‘It’s alive!’ yelled Frankenstein.
‘Cor, blarst me!’ yelled George, jumping clean out of his seat and showering the floor with pineapple chunks.
Poor George. As we exited, blinking, into the sunlight in Downham Market, he looked quite drained by the experience. Fortunately, by the time we’d had a sticky bun and a cup of tea at a nearby teashop, he’d recovered himself.
‘I had a really lovely afternoon, Mollie,’ he said earnestly, placing a warm hand on mine. ‘I’m right keen on you.’
‘I don’t want anything shameful happening between us, George,’ I warned.
He whipped his hand away like it had been scalded.
‘My heart alive, I didn’t mean that, Mollie,’ he spluttered. ‘I just meant I likes you. I’d never try anything to offend you.’
I was so used to fending off lecherous farmhands behind haystacks and frisky footmen that I hadn’t realized some men could be decent. George was the perfect gentleman after that and when he’d cycled me home and left me at the entrance to Woodhall, he paused only to place a soft kiss on my cheek.
‘Fare ’ee well, Mollie,’ he smiled gently.
I could just make out Flo and Alan peeking through the kitchen window.
I’d give ’em summit to talk about.
‘Thanks, George,’ I grinned, taking his cheeks in both hands and planting a quick smacker on his lips. ‘I had a lovely day.’
His face crumpled into a delighted smile and he pedalled off back to the farm the colour of a tomato.
I floated into the kitchen.
‘Is he your new boyfriend?’ Flo gushed. ‘Are ya courting?’
‘Maybe,’ I teased.
Alan glowered from over the pile of silver he was polishing. ‘He’s a boy, all right,’ he snapped.
‘You’re so green with envy you’re the same colour as that apron,’ I laughed, flicking his baize apron.
‘OK, we’ve had our fun,’ thundered Mrs Jones, throwing my apron at me. ‘Can we get back to some work now?’
After that, George and I lived in each other’s pockets and saw each other as much as our time off allowed, which wasn’t much, admittedly, and true to his word he was the perfect gentleman.
There was just one snag – his older brother, Louis. Try as I might, when I was kissing George goodnight, it was Louis I was thinking of.
I confided my fears to Flo in our bedroom.
‘It sounds awful, but my heart belongs to Louis,’ I wailed.
‘I know, Mollie, but he’s promised to another,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t go breaking George’s heart. He’s keener on you than you are on him. That’s plain for all to see.’
I hadn’t been seeing George long when Christmas rolled round. Christmas in service is much like any other day, to be honest. You work the same hours. Steps and floors still need scrubbing and the range still needs blackleading. There was no well-filled stocking waiting for Flo or me when we blearily opened our eyes at six thirty a.m., just the prospect of a mountain of work.
‘There’s goosebumps on my goosebumps,’ I joked as I cracked the ice that had formed on the top of the jug of water we used to wash with. I splashed cold water under each armpit and doused my feet and cheeks in the freezing water for as long as I could bear before running shivering back to the bed to change into uniform.
I was just about to throw over the covers when, to my surprise, I found a small brown package neatly tied with red ribbon.
I turned to Flo. ‘So Father Christmas has been!’
‘It’s nothing big,’ she blushed. ‘I … well, I just thought us girls have got to look after each other, haven’t we?’
I ripped open the package to reveal a beautifully knitted pair of emerald-green wool gloves. I slipped my hands into them and they were as soft as kittens.
‘Oh, Flo,’ I sighed, throwing my arms round her. ‘You didn’t need to do that.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she protested. ‘It’s just a little something. I’ve been knitting them on my half-days off.’
‘But I haven’t got you anything,’ I sighed.
‘You don’t need to worry about that, I weren’t expecting nothing,’ she said.
‘Hang on,’ I laughed, pulling out a package from under the bed and handing it to Flo. ‘What’s this?’
Flo unwrapped it to reveal a bar of milk chocolate. Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
‘Tease,’ she giggled.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I wanted to get you a bigger bar but that was all I could afford.’
‘It’s the best present I’ve ever had,’ she said. ‘In fact, you’re the best friend I ever had. Even if you do make me shin down ladders from three floors up.’ She smiled at me and I felt a sudden rush of warmth towards my friend. Flo was so gentle, sweet and honest, it wasn’t true. She radiated sincerity and kindness. She didn’t have a drop of bad blood in her body and in all the time I’d known her I hadn’t heard a single nasty thing uttered from her lips.
I wasn’t the least bit surprised when she snapped the bar of chocolate in two and offered half to me. Giggling, I peeled off one of my gloves and she slipped it on.
That cold and frosty Christmas morning in 1932 a scullery maid and a kitchen maid sat on a bed in an old servants’ quarters, nibbling on a bar of chocolate and wearing one green glove each. I knew from that moment on we’d be friends for life.
Downstairs there was no tree or Christmas music, but Flo and I, being young girls high on life, tried our hardest to inject some Christmas cheer into the cold, dark kitchen that morning. Even Mrs Jones coming down and grumbling about her varicose veins couldn’t suck the joy out of us.
‘Hark the herald angels sing,’ I warbled as I piled up the stove with fresh coal.
‘I’ll give you hark the herald angels if you don’t get that stove on and a kettle brewing, my girl,’ she muttered.
In fact, if it hadn’t been for mine and Flo’s singing you’d barely have known it was Christmas Day. It was the same each year. Mr Orchard wafted about Woodhall without a hair out of place, looking like he had a pole up his backside, and Mrs Jones was in one of her dark moods as she prepared the boss’s breakfast. It was only the youngsters – myself, Flo, Alan, John and the two housemaids – who seemed to even really care that it was Christmas. There wasn’t a tree or sprig of holly about the place. I guessed that with it being Mr Stocks on his own he didn’t reckon there was much point.
But after Mrs Jones had retired to her sitting room with Mr Stocks, she came out with news to finally instil everyone with a bit of Christmas spirit.
‘Present from Mr Stocks,’ she said, pressing half a crown into everyone’s hands.
Now, I have read of other servants having a miserable old time at Christmas and being forced to line up in order of priority, with scullery maids at the bottom of the line and butlers at the top, to receive a handout gift. ‘Gift’ being used in the loosest sense of the word, as more often than not it would be a new apron or something they would have to wear in service, which doesn’t strike me as much of a gift. So getting actual money had to be a step up, surely?
‘Half a crown,’ sighed Flo happily, staring at hers like it was made of rubies and pearls. ‘I’ve always been given a pair of scratchy old black lisle stockings. He’s a proper gent, through and through.’
‘I told you so,’ sniffed Mr Orchard as he swept past. ‘Who do you think spring-cleans this place or Cadogan Square when we’re not there?’ he went on, warming to his theme. ‘Not us. In most households you’d have to do it and for no extra money, mind, but Mr Stocks pays the head gardener and his wife to spring-clean Woodhall when we’re not here and there will be someone spring-cleaning Cadogan Square before we go there for the season. Who do you think comes in here and spring-cleans the place, the fairies?’
Flo and I found ourselves speechless for once. I knew the work involved in a spring clean. What people do for a spring clean today is what we did on a day-to-d
ay basis. A spring clean in the 1930s involved no end of work.
All of Woodhall’s Tudor chimneys would be swept and the flues cleaned out. Every single room would be turned out and scrubbed down. Every single piece of silver, china and every ornament would be brought out and polished. Curtains would be taken down and beaten, mattresses aired. No nook or cranny in the vast house would be left untouched. Even the game room would be scrubbed with carbolic soap and steaming hot water until the dark red pools of dried blood were cleaned off. It was a major operation. So I supposed we should be thankful.
The rest of the day was all about the food.
Mrs Jones cooked an amazing roast Christmas dinner. We had a beautiful big goose and a Norfolk turkey from the local farm. The enormous turkey was stuffed with veal forcemeat. It was a Mrs Beeton recipe, so of course Mrs Jones loved it.
‘The king of stuffin’, this is,’ she said.
It would be enough to stuff anyone, mind.
She’d taken a pound of veal and minced it up so fine it was almost like a smooth pâté. Next, she’d pounded it with beef suet and smoked bacon. Then Flo had taken over and passed the whole lot through a wire sieve before mixing with onion, two eggs, mace, parsley, nutmeg and fine breadcrumbs. The whole lot was stuffed in the cavity of the bird, coated in more bacon and roasted in the range until it was golden brown. By, it looked tasty!
An even bigger goose was roasted next to it and stuffed with a rich onion forcemeat. The smells that came from all that cooking meat drove everyone near crazy, they were that delicious.
Alan and I hovered around the range like a couple of excitable puppies.
‘A watched bird don’t cook,’ Mrs Jones scolded. ‘Now can you all get away or you’ll feel the toe of my boot somewhere in a minute.’
By the time it was lifted, sizzling, from the range and sent up with roasted potatoes, more stuffing, gravy, apple sauce, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, sprouts with bacon and chestnuts and parsnips, we were near delirious.
The boss had just two small slices off the turkey and Alan brought the rest down.
‘Happy Christmas, everyone!’ he cheered. ‘Boss says the rest is for us.’
The servants’ hall was alive with laughter and chatter as we gorged ourselves on turkey and all the trimmings, followed by Mrs Jones’s really excellent suet Christmas pudding drowned in some of the local farmer’s extra-thick cream.
After I’d scraped my plate clean and sat back with a tummy full of really good food, I closed my eyes, loosened my apron strings and smiled dreamily. My limbs seemed to melt into the chair, I was that tired and full. Alan took his chance to hover over me with a sprig of mistletoe and plant a cheeky kiss on my cheek. I jumped out of my skin so high that even Mrs Jones and Mr Orchard managed to raise a smile.
As the staff chattered and played cards and the room was filled with a convivial buzz, my mind drifted to dear old Mr Stocks in his dining room. He’d be up there now, eating alone in his dinner suit, in that big old room. It seemed such a crying shame that he couldn’t come and eat in here with us in the warmth of the servants’ hall and have some company. Our laughter must have carried along the hall to his quarters. Did he ever long to join us – have some company, a laugh and a joke with the people who devoted their entire lives to caring for him? Who knew? But in any case, I wasn’t daft. The divide was clearly marked between him and us. Even if he wanted to, he could no more cross that class divide than he could walk to the moon. His dining room was on the other side of the house, but it may as well have been 500 miles away, so apart were we. We used different doors, we ate at separate tables, and yet we all lived under the same roof. What a strange world we occupied.
Little did any of us know, but by the end of the decade a dangerous evil would be busy breaking down the great British class structure, throwing into chaos everything that the upper class held as sacred. World War Two was a great social leveller. In six years of war, Hitler’s bombs were to blow apart centuries of tradition and put Mr Stocks’s way of life into peril. People would finally become just that – people. For the first time, as we fought to overcome tyranny, the class divide would be put to one side. But, for now, the upstairs/downstairs divide remained resolutely in place and that Christmas we dined in blissful ignorance of the horrors that lay ahead.
Boxing Day was even more fun. After a leftover lunch of devilled turkey legs and hashed turkey there was a big dance at the village hall. Mrs Jones and Mr Orchard went to the whist drive and me, Flo, John and Irene were allowed to let our hair down at the dance that followed.
‘You have to stay here and look after Mr Stocks,’ Mr Orchard ordered Alan.
He had a face like thunder as we all cycled off to the village dance.
Once there, Flo and I listened to other servants from nearby grand homes moaning like mad about their bosses. They were full of it. Who was having an affair with who, who got the stingiest present. Flo and I kept our traps shut, for once grateful we had nothing to say.
Later that evening, George took me outside and kissed me in the snow. As the flakes fluttered down and settled on our eyelashes, he wrapped me into his big warm wool coat and planted a gentle kiss on the top of my head.
‘I think I’m falling for you, Mollie,’ he sighed.
Magnificent Woodhall, a beautiful listed Tudor home in the Norfolk countryside.
I said nothing, just snuggled down into his warm embrace and tried to push an image of Louis out of my mind.
As winter thawed it gave way to a countryside beautiful beyond comparison. The fields around Hilgay were blanketed in bluebells, snowdrops pushed their way through the soil and wildflowers burst out the hedgerows.
The sap was rising in Woodhall too.
Alan cornered me by the woodshed one afternoon.
‘We’ll be heading back up to London for the season soon enough, Mollie,’ he said, his eyes glittering. ‘You’ll have to wave goodbye to that boyfriend of yours. Then you’ll be able to get your hands on a real man.’
Angrily, I pushed my way past him. I hadn’t really thought what would become of George and myself when we moved back to London, but how could I court him when we were eighty miles apart? I couldn’t ring him and I knew neither of us were letter writers.
‘He’ll wait for you, I’m sure,’ soothed Flo when I spilled out my fears to her later.
‘But I’ll miss him so,’ I sighed dramatically. ‘I’ve never really courted a man before. What will become of us?’
It was May 1933 and as the day drew ever nearer to us leaving and Mrs Jones began to pack up her beloved copper pots, a sense of sadness settled in my heart. I liked George. He was kind, considerate and treated me right.
‘Don’t worry, Mollie,’ he said when we met briefly after lunch service. ‘I’ll wait for you. Old place won’t be the same without your red hair bobbing through the fields.’ He smoothed down a stray hair. ‘Same colour as cherryade,’ he said softly. With that, he planted a soft kiss on my lips. He smelt of fresh-cut grass and tasted as sweet as strawberry jam.
I watched his strong lean body lope off back along the fields to his father’s farmhouse and I sighed deeply. I wasn’t only going to miss him but the country too – the fresh air, the space, the lights of Woodhall spilling out over the fields as Flo and I cycled home for dinner service. Being here was like taking a warm bath: safe, closeted, comforting.
But, as ever, in service your time is never really your own and the London season and Cadogan Square beckoned.
The next day, as we boarded the train bound for London, even Flo couldn’t raise a smile out of me and I was as low as a snake’s belly by the time we reached Knightsbridge. Mabel sat and stared gloomily out of the window, obviously reflecting on how much she was going to miss her trysts behind the woodshed with the mysterious Frank. Only Mr Orchard looked pleased to be returning to London.
Once back at Cadogan Square, Flo kept up her mission to lift my spirits, as only a true friend does. ‘Look,’ she said, triumphantly
pointing to the servant’s toilet at the end of the landing by our bedroom. ‘No more smelly old chamber pots. We get to use an actual toilet.’
I shrugged.
‘Tell you what,’ smiled Flo, putting an arm round me, ‘as a treat after lunch tomorrow, what say we go to Pontings on Kensington High Street [now the site of House of Fraser] and we’ll use that half a crown we got for Christmas to buy some flash material. I’ll run you up a lovely dress, perhaps in emerald green. It’ll go a treat with your red hair.’
I frowned.
‘We can even go to Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch and treat ourselves to afternoon tea if we’re quick enough. Sandwiches with the crusts off and tea from a fancy pot. Maybe even a scone, if you like?’
I nodded. I did love having a good nosy around London.
‘Perhaps stop in on Harrods on the way back and have a look?’ she added. ‘They have the best window displays, you know.’
My mouth twitched into a smile. ‘George who?’ I said.
Flo burst into laughter. ‘That’s the Mollie I know and love,’ she grinned.
Youngsters aren’t half fickle. If you’d have asked me the week before back in Woodhall if there could be life after George, I’d have sworn not, but back in London with the thought of a scone on a bone-china plate and a chance to gawp at pretty, glittery Harrods and he was but a distant memory.
The next day, no sooner was the last plate dried up and put away on the rack than Flo and I were haring upstairs, tearing off our uniforms and heading out on to the teeming streets of London. Flo had made herself a lovely tailored wool coat. It was nipped in at the waist and then flowed out, giving her a wonderful hourglass figure. The sleeves stopped just above her wrists and she’d teamed it with a pair of white gloves, matching black and white court shoes and a hat that she wore at an angle. Her soft brown hair was styled in elegant finger waves and under her arm was tucked a little leather clutch bag. She looked the picture of sophistication.
Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid Page 14