Downton Abbey

by Julian Fellowes

  2 INT. HALL. DOWNTON. DAY.

  This is a hive of activity. Anna, Ethel, the hall boys, the other maids and some nurses are carrying bedding in, and furniture out, of the rooms. Sybil catches up with Violet.

  SYBIL: Granny, different ranks can relax together. It has been known.

  VIOLET: Oh, don’t look at me. I’m very good at mixing. We always danced the first waltz at the Servants’ Ball, didn’t we, Carson?

  CARSON: It was an honour, m’lady.

  VIOLET: But it’s a lot to ask when people aren’t at their best. I’m searching for Lady Mary, Carson. Will you tell her I’m in the library?

  Carson walks away past Edith, who has just come out.

  ISOBEL: Don’t loiter, Edith. There’s plenty to be done.

  EDITH: Of course, but I’m not quite sure what’s —

  But Isobel has gone and Edith is talking to herself.

  3 INT. SERVANTS’ HALL. DOWNTON. DAY.

  The servants have finished lunch. Daisy is clearing away.

  ANNA: I’m going down to the village this afternoon, if anyone wants anything.

  MRS HUGHES: Some stamps would be kind. I’ll get you the money.

  CARSON: I’d like to thank you all for your work this morning.

  ETHEL: It’s so strange to see the rooms converted into dormitories.

  ANNA: But good. It was wrong for our life to chug along as if the war were only happening to other people.

  DAISY: How will it be, though? Are we all working for Mrs Crawley now?

  O’BRIEN: We are not.

  CARSON: I’m sure the chain of command will be sorted out soon.

  O’BRIEN: Or there’ll be blood on the stairs.

  CARSON: Thank you, Miss O’Brien.*

  * The chain of command for the servants was an important element that many of these houses had to deal with, because during the war, when the house was used differently, outside people came in and confused it. It was something that had to be negotiated, and even Carson is not prepared to be quite definite. We have established that, for as long as the war lasts, we will be in this strange territory, where Downton Abbey will be a public rather than a private house.

  4 INT. LIBRARY. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Violet is with Mary.

  VIOLET: But what do you think it meant?

  MARY: Really, Granny. Lavinia Swire knows Richard Carlisle. So what? One knows lots of people in London.

  VIOLET: I don’t know many people who’d threaten me behind the laurels.

  MARY: Aunt Rosamund said herself she didn’t know what to make of it.

  VIOLET: I still think it’s a peculiar way for a gentleman to speak to a lady.

  MARY: At least you think him a gentleman.

  VIOLET: The point is, do you think he’s a gentleman?

  MARY: I’m not sure it matters much to me.†

  VIOLET: Well, I’m going up to London to stay with Rosamund for a day or two. I think we’ll have Lavinia for tea.

  MARY: You sound as if you’re going to gobble her up.

  VIOLET: If only we could.

  † Because this slight hiccough has arisen with Lavinia Swire and Richard Carlisle, which is not part of Mary’s plan, her instinct is always to dismiss it. My own feeling about that, and I suppose in a way I use Mary to demonstrate it, is that self-knowledge, or at any rate knowledge, is the key to achievement. And when you ignore facts, particularly about yourself, then you open yourself up to the possibility of failure. We toy with that notion here.

  5 EXT. DOWNTON VILLAGE. DAY.

  Isobel Crawley is walking along when Anna hails her. She carries a shopping basket, but it is still empty.

  ANNA: Mrs Crawley, can I trouble you? I’d like to help when the wounded come, and since you’re running things —

  ISOBEL: It’s not quite decided, but I think I will have the role of supervisor, yes. There really isn’t anyone else who can be spared from the hospital.

  ANNA: So, what do you think?

  ISOBEL: We can’t have enough help. But we mustn’t steal all your free time.

  ANNA: I don’t want free time, ma’am. Not at the moment… Now, I’ve some errands to run and I must get to the Post Office before it shuts.

  Suddenly we cut back, across the village green. We are watching them chatting through someone else’s eyes.

  6 INT. KITCHEN. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Mrs Patmore is preparing dinner. Carson is there, carrying a couple of letters. He’s given one to Daisy, who’s reading it.

  MRS PATMORE: But where are they going to eat?

  CARSON: I understand from Mrs Crawley that they’ll share the dining room with the officers who are almost well.

  MRS PATMORE: So am I running a canteen now?*

  Daisy gives a slight laugh, which distracts them. She speaks.

  DAISY: William says he’s got time off between the end of his training and going overseas.

  MRS HUGHES: He’ll be with his father, surely?

  DAISY: He’s going home first, but he wants to come here for his last night.

  MRS HUGHES: You wouldn’t mind that, would you, Mr Carson?

  CARSON: Certainly not. I’d be glad to wish him luck on his way.

  Branson enters the kitchen. Carson hands him a letter.

  CARSON (CONT’D): Ah, for you, Mr Branson.

  The butler and housekeeper go.

  DAISY: Why do you think he’s coming here?

  MRS PATMORE: To see us all and say goodbye. What’s wrong with that?

  DAISY: But suppose it’s something more. Suppose he’s got plans.

  MRS PATMORE: Well, you have to deal with that when it happens. And mind you deal fair. Now go and grate that suet before I grow old and die.

  * It is not quite fair to hire people for one job, and then blithely promise them for another without ever checking properly, although heaven knows it goes on. If you said to Cora, ‘You do realise you’ve made an enormous amount of work for your servants,’ she would be horrified, because, after all, other people are coming in from the village to help, aren’t they? ‘Yes, they are, m’lady, but it doesn’t alter the fact that there’s a lot more to do for all of them.’

  7 EXT. DOWNTON VILLAGE. DAY.

  Anna comes out of a shop with a full basket. Heading for the Post Office, she spies a familiar figure. She whispers.

  ANNA: Mr Bates?

  But when she hurries over, whoever it was has gone.

  8 INT. DRAWING ROOM. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Cora is with Mary, Edith and Sybil, who is making one of the beds.

  CORA: Who’ll be in charge?

  EDITH: Cousin Isobel thinks it’ll be her. She said so to Anna.

  MARY: All I know is that she’ll drive us mad before the end.

  Cora looks at her. She does not trust herself to comment.

  CORA: I’m going up to change.

  SYBIL: I just want to finish this.

  Cora and Mary leave.

  EDITH: Aren’t you going to the hospital?

  SYBIL: Not yet. I’m on a night shift. I’ll walk down after dinner. And please don’t start lecturing me.

  EDITH: I won’t. The truth is I envy you.

  SYBIL: Do you ever miss helping out on the Drakes’ farm?

  EDITH: That’s a funny question. Why?

  SYBIL: No reason. It’s just you seemed to have such a… purpose there. It suited you.

  EDITH: It did suit me. I enjoyed it.

  SYBIL: If you see that, then turn this new adventure into something good.

  EDITH: How? I feel like a spare part.

  SYBIL: Trust me. You have a talent that none of the rest of us have. Just find out what it is, and use it. It’s doing nothing that’s the enemy.*

  * Edith has been, to a certain extent, blown around by fate, and now we start to leak the fact that helping on the farm has given her a taste for being useful, for going to bed feeling she’s tired and has done something worthwhile with her day. This will lead on to greater things for Edith eventually, and Syb
il is right to be encouraging.

  9 INT. CORA’S BEDROOM. DOWNTON. SUMMER EVENING.

  Cora is being fastened into an evening dress.

  CORA: I think he’s made it too tight. I know it’s supposed to be a hobble skirt, but I can’t even hobble.

  O’BRIEN: They say women must suffer to be beautiful.

  CORA: Well, women must suffer, anyway.

  O’BRIEN: The truth is, m’lady, Mrs Crawley has forgotten this is your house. And we need a friend in charge of the day-to-day management. Because if Mrs Crawley gets one of her toadies in to run things, she’ll have her nose in every pie before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’.

  CORA: But who…?

  O’BRIEN: What about Thomas, m’lady? He’s hospital trained and he’s always had a soft spot for Downton.

  CORA: Thomas, the footman? Managing Downton Abbey?

  O’BRIEN: But he’s not a footman now, is he? He’s a corporal, with real battle experience as a medic.

  CORA: Could Doctor Clarkson spare him?

  O’BRIEN: Well, I suppose he’ll have to spare somebody.†

  † Thomas’s war has enabled this, because he’s now a trained nurse. He’s been in the Medical Corps, and he’s working in the hospital, again largely through O’Brien’s manipulation of Cora. And she hasn’t stopped yet. What she means to prey on is Cora’s growing irritation that the whole business of making the house over to be a convalescent home is getting away from her control. O’Brien is a pretty good psychoanalyst. She knows that is Cora’s weak spot.

  10 INT. ROBERT’S DRESSING ROOM. DOWNTON. SUMMER EVENING.

  Lang is helping Robert into evening dress.

  ROBERT: We’ll see some rough sights. The wounded aren’t always very pretty.

  Lang concentrates on his work. He doesn’t need reminding.

  ROBERT (CONT’D): But maybe to show no fear or horror in the face of their suffering is a kind of patriotic duty in itself. That’s what I feel, anyway.

  Lang is fumbling with the cufflinks.

  ROBERT (CONT’D): But it may be a difficult reminder for you. Which I quite understand.

  This makes Lang’s hands shake even more. He drops the link.

  11 INT. MARY’S BEDROOM. DOWNTON. SUMMER EVENING.

  Anna is about to wave Mary’s hair with a new iron.

  MARY: Ready?

  ANNA: I think so. Although I wouldn’t have minded a bit of training.

  MARY: Don’t be so faint-hearted. Mr Suter swears by them, and everyone goes to him now.

  Anna starts to create a series of Marcel waves.*

  MARY (CONT’D): Are you all right? You seem a bit preoccupied.

  ANNA: I had a… No, never mind.

  MARY: What?

  ANNA: It was this afternoon. In the village. I thought I saw Mr Bates.

  MARY: Bates? Isn’t he in London?

  ANNA: I might have been wrong. I walked over to where he was standing and there was no sign of him. But…

  MARY: Do you know his address in London?

  ANNA: As long as he’s still there. Why?

  MARY: I’ll telephone Sir Richard and ask him to look into it.†

  ANNA: But what would he know?

  MARY: He works in newspapers — a world of spies, tip-offs and private investigators. I promise you, he can find out whatever he likes.

  ANNA: All right, then. If you think he can help.

  MARY: Good. I’ll ring him tonight.

  She steps back. It looks quite good.

  MARY (CONT’D): Not bad. But try and fit in a bit of practice. We’ve plenty of time to get it right before there’s anyone to see me who matters.

  * That very distinctive look of the Marcel wave lasted for fifteen or twenty years, from something like 1915 to 1934 or thereabouts, when smoother hairstyles crept in. As we know, by the Forties it was those big curls and so on. But I think, funnily enough, those hot tongs that were used to produce a curl in the hair were part of the liberation of women. The long hair of the Edwardian women that needed constant brushing and combing and putting up and taking down seemed increasingly unsuitable for the lives they were living. Even for working-class women, it was on the whole not accepted for them to cut their hair, so hair became, in a way, a sign of bondage, as it is in some other cultures to this day. Long hair is a statement, both of femininity, but also of impracticality, which renders its wearers less suited to any task outside the home. In the Forties, they actually had to get the film star Veronica Lake to cut her hair, because so many women were imitating her and their hair was getting caught in the machines. So she cut off her long, seductive locks, and with them, I’m afraid, her career. But, anyway, what I liked about Anna using the Marcel waver was (a) it was distinctively period, (b) it was another advance technologically and (c) it was part of the changing role of women. Fussing with a Marcel waving machine is rather tedious, I should imagine, but in those days it was a more liberated look, because once you had done it you put a comb through your hair and you were off. That freedom is what it was for, really.

  † The point here was really to remind the audience that the sort of omniscience of modern communication was coming. The telegram, the newspaper and the telephone had already begun that kind of universal information gathering that Mary takes advantage of. Here was one of the ways that the upper classes kept everything effectively under their control. Within that world, at one remove, everyone knew everyone. But if you go below that world, in the old days, there was no intercommunication network in the same way. So it was rather like a sort of KGB, although rather better dressed, who were all in touch. The information network has changed that now. It has given the power of knowledge to a much wider group and shifted the balance. People still ring each other and ask, ‘Whom do we know at such-and-such a university?’ ‘How can we get my son into banking?’ ‘Thingummy needs some work experience in fashion.’ And everyone pulls strings. But now this string-pulling is open to a far wider section of the community.

  12 EXT. LADY ROSAMUND’S HOUSE. BELGRAVE SQUARE. DAY.

  The cold sunlight illuminates the white-stuccoed mansion.

  13 INT. LADY ROSAMUND’S DRAWING ROOM. DAY.

  Violet and Rosamund are having tea with Lavinia Swire.

  LAVINIA: I only know Sir Richard because he is, or was, a friend of my father’s, and of my uncle, Jonathan Swire.

  ROSAMUND: The Liberal minister?

  LAVINIA: That’s it. But I’m afraid they’ve fallen out…

  ROSAMUND: Ah.

  LAVINIA: This room is so pretty. Has the house always been the Painswicks’ London home?

  VIOLET: There’s no ‘always’ about the Painswicks, my dear. They were invented from scratch by my son-in-law’s grandfather.

  ROSAMUND: We bought the house when we were married.

  LAVINIA: You make Mr Painswick sound rather a rough diamond, Lady Grantham.

  ROSAMUND: Marmaduke wasn’t a rough diamond, was he, Mama?

  VIOLET: No. He was just cut and polished comparatively recently.*

  * This scene demonstrates the tribalism of these families, that however much they disagree, when their interest is threatened, usually they will line up shoulder to shoulder. Which is one of the reasons that can make them quite difficult to marry into, because – and I wouldn’t say this is true of every family, but I think it’s true of a lot of them – you’re always slightly the second banana, as the wife or husband of a true-blood member. The real club consists of the born members, and while a new arrival can eventually earn their stripes to a certain extent, nevertheless for a young spouse marrying in, I think it can be pretty tough.

  Violet here cannot resist the dig about Rosamund having married Marmaduke, but I think it’s important to realise that the late Victorians were a much more socially mobile society than people often think. Our taste for oppression means that we like to represent the world before the Second World War as being cruel and closed. If you were born into the top tier, fine, and if you weren’t, you’d had it. In
fact, this was not true from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, because the imperial economy, with its tremendously expanding markets, meant that new families were coming in all the time.

  I felt that it was more interesting to give Rosamund this slightly broader approach, that she has made the decision to marry a very rich man who is reasonably born (her mother-in-law was the daughter of a baronet, we’re told), although this upwardly mobile line did not then continue, because Rosamund had no children. Nevertheless, I think it gives her a better position to advise Mary. She’s not simply living in the old world, but also the new, which Violet senses.

  14 EXT. STABLE YARD. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Branson is cleaning the car. Sybil is watching him.

  SYBIL: Carson’s told Papa you’ve been called up.

  BRANSON: There’s no need to look so serious.

  SYBIL: You’d think me pretty heartless if I didn’t.

  BRANSON: I’m not going to fight.

  SYBIL: You’ll have to.

  BRANSON: I will not. I’m going to be a ‘conscientious objector’.

  SYBIL: You can’t.

  BRANSON: Watch me.

  SYBIL: They’ll put you in prison.

  BRANSON: I’d rather prison than the Dardanelles.

  SYBIL: When will you tell them?

  BRANSON: In my own good time.

  SYBIL: I don’t understand.

  BRANSON: I’ll go to the medical and report for duty. And when on parade, I’ll march out front and I’ll shout it loud and clear. And if that doesn’t make the newspapers, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.

  He laughs at the thought, but she does not.

  SYBIL: But you’ll have a record for the rest of your life.

  BRANSON: At least I’ll have a life.* Come on. You’re not telling me you think this war is right?

  SYBIL: I don’t know. But I know we must stick together, now more than ever. All our differences, of class or fortune or even politics, don’t matter now. We have to come through this and we can’t let people feel the sacrifice was for nothing.

  BRANSON: Well, it was.

  * One of our main storylines now gathers momentum, with Sybil actually interested in Branson enough to want him not to get into trouble or be wounded, and we also have the laying of Branson’s plot, that he is going to resign from the Army while on parade, intent that it’ll be in all the newspapers. I think it’s actually debatable, because in those days you could control the newspapers rather more than you can now, but nevertheless he probably could have got it into some anti-war publications, and so he wants to make a public renunciation.