Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid

by Moran, Mollie

  Aside from that I also had a white apron, a white mop cap, black wool stockings and black leather lace-up shoes. Talk about proud of my new uniform. I’d got it out that many times, Mother had had to press it with the flat iron again.

  For the journey I was wearing a new cream cotton dress that Mother had made, as she didn’t want me shaming myself by turning up for service looking shabby. My leather shoes shone so much you could see my freckled face reflected in them. Didn’t I feel superior!

  Once at the station, Mother dissolved into tears. ‘You can come home if you don’t like it,’ she sobbed, enveloping me into her bosom. ‘You don’t have to stay.’

  It must have been an emotional time for her, waving her young daughter off to work in the big smoke. Not that I gave two hoots for emotion back then. Tears and hugs? Load of old tripe.

  Father was less sentimental. ‘Don’t answer back and don’t get above your station,’ he said gruffly.

  In a flurry of tears and hugs I finally managed to make my escape from Mother’s slightly soggy embrace.

  ‘Don’t fuss so,’ I grinned, boarding the steam train.

  I squeezed myself into a space on the train carriage seat, next to a cage of chickens and a farmhand, and with that I bid farewell to the Norfolk countryside.

  It took some time to get to London and when I eventually arrived at Liverpool Street Station I was tired and sticky from travelling. But as soon as I disembarked, my senses were assaulted. The intense noise, the steam and the babble of sophisticated voices hit my weary head like a shower of cold water.

  I was a country girl at heart and apart from my one brief trip to the city two years ago, this was my first real experience. I was fourteen and all on my own. Did I feel fear or regret? Not one little bit. I felt more alive than I had ever done in my whole life. Ready for whatever experience life had to offer me. Excitement drummed through me. What an adventure.

  ‘Mollie Browne?’ asked a voice.

  The smoke cleared and standing in front of me was a most peculiar-looking man. He was wearing dove-grey knee breeches, matching grey jacket, boots so shiny they made mine look dull in comparison and white gloves, with the whole ensemble topped off with a peaked cap. A fine sight he made.

  ‘Mr Thornton,’ he said. ‘I’m Mr Stocks’s London chauffeur come to collect you.’

  ‘Ooh, ’ello,’ I gushed. ‘Pleased to meet you. Nice of you to come and collect me.’ And with that I stuck out my sticky hand.

  Looking at me a little strangely, he ignored my outstretched hand and took my bag instead. Next he ushered me to where a black shiny Daimler was waiting.

  ‘Get in,’ he said, opening the back door.

  Didn’t I feel grand sliding into the cool, black leather seats? No one had ever held a door open for me and nor had I ever sat in such a grand motor car before. Cars were a rare sight where I came from and here I was sitting in the grandest of the lot. I could get used to this.

  ‘This beats sitting next to a chicken,’ I chattered on.

  He smiled coolly as he slid the Daimler out into the road. They say the streets of London are paved with gold, but back in them days they were filled with cars, trams, buses, errand boys, buskers, traders and a million other forms of life and transport. It seemed even busier than when I’d visited two years ago.

  I gazed out of the window as London in all its glory unfolded. Soon my head was spinning at the sights. In Downham Market there weren’t that many cars on the road – lots of men on bikes or horses, and lugging barrows and ladders about, but not much in the way of cars. Here in London they were everywhere; not like you see today, of course, but to my eyes it was still a lot of traffic. By 1931 elegant motor cars had replaced most horse-drawn carriages. It would be another two years before the London Passenger Transport Board was established to bring all of London’s transport providers together, but there were still many different ways to get about London if you had the knowhow.

  Red double-decker buses and trams whizzed past, belching out clouds of smoke. The 20 mph speed limit had been abolished the previous year and drivers were bombing about at speeds that made my eyes water. Amazing when you think about it, isn’t it? Driving tests weren’t established until 1934 so any old lunatic could get behind the wheel.

  Soon we passed an underground station, which I’d heard so much about.

  ‘Train every ninety seconds,’ informed Mr Thornton.

  Unimaginable.

  We paused briefly at some large poles with strange moving lights inside.

  ‘Why are we stopping?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re traffic lights,’ replied Mr Thornton. ‘Bloomin’ nuisance they are, going up all over London.’

  Traffic lights were just one of the many changes sweeping 1930s London.

  Organizations were popping up to deal with the city’s existing problems and make it a cleaner, more efficient place. There were slum clearances and council-house building programmes, and electric lighting was being installed across the city. The telephone exchange in Mayfair where Mother had worked when she was my age was now automated. To me, all this heralded an amazing new era of sophistication.

  Charlie Chaplin’s latest flick was on at the pictures and, outside, street traders sold you pretty much anything you wanted, from roast nuts for a penny a bag to chestnuts and baked potatoes. The streets were teeming with people plying their trade from the back of horse-drawn carts to simple barrows. Wounded old soldiers still wearing their medals and uniforms sold matches from trays slung round their necks with string and elderly ladies selling lavender from wicker baskets sat huddled under umbrellas. Rag-and-bone men clattered up the streets past our car calling out for ‘any old iron’. Newspaper boys cried out ‘Post!’ to compete with the noise of car horns and ‘muffin’ men strode along ringing large bells and carrying trays of hot buns and butter on their heads. The noise was deafening.

  ‘I can hardly hear myself think in London,’ grumbled Mr Thornton.

  The Depression may have destroyed large parts of Britain, but London had largely escaped and, driving through it now, I saw no sign of it. The new ‘sunrise’ industries, such as producing electrical equipment and consumer goods, helped to offset unemployment in more traditional industries. And there were many jobs created in engineering – manufacturing of clothes and shoes, food and drink production, furniture and printing to name but a few.

  My mouth dropped open at this spectacle of noise and colour. It was as far removed from Norfolk as it was possible to get. Craning my neck up, I stared at the highest buildings I’d ever seen in my life, thrilled to be in London again. Norfolk is flat in all directions, but here in London, round every street corner, amazing red-brick buildings soared into the skyline. This was pre-Blitz and the streets were a jumble of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century terraced buildings. And shops, so many, many shops! Girls in uniforms and whistling errand boys on bikes zipped around like busy little worker ants laden down with brown paper packages.

  Sensing, perhaps, that I was a little dazzled by my surroundings, Mr Thornton frowned. ‘Now, you are going to behave yourself, aren’t you?’ he mumbled, staring at me hard in the rear mirror.

  ‘Course, Mr Thornton,’ I grinned as I gazed out of the window and waved at some boys hopping on to a tram.

  Gradually the hustle and bustle gave way to a different and, even to my untrained eye, more well-to-do neighbourhood. Crowded cobbled streets turned to wider pavements and smart leafy squares. This was the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the 1930s, and a more stylish place I’d never before seen. The air seemed cleaner and more refined somehow. Elegant, stuccoed houses looked out on a slow-moving world. The traffic thinned out and even the people looked more expensive. Smart gentlemen in wide-legged suits with large turned-up hems and creases, thin moustaches and oiled-back hair, strolled arm in arm with the most beautiful ladies imaginable. They all looked groomed, dapper and suave. From the hems of the smartly tailored wool suits to their shoulder pads and fo
x-fur stoles, these women oozed money, class and privilege. Their shiny hair had been sculpted into perfect finger waves and many wore jaunty little hats at an angle. I pushed back a lock of my thick red hair and nervously twisted the hemline of my loose cotton skirt.

  These women looked like they’d been carved from marble. Even the children looked immaculate as they trotted alongside their nannies in smart sailor suits or pretty smock dresses.

  Suddenly I felt exactly what I was – a knock-kneed fourteen-year-old up from the sticks. ‘Ooh, my stomach’s like a bag of ferrets,’ I said nervously.

  Mr Thornton said nothing. Instead, he pulled the Daimler to a stop outside the biggest house I’d seen in my life.

  I literally gasped.

  Number 24 Cadogan Square looked like a giant iced wedding cake and towered into the blue skies above. It was at least six storeys high. Every other house in the genteel square was just as impressive and the centrepiece was the beautiful leafy green garden in the middle, surrounded by black railings. Nannies and children sat on the grass playing in the sunshine and instinct told me that wasn’t a place I’d be spending a lot of time in climbing trees.

  Number 24 Cadogan Square, Knightsbridge, Mr Stocks’s London house. We’d come up here every year for the London season.

  I clambered out of the car and started to ascend the six white steps that led up to the mansion.

  ‘Ahem,’ coughed Mr Thornton. ‘This way.’ With that, he gestured to the ‘area’ steps that led downstairs to the basement. ‘We’re downstairs.’

  ‘Of course,’ I blustered. How could I have been so stupid?

  If London’s Knightsbridge seemed quiet and tranquil outside and upstairs, well, downstairs it was certainly a different story. In a way the house was like a swan – all serene up above and effortlessly gliding along, while down below there was frantic activity and constant motion to keep it staying afloat.

  A long hall ran the length of the basement of the house with rooms opening off it. ‘Housekeeper’s sitting room, servants’ halls, toilet and butler’s bedroom,’ said Mr Thornton, gesturing to the rooms that ran off to the right. ‘This side is the footman and hallboy’s bedroom. Out of bounds to you,’ he muttered. ‘Hallboys, footmen and butlers sleep downstairs and kitchen maids, cooks and housemaids sleep upstairs.’

  On the walls of the passage ran a long line of brass bells with room names above them.

  ‘Service bells,’ he explained. ‘You won’t need to bother much with them. They’re for the butler, footman and housemaids.’

  As we clattered up the echoey corridor and into a vast kitchen at the end, Mr Thornton called out: ‘New girl’s here, Mrs Jones!’

  A short, dumpy woman was drying her pudgy hands on her white apron. She had flour smeared on her forehead and a hot flush had spread over her from her morning’s efforts. Her little dark eyes peered out suspiciously from her red face as she sized me up.

  ‘You’ll do,’ she said in a strong Welsh accent. ‘Right, I’ve just finished getting the boss’s lunch ready. We sit down to ours now and when we’ve finished I’ll talk you through the rules, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ I nodded eagerly. I wanted this woman to like me.

  In the servants’ hall everyone sat down to eat. No one introduced me to anyone and I hadn’t the faintest clue who anyone was and where I was in the pecking order, though I guessed as I was easily the youngest person in the room, it would be me at the bottom. Trying to blend in, I took a seat at the end of the long wooden table.

  A young girl, a bit older than me, started bringing in trays piled high with food. And what a feast. After my long journey my stomach was grumbling. Sunday lunch in this household was obviously a big deal.

  I waited for everyone else to finish serving, then helped myself.

  Dishes were piled high with piping hot crispy roast potatoes, hunks of smooth brown Yorkshire puddings and steaming vats of peas and carrots glistening in butter. The centrepiece was a giant sirloin of beef, cut so thinly the rare pink beef looked like it might melt in your mouth. Mrs Jones had quickly cast aside the paper doily and fancifully cut carrot and parsley it had been garnished with for Mr Stocks’s benefit and the two eldest members of the household had helped themselves first.

  A young, good-looking lad opposite me must have clocked my expression, because he laughed. ‘You’ll not starve in this house,’ he said with a grin. ‘Always beef on a Sunday, never any different. The boss has two slices off the fillet then he sends down the sirloin to us.’

  Without saying a word, I loaded my plate up, smothered it all in a lake of piping hot gravy and tucked in.

  If it looked mouth-watering, it tasted beyond heaven. I’d never tasted meat quite like it afore. The meat was so tender it melted like ice cream in your mouth and the sizzling hot potatoes were fluffy and light as clouds, but with a wonderful chewy skin from being roasted in duck fat. The flavour was out of this world.

  My father tried his hardest, but the odd dry pigeon and poached pheasant couldn’t compete with this sirloin.

  It was gone in a heartbeat and I mopped up the last of the unctuous gravy juices with a hunk of bread and sat back happily in my chair. Everyone chattered about their business and ignored me, but I guess as the new scullery maid I was pretty invisible.

  Next came the puddings. Peach tart, laced with a generous jug of double cream, and spotted dick groaning with big fat currants and smothered in vanilla custard. I had landed on my feet here all right. How lucky could I possibly be? I stifled a smile. All them doomsayers telling me how hard domestic service was, what did they know?

  The fella opposite me, who I later learnt was Alan, the footman, winked at me as he spooned in a mouthful of pudding.

  ‘I love a tart,’ he winked. ‘Don’t you?’

  I grinned back. I could deal with a cheeky sort like him, no trouble.

  A thin older man next to him shot him a sour look from over his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  Swallowing back the last of my spotted dick, I started to feel warm, comfortably full and a little drowsy. I was just stifling a yawn when suddenly the room was full of the sound of scraping chairs and everyone leapt to their feet. Lunch was over.

  ‘Get your uniform on and report for duty,’ barked Mrs Jones. ‘Servants’ bedrooms are that way,’ she said, gesturing to a separate stairway that led off from the kitchen. ‘Never ever use front stairs, boss don’t want to see you climbing ’em. Back steps are for us.’

  I climbed the linoleum steps, and climbed, and climbed – the roast beef and pudding sloshing about in my tummy as I dragged myself to the very top of the cavernous house.

  ‘I’ve never been up so many steps,’ I huffed.

  ‘Just keep on and stop your yakking,’ Mrs Jones puffed behind me. By the time we reached the top she was the colour of beetroot. ‘That’s your room. You’ll share it with the new kitchen maid who’s starting soon,’ she wheezed.

  The tiny room was in the attic and was stifling hot. Throwing open the window, I could just about see over the jumbled rooftops of West London. The room was bare apart from a single iron bed, a chair and a small chest of drawers for my clothes. The walls smelt of distemper (a kind of paint mixed with glue) and were bare of any pictures.

  ‘Bathroom and toilet’s at the end of the hall,’ barked Mrs Jones. ‘Make the most of it, as when we go back to Norfolk there’s no such luxury and you’ll have to use a chamber pot and hip bath in your room.’

  I daresay the room might have looked sparse and the idea of doing your bodily functions in a pot back in Norfolk depressing to some, but I was used to a basic way of life so to me it was just fine.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Mrs Jones impatiently as she bustled out of the room. ‘Get yourself dressed. Chop-chop!’

  Changing into my outfit, I smoothed down the apron and teased my red curls into the mop cap. ‘Don’t you look the bee’s knees,’ I murmured to myself. Even at fourteen I had a cracking figure. A big bum and breasts but a
tiny waist accentuated by the cut of the waist of my apron.

  Scurrying downstairs, I presented myself to the cook, who was making a big meal of sitting down with a heavy sigh.

  ‘Right, my girl,’ she said, glaring at me suspiciously. ‘You can start by tucking that hair back.’

  A stray red curl was defiantly poking out from under my mop cap and I swiftly tucked it in.

  She fixed her beady eyes on me. ‘I know what you young girls are like,’ she snapped. ‘Boys, dresses and dancing is all that fills your little heads. But while you’re in my kitchen you follow my rules, you hear. Your day starts at six thirty a.m. You come downstairs, blacklead the grate, polish the hearth and light the range fire. Woe betide if it’s not done to my standards.’ She paused. ‘Put the kettles on for staff teas and bring me a nice cup. Strong, brown and sweet’s how I like it.

  ‘Then you clean the steel fender and the fire irons, clean the brass on the front door and scrub the front steps. We ain’t got one here, but in the country you’ll need to clean out the fireplace. Then you’ll need to scrub and polish the kitchen floor and passageways.

  ‘Then you and the kitchen maid need to start on staff breakfasts and laying the table in servants’ hall so we can eat at eight a.m. At eight I will come down and make the boss’s breakfast for nine a.m.’

  My head started to swim as she carried on. I could see her mouth moving up and down but the words were starting to blur in my mind. Fourteen-year-olds don’t have the biggest attention span in the world. Forcing myself to listen, I tuned back in.

  ‘After breakfast, wash up and clear down, then you need to scrub down and prepare my table.’

  I glanced at the vast oak table that dominated the entire room. It must have weighed a ton and was scrubbed to within an inch of its life.