by Anwyn Moyle
‘Go back to Wales, I suppose.’
‘And do you want to?’
‘Not really.’
She said I should come back to the tea shop if my interview was unsuccessful. They were looking for a girl and I seemed like the type who would fit in well.
‘But, Lucy, I have nowhere to live.’
She lived with her family down in Bermondsey and travelled up here on the tram every day to work. I could share her room with her and we’d be company for each other on the way. I was slightly sorry I’d applied for the lady’s maid job now, because the tea shop seemed like more fun. But if I hadn’t gone for it in the first place, I wouldn’t be here now – kismet? Or wyrd, to put it the old Welsh way. And there was little chance of me being taken on, so I thought I might as well keep the appointment – for the experience.
Lucy said I could leave my case in the tea shop and, at 12:30 p.m., I made my way back up to 24 Chester Square. I gave myself half-an-hour for the five minute walk, so I’d be nice and early and make a good impression. I didn’t know what sort of formalities I’d have to go through but, even if I wasn’t going to get the job, I wanted to let them see I was a real person and not some stereotype to be snorted through their noses at. So I got out the green hat Mrs Reynolds gave me and wore my best few stitches of clothes and Lucy helped me with some lipstick and make-up and I thought I looked the bee’s knees and it made me feel confident.
‘Good luck, Anwyn.’
‘Thanks, Lucy.’
When I got to the house, I didn’t know whether to knock on the front door or go down the steps to the basement, like I had to at Hampstead. But I thought, I’m here for the job of lady’s maid, not skivvy, so the front door it was. It was a big black door, heavy and intimidating. The single step was polished and the brass handles and knocker were gleaming, and I thought some poor scullery maid was probably out doing that work at the crack of dawn this morning. It was a while before the door opened. I didn’t want to knock again and seem impatient and impertinent. When it did, a thin man in a tailcoat stood there, looking down his long beak of a nose at me.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m Anwyn Moyle.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve come for an interview.’
I could see him looking me up and down and I thought he’d seen through me already and would send me packing with a flea in my counterfeit ear. But he held the door open and I walked through into a spacious hallway. The thin man in the tailcoat led the way to a waiting room, where two other women were already seated. The merest hint of a smile ran across their faces when I came in, as much as to say, not much competition there.
Other women joined us in the waiting room as the minutes ticked slowly past and it ended up with eight of us altogether. They were all older than me and looked so sure of themselves that I was going to get up and leave, as it was obvious I’d never get the job and I was a fool for applying in the first place. But I started to read the fashion magazines that were strewn on a well-polished walnut occasional table in front of us. None of the others read, just sat primly perched on their chairs as if they knew they were being observed through some secret spyhole in the wall – while I slouched back in my seat and crossed my legs like a layabout and looked through all the magazines.
On the stroke of 1:00 p.m., the thin man in the tailcoat began calling us out of the room, one by one. There seemed to be no order to his selection and women who’d arrived after me were being called before me. Eventually I was the only one left in the waiting room and it was 6:00 p.m. and I’d read all the magazines from cover to cover and I was starving. I wished I’d brought Cook’s little muslin parcel of food so I could have a chew on something, but I’d left it in the case, back at the tea shop. Finally, beak-nose came and called me.
‘Anwyn Moyle.’
‘That’s me.’
‘Come.’
I followed him up a flight of stairs and then down a long corridor to a kind of anteroom with a frosted glass partition. I could hear voices coming from the other side when tailcoat went through and announced me.
‘Anwyn Moyle.’
‘Show her in please, Jacob.’
He stood in the entrance and beckoned me to step through.
The room was large and luxuriously furnished, with big casement windows looking out onto the square below. A shiny, black grand piano stood silent in one corner and there was a large mahogany desk in the middle of the room, with two people sat behind it – a middle-aged man who looked like a solicitor or an accountant, and a stylishly dressed woman of about thirty. There was another person some distance away in a secluded corner and it was difficult to make out whether it was a man or a woman.
‘Sit . . . please.’
The man behind the desk stood up and pointed to a chair placed several feet back from the other side. His voice was pleasant enough and I seated myself as comfortably as I could, under the inquisitional circumstances.
‘I’m Mr Peacock, advisor to the household, and this is Mrs Staines, the outgoing lady’s maid.’
I nodded to them and handed over my reference. The woman behind the desk smiled and inclined her head slightly to one side. Mr Peacock didn’t introduce the person in the gloom at the other end of the room, who was preoccupied with reading a book.
Mrs Staines spoke and her voice was soft and accent-free. She looked directly at me and her eyes were a pale-blue colour and they seemed to pierce my very soul.
‘How old are you, Miss Moyle?’
‘Eighteen, Madam.’
They glanced at each other for a brief moment, Mr Peacock and Mrs Staines, but didn’t pursue the age question any further and seemed to accept that I was a year older than my birth certificate would have confirmed. Peacock began the interview.
‘Your letter of application is certainly impressive, Miss Moyle . . . good handwriting and a nice turn of phrase. Short and to the point.’
‘Thank you, Sir.’
‘And what have you read?’
I recited a litany of the books I’d read over the years and he seemed impressed. Mrs Staines was more pragmatic, while Mr Peacock perused my reference.
‘Tell me, Miss Moyle, what experience do you have?’
‘I was a scullery maid for a while, Madam, as well as a kitchen maid, so I can clean and cook and sew and mend and—’
‘I was referring to lady’s maid experience, my dear.’
‘Well, your advertisement said experience desirable, not essential.’
‘And your application said you had some.’
She’d called my bluff. I had no experience as a lady’s maid – I didn’t even know what the job entailed, apart from the bits and pieces I’d seen Mona doing up in Hampstead. I’d been found out, exposed for what I was – a fraud. Mr Peacock chirped in, to save my guilty blushes.
‘It’s a good reference.’
‘Thank you, Sir.’
‘But it’s from the butler, not from the lady of the house.’
‘No, Sir.’
That was it, I was finished. This would be the shortest of all the interviews. I expected they were tired after the long afternoon and wanted to get away to their tea or dinner or whatever it was they would be getting away to. Then the figure in the corner moved out of the shadows and I could see it was a woman of about twenty-six or -seven. She put down the book and spoke for the first time.
‘You worked for the Hardings, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘That explains why you didn’t get a reference from the lady of the house.’
She came closer and I could see she was quite beautiful, in a wild sort of way, with jet-black hair and dark eyes. She was slightly shorter than me, but her figure was statuesque and her demeanour was somewhat imperious.
‘Can you think for yourself, Anwyn Moyle?’
I didn’t understand the question.
‘In what way, Madam?’
‘There is only one way a woman can think for herself.’
‘If you mean, do I respect myself as a woman, then I most definitely do, Madam.’
She turned away and picked up the book again. It was obvious she knew all about me and I hadn’t given her the answer she wanted. Mr Peacock stood up and rang a little bell.
‘We’ll let you know, Miss Moyle. Where shall we send our decision?’
‘I beg your pardon, Sir?’
The woman with the book spoke again. This time she didn’t look at me, but addressed the page she was reading, or pretended to be reading.
‘The Hardings let you go, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, Madam.’
Peacock smiled condescendingly and spoke again.
‘So, where should we send our decision?’
I couldn’t tell them to send it to Wales, and there was nowhere else – except the tea shop.
‘To the Sussex Rose Tea Rooms . . . in Sloane Square.’
‘I know it.’
Beak-nose appeared like a spectre in his tailcoat. Peacock handed me back my reference.
‘Good evening then, Miss Moyle.’
I was on my way to the door when the woman with the book called after me.
‘That hat . . . where did you get it?’
‘It was a gift, Madam.’
‘What design is it?’
‘It’s a Henry Pollak, Madam.’
And that was it. I was outside on the step with the cool evening breeze blowing on my face and the whole interview seemed bizarre, like a chapter out of one of Mrs Beeton’s books.
I went back to the tea shop and Lucy was waiting for me after finishing her shift. I opened my case and devoured the food Cook had given me, along with a pot of tea. Lucy was anxiously waiting for me to stop stuffing my face and tell her what had happened, but I was famished and couldn’t talk until I’d eaten everything in the piece of cloth.
‘You were gone so long, Anwyn.’
‘I was the last one to be seen.’
‘That’s a good sign.’
‘Is it?’
Lucy had been to many interviews and she told me they normally keep the most likely candidate till last. But I didn’t believe that applied in this case. I said they knew who I was and that I’d been sacked and I wasn’t eighteen and had no experience – so why would they give me the job?
‘Why did they ask you for interview in the first place, if they already knew all that?’
It was a question I couldn’t answer. A total mystery. And it didn’t solve my immediate problem – I was jobless and homeless. Lucy said I could come back to Bermondsey with her that night and we’d sort everything out the following day.
Chapter Seven
Bermondsey was a slum area of London in the 1930s and Lucy’s father was a docker who worked on the wharfs along the Thames and Surrey docks, which was a centre of the timber trade and barge-building and rope-making. Food factories flooded the area, with Crosse & Blackwell in Crimscott Street and Lipton’s on Rouel Road and Pearce Duff on the Spa Road and Peek Frean’s by the St Saviours dock – and Courage had a brewery near to Tower Bridge. Most of the work in these places was casual and wages were low and the area was deprived and poverty-stricken. Housing conditions were bad, with over-crowding and poor sanitation and absentee landlords nor caring if their tenants had to live like rats. The industrial activity contributed to poor air quality and endemic health problems – and I’d thought life was tough in the coal-mining villages of South Wales. When I got down to Bermondsey in 1935, things were beginning to improve. Slums were being demolished and streets cleaned up and communal laundries opened. What couldn’t be cleaned was radiated in a purpose-built solarium and tuberculosis dispensaries and foot and dental clinics were being set up.
But conditions were still very bad.
Although Lucy’s family had a two-bedroomed house, she had three sisters, and they shared a toilet with another family from next door. There was clearly no room for me, even though they made me feel as welcome as they could. Her mother said she shouldn’t have let me think she had her own room and was sorry that I’d been deceived so. Lucy said she just wanted a friend that she could travel back and forth from work with and I had no place else to go and I could sleep with her in her bed and have half her food. But it wasn’t right. I just couldn’t put upon poor people like that. So, when we went back to the tea shop in Belgravia the next day, I took my case with me. Lucy was a bit upset and said I didn’t have to leave – but I knew I couldn’t stay.
The tea shop was run by a woman called Hannah who said she’d give me a week’s trial as a nippy starting on the Wednesday, but it got very busy and I’d have to be on my toes. There was a little room with a bunk and a sink at the back of the shop and I could sleep there until I found something better. But once the shop shut in the evening, I’d be locked in and couldn’t leave until it opened again at 7:30 in the morning. I said I didn’t mind and at least I’d have some time to myself in the evening to read. I went to the local public lending library and took out some books and magazines and other stuff, and while I was there I came across a manual about how to be a lady’s maid and I thought I’d have a flick through it, just to see what I was going to be missing when they didn’t give me the job.
That night was lonely in the bleak little back room with the late London noises all around me but strangely separated from me. I heard a mouse scrabbling somewhere and then I fell asleep reading an edition of The House of Dreams by Katharine Tynan.
My first day in the tea shop was disastrous. I was all the time depending on Lucy and the other nippies to tell me this and that and what a masala chai or an oolong or a lapsang souchong was. Don’t forget, the shop was in a high-class area and the clientele liked to show off their aesthetic knowledge by ordering the most obscure beverages they could think of. This was no bacon buttie place and there was a bewildering assortment of cakes and tarts and scones and croissants and strudels and bizcochos and eclairs and pains and sandwiches and short-breads to choose from. They had a specialist Chinese tea-brewer in the kitchen and a patissier for anything that wasn’t à la carte and it was total confusion in the busy periods.
At the end of that first day, my feet were nearly crippled from running between the tables in the block-heeled strap-boots they gave me as part of the black-and-white uniform, and I was glad when it was all over and they locked me into the little back room to rest and recuperate.
That night, instead of studying the menus, like Hannah told me to, to better accustom myself with the tea shop’s cuisine, I picked up the lady’s maid manual and thought to myself that I was a bit premature in not caring whether I got the job or not. I read that a lady’s maid had to be a combination of seamstress and hairdresser and beautician and masseuse and secretary. They reported directly to the lady of the house, rather than the housekeeper or head butler. Their duties could range from bringing the mistress breakfast in bed to selecting her wardrobe and jewellery and styling her hair. A good lady’s maid could make a plain woman look beautiful and more recherché than she really was, and often it was the lady’s maid’s taste that was behind the outward show of her mistress. She would supply the glamour and sophistication required to maintain these upper-class women in high society, and the skills of the lady’s maid could mean the difference between triumph and disaster.
The lady’s maid needed to be aware of the latest fashions and choose perfumes and ball gowns and perform manicures and pedicures and facials. She should know about etiquette and local customs and cultures and formalities, so the mistress didn’t put her foot in it with dignitaries. She’d be responsible for the upkeep of the lady’s wardrobe and would be skilled in the care and cleaning of valuable clothing.
And I thought to myself, maybe it’s just as well I didn’t get the job, as I didn’t have a clue about most of that stuff. All right, I’d seen moaning Mona perform some of her duties at the Hardings’, but our paths didn’t cross that often and she wasn’t one for fraternising with scullery maids.
Thurs
day in the tea shop was just as frantic, with Hannah frowning at me for not doing what she told me and studying the menus and the methods of serving and satisfying the delicate Belgravian palates. I was slower than the day before because my feet were killing me from long hours in the boots and I knew I wasn’t going to make it as a nippy and would be on my way back to Wales at the end of the week’s trial. By Friday, though, things were starting to get a little bit better. I was getting used to the work and the customers and the cuisine and the different types of tea. But Hannah was making grumpy noises about the back room and if the owners found out I was living there she’d get it in the neck and I knew she wanted me out. I was thinking, if I could just get somewhere to live, then this job might not be so bad after all. I made up my mind to go searching on Sunday for a room or a boarding house somewhere, but it would mean being locked out of the shop from Saturday night until it opened again on Monday morning.
Then an embossed envelope was delivered by hand to the tea shop. It was blazoned with a lion couchant and it was addressed to me. I opened it, expecting to be told I hadn’t got the job as a lady’s maid.
Dear Miss Moyle,
Thank you for attending for interview on Monday. We would be grateful if you could return for a further, informal consultation on Sunday next at 11:00 a.m.
Thanking you in anticipation,
Yours sincerely,
Walter Peacock ACCA
I showed the letter to Lucy and she was convinced they were going to give me the job after all.
‘Surely not?’
‘Why would they ask you back, then?’
‘Maybe I’m not the only one?’
So, Saturday after work in the tea shop, I collected my wages of half-a-crown and lugged my case back down to Bermondsey to spend one more night with Lucy and her lovely family. I gave her mother a shilling for my bed and board and she didn’t want to take my money, but I made her.