauffeur is waiting outside for hours in the cold and the wet. And the chauffeur is, by the professional rules of his employment, to remain silent about what he has seen.’ Or, Eric might have added, not seen. The conspiracy of not speaking the truth pervaded all parts of society.

  Some of Eric’s younger relations rolled their eyes behind his back, realising for the hundredth time that there was no hope of accustoming Uncle Eric, now well into his seventies, to the new ways of behaving. But the eye-roll was undoubtedly of the affectionate kind. Everyone who knew him agreed that Uncle Eric was one of a kind and that they didn’t make butlers like that any more.

  For a brief interlude, however, Eric had been given a job that took him back to memories of happier times. Rajah Sir Harry Singh, whom Eric had served before the war, returned to London. He had taken a house in Curzon Street for six months from June 1919 from where he celebrated the Victory Parade. The Rajah, ‘one of the most likeable men there has ever been’, brought his own Indian staff with him for his immediate needs but he also took on several English servants and ran the house in a style that Eric approvingly noted was ‘princely without being extravagant’. Here was a household where ‘flowers and fruit abounded’. Visitors were served delicious home-prepared Indian curry and while the Rajah was an abstemious man he made sure the ‘choicest wines’ were served to his guests.

  Only once, with Eric’s help, did proceedings become a little excessive. On the night of the Victory Parade itself, the prince had taken a box at the theatre and when the beauty of the lady in the adjoining box was noted and remarked upon by the prince’s all-male guests, Eric slipped next door and ‘by the exercise of a little influence’ with the butler there, conveyed champagne and supper into the box, whereupon the lady herself agreed to be lifted over into the Rajah’s own box. Members of the audience who noticed this small transaction applauded with polite but envious laughter and the jollity of the evening helped a little in forgetting the recurring pain of Emily’s death. Despairing of a return to the good old days of life before the war, Eric took comfort in his association with an Indian prince whose intelligence ‘far surpassed any Englishman I ever met’.

  13

  Dreaming

  Mid-Spring 1920

  Driving days were over for Tommy Atkins, the former under-chauffeur of the Marquis de Soveral, even before they had begun. Having never managed to learn the skill since the humiliating incident when he was caught having a go at the wheel of the Portuguese ambassador’s Rolls-Royce, Tommy was further ashamed to have been invalided out of the London Irish Rifles on account of his feet. He had enjoyed a moment or two of authority when guarding prisoners of war in the North of England. One day, overseeing some German prisoners digging a trench in the English mud and relishing his new-found gift for languages acquired in ‘Paree’, he asserted this authority with a German phrase that sounded pretty good to him even though he could not confirm its accuracy. As he bellowed out ‘Ein Mun mit spaden’, simultaneously indicating to the men that they should pick up their digging tools, he noted with pleasure how his words had the instant effect of making them jump to his command.

  Tommy was the second youngest of twelve children and although Albert, one of his four brothers, had been killed in the fighting, Tommy was proud to know that the name of Private Atkins, a former engine cleaner for the London and South Western Railway Company, would appear in a special memorial plaque at Waterloo Station. Tommy had never had much time for religion, especially after he had seen his first dead German body lying in the mud with the words on his belt buckle still visible, Gott mit uns. No God, reasoned Tommy, could be on both sides of this ghastly carnage. Any belief he might have had evaporated immediately.

  But Tommy’s faith in human love remained undimmed. He had always been a romantic, although the sight of a couple in an unashamed embrace, or the lingering comings and goings between the milkman and the lady of the house next door, troubled him. He did not approve of public demonstrations of affection. However, he had been ecstatically happy to come back south to his sweetheart Kitty whom he had married immediately after the war. He treasured a photograph taken at Elstree of the two of them, their heads leaning into each other, Tommy jauntily bending his knee, his new moustache emphasising his handsome features. Everyone said he was a dead cert to win first prize in any
competition searching for Mr Debonair. Tommy and Kitty were happy, despite having very little money, but he did not think that a return to life in service was for him even though most of his brothers and sisters had once worked for the gentry. Although Tommy had left school at the age of thirteen and was a bit of a dreamer, there was enough of an air of authority about him in the smart uniform that went with his new job as a meter reader in the Hackney Electrical Company.

  Tommy and Kitty rented a room in a boarding house in Stoke Newington in London’s East End run by a large woman called Annie who was three years older than Tommy. Marital prospects for Annie were slim not only because of the coldness of her expression but also because of her thrice-widowed and immensely demanding mother who lived with her and banged her stick on the floor whenever she wanted her daughter’s attention. Annie was a hard-working woman, a seamstress by day, turning out exquisite panels of smocking which she would deliver to the factory up the road to be made up into children’s dresses. In the evening she would cross London to fulfil her barmaid duties at Lambeth’s Elephant and Castle Theatre, with its distinctive figure of an elephant sitting on the top of the entrance. Charlie Chaplin had grown up in a street not far away.

  But Annie was not a happy woman. From the age of three her mother had farmed her out to be brought up by an aunt. Annie secretly dreamed of the day she would have a little girl for whom she could make pretty clothes and send to dance lessons in a theatre and for whom she would always be waiting when she returned from school. She would be a mother who might not be able to show much warmth, but who would make sure that when the occasion was right she would let her daughter know that she loved her unconditionally. But even while Annie dreamed of finding a decent man as a husband and father of her children, she knew the probability was remote. Meanwhile her lodgers, Tommy and Kitty, in the first flush of marriage, kept themselves to themselves.

  Although Tommy’s ambitions to drive a Rolls-Royce had not been realised, the post-war passion for driving was increasing every year. Douglas Ann, a dashing moustachioed ex-soldier, a passionate naturalist and owner of a modest farm in Sussex, thought he could make some money out of this new craze for motoring. Immediately after the war Douglas had married a plain but ambitious woman called Drusilla. For two guineas a week ‘all found’ the enterprising Mr and Mrs Ann had offered to train half a dozen well-to-do girls in the skills of becoming financially self-sufficient, just in case the limited post-war supply of wage-earning husbands should be denied them. The eager girls mastered the care of the cow, the three pigs and the varied selection of beautiful chickens including White Wyandottes, Red Dorkings and Light Sussex hens kept by the Anns. By the end of their stay and after several months immersed to their knees in muck and mire, the girls had become qualified to run their own smallholdings.

  Meanwhile the enterprising Douglas and Drusilla had noticed that the main road between Brighton and Eastbourne was becoming busier. When a disused bone mill came up for sale, sitting in twenty acres of empty land and only a stone’s throw from the busy main road, they bought it. They had a hunch that the new hobby of taking the car out for a run would create demand for a tea shop and the energetic Anns were determined they would have the most popular tea shop in the county.

  They took out an advertisement in the Lady, offering training (still at the bargain price of two guineas a head) in the baking and management skills necessary for opening a small tea shop. The response to the advertisement was tremendous and soon the Anns had their pick of a fully qualified staff. Douglas named the new establishment after Drusilla. He would not have dared choose any other name, given the fierce temperament of the woman who was his partner in business and life. Only on Douglas’s regular escapes down to the river to fish, or when chatting with the handsome girls under his tutelage, did he ever really feel free of Drusilla’s never-ending and exhausting demands.

  Within a short time ‘Drusilla’s’ was providing the local villagers with much needed employment working in the kitchens and the tea shop and caring for the beautiful grounds. The tea shop, swiftly acknowledged to be one of the best in the Home Counties, served its visitors delicious cakes, eaten, on fine days, in large wicker seats down by the lake while looking at the glorious views of the South Downs. Soon ‘Drusilla’s’ became a popular meeting place for motorists from all over Sussex. Archie from Eastbourne and his cloche-hatted wife Ethel would drive over in the lovingly polished Bentley for a rendezvous with their friends Harry and Maude, his new sweetheart. Harry had motored over to meet them from the opposite direction at Hove in his shiny new Lagonda and they would join all the other couples delighting in a day out in the countryside while showing off their new cars.

  The Anns’ commercial hunch proved correct. Soon a poster advertising ‘Drusilla’s’ boasted that the car park was ‘The Motor Show of the South’. Occasionally a demobbed sailor would visit the tea shop, bringing with him a brilliantly feathered and chatty parrot or a tiny shivery monkey, picked up in some exotic place during his wartime service. The Anns were happy to house these animals as they gave such pleasure to the children of their visitors. Some of the locals were amused and charmed to see the place turning into a miniature zoo.

  Doris Scovell had worked in kitchens since the age of 14. She had left school just a few years short of the Education Act of 1918 when the number of teenagers remaining at school beyond that age rose from 30,000 to 600,000. But Doris was growing up in a different environment. In a manner of speaking, she was almost married to the cooking profession, having fallen in love just before the war with Will Titley, the under-footman in the smart household where she worked in Piccadilly, one door away from the Rothschild house.

  Doris was born eighteen months after the death of Queen Victoria, making her just twelve years old when the war began. She had spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in High Wycombe, some thirty-nine miles from London and, for a young child, an impressive full day’s walk from her home in Kensington. Accompanied on her way by her father, Doris would let her mother know of her progress by sending three postcards during the journey that, with the excellent pre-war postal service, would be delivered to London at intervals within the same day.

  Granny Scovell was a naturally gifted cook and during Doris’s visits to High Wycombe she acquired something of her grandmother’s skill. Later on, wartime shortages of food led to a whole series of expressions related to quantities, all familiar to Doris and her grandmother as they talked of’a lick of marge’, ‘a screw of sugar’ and ‘a marsel of cheese’. Ingenious ways to serve eggs had become a competitive habit, including infinite variations of scrambling. The dish came with anchovy essence, with grated cheese, sometimes with peas or tomatoes, with minced ham, diced sheep kidney, chopped mushrooms and sometimes nestled in a circle of spinach.

  Food had been a major preoccupation during the war years. The Government’s advice was to ‘use as little as you can’, and butchers, usually open for only one day a week, were often implored for any bit of offal that was going. A pound of meat a week was the average allocation, with perhaps a rasher or two of fatty bacon. Every flower bed and window box had been given over to growing vegetables. Only in gentlemen’s eating establishments was the impact of rationing absent. At White’s Oyster Shop at the top of Chancery Lane the oysters when in season were plentiful but on bookseller David Garnett’s visits he would have a good lunch even out of season, with a choice of either lobster or crab, accompanied by brown bread and butter and a delicious chilled hock. After a plate of fine cheddar and a glass or two of port, he would continue puffing on a substantial cigar as he weaved his way back to the bookshop. Other city dwellers, however, without access to a gentleman’s club or a plentiful rural estate, suffered. But country people like Doris’s grandmother were endlessly resourceful. Rabbit was a staple and cooked in every possible way, in casseroles, pies, as pâtés and roasts.

  In the early years of the war the stylish Marchioness of Tweeddale, who wore enormous hats even ins
ide the house, took Doris on as a tweenie maid, and soon she was dashing between the upstairs and downstairs floors of the large house. She would help the cook with the vegetable preparation, tear upstairs to help the parlour maid with the bedmaking and dusting, scrub the floors and corridors and carry messages from the cook to the Marchioness with all speed. The other staff, the cook, the two parlour maids and the housemaids, all used to joke among themselves that the Marchioness didn’t even know where the kitchen was! At least the Marchioness did not ask her maids to hold her knickers for her as she stepped into them, as some grand ladies were said to do.

  One afternoon in February 1918, a few months after the introduction of wartime rationing of meat, butter and margarine, the cook’s mother suddenly fell ill and the cook was called away to her bedside. The Marchioness was having an important lunch party for six ladies the following day and a semi-hysterical parlour maid came to Doris in the servants’ hall, clutching a closely wrapped brown paper parcel. ‘You will have to cook this,’ the maid shrieked at Doris, shoving the package at the young girl, ‘because I haven’t an idea of what to do with it, to save my life.’

  Scarcity such as was known in her grandmother’s kitchen was not generally met with in the basement of the Marchioness’s house; there was, it seemed, almost always plenty to go round. But on this particular day Doris was taken aback at the quality of the raw ingredients. Unwrapping the layers of newspaper, she found herself looking at a whiskery face in need of a haircut. The insolent-looking eyes stared out of the complete head of a calf, daring Doris to reject it. But there was no question about it. Remembering the lessons she had learned from her grandmother, Doris was determined the lunch should go ahead.