Below Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  Mrs Moffat, as befitted anyone who had Mr Moffat for a husband, was a meek and mild person. I often wondered if she was meek and mild when she had dealings with her kitchen maid. But everything that Mr Moffat said was gospel truth to her. I don’t know what Christian name Mr Moffat had but she never used to call him by it. It was always, ‘As Mr Moffat said to his Lordship’, or, ‘When Mr Moffat was serving Lady so and so’, or, ‘Mr Moffat told John’ (that was one of the footmen). It was ‘Mr Moffat this’, ‘Mr Moffat that’. Her whole life was wrapped around Mr Moffat. What personality she had, if she’d ever had any, and presumably she must have had to have attracted him in the first place, unless it was her cooking that appealed to him, was submerged in him so that in a way although Mr and Mrs Moffat came to dinner with Mrs Bowchard, it was only one person – Mr Moffat.

  When I was serving I went to Mr Moffat first, and poured him out his port first. He was the kingpin. He was imbued with the importance of the establishment he worked for. You know, I suppose that’s what people mean when they say that the servants live for them.

  In Mr Moffat’s case it really was so, he aligned himself with his Lordship. When his Lordship went out to dinner Mr Moffat went out to dinner, because in his mind’s eye he saw what his Lordship was doing. When his Lordship was presented to noble personalities, Mr Moffat was also presented to them. I could tell that because he told us things in detail that he couldn’t possibly have known because he wasn’t at the functions. That, of course, was the kind of servant that people really liked, because if you submerged your whole personality in your employers, they were going to get the very best out of you. I think that’s why I was never such a good employee because to me they were a means to an end. A means, at the time, of living, and the end was to get out of service as fast as I could.

  Living in such close contact with the other servants, a lot of quarrels went on. You can’t coop up a lot of females, perhaps it even applies to men, without words passing, and what words too. But it didn’t matter how much we servants quarrelled among ourselves, a united front was always presented to them upstairs.

  We always called them ‘Them’. ‘Them’ was the enemy, ‘Them’ overworked us, and ‘Them’ underpaid us, and to ‘Them’ servants were a race apart, a necessary evil.

  As such we were their main topic of conversation. The parlourmaids used to come down and tell us. It would go something like this. ‘You know if I lived in a little country place I wouldn’t bother about servants at all, they are only a nuisance to me; they quarrel among themselves, they want more money, and they don’t want to work hard, and they don’t do the things the way you want them, but there, you see, I have a certain position to keep up and so I must employ them.’

  Mrs Cutler certainly looked upon us as necessary evils, so in that house we were always united against ‘Them’ upstairs. In the opinion of ‘Them’, we servants must never get ill, we must never dress too well, and we must never have an opinion that differed from theirs. After all it was perfectly obvious, wasn’t it, that if you’d only stayed at school until you were thirteen or fourteen, your knowledge was very small in comparison to what they knew upstairs. So if you had to have opinions why not take them from those upstairs who knew more than you did?

  It was the opinion of ‘Them’ upstairs that servants couldn’t appreciate good living or comfort, therefore they must have plain fare, they must have dungeons to work in and to eat in, and must retire to cold spartan bedrooms to sleep. After all, what’s the point of spending money making life easier and more comfortable for a lot of ungrateful people who couldn’t care less what you do for them? They never tried, mind, to find out if we would have cared more by making our conditions good and our bedrooms nice places in which to rest. No, it wasn’t worth spending your money because servants never stayed with you, no matter what you did for them. After all was said and done, only ‘Them’ upstairs needed luxury living, only ‘Them’ could grace the dining-room table and make witty conversation. I mean there’s got to be a stratum of society in which people can move around graciously and indulge in witty conversation, and no one can do this if they work hard. So make life harder for those who work for you, and the less inclined they’ll feel for any kind of conversation.

  But if ‘Them’ upstairs could have heard the conversation the parlourmaids carried down from upstairs, they would have realized that our impassive expressions and respectful demeanours hid scorn, and derision.

  17

  MR CUTLER was fond of shooting. He was in Africa for some years and if the trophies in the house were any indication, he spent a great deal of his time shooting things there.

  The hall was absolutely festooned with antlers of this and antlers of that, I don’t know what the animals were, all I know is that some were curved and some were straight and it was my job to get up and dust them.

  Back in England, of course, with there not being the same kind of animals, he shot at birds. I got sick of the sight of grouse and pheasants and partridges. These were sent down from wherever he was shooting as quickly as possible, they were hung until they were high, and high they certainly got believe me.

  They used to hang in the basement passage from an iron rod, and many a morning when I came down I would find just a head hanging there and the body on the floor. The maggots had eaten clean through. Then it was considered high enough to cook for their dinner.

  It was my job then to pluck them without breaking the skin and then to clean the insides. A foul job; they reeked to high heaven.

  When the cook served the pheasant she’d keep the head with all the feathers on it, and the tail feathers, and when the bird went up to the meal its head would be placed at one end and the tail feathers at the other.

  Another distasteful job was cleaning the hares he shot. They seemed simply full of blood. I think they must be vampires and live on blood. In the cold weather they used to hang for two weeks at least, and you needed the strength of ten to remove the skin from them.

  I used to try and get it off in one go because anything like that, rabbits’ skins or hares’ skins, were my perks. The rag- and-bone man used to give me ninepence for a hare skin that was pulled straight off without being torn in any way.

  The cook, she would never let me wash the hares. I had to get them clean with tissue paper. She said that if you washed hares or washed game of any kind it took the flavour away. She didn’t like you washing anything, she always reckoned that you washed the flavour down the sink.

  Mrs Bowchard loved cooking jugged hare because of the port wine. This was always sent down into the kitchen when we had jugged hare. The parlourmaid used to bring it from the dining-room, two wineglasses full, but never more than one glass ever went into the cooking. Mrs Bowchard always used to try and drink it secretly so that I could never say afterwards, ‘Well, Mrs Bowchard had some of it.’ I used to watch out of the corner of my eye. One glass used to go into the jugged hare, the other glass went down Mrs Bowchard’s gullet. If she knew I’d seen her she’d say, ‘Oh well, it’s the cook’s perks. Everyone does it.’ Perhaps everyone did; I remember doing it myself later.

  Still Mrs Bowchard was a very good cook. Cooking was really something in those days because you had unlimited materials. There was none of this business as in the war when they told you how to make a fatless or eggless cake which was the most appalling thing you ever ate in your life; you used vinegar and lard. People just deluded themselves if they thought it was worth eating.

  Even nowadays when you see an economic recipe and they say you can’t tell the difference from the original, well probably you can’t if you’ve never eaten the original, but if you have there’s a vast difference. It’s like using margarine instead of butter, the top of the milk instead of cream, having cheaper cuts of meat instead of the best, and having frozen salmon instead of fresh salmon. None of it tastes the same.

  The food was marvellous then because it was always fresh even butchers and fishmongers never had things like deep
freeze. They used to have a cold room but it didn’t freeze things, so that all the food you had was fresh; it had a flavour.

  Nowadays they are at their wits’ end to put things on the market to put back the flavour into food, the flavour that’s come out with freezing. But it can’t be done. No one can delude me into thinking that it can be, but of course if you’ve not had it the old way you don’t know the difference.

  Today when people talk about their jobs they always mention the ‘fringe benefits’. As I’ve said cooks used to get fringe benefits from the stores they dealt with. You’d have thought that cast-off clothes might have found their way downstairs, but they didn’t. They didn’t care to give them to the servants because they wouldn’t want you to wear them while you were living in their house, and of course they wouldn’t want you to leave so that you could wear them somewhere else. They preferred to give them to societies.

  All these people interested themselves in charities, they were all on this board and that board. If you read the papers you would see Lady this, and Mrs that, had a stall here and a stall there.

  Mrs Bowchard used to make cakes for the stall Mrs Cutler ran for helping fallen women. Mrs Cutler used to be very keen on helping the fallen women, from a distance. Like a lot of people, she could be generous if she was not involved. It was to charities like this that they used to send their old clothes.

  I remember the head parlourmaid being very annoyed once because there was a nice coat with a fur collar which Mrs Cutler had had several years. The head parlourmaid knew that she’d very soon be getting rid of it and she felt sure it would come to her because she’d dropped a few hints which seemed to have had an effect, but no, it was packed up and sent to a charitable institution.

  There wasn’t very much given away to us. At Christmas, we got presents of cloth to make things with, aprons, and horrible sensible presents.

  Although I’d made such a fuss about going there, during the two years that I stayed in Thurloe Square I saw very little of London. I was always too tired to go and look. Yet before I went I got a book on various aspects of old London. Where people had stayed, like Carlyle, Wells, and Dickens, and I thought how marvellous it would be to walk around and to be able to say that I’d been there, because I was always mad on history and reading.

  But I was always too darned tired, I just wanted to go to the films where you could sit in darkness, where it didn’t matter that you hadn’t dressed up.

  On my day off I used to go to the nearest cinema and get all my romance second-hand. It took a lot less energy. I often thought I wouldn’t have had the strength if a marvellous lover had swum into my life. I couldn’t have done anything about it.

  Once a fortnight I used to get a Sunday evening off with Gladys the under-housemaid, and we used to stroll around Hyde Park.

  Gladys was a year older than me and she’d lived in London all her life. Her home was in Stepney, she had eight brothers, and ten sisters. She could hardly remember when her mother wasn’t having a baby. She told me lurid tales of life in Stepney, the overcrowding that there was, and bugs in the beds, the filth, and the drinking, and the fights on Saturday nights. I thought it was marvellous to listen to, although I wouldn’t have wanted to be there.

  According to Gladys, her father drank like a fish and he came home most nights roaring drunk and incapable. I used to think he couldn’t have been so incapable otherwise her mother couldn’t have had nineteen children, could she?

  Gladys wasn’t a pretty girl by any means, neither was I, but she had a very lively personality and she certainly knew how to look after herself. Coming from a place like Stepney I suppose she had to, with all those brothers and sisters and a father who drank. She’d learnt how to take the buffets of life and still come up smiling. No one could put much over on Gladys. She used to give me a lot of good advice. One of the things she told me, she said, ‘Never, never at any time when you meet a boyfriend, let on that you’re in domestic service, because if you do you’ll only be called a skivvy and you’ll never keep him.’ So I said, ‘What shall I say I do then?’ ‘Oh tell them any old yarn, tell them you work in a shop or in a factory.’ I said, ‘Well, factory girls aren’t any better than us.’ ‘They are in a boyfriend’s eyes,’ she said. ‘Anyone that works in domestic service is a skivvy and they never bother about them. The very fact that our hours are limited is enough to put anyone off for a start.’ I followed all this instruction but I really couldn’t see it mattered much because the only young men that we ever met were the Red Coats from the Knightsbridge Barracks, the soldiers.

  They never had any spare cash at all, or if they had, none of them ever spent a penny on us. All we ever did was wander round the park for hours on end or listen to the soapbox orators at Marble Arch. We had to be in at ten o’clock sharp, so the goodbyes weren’t prolonged. A lot of inane remarks from the men and a lot of giggles from us, a few kisses and further promises to be sure to meet them at the same time next week, but neither Gladys nor I had any intention of having permanent dates with such ill-paid escorts. It wasn’t our idea of romance to walk around Hyde Park for hours on end with a couple of Red Coats and never get anything out of them.

  Gladys and I were avid readers of those women’s magazines of the time; things like Peg’s Paper, The Red Circle Magazine, and the Red Heart. Between their pages many a poor and lonely heroine ended up marrying some Rudolph Valentino sort of man, or a Rothschild with loads of money. Of course the girl, in spite of her upbringing, always had a lovely almond-shaped face and beautiful liquid violet eyes, and although Gladys and I hadn’t got these attributes, it didn’t prevent us from dreaming that we had and that one day our prince would come. My idea of heaven at that time was a place where there was absolutely no work to do.

  Gladys had a very vivid imagination, maybe Stepney is a place where vivid imagination is the only thing that keeps you going. She used to be able to rattle off details of an imaginary job to any boyfriends that she got to know. It was useless for me to pretend that I did any other sort of work except physical work because my hands were always so red and raw, and that was a dead give-away. How could they be anything else because there weren’t rubber gloves in those days, or if there were kitchen maids didn’t wear them, and barrier-cream certainly hadn’t been invented. Even if it had, by the time I’d done the front stone steps and the brass in the morning and all the washing-up that followed done in strong soda water, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  I think one of the things I hated most was doing the steps with hearthstone. Nowadays if you do hearthstone your steps, and not many people do, you can buy it in a packet of powder, but we used to have a big lump like a beach stone, and had to rub it hard on the steps. There you were in a sacking apron with your bottom sticking out and the errand boys throwing cheeky remarks at you. In the beginning I tried to do the steps from the bottom one up, but I couldn’t because I tipped forward. They had to be done from the top down.

  Another pet hate was cleaning the copper saucepans. Every time they were used they got filthy. All the bright polish would be tarnished after every meal. They had to be cleaned with a horrible mixture of silver sand, salt, vinegar, and a little flour. You mixed all this into a paste and then rubbed it on with your bare hands. You couldn’t put it on with rags because you couldn’t get the pressure that way, you dug your hand into the tin where you had previously mixed it all up and you rubbed it on the copper outside. It was a foul job. Every morning I had to do it. Mind you they looked lovely when I’d done them, they used to hang all along the wall in the kitchen, right from the very tiniest little saucepan, which didn’t hold more than a teacup full, to the most enormous one in which you could put three Christmas puddings side by side. And there was a big fish-kettle as well. I used to get so miserable sometimes that I used to wish that they’d all get ptomaine poisoning from them. I was always being told that if I didn’t clean them properly they’d get ptomaine poisoning. If they had they might have changed their saucepa
ns.

  They did eventually change them I heard afterwards because the new kitchen maid flatly refused to clean them. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d refused to. I suppose they’d just have given me a month’s notice.

  After I’d been there a year I did give in my notice, and a very nerve-racking procedure that was. First, of course, I had to tell Mrs Bowchard, the cook, and that brought on, as I knew it would, a long diatribe on the ingratitude of young people in general and kitchen maids in particular. ‘You train them,’ she moaned, ‘and for what? As soon as they’ve picked your brains they go off somewhere else.’ She continued in this strain for some moments, glaring at me all the time.

  It was a lot of tripe. She never taught me how to do any of her special dishes, the things I really wanted to know. All the ordinary stuff you can pick up out of a book, but every good cook has specialities with that little something that’s not in any cookery book. Many a time I’d ask her what made a particular thing taste like this or how it turned out like that, but she would never tell me, ‘that’s the cook’s secret’, she would say. It was most unfair because when you go as kitchen maid you’ve taken the worst job in the house, you work harder than anyone else and you wait on servants because you eventually hope to have the best job in the house, the cook’s. So it really is up to the cook, if you are doing a good job for her, to return it by helping you.

  Anyway, my notice. I got over the ordeal of telling her. The next thing of course was to see Madam. I really don’t think there was much to choose between them, they were both terrifying ogres as far as I was concerned. But the performance when you want to see Madam and you are only a kitchen maid! First you’ve got to ask the parlourmaid to ask Madam if she could spare you a few minutes of her time, and you have to say it in the tone of voice that shows you know Madam’s time is so very precious.