Below Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  Then sometimes we would follow a pantechnicon through the street waiting for it to stop and the horses to oblige. So it didn’t take very long to fill a barrow with a load of manure.

  When I look back on it, we must have been very honest. We didn’t just pile it up. We would pat it all down with our shovels so that people really did have their money’s worth. It used to surprise us that, with so much of the stuff lying around, people were willing to pay for it.

  After several days of this selling of jam jars and collecting manure, we managed to accumulate half a crown which, at sixpence each, was the entrance money for the five of us.

  So the great day came. It was like a fairy tale. A girl dressed in glittering tights came on leading four or five elephants. She let the elephants pick her up in their trunks. Then she would lie on the floor and let them step over her.

  The lions came on and roared suitably. As part of the act a man put his head right into the lion’s mouth. I couldn’t watch.

  Another thing I couldn’t watch was the aerial trapeze.

  But the high spot of the evening for us was the man to he shot from the cannon. The night before we went, we’d heard Mum saying to Dad that when this act had been on in America, the man didn’t land in the net the right way and he broke his neck. Well, with the callousness of children, we didn’t think it was a bad thing at all. Suppose it happened when we went. After all, he had been doing it for several nights and it was time he had a mishap.

  It was the very last act of all. We saw him climb in feet first. Then came the ‘Boom’ we’d anticipated. Out he shot in a cloud of smoke. I must admit I didn’t see him sail to the other side of the tent. I suppose he must have done. He landed in the net quite safely, and there was a tremendous burst of applause which we joined in. Mind you, we would have given just as much applause if he had broken his neck.

  It was a marvellous evening. I didn’t go to sleep that night thinking about it all.

  4

  ANOTHER DIVERSION which may seem a commonplace now was the cinema but, of course, it bore no comparison with films today. The places by present standards were sleazy.

  The one we liked was in the main street. The films were livelier and so were the serials. It used to be on every evening and Saturday afternoon. In the evenings the prices were sixpence, ninepence, a shilling, and one and threepence, but on Saturday afternoon children could get in for three halfpence if you sat downstairs, or threepence if you sat in the gallery. All the well-to-do children, well-to-do by our standards that is, went upstairs and subjected us to an avalanche of orange peelings and nutshells.

  Infants in arms went in for nothing. We used to stagger up to the box office with three- and four-year-olds in our arms so that we didn’t have to pay for them. The moment we passed the box office, we put them down and let them walk.

  We would all go into the cinema at least an hour before the film began. During that hour, a tremendous uproar would go on. There was a woman who always played the piano. Her name was Miss Bottle or so we always called her. She was a middle-aged spinster who had her hair scraped back in a bun with what appeared to be a hatpin skewered through it at the back. She had the most tremendous bosom. Women didn’t wear falsies in those days so I suppose it was natural. About a quarter of an hour before she was due to arrive, we used to stamp our feet on the floor and cry out, ‘Miss Bottle! Miss Bottle!’ She must have been flattered, and when she did appear, Paderewski could not have received a greater ovation than Miss Bottle did. Not that we cared the least about the music or the fact that she played the piano, it was because when she appeared we knew that the film was just going to start.

  During the whole time that we were in the cinema, there was nothing but pandemonium. Babies were howling and the kids were screeching. But it didn’t matter because they were silent films. We did all the talking that there was.

  Just before the film began, the manager used to come on stage with a megaphone and bawl through it, ‘Quiet! Quiet!’ Then, oozing benevolence, his face wreathed in smiles, he used to say, ‘Now, kiddies, you are going to have a marvellous time this afternoon. You’re going to see two lovely films, and I know you are going to enjoy yourselves so when you go home, don’t forget to tell your mummies and daddies what a good time you’ve had.’ Then his face would change. The smile would be wiped off, and glaring at us ferociously, he would say, ‘Look after the babies and don’t you let the little buggers wet the seats!’ But we never used to care. We used to stamp our feet and scream. Nobody took a bit of notice of him.

  Then began the main film and Miss Bottle played all the way through. When I think of the stamina of those pianists! When the action was fierce, she would bang on the keys and put her foot down on the pedal to get it as loud as possible. In the romantic love scenes, she would play soft melodious tunes and the kids used to put their fingers in their mouths and whistle. We didn’t care tuppence about love in those days.

  The serial was often the most harrowing thing. It also used to be our bugbear because there were some weeks when we couldn’t afford to go. Dad would be out of work and he couldn’t even give us the three halfpennies we needed to get in. It always happened when the serial had reached a most thrilling episode like the heroine being suspended over a cliff or tied on the railway line or fixed just in front of a circular saw coming nearer and nearer to her. Then up would come the words, ‘To be continued next week’. The times I’ve hung around the cinema that next week waiting for my friends to come out to tell me what had happened. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t really get killed, that she couldn’t because the serial had to go on. I used to ask, ‘What happened to her? Did she get killed? How did she get away?’ So really the serials were a terrible worry to me.

  5

  THE SHOPS, of course, were nothing like the shops there are now. There were no such things as supermarkets or self-service stores. They were mostly little family concerns.

  There was a Woolworth’s. I don’t think it was called Woolworth’s in those days. It was the ‘Thruppenny and Sixpenny Bazaar’. Everything in it was either threepence or sixpence. You would have thought that at these prices there couldn’t have been much variety but the way they used to get over it was most ingenious. They would separate things. For instance, sixpence for a kettle and threepence for the lid, not sold separately so, you see, it was still sixpence and threepence. The same with saucepans, cups and saucers and so on. Nevertheless, for sixpence, you could get a great many things.

  The pawnshop played a big part in working-class people’s lives. Every Monday morning the wives would cart their husbands’ suits along to put them in pawn and have enough money to get them through the week. On Friday night or Saturday morning, they’d be along to get them out so that the husbands could wear them on Saturdays and Sundays. On Monday, back they would go again. In very hard times, other things would go in, like sheets and blankets. You didn’t get a lot of money on them but even a shilling or two helped you through the week.

  Then, of course, the little grocers’ shops were a great standby. They were always ready to give tick. Mother would send me along with a note saying could she have this, that, and the other on her list and she would pay at the end of the week. They would let you do it because people always paid when they could. Mostly everybody was poor and relied on getting things on tick. The shops may not have been as attractive as they are today but I’m sure the food had more flavour.

  Take the baker’s shop on the corner of our road. It was the most wonderful shop to us! You see they really baked the bread there, and the glorious smell greeted us on our way to school in the morning. Even if you weren’t hungry the wonderful smell of that bread would make your mouth water. They used to do doughnuts for a halfpenny each. Not the sort of doughnuts that you find now that are a lump of dough. One bite and you haven’t found the jam; another and you’ve passed it. They were gorgeous, greasy, and golden, coated in fine sugar, and loaded with jam. The baker used to make several batches
a day. On a weekend when Dad got his money, for a treat we would have some of these for tea. They beat any cakes that I’ve ever known now. And so did the bread. It wasn’t like this kind of bread you eat now that tastes like cotton-wool in your mouth, you can chew it for ever and it’s like swallowing lumps of wet dough. It was like cake. Of course by present-day standards, it wasn’t hygienic. None of it was wrapped.

  When I was a girl practically every street had a pub, in fact some streets had one on each corner.

  Saturday night was the main drinking night. The gaiety there had to be seen to be believed. I can well understand why. You see, employers in those days were vastly different from what they are now. Today ‘Jack’s as good as his master’, but in those days he certainly wasn’t. It was ‘Yes, sir’, ‘No, sir’ and work from morning till night. And work hard because if you didn’t there were half a dozen people queuing up to take your place. But when you got in the pub you were your own master. Yes, then a man had money in his pocket regardless of the fact that it was supposed to last him all the week. So he let go. He went in the pub and aired his opinions and there was no boss to dictate to him. He could say what he liked. Mostly the men got over there as soon as the pub opened and the women as soon as they put the kids to bed. Many women took their children with them – leaving them outside the doors.

  On a Saturday night, by eight o’clock, it would be absolute bedlam inside. There’d be all the people singing and dancing. There was always music. Somebody would play a concertina; somebody a banjo. Somebody would give a turn singing. The men would be swearing at the top of their voices, and often the women as well.

  And the kids outside. Some of them would be in prams; some would be playing; some would open the door and bawl,

  ‘Mum, aren’t you coming out? Mum, baby’s howling!’ And out would come mother. She’d either give the baby something or she’d cuff all her offspring for getting her out and back she would dart in again. Of course, when it came to closing time there was nearly always a free fight on the pavement. They just fought with their fists and shouted obscenities. There was no knocking them down and kicking them in the balls or using knives and bottles like you get now.

  There used to be one man whose wife didn’t drink. When he came out of the pub, three sheets in the wind, reeling along, he’d look up at his bedroom window. If he saw a light on, he knew she’d gone to bed and he’d bawl out, ‘It’s no good you bloody well going to sleep, you old cow, because I shall need you in a minute!’

  There was nothing else for working-class people but the pubs. They couldn’t afford to go to the theatres; the cinema maybe. It wasn’t that they spent such a lot. The beer was so strong then. When my Dad was in work he used to come home Saturday at dinnertime and send me around to the bottle-and-jug department to get half a pint of Burton. They used to have only this half a pint between them. But my mother said it was just like drinking wine, it was so strong and smooth that that was as much as they needed. Nowadays you can down pints of the stuff and all it does is fill you full of wind and water.

  6

  ALTHOUGH WE lived by the sea a lot of our playing was done in the streets. It is nowadays to some extent, but then we used to play proper games. The games were marvellous because not only did you have the pavement, you had the road as well. There wasn’t much traffic then.

  At Easter, for example, it was street skipping. We’d get a long scaffold rope out, stretching from one side of the street to the other. The mothers would turn the rope and anyone who liked could skip in. Sometimes there would be a dozen all skipping at the same time and singing, ‘Hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns.’

  Another game was Buttons. How my mother used to dread the autumn when Button time came around! We used to draw a chalk square on the pavement by the house and shoot the buttons into it. The first person who managed to get her button into the square and knock somebody else’s out won them all. I was an absolute duffer at the game.

  Then there was hopscotch time. You drew a big oblong in chalk on the pavement and squared it off, and numbered these squares from one up to twelve. Then you threw a stone first into ‘One’, then you hopped into that square, picked up the stone and bopped the way around without touching the lines. Next you threw the stone into ‘Two’ and hopped and picked up the stone in ‘Two’ and hopped all the way around again, and so on till you’d put the stone in all the squares. The moment you put the other foot down or you didn’t succeed in picking up the stone, you were out.

  Marbles was the game everybody went mad about. You kicked a hole in the road about six or seven feet from the gutter. And you could then. The idea was to get the marbles into the hole – and the game developed in the same way as Buttons. Yet another game was hoops. My aunt bought me the largest hoop you could have. It had an iron guide which you hooked on to the hoop and I ran all round the roads with it. You never had to worry about traffic. No child would last very long doing that today.

  Then, of course, there was top time. That was a wonderful time because these tops you just wound up with string and you could whip them from one end of the street to the other. You could paste little coloured pieces of paper on the top of them so that when you whipped, it was like a rainbow going round.

  Later in the autumn, we used to go up to the Downs and get horse-chestnuts and play conkers. It didn’t cost us anything. And as soon as we lost one supply we could always get more.

  I don’t want to give the impression that life was all games. There was always school and the holidays weren’t as long as they are now, but I always enjoyed going to school because I did pretty well there. I never found any of it hard except things like art, knitting, and needlework. None of those things were any good to me at all. The needlework was my biggest hate. We had to make such ugly garments; chemises and bloomers – as they were called then. Both made of calico. The chemises were wide with sort of cap sleeves and they reached down to the knees. The bloomers did up at the back with buttons and were also voluminous. Whoever bought these awful garments when they were finished I really don’t know. I should imagine they were given to the workhouse because I certainly never brought any home. There were always loads of gathers and you had to stroke the gathers. I was absolutely hopeless at it. In the first place, I could never seem to get on with the thimble. So, of course, I used to prick my finger and the garments got spotted with blobs of blood. It started out as a white garment but it was red and black by the time I’d finished. Well, can you wonder at it? There were the most primitive lavatories in the yard but there was nowhere to wash your hands. So I came in after playtime with my hands filthy to do this needlework.

  Singing was hopeless too. I always remember the school concert. We had a concert once a year and, as I was always a bit of a big head, I thought that I would be able to do something. The teacher said to me, ‘You can’t sing.’ So she said, ‘I know what you can do. You can tell a funny story. I’ll write it all out for you and you learn it all off by heart.’

  The funny story was about a man who went into a café and wanted a plate of boiled onions. He got so muddled with it that he asked for a plate of oiled bunions. I thought it was quite funny. So did my family. They got the joke presumably. But when it came to the concert and I got up on the platform I started saying it in a very straight way – sort of parrot fashion, and then I got my onions and bunions all the wrong way round and at the end I waited for the laugh but nobody did except the teachers. They had to laugh. It was terrible. I never felt so mortified in my life. I went as red as a beetroot, and left in a great hurry. They never got me to do anything else. They had no manners at all. They should have laughed. Especially as it was free.

  But the great thing about school in those days was that we had to learn. I don’t think you can beat learning; how to read and write, and how to do arithmetic. Those are the three things that anyone who has got to work for a living needs. We were forced to learn and I think children need to be forced. I don’t believe in this
business of ‘if they don’t want to do it, it won’t do them any good’. It will do them good. Our teacher used to come around and give us a mighty clump on the neck or box on the ears if she saw us wasting our time. Believe me, by the time we came out of school, we came out with something. We knew enough to get us through life. Not that any of us thought about what we were going to do. We all knew that when we left school we’d have to do something, but I don’t think we had any ambitions to do any particular type of work.

  7

  I WON A SCHOLARSHIP when I was thirteen which was the age one sat for it then. You had to say on your paper what you would like to be. I said I wanted to be a teacher. My parents saw my headmistress but when they found out that I couldn’t possibly earn any money till I was eighteen and up to that time they would have to keep me, and not only keep me, but buy my books and clothes, they just couldn’t do it. You see, there were no government grants in those days.

  I was allowed to leave school because I was in the top class and if I had put in another year it would have been the same work all over again.

  Looking back, I wish it had been possible to have gone on with my education but at that time I didn’t mind in the least. I didn’t think my parents were hard because I knew I had to go out to work, I knew we needed the money so desperately. I had known the mortifications of poverty. I remember when I was about seven – it was early in the Great War. Dad wasn’t called up then but nobody was having anything done in the decorating line; the men had gone into the army and money was very tight indeed.