‘What are you looking at?’ I muttered at the stag, half-wondering if I wouldn’t end up in the same predicament myself.
The door swung open and in walked one of the prettiest and most flustered ladies I’d seen in a long while. She smiled warmly and I instantly relaxed.
‘Good morning,’ she said, holding out a slender pale hand. ‘My name’s Nell Luddington and you must be Mollie.’
She was as fragile as a fawn with kind brown eyes smiling out from under arched eyebrows. She can’t have been that much older than me. I later found out she was just twenty-six, but her expensive silk blouse and tweed skirt, coupled with her impeccable manners, made her seem much older.
‘My husband and I are in the most dreadful predicament,’ she said, just as a young hallboy brought in a tray of tea. I saw myself getting checked out by the boy and knew my ears would be burning the minute he got back to his side of the house.
‘Our cook is quite ill with pneumonia, poor lady,’ went on Mrs Luddington. Pouring the tea, she wrinkled her perfect nose. ‘We don’t know when or if she’ll return.’
I felt like saying, More like she heard of the ghost and took her leave. Instead, I just smiled politely.
‘We are offering a wage of one pound a week. Will you come and see how you get on, just in the short term? We’re frightfully in need. I’m not really sure I know how we’re surviving. The butler, bless him, is trying his best, but Mr Luddington is missing his puddings.’
I hesitated.
‘We don’t go in for a lot of fancy cooking,’ she added, pressing a teacup into my hand.
‘Well …’ I began.
The cup of tea was swiftly followed by a ginger snap.
Her brown eyes took on a slight air of desperation. I’ll admit it, there was a small part of me enjoying this. Who’d have thought it? Little old Mollie being offered a cook’s job at just twenty.
‘We’ve recently bought a fridge,’ she said with a last roll of the dice.
A fridge! Well, that settled it. Nowhere I had worked had ever had the luxury of a fridge. In fact, no one I knew had one. Wait until I told Mother about this.
‘I’ll take it, Mrs Luddington,’ I said, standing up.
‘Oh, I am so pleased,’ she said with a smile. ‘You can start tomorrow, can’t you?’
I was about to take my leave when she placed a delicate hand on my arm. ‘Just one thing,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind ghosts, do you?’
I gulped and shook my head. Then, with my head still spinning from the speed of my appointment, I stumbled outside to find Tom Jackson leaning over a fence stroking a horse.
‘Meet the new cook of Wallington Hall,’ I said.
‘Well done, Mollie lass,’ he grinned. ‘I knew you’d do it.’
When I reported for duty the next day, Mrs Luddington welcomed me warmly and gave me a tour of the house and kitchens.
Under a bright winter sun and clear, frosty skies the house took on an altogether different appearance. It really was magnificent. The Hall was surrounded by woodland, fields and lakes for as far as the eye could see. Beautiful thoroughbred horses grazed in the paddocks that surrounded the house. Beyond them, a low mist hung over the lakes and woods.
I honestly think the grounds were the most beautiful I’d ever clapped eyes on. How lucky this woman was to own all this land at just twenty-six.
‘If you want to meet my husband you’ll usually find him out there, shooting,’ she said, gesturing towards the misty woods and arching one perfectly groomed eyebrow. ‘Those woods resound to the sound of gunfire,’ she said. ‘We run a commercial shoot, so you’ll find yourself catering for a vast number of shooting parties. That doesn’t intimidate you, does it?’ she asked.
‘Oh no, Mrs Luddington,’ I reassured her. ‘I’m used to that.’
I knew through local gossip that they charged for shooting parties, unlike Mr Stocks, who just used to open up his land to his friends. Rumour had it she was the niece of an earl and from a very well-to-do family. No doubt that meant she was from old family money, but probably not terribly well off, hence the reason they needed to get an income from the shoot. Her husband, my new boss, was one Major James Hilton Little Luddington (a right mouthful, but fortunately I only had to call him ‘sir’) and Wallington Hall had been in his family for generations. Mrs Luddington certainly looked like she had the breeding to match his all right, as she turned on her heel and I scurried after her slender, silk-stocking-clad ankles.
‘Follow me and I’ll show you round the Hall,’ she called out.
As she swept down hallway after hallway, rattling off conversation like gunfire, I struggled to keep up with her. My eye was turned, you see, by the beautiful paintings and artefacts adorning the walls and sideboards. Large oil paintings of stern-looking men with bushy moustaches astride magnificent hunting horses stared down at me. This was better than the V&A. Imagine living surrounded by all this splendour.
My eyes were drawn to a magnificent painting of one of her husband’s ancestors as I bustled after her. I didn’t notice that she had stopped and I smacked clean into her.
‘Sorry,’ I blustered. ‘Just gawping at all your beautiful things.’
‘You are up to the cook’s job?’ she said, narrowing her brown eyes. ‘You are awfully young, after all.’
Come on, Mollie. Get it together.
‘Of course I am, Mrs Luddington,’ I said in my most businesslike tone. ‘You can count on me.’
‘Good,’ she said briskly, drawing herself up. ‘Now, as well as the shoots you will have to cater for myself, my daughter Sarah, who’s five, Ted, who’s three, and our new baby, Johnnie.’
Baby? This didn’t look like a woman who’d just given birth. She was whippet thin. Then again, this was the gentry. She had legions of staff and no end of time to recuperate. I doubted she’d have got out of bed for at least two weeks. Makes me laugh. I was back doing the housework the day after my first child was born. No such fate for Mrs Luddington.
‘Besides us, you will need to cater for our nanny, Connie, our under nanny, two housemaids, the butler, the footman and a kitchen boy, who is there to help you, of course. Tom, our chauffeur, and his wife live in one of our cottages on the estate, as do the groundsmen, gamekeeper and gardeners, so you shan’t need to worry about them.’
I gulped and smiled as brightly as I could. That was an awful lot of cooking by anyone’s standards.
‘You’ll find me here in the day nursery most of the time,’ she said, gesturing to the door behind her. ‘Of course, I will meet you each morning in my office to go through the day’s menus at ten thirty prompt.’
I idly wondered what the nanny and under nanny were like. I knew domestic staff could be a bit sniffy about nannies, as if, because they lived on ‘their side’ of the house, they somehow thought themselves above their station. Well, I didn’t give two hoots for all that nonsense. I’d take them as I found them, as I did everyone.
As we marched back down the corridor I suddenly felt the temperature plunge and I shivered.
‘Did you notice that?’ Mrs Luddington asked, pausing and placing one delicate hand on a thick wooden door.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why’s it so much colder here than anywhere else? I feel like a cold chill’s just run down my back.’
‘Aah,’ said Mrs Luddington, a little smile playing on her face. ‘I see I’m going to have to explain all about our resident ghost, who unfortunately resides in the bedroom right below yours.’
‘A ghost?’ I quaked.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Mollie?’ she went on, her brown eyes boring right into mine. Suddenly I found myself shifting uncomfortably. ‘I’m rather afraid that most of the servants do tend to believe in ours.’
‘I … well, yes, that is to say no … maybe?’ I stuttered.
Unfazed by my obvious nerves, she went on: ‘In the mid-1500s a lady by the name of Elizabeth Coningsby inherited Wallington and then married a rather unpleasant-sounding man
by the name of Sir Francis Gawdy.
‘Sir Francis was an infamous judge who sat on the commission which tried Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringhay in 1586 and was a member of the court which condemned Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603. I rather fear Elizabeth was a perpetual affliction to Sir Francis, who by a trick of the law managed to possess himself of his wife’s estate.
‘He also destroyed a whole village to make way for all our beautiful parkland and converted the local church to his dog kennel. You can imagine this made him somewhat unpopular with the locals, so much so that after his death he was refused burial and was eventually flung without ceremony into the churchyard nearby and covered in a heap of stones. Before his death he was rumoured to have buried his fortune somewhere in the grounds.’
‘Buried treasure?’ I gasped, wide-eyed, suddenly remembering what Tom had told me. ‘And what about his wife?’ I asked.
‘She met a tragic end in this room,’ Mrs Luddington sighed. With that, she pushed open the heavy door to reveal a small, chilly bedroom.
My heart leapt into my throat. ‘Urgh,’ I gasped, startled. There was just such a hideous presence. Such a deep, festering feeling of misery that seemed to rise up from the floorboards in waves.
‘After a local uprising she locked herself in here to escape, but once the rioters dispersed she found herself too weak to unbolt the door. Her own staff deserted her to join the rioters.
‘She perished miserably from hunger and thirst right there on the floor. Apparently her ghost has been sighted wandering in this part of the house – a small, grey and spiteful figure in Elizabethan dress.’
I stood rooted to the spot in silence. ‘What a truly horrible story,’ I gasped eventually. ‘Poor woman! Despised by her husband and then left to rot and starve to death in her own home. No wonder she can’t move on, poor wretched soul.’
‘Yes, it is rather a sorry tale, isn’t it?’ agreed Mrs Luddington. ‘Could have leapt from the pages of a historical novel. Except, of course, it all actually happened right here.’
Suddenly I felt quite depressed.
‘Still,’ smiled Mrs Luddington brightly, ‘I’m sure you’ll be much happier here than poor old Elizabeth Coningsby.’
I hoped so!
That night, as I drifted off to sleep with a blanket over my head, the fact that for the first time ever I had my own bedroom was totally lost on me. I was sleeping slap bang over a scorned ghost. The wind rushing through the branches outside sounded eerily like the soft moaning of a dying woman. And if I listened really hard, over the soft hooting of an owl that drifted through the night sky, could I make out the faint sound of scratching? A desperate woman clawing at the locked wooden door below?
‘Get away, Mollie,’ I scolded myself. ‘You’re daft as a brush. It’s just mice.’
This was a strange old place with its haunted bedrooms and buried treasure in the grounds! I’d never been anywhere quite like this before.
I eventually drifted off, with disturbing images of rioters and headless horses galloping through my dreams. The next morning I was exhausted, but the sound of a small tap at the door woke me up.
‘Half past six,’ called out a boy’s voice, followed by retreating footsteps.
I opened the door to find someone had left a cup of tea for me, just as I always had for Mrs Jones.
‘I could get used to this,’ I grinned blearily, picking up the steaming mug of tea.
After my tea and a bracing wash with freezing cold water from a jug, I felt much better, almost ready to take on the day, scorned ghosts and all. Carefully, I took my new uniform out from the wardrobe and held it up like it was made of butterfly wings. Talk about proud! Mrs Luddington and I had come to an agreement that instead of buying me a new cook’s uniform I could use my cousin Kathleen’s old nursing uniform. I had three pure cotton knee-length dresses, two in brown, one in mauve, and all with pristine starched white aprons.
Aunt Kate had given them to me when her daughter, my cousin, had dropped out of a nursing apprenticeship at Guy’s because she’d been unable to cope with the workload. She might have been too soft and let them go to waste, but I wasn’t about to. Mrs Luddington and I both agreed that with a little alteration they’d make perfect cook’s uniforms. I think she’d been secretly a bit pleased at not having to fork out for a new one.
By the time I’d dressed myself in a brown one and smoothed down my white apron, I felt the bee’s knees. I was determined to do my best. I was cook now, after all. Queen of the kitchen at last!
Walking down the narrow back stairs, I found myself whistling despite the ungodly hour. Mrs Beeton wrote (and I do agree with this): ‘It is a thousand times tested truth that without early rising and punctuality good work is almost impossible. A cook who loses an hour in the morning is likely to be toiling all day to overtake tasks that would otherwise have been easy.’ She was right as always. Cooks have to steal a march on the day and that always meant rising before the rest of the household stirred.
If you’re wondering why I was so cheerful, despite living over a ghost and the prospect of a mountain of work, it was because, quite simply, I was the boss now. No one can understand it, unless you have been a skivvy that is, that enormous feeling of pride that comes with rising up through the ranks and knowing you are no longer a dogsbody. Here the lady of the house spoke more than just two words to me. Thanks to my rise from kitchen maid to cook, I actually mattered here. No more scrubbing, plucking or being talked down to for me.
Walking into the kitchen, I looked around and smiled. It was big and dominated by the usual vast scrubbed oak table; copper pans hung from the stone walls and a beautiful cream and black Aga dominated one wall. And, joy of joys, we had a fridge, an actual fridge. No more packing great chunks of ice in a lead-lined box and nearly freezing your fingers off just to reach the milk. When I tell you that even as late as the 1940s only 25 per cent of homes had fridges, you will see what a rarity ours was in 1937. The price of such luxuries simply put it beyond the means of most families, so food was kept cold on a marble slab at the back of the larder, in iceboxes or outdoors.
A housemaid was on her hands and knees scrubbing at the wood floor with a bar of carbolic soap, but when she spotted me she jumped to her feet.
‘Can I get you another cup of tea?’ she asked nervously. ‘Er … what shall we call you?’
I laughed. ‘Well, Mollie, of course.’
The kitchen boy, who could only have been about fifteen, shot out of nowhere and presented a cup of tea to me.
‘Already done it,’ he snapped at the young girl. ‘Here you go, Mollie.’
I could definitely get used to this. They were actually talking to me and looking at me with respect. I smiled back warmly. I wasn’t going to have any of that snootiness that I had experienced. As long as they pulled their weight I would talk to them like they were my equals. What was the point of being horrid or sarcastic to them? I’d had enough of that treatment to know it wasn’t nice to be on the receiving end of a telling-off.
I’d like to be able to tell you what that nervous girl’s name was and the butler, footman and other staff of the house for that matter, but I can’t. The memory of them is expunged from my brain because, quite simply, there was too much else going on in there at that time. Because from that moment on, and for the next two years, I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life. During the day my routine was like a more intense version of a soldier in the army. Every minute and second was accounted for and it’s a wonder my poor old brain didn’t burst.
A typical day went something like this:
6.30 a.m. Wake when kitchen boy knocks and leaves tea.
8.00 a.m. Cook staff breakfasts.
8.30 a.m. Cook breakfast for children and nannies in the nursery.
9.00 a.m. Get Mr and Mrs Luddington’s and visitors’ breakfast ready.
9.30 a.m. Clear down breakfast and plan and write up day’s menus.
10.30 a.m. Meet with Mrs Luddington an
d go through menus.
11.00 a.m. Start cooking lunches so children and their nannies can eat at 1.00 p.m. in the day nursery and the Luddingtons at 1.30 p.m.
2.00 p.m. Staff lunch.
2.30 p.m. Clear down after lunch.
3.30 p.m. Start making afternoon tea for Luddingtons and nursery teas. Prep for evening meal.
5.00 p.m. Start cooking evening meal to be served to the Luddingtons at 8.00 p.m.
8.00 p.m. Evening meals must be ready for butler to take to dining room.
8.30 p.m. Staff evening meal.
9.00 p.m. Have pudding ready for butler to take through and cheese, biscuits and coffee ready.
9.30 p.m. Clear down evening meal and then off duty. Play cards, order food, plan more meals or read. (Sometimes I’d get to go to a dance and I could leave earlier on those occasions. Doors to Wallington Hall were always locked at 10.30 p.m. sharp so you had to be back for then.)
It was a hectic schedule and there was no time for dawdling. I was always to be found scurrying around the kitchen, flushed as red as a tomato, pencil behind my ear, a half-drunk cup of tea going cold on the kitchen table as I struggled to keep my eye on the ball.
But back to my first day.
I started on the staff breakfasts – easy, I could do those with my eyes shut. I rustled up eggs, bacon, kedgeree, sausage, toast, mushrooms and black pudding for nine people including the two nannies, followed by breakfast for the ‘other side’ of the house – more cooked breakfast for Mr and Mrs Luddington and boiled eggs and soldiers for the children.
Then I sat down and drew up the menus for the rest of the day. Checking the larders, I noticed we were running worryingly low on food supplies and some of the meat didn’t look all that bright neither. I made a mental note to swap supplies from their current butcher to Harcourts, where my uncle worked. Well, you’ve got to do right by your family, haven’t you?
I drew up a tasty-sounding lunch menu of mushroom soup, followed by roasted venison with all the trimmings. What was it Mrs Luddington had said her husband had, a sweet tooth? I put down a trifle, fruit salad and apple crumble for pudding. He had to fancy one of those. No man could resist Mollie’s trifle. Then we’d have cheese and biscuits.
Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid Page 25