‘All right then,’ I said with a grin, fluffing out my hair and putting my hand on my hips like I’d seen them film stars do at the cinema in London. With that, I took to the oscillating catwalk. It juddered up and down and your aim was to get to the end without falling off.
Not two yards in I was helpless with laughter. I wasn’t strutting now, just struggling to stay upright.
‘Look!’ I yelled to the crowd of admiring boys. ‘No hands.’ I bumped and lurched along before being spat off in a heap at the end.
‘What a spectacle, Mollie,’ said my mother, waiting nearby. ‘When will you learn?’
‘She’s just showing off to the boys,’ deadpanned my little brother.
Poking my tongue out at him, I headed to the rock stall. This stall, run by Mr King, was the one I loved more than anything. The rock stall always drew an admiring crowd as we watched him make the rock by hand. He was a giant of a man with hands like trowels and hairy arms shaped like legs of mutton.
‘Stick of rock for a penny, please?’ I asked.
Fascinated, I watched as he tossed a band of pink-and-white-coloured mixture over a hook in the wall, then stretched it out. When satisfied it was the right texture and temperature he’d slap it down on the table and snip it up with scissors. He sold it in lumps bagged up to buy by the quarter or as an individual rock.
Sucking my rock, I wandered happily around the rest of the fair, taking in the sights, smells and sounds. Soon I overheard some boys talking.
‘There’s a dance on next week, who you got your eye on then?’
A dance. Now that sounded interesting. Our usual entertainment round these parts was going to the cinema on a Saturday afternoon. These were the days of silent black-and-white films, before colour films and talkies. We’d queue up and pay tuppence ha’penny to watch Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. It was marvellous escapism and all the children from the area would flock to the cinema. The soundtrack came from old Mrs Long from Downham, who sat bolt upright and banged away on an ancient piano to provide a suitable musical backdrop.
Laughable, ain’t it? You can’t imagine it now with all this surround sound and 3D business.
But much as I loved the films, I was thirteen now and I wanted to be at village dances, not frantically trying to eye some fella up in the gloom of a cinema.
Surely I was old enough to make my own decisions?
‘Out the question,’ snapped Mother when I brought the subject up back at home.
‘But, Mother,’ I protested, ‘there’s only one every three months. Besides, I’m not daft, you know I won’t get myself in trouble. Please?’ I begged.
‘I forbid it,’ said my father, his dark eyes flashing.
I looked at his double-barrel shotgun sitting by the kitchen door and winced.
Could I sneak out?
‘You’ll feel the cut of my hand across your backside if you so much as try and sneak out,’ he added.
‘Do I need to remind you about Granny Esther?’ added Mother ominously.
I shook my head and for once found nothing to say. It was absolutely unthinkable to get pregnant out of wedlock back in them days. All girls were brought up with the fear of God drilled into them at the prospect of having an illegitimate child. You would never dream of bringing such shame on your house. Besides which, everyone knew everyone else’s business in the country so if you put a foot wrong it would be round the Friday market before you could say ‘family way’.
There was a local girl who’d managed to get herself pregnant. She was dismissed from her job and turned out of her home. Where she went we never knew; the streets maybe, or the workhouse with the tramps perhaps? More than likely she ended up at the workhouse, where she would have had her hair shaved and been separated from her bastard child and forced into a life of mind-numbing work, like picking the tar out of old ships’ rope.
Like I say, this place was frightening and fascinating in equal measure. The tiny windows were so high off the ground you couldn’t see in and it was sealed off in any case behind high black wrought-iron gates.
Nowadays I see young girls round Bournemouth where I live with prams full of kids and they’re so young and you know they’ve got a nice warm council flat and food for the table. Well, you’re virtually encouraging it, aren’t you? But, back then, the fear of the workhouse meant you kept your drawers pulled up. A bit of slap and tickle was fine, as long as you knew where to draw the line. Not that I knew much about any of that, aged thirteen.
‘You need to drag your head out the clouds, my girl, added Mother. ‘And start thinking about what yer gonna do when you leave school next year. When I was a young girl I worked on the Mayfair telephone exchange all the hours and good work it was too. Hard work never killed anyone,’ she added.
With that, my heart plummeted like a stone in the Denver sluice. I didn’t need reminding that soon I would be turning fourteen and it would be time to face up to my responsibilities.
Downham Market Baptist Church members on a day out in the 1920s. I’m in the middle, behind the boy in the white shorts.
I was tall for my age and, after years of cycling, running and roaming the countryside, I had a strapping physique. This made me an excellent candidate for an apprenticeship. Nobody wanted to employ some weakling who couldn’t pull their weight and work hard, or was forever fainting or calling in sick.
As my fourteenth birthday loomed into sight, Mother came to a decision. ‘A girl like you’ll get work easy. Do you want to work with your grandmother in the shop?’ she asked.
My stomach tightened. As much as I loved Granny Esther I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working under her.
‘Oh no, don’t make me,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll forever be under her control.’
I had my sights fixed further than a village shop. My mind wandered back to the bustling streets of London where royals and high society mixed. Why couldn’t I find work there?
‘All right, Miss Fussy, my friend runs a dressmaker’s and a draper’s in Downham and she’s looking for starting girls. I’ll go and talk to her.’
By the time she returned she was full of it.
‘She’ll take you on, Mollie,’ she beamed, pleased as punch with herself. ‘You can start Monday. They’re charging five shillings for the apprenticeship, but I’m sure your gran’ll foot the cost.’
I smiled weakly, but inside a feeling of doom gathered and I couldn’t shake it all weekend.
On Monday morning at seven a.m. Mother marched me to the dressmaker’s. The bell on the door clanged as we entered. It was like the sound of a jailer’s key signalling the condemned man to go and meet his fate.
The room was small, dark and smelt of mothballs. A wizened old woman, who looked like a proper harridan, sat behind a wooden counter. Her shrew-like eyes sized me up.
‘Follow me,’ she muttered, leading us to an even smaller room out the back.
I felt like a carthorse in the poky room. The dark space was dominated by one big table covered in calico, cloth and ticking. I thought longingly of the dazzling beauty of the V&A, of all the riches and everything looking so fine and opulent. Then to this room, which was as dry and dusty as its owner. The V&A was a place of intrigue and beauty. This was a place you came to die.
A clock ticked slowly on the wall and as the woman began to run through my hours and duties I wanted to run out of that shop and never stop running. Panic and desperation pumped through my veins. I felt like a caged animal.
Can you imagine? I couldn’t spend my life sitting on a chair doing fiddly sewing in a dark, airless room with a stuffy seamstress. Day after day, month after suffocating month. I would shrivel up and die. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
The walls started to close in on me. Suddenly even the air in the shop felt thin.
‘NO!’ I blurted out. Mother and the seamstress stared at me in surprise. ‘I can’t stay here. I won’t.’
I knew my outburst would earn me a proper raggin’ but I didn’
t care.
There had to be more to life than this, surely. There was more to life than this …
Tips from a 1930s Kitchen
…
BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING
If my childhood could be summed up by a recipe, then bread and butter pudding would be it. Comforting, sweet and sticky. Try it out.
6 thin slices bread and butter
1 pint (570 ml) full fat milk
4 eggs
1 dessertspoonful each: sugar, sultanas,
currants and candied lemon
Cut off the crusts and divide each slice of bread into four squares, arrange them in layers in a well-buttered pie dish and sprinkle each layer with sultanas, currants and candied lemon. Beat the eggs, add the sugar, stir until dissolved, then mix in the milk and pour gently over the bread, which should only half fill the dish. Let it stand for an hour to let the bread soak up the milk then bake in a moderate oven, standing in a tin of water, for nearly an hour. If you’re feeling flash, serve with cream.
HOUSEHOLD TIP
Save a fortune on expensive leather-cleaning products. Simply run the inside of a banana skin over your bag or shoes then polish with a soft dry cloth. Sparkling in seconds.
3
Tears in the Scullery
We are all in the gutter, but some of us
are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
Back at home it was hard to say who was more cross, Mother or Father.
‘What do you mean, Mollie, making a fine show of me in front of my friend?’ Mother snapped. On and on she went as I stared dully at the flickering flames dancing about in the grate.
‘I go to all this trouble to line you up work …’
I wished I was a flame and could just dance where the breeze took me.
‘… and work you will, my girl, make no mistake.’
I didn’t mean to upset my mother, really I didn’t. I took no joy from it. Girls of my generation always did what our mothers told us. Their word was the law. But in this case I just couldn’t. I couldn’t have gone to that shop and fossilized into the woman who worked there.
For weeks I moped about like a wet Sunday in Yarmouth. Even the promise of bird’s-nesting didn’t sound as enticing as usual. Everything felt tedious and flat and I was fed up with my little brother needling me. It was all right for him. When he left school he had many more choices open to him. He could learn any one of a dozen trades and more likely as not be out in the fresh air at the same time.
One day I came home for lunch to find a strange man sitting in the kitchen sipping at a mug of tea.
‘Aye,’ he chuckled as his eyes roamed over my body. ‘She’s a strapping lass, reckon she’ll do.’
I eyed him suspiciously.
‘They always prefer Norfolk lasses,’ he went on. ‘Reckons they last longer and work harder, so as they do.’
My eyes went out on stalks. Who were they and what did they want with me?
‘This is Mr Llewelyn,’ explained Mother. ‘He used to be a chauffeur for old Mr Stocks up at Woodhall. He’s retired now, but he’s still in touch with Mr Stocks.’
I’d heard of Mr Stocks. He was a member of the gentry, a bona fide blue-blooded gentleman who owned a vast Tudor pile called Woodhall in Hilgay, two miles from Downham.
‘Mr Stocks is looking for a scullery maid to start immediately.’
I stared blankly and Mother shook her head.
‘Do you want to be a scullery maid, Mollie?’ she asked.
I paused. Me? Be a domestic servant?
‘You’ll have to start up in London,’ said Mr Llewelyn, setting down his tea and eyeing up a tray of Mother’s sausage rolls. ‘It’s the London season now and Mr Stocks is up in ’is Knightsbridge home. Fine place it is too, the very last word in grandeur, like.’ He placed much significance on the word grandeur and smacked his lips as he said it, while reaching out to grab a couple of sausage rolls.
London.
With that one word it was like a light bulb had pinged on in my head. I’d be free. I’d get to go to London! It was impossibly perfect, as if all my dreams were slotting into place in an instant.
‘You’ll get five shillings a week and all your food and keep,’ he said through mouthfuls. ‘Scullery maids work hard,’ he warned. ‘The bottom of the heap. You’ll have to do everything the cook tells you. You’re not afraid of hard work, are you, Mollie?’ he asked.
‘No, not at all,’ I said, vigorously shaking my head.
‘Well then,’ he said, heaving himself to his feet and brushing off the crumbs. ‘I’ll tell Mr Stocks you’re suitable and get your train ticket sent in the post.’
And just like that I had a job as a scullery maid!
After he’d left, Mother had to scrape me off the ceiling, I was that excited.
‘Are you sure you want to go to London, Mollie?’ she asked. ‘You’re only fourteen. It’s a big, dangerous place, you know.’
‘Oh, please!’ I said, flicking my hand nonchalantly. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Father, when he heard, was just as surprised.
‘You?’ he snorted. ‘Do as what others tell you to? That’ll be the day. Suppose you’ll get all your food and lodgings free though.’
One less mouth to feed would be a blessing to my parents.
Later on, lying in my bed, staring out of the window at the thick blanket of stars that stretched across the dark Norfolk skies, I could scarcely sleep for the excitement bubbling up in my chest. My parents may have been worried, but I wasn’t. This was the beginning of the rest of my new life. Old people, what do they know? I laugh now. My parents can only have been in their early thirties, but when you’re young everyone seems ancient.
I suppose, looking back, the only reason my parents let me go to London at such a young age was because they knew the chauffeur and Mr Stocks had a good reputation locally. He wasn’t like some of these flighty young aristos setting London alight. He was well into his seventies and looked upon with a mixture of respect and sympathy. His wife had long since died, at the time leaving just him and his two sons, Captain Eric and Captain Michael.
Years back, before the war, to celebrate Michael’s twenty-first birthday, Mr Stocks had ordered mountains of meat from a relative of ours who was a butcher at the time. They had an enormous bash by all rights, with the wine flowing and enough roasted meat to sink a battleship. The music, dancing and gaiety could be heard drifting over the Norfolk fields. Then a year to the day after the party, in 1914, Michael was killed in the war at Zillebeke while serving with the Grenadier Guards. Now it was just Mr Stocks and his youngest son, Captain Eric, rattling around that big old house on their own. People felt for him like they would their own, for the aristocracy lost a whole generation of sons just like the working-class poor did. Mr Stocks was left heartbroken and Captain Eric, like Father, was never the same again and suffered with consumption, though I’d heard tell that when he went to recuperate it was not to the sanatoriums of Hastings but Switzerland!
Now I was to be their scullery maid.
It may seem odd that I got the job without being interviewed, but in those days references were more important than anything. The upper class didn’t want any old sort coming into their house and seeing where all the family silver was. People were terrified that you might steal things or have a boyfriend who worked in a gang. But Mr Llewelyn had been their Norfolk chauffeur for years and they trusted him. If he said I was a good honest Norfolk girl from a decent family then that was good enough for them. Besides, Norfolk girls were generally considered to be hale, hearty, strapping and hard-working and what else did you need in a scullery maid? Perhaps that’s why a lot of the servants I came across in the next ten years were from Norfolk.
‘I don’t know why you don’t wanna come and work with me in the shop,’ tutted Granny Esther when she heard. ‘You’ll have to set an alarum clock you know. The hours are long and they won’t care you’re just a nipper. You’ll have to scrub eve
rything in sight. You’ll be a skivvy. Servants get treated awful.’
‘Oh, Granny,’ I sighed. ‘Maybe in the twenties, but not now. Times have changed. They’re better looked after. Loads of young girls are doing it.’
It was true. I wouldn’t have been alone. By 1930 there were countless young women leaving home for the first time in search of work, money, food or just the chance to better themselves, and taking a job in service was seen as a good way of doing this.
Most people think that the First World War was the end of domestic service in the UK, but that’s not the case. From the end of the nineteenth century to 1911, 13 per cent of the female working-age population in England were employed as domestic servants. It’s true that the First World War saw a steep decline in the numbers of servants, but there was a marked increase in the numbers employed in domestic service during the 1920s. By 1931 the percentage had dropped to 8 per cent. Despite this, domestic service remained the most common entry-level job available to young women like myself.
I doubted there was a single girl more excited than me in all the land. Granny Esther could have told me I’d have to scrub all night long and I’d still have gone. It’s crazy, isn’t it? You’d think I was going off to shop and party, not skivvy, but like I say, back then nothing daunted me.
My head wasn’t going to be turned by nothing and nobody.
So, in May 1931, on a sunny Sunday morning, aged fourteen, I found myself bound for Cadogan Square in London’s Knightsbridge. Mother had packed my bag with a few clothes, some clean underwear and some ham sandwiches, and she and father walked me the three miles to Downham Station, along the Lynn Road. There were only two buses a week so it wouldn’t do any good to wait at the bus stop.
As we trudged along I thought of how the king and queen used this same road to travel between London and Norfolk. Now I was following in their footsteps!
Last week Mother had taken me to Tyler’s, the draper’s shop in town, and got me kitted out with my service uniform. In my bag was a green dress that, to my delight, sat just above the knee. It makes me laugh, you know. Whenever people ask me about Downton Abbey and whether it’s true to life, I always say it’s exactly the same, except that in reality the skirts were much shorter.
Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid Page 4