I remember the first time I met him. I happened to pass him on the stairs, and he stopped, and he said to me, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘are you our new cook?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Sir,’ you know, colouring up like a beetroot, and he said, ‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy here. You’ll find it’s a very happy house.’ And he was right, it was. The parlourmaid said to me, ‘You ought to be here at Christmas. We have a simply wonderful time at Christmas,’ she said. ‘We have our own tree and our own presents, all put round the tree,’ she said, ‘none of this business of having to go up there and parade in front of them. They’re all put there overnight,’ she said. ‘We can go to a theatre during the month of January, any theatre that you choose, and you don’t have to go together, you can take your own friend.’
I didn’t wonder that Lady Downall never had a servant problem. There the servants really cared about their employers. If anyone had said that to me before I’d have said, ‘Oh, that’s my eye, no one cares about the people they work for. You work for them and you do the best you can because they’re paying you, and because you like to make a good job, but you can’t care about them.’
I got four pounds a month there too. You know I didn’t wish their poor cook any harm, but I couldn’t help hoping that she’d get complications and be away for a year or so. It’s terrible, isn’t it, to be like that, but I was so happy there.
And it was so pleasant when Lady Downall came down in the mornings; she’d say, ‘Good morning, Margaret. Have you any suggestions for lunch?’ in a pleasant tone of voice. Or, ‘Oh Margaret, as there’ll be such a large dinner party we’ll have a cold lunch today. That’ll give you more time for the preparation tonight.’ Consideration, you see. A rare quality.
This gave me the incentive to cook as well and better than I had done. One of my specialities was soufflés. I used to make marvellous soufflés, I had a light hand in those days. Either savoury ones, or sweet ones. But I could never do much with them on those kitchen ranges. Either they got too hot and the soufflé shot up like mad before the centre was cooked, or else it never rose at all. I’d battled for so many years with kitchen ranges that I got a thing about them and used to look on them as my bitterest enemy. But there I had a gas stove and I was fine.
Every night when I went to bed there I used to pore over Mrs Beeton’s cookery book. That was the book we all used in those days. I’d pick out a recipe and study it well so that when Lady Downall said next day, ‘Have you any suggestions?’ I could produce this recipe, sort of casual like, as though it had been a thing I’d done often. I used to work it out in my imagination until the dish was absolute perfection. In my mind that is, not always on the table. Still that happens to all cooks, we all plan things, but they don’t always quite work out as we hope they will. Lady Downall used to appreciate any suggestions, and once she said to me, ‘You know, I’m very fond indeed of old Aggie’ (that was her real cook) ‘and she’s been with us for years, she started as kitchen maid in my mother’s house, but it has been a very pleasant change having all these different things that you know how to do.’
Little did she know I’d sat up half the night before, learning them.
Lady Downall loved going to the Caledonian Market. It’s closed now, but at that time it was thriving in Camden Town. She used to love wandering around looking at the genuine antiques, well, that’s what they told you they were; genuine antiques. We used to take it in turn to go with her, and great fun it was. The chauffeur used to bring the car round about ten o’clock. I sat in front with him.
He was a very handsome man, not that I could do much about it because Lady Downall could see if you were laughing too much or anything. Anyway, the fact that he was handsome couldn’t mean that much because he was already snaffled. He was married and had two children.
We used to wander around the market, and Lady Downall would pick out any items that she fancied and that she thought were good. She never bargained for them because she said immediately she opened her mouth she put her foot in it. She meant that if she asked about the price they knew that she’d got money, and they put their prices up accordingly. So if she saw anything she fancied, she would get whoever she had taken with her to go up and ask the price, and bargain for it.
I remember once while she was looking to see what she fancied, I was wandering around to see if there was anything I fancied, and I noticed on one stall a very large blue pot with a handle each side. I thought to myself, that would be just fine for my mother’s aspidistra – everyone had an aspidistra in those days. So I approached the stall-holder in what I thought was a nonchalant manner; mind you, they know perfectly well you’ve got your eye on something, they weren’t born yesterday. But I looked at everything but this pot, and I thought I was being very clever. At last I said to him, ‘How much is that blue pot?’ so he said, ‘Oh, ten bob to you,’ so I said, ‘How much to anyone else, half a crown I suppose? I’ll give you five shillings for it.’ So he said, ‘Five bob? You must be joking. Anyway, what do you want it for?’ I told him I wanted it for my mother’s aspidistra. ‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘and when she’s finished using it for that, she can knock one handle off and stick it under her bed! Two things for the price of one. You’ve got a good ten bob’s worth there, haven’t you?’ I blushed like a beetroot, and beat a hasty retreat. I never went near that stall again!
23
ALL TOO quickly those three months passed. Perhaps flushed with my success at Lady Downall’s I decided I’d try one more temporary job.
I got a place near Victoria Station. It was one of those grim, tall, rather shabby houses outside, with an interior to match. It was one of those ‘I’m here for ever’ kind of houses.
Here again we were underfed and underlodged. For the first and last time in my life I slept on chaff. The mattress was made of chaff, and laid on lathes, you know, not on a spring at all. As I moved in the night it rustled as though I was a horse turning over. Even at home we had flock beds that you could shake up and make comfortable.
I didn’t sleep a wink on my first night, and when I got up in the morning I was determined to complain about the bed. But at ten o’clock when my employer, Mrs Hunter-Jones her name was (Hunter-Jones, hyphenated you know, you must always sound the two together), when she appeared she looked so formidable that all my resolutions to moan about it faded away completely. I just hadn’t got the pluck to say a word. It’s terrible to be a coward like that but one look at her face finished me. I comforted myself with the thought that I wasn’t serving a life sentence, I had only gone there as a temporary, and temporary I now decided it was going to be.
The housemaid and the parlourmaid, they’d been there two years, but as their ages were sixty-three and sixty-five it wasn’t easy for them to find other employment. Conditions were beginning to get a little bit better – not that people had suddenly changed and become more humane, but there were now more occupations for women to choose from, and naturally if there was other work they could do instead of domestic service they did it. So there was some competition and this meant providing better conditions. But at the ages of sixty- three and sixty-five domestic service was the only thing left to do.
For these two poor old things years of spinsterhood and working in other people’s houses had made their hands bent, their faces all craggy, and their dispositions extremely foul. And the appearance of these blighted specimens of womanhood plus that of the formidable Mrs Hunter-Jones made me determined to leave at the earliest opportunity. You see all the time I was thinking I might get married, that was my main object in life, and every new job I got I thought somebody might come along, perhaps one of the tradesmen might be all right, and that would be that.
But I could see that this house was a dead duck from that point of view straight away, and the idea of getting experience as a temporary wasn’t going to work either because Mr and Mrs Hunter-Jones did no entertaining at all, and the plainness of the food was only equalled by the scarcity of it. So with no pleasure in cooking, no
company but those two old drears, and a house that was as quiet as a mausoleum, I was very depressed.
Even if you’ve got a mistress who’s disagreeable, if the other servants are young and lively you can extract some humour from the place even if it’s only making a combined attack on her upstairs. We used to give them a sort of kitchen psycho-analysis, Freud wasn’t in it. Mind you I reckoned we knew more about their sex life than he’d ever have discovered.
But that subject would have been out even if my gaunt companions could have discussed it. It’s my confident opinion that the old dear could never have indulged; she hadn’t any children and a look at her husband would have confirmed my view. He was a trophy, if the truth was known, and he might just as well have hung on the wall with the other antlers for all the use he could have been.
But not only was there no congenial company in this house, there was nowhere to sit and relax. There wasn’t even a servants’ hall. You just sat in the kitchen surrounded by the ‘Ideal’ boiler, the gas stove, the kitchen table, and the dresser. So I took to going out of an evening.
I had a friend, she only lived about ten minutes’ walk away, who was also in service. I used to go out and see her about half past eight, but I was always in before ten o’clock. It didn’t hurt anyone at all. But it didn’t please those other two old servants. I know they were sour, but you wouldn’t have thought they would have moaned about it because after all it didn’t affect them. But the thing was they couldn’t get out, so why should I be able to?
So after I’d been out a few nights they informed Mrs Hunter-Jones. This information was a great shock to her. She had never heard of such a thing as a servant going out above the stipulated time for her outings, so I had to listen to a long lecture, and demands as to why I wanted to go out of an evening. She said, ‘You have every Sunday evening and one other evening free.’ ‘Yes, Madam,’ I replied, ‘but when I finish work there’s nowhere comfortable to sit.’ So she said, ‘Oh well, other cooks have sat in the kitchen, why cannot you? You’re certainly not free to go out whenever you feel like it.’
I thought about this and I thought about these two old spinsters. It didn’t really make me dislike them because I could see that their lives were unhappy.
Their names were Violet and Lily, names which probably suited them some forty years ago, but it certainly didn’t go at all well with their appearance or their dispositions now.
On one of the rare occasions when we all got chummy together they’d told me that they’d worked as a parlourmaid and a housemaid for twenty-five years in the same house for one lady, a childless widow. According to Lily and Violet, this lady had promised them that if they stayed with her until she died she’d leave them an annuity, enough money for them to leave domestic service and set up a flat together. Mind you, I thought they were muggins not to have seen the proof. Anyway, when the old lady did die it was found she hadn’t made a will at all, and all the money went to her next-of-kin, her nephew. He just sold the house, and all poor Violet and Lily got was three months’ wages, and then he thought he was being very generous to them, because nothing stipulated that he should give them anything.
So you can imagine after twenty-five years in one job, and what they thought was coming at the end of it, then to be dismissed with three months’ wages. You can’t wonder that they were grim, can you?
Mind you, it happened in a lot of cases. It was a way of keeping servants when you were getting old. But it’s hopeless to trust in people like that. I wouldn’t have believed a word.
The trouble was that they were convinced that their madam had really left them the money and that the nephew had done them out of it. I tried to explain to them about wills and solicitors and things, but they didn’t want to believe me. Well, nobody likes to think that they’ve been caught for a sucker, do they? But it made me understand why they were so sour and everything.
It was only too evident they would never get anything from Mrs Hunter-Jones. She underpaid them anyway because she knew that they’d have difficulty getting a job anywhere else.
Still I didn’t feel that by staying in the house I could alleviate their lot in any way. There’d just be three disgruntled people instead of two. So I gave Mrs Hunter-Jones a month’s notice. It was a very unpleasant business working out my notice in that house. A month is a long time when people are unpleasant to you, and the two old dears, although I didn’t make things any worse for them, resented that I could get out, that I’d got a future, and that they hadn’t. They’d only got the past and that hadn’t been too good.
My main worry was about my reference, because I sensed that Mrs Hunter-Jones wouldn’t give me a good one in spite of the fact that I came to her with a wonderful recommendation from Lady Downall. I tried to get a written one from her so that I could read her opinion of me, and then perhaps I could have done something about it. But she wouldn’t give me one, she said she never reckoned to do anything like that.
It was with some considerable trepidation that I gave the next prospective employer Mrs Hunter-Jones’ telephone number. I knew they wouldn’t meet each other because I had decided that I would work in Brighton for a while, so at least I knew that they wouldn’t get together and have a good natter over me.
The job I went after was in The Drive which at that time was a very palatial road indeed. I was interviewed by a Mrs Bishop. I took great pains to tell her I’d only been temporary at Mrs Hunter-Jones’, but she said that she would ring her up and would I call back the next day to see what the verdict was.
When I went she said, ‘What a peculiar person your last employer is. When I telephoned her for a reference she said, “Well, I think Margaret Langley could cook if she was ever in to cook, but as she expects to be out morning, afternoon, and evening, she never has the time.”’ That reference would have been damning in the ordinary way but it turned out that Mrs Bishop had an odd way of life which made it difficult for her to get and keep a staff.
So in spite of Mrs Hunter-Jones’ efforts she engaged me as a cook at a wage of fifty-two pounds a year. This was very good money indeed because this was not temporary, it was a permanent job.
You may think I’m going on about this reference business. But it was most frightfully important then. People were frightened that you might steal things or that you might be working ‘inside’ for a gang of thieves. They wanted to know all the ins and outs about you. Mind you, they never gave you a reference about themselves, which I used to think you had a right to; whether you had to work like a slave, whether they kept late hours, whether they were mean and selfish, whether they treated you like dirt; nothing like that, but they wanted to know all about you. And if you hadn’t got a good reference from your last place it was useless to explain that you’d been in domestic service since you were fifteen years old, that there were many other people to whom they could apply, and that the reason that this reference wasn’t a good one was because in your last place you dared to speak up about conditions of employment. Employers didn’t want to hear that kind of thing. That was bolshevism. ‘How dare one of the lower classes criticize the upper classes!’ Girls like me who they considered came from poverty-stricken homes should be glad to work in a large house with food and warmth. To them upstairs, any home was better than the one that you lived in with your parents. It was mutiny if you said in your last place you didn’t have this or that – it must have been better than what you’ve been used to. And as for domestic servants having aspirations to rise above the basement, such a thing was incredible to them.
Even Lady Downall was the same in some respects. I remember asking her if I could borrow a book from her library to read, and I can see now the surprised look on her face. She said, ‘Yes, of course, certainly you can, Margaret,’ adding, ‘but I didn’t know you read.’ They knew that you breathed and you slept and you worked, but they didn’t know that you read. Such a thing was beyond comprehension. They thought that in your spare time you sat and gazed into space, or looked at Peg
’s Paper or the Crimson Circle. You could almost see them reporting you to their friends. ‘Margaret’s a good cook, but unfortunately she reads. Books, you know.’
24
THE BISHOPS’ house was a large, four-storeyed, detached building with the usual basement, and a back stairs for the servants.
Mrs Bishop was an absolute revelation to me. I had been used to solid superficial respectability, with ‘Them’ upstairs. But what a change she was. She was Italian by birth, nearly sixty years old, but made-up to look about thirty, and from the back view that’s the age she looked. She had her face enamelled, I don’t quite know what they did with it, but she never gave a hearty laugh, she just tittered so that it never cracked. She didn’t move the muscles of her face. Her hair was dyed, and hair-dyeing in those days hadn’t reached the perfection it has now, so that each subsequent dye was never the same colour as the last, and the head became patchy. I couldn’t take my eyes off her when we first met. She had a figure slim like a young girl’s. That was unusual in those days. People weren’t figure-conscious, nobody thought of dieting. They merrily consumed three-course lunches, and five- or six-course dinners every day, and ‘hang your figure’. She had an attractive husky voice. I thought she had a sore throat when she interviewed me. She was very proud of this voice, she said, ‘It’s just like Tallulah Bankhead’s, you know.’ Tallulah Bankhead was all the vogue at that time.
As well as the house they had a flat in London. They spent from Tuesday afternoon to Friday afternoon there. This meant that, although we had free time in the week, we never had a weekend to ourselves. This was the reason she had difficulty getting maids because they like their free days at weekends, especially if they happen to be courting. But it didn’t worry me, I hadn’t got a young man yet.
From Friday evening until Monday morning the house used to be packed with visitors, some were young business people, a lot were hangers-on of the film and theatre world, nobody of any class at all, always plenty of young men of a variety of nationalities. Mrs Bishop was very very fond of young men. None of us ever had half an hour we could call our own at weekends. I didn’t mind at all, at least there was some life, even if I was getting it second hand.
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