“Tell me, May,” he had asked, “am I mistaken or do you have a secret passion for these smelly machines?”
May blushed at his observation but nodded, admitting to being mesmerised by the sight of so many beautiful cars.
“Why not look for a job as a chauffeur?” Nat said. “Loads of women drove cars professionally in the Great War. Women wore the trousers in those days. And many still do,” he said, darting a look in Rachel’s direction. “Even though there is talk down at the workshop of another war,” Nat continued, his eyes meeting Sarah’s, who was nodding in agreement, “none of us think it will come. Even Mosley and his fascist thugs are losing power in this country and anyway, Baldwin will do everything in his power to prevent it.”
Nat did not sound optimistic.
“But whatever happens there is no reason for women drivers to wait for another war to give them a professional role. Especially if they have a real skill for it.”
“What sort of car would I drive?” May asked. “And who would be inside it?”
“Well, they say the test to drive a London taxi is a hard one. You have to know all the streets of London backwards as well as forwards. They call it ‘the Knowledge’ and it is said to be more difficult to pass than the exam to get into Oxford or Cambridge!”
“She’s a quick learner,” Sam interrupted with brotherly pride.
“I am sure she is,” replied Nat, “but it might be an idea to see if any private work is advertised in the paper. Perhaps a Times reader would be looking for her in the same way that she’d be seeking them?” he suggested.
May sat on her bed and opened the newspaper once more, beginning again with the third page. She ran her finger down the situations-vacant columns. With the cutting back of numbers of servants since the Depression, even the grandest houses were looking to double up on staff roles. That day the advertisements for “cook-generals” outnumbered all the others, a euphemism that according to Nat disguised something closer to general slave labour.
“You would never have found such a job advertised before the war,” he had said.
Even so, a parlour maid was required for a family in South Kensington and a head housemaid was needed to head a team of four other servants near Southampton, the advertisement assuring all applicants that the employers were a “titled family.” Neither position sounded at all what she was looking for. Further down the page, however, May drew in her breath a little. Her finger hovered for a moment and then, putting her hands in her lap, she read the few compact lines slowly.
Discretion is an essential qualification for the successful candidate who applies to work as chauffeuse, with additional general secretarial duties for a busy member of Parliament, based both in London and in Sussex.
Flexibility, a willingness to work hard, a head for bookkeeping, a smart appearance and an impeccable driving record are all requirements.
May circled the advertisement with a pencil, went downstairs and waited for Sam and Nat to come home. She planned to seek their advice even though her mind was already made up. Later that evening, she rang the number printed in the newspaper from Nat’s workshop telephone, and an arrangement had been made for May to take the train from Victoria down to Polegate station where she would be met and driven to Cuckmere Park. She had been told by the housekeeper, who in a deep voice introduced herself as Mrs. Cage, that Sir Philip Blunt would be at the house and would be pleased to interview her himself.
“He needs to be certain of getting the right one this time,” Mrs. Cage had said. “And he’s not the only one here at Cuckmere who doesn’t want any more balls-ups, pardon my French,” she continued. “Spent too much time abroad with men and their bad ways with language, I have. Mind you, a woman might cause a bit of attention behind the wheel. I hope you scrub up nice and smart,” a note of warning in her voice as she replaced the receiver.
Nat had made Sarah a warm coat for the winter in thick tweed. Sarah insisted that the coat was ideally suited to May’s neat figure and would be perfect for impressing Sir Philip. She also leant May a pair of cotton stockings. May, who had never worn such things before, pulled the stockings up and clipped them to the suspenders just as Sarah showed her. She did not know that legs could experience claustrophobia, even though Sarah assured her the stockings would soon expand and wrinkle at the knees and ankles. At the last moment Nat had produced a striped, battered box from which he lifted a small black velvet hat with a jaunty feather on one side.
“Mum would be honoured to think of the daughter of her favourite sister wearing her best hat on such an important day. This is the only piece of clothing the prison returned to us after Mum died. All her other clothes had been burned because she was too thin to wear them.” Nat’s voice faltered. “But Mum didn’t mind. ‘Anything for the suffragette cause,’ she always used to say. I always wish she had lived on just a bit longer to see women given the vote and Lady Astor taking her seat in Parliament. Then she would have known the fight was worthwhile.”
“Well, I want to try and do Aunt Gladys and her hat proud,” May said, reaching up to give Nat a kiss on his cheek. “So here comes a woman aiming for a man’s job.”
Placing the hat on May’s head, Sarah pronounced it a perfect fit.
As May sat on the train in her third-class carriage she passed innumerable back gardens and yards. The scene passing her eyes was as strange as anything she had seen at the pictures. Some of these tiny patches of horticulture were pristine in their winter tidiness, the flowerbeds turned and forked with the care given to the potato topping of a meat pie, paths swept of leaves and the still stark trees forming a skeletal silhouette against the sky. Other gardens were overrun with weeds, and sometimes, just visible in the thick mist, the train passed an abandoned swing settee, its seat rotting in the damp, a reminder of summers past. Most of these small plots were devoid of life, although as the train slowed down for a station, May spotted a sleepy cat curling itself around the back fence of a house and a bent-over figure emerging from his potting shed, probably escaping the demands of domesticity in the house. And yet this unlikely jigsaw of semi-tended earth, despite the apparent mismatch of the pieces, slotted together to form the overall effect of a satisfying collage.
As the London suburbs gave way to the muddy greenish-brown of the Sussex winter countryside, a thin white frosting covered the fields. May had never seen snow before. The pictures illustrating Hans Christian Anderson’s icy queen in her white fur coat were the closest she had come to such a sight. There was no one in the empty railway carriage to whom she could show her excitement. Sam had wanted to come with her but that day he had an appointment on board HMS President, the huge ship permanently moored at King’s Reach near the Law Courts at the Embankment. She wondered how he was getting on. His hope that the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve would take him on as a rating was a long shot but even so Sam was confident that he would soon be wearing a jacket with the volunteers’ herringbone stripe at the cuff.
Nat had also offered to come with May on the journey, but she assured him she would manage fine on her own. Just at that moment she felt deliriously independent. The train made its way through the frozen landscape, the bosomy undulation of the South Downs rising into view as if the backdrop of a theatre had just been changed for a new scene. May tried to count the number of flint churches with pencil spires that pointed upwards towards the grey skies and felt the return of an old tumble of words from a poem that her mother used to read to her when May was very small, the rhythm of it dependably sleep-inducing even if the words did not then mean much.
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain
As the painted stations of the Sussex Downs whistled past her window, May only just had time to read the
letters on the wooden signs announcing the successive towns of Plumpton and Lewes, Glynde and Berwick, until at last the train began to slow down and a ripple of nerves overtook her. Sarah had suggested she might suit a bob cut, and had offered to give her a shining blond Jean Harlow–style, with a little help from her infallible tin of bleach. May had resisted the offer but wondered whether she had been right to do so. Now she could only hope that her hairpins would hold their place.
A man in overalls was standing at the far end of the platform, holding a tweed cap. He raised a hand to May in greeting. She waved back. A sharp gust of wind lifted off her black velvet hat and, bending to retrieve it, the pins that she had carefully tucked into her hair two hours earlier slithered out onto the ground. They will never take me seriously now, she thought, as she stood up, juggling hair, hat and pins and made her way towards the man who was standing beside a beautiful car.
CHAPTER SIX
May was waiting for Sir Philip in the library, attempting to calm herself by laying her open handkerchief out flat on the table in front of her and folding down each corner, one on top of the other so the handkerchief became an ever-decreasing square. This schoolgirl trick, if done correctly with paper, resulted in a fortune-teller’s cup. But the corners of the cotton handkerchief were too bulky to stay in place and no sooner had May flattened the edges than they bounced back up again. She felt horribly unprepared for the interview ahead of her. She was still getting over her arrival at the station.
Reaching the end of the platform, she had put her hand out in greeting towards the man waiting for her, only to notice his misshapen chin and a nose resembling a squashed fig that was nowhere near the centre of his face.
“Hooch,” he said. “Mr. Hooch,” by way of introduction.
“I’m May Thomas,” she replied. “Nice to meet you.”
She had avoided looking at the disfigurement that was plainly visible in the driver’s mirror during the ten-minute drive from the station and had instead allowed herself the unaccustomed treat of being a passenger in such a lovely car. The familiar smell of the Rolls-Royce’s red polished leather seats was comforting while the upholstery felt fit for a king.
When the car reached the end of the single-track road lined with huge elm trees, in the grand French manner, she saw Cuckmere Park rise out of a dip, its Sussex flint stones the colour of the rain clouds above, each window in perfect proportion to the next. The front door was wide open and a woman wearing a black dress reaching almost to the ground was standing just inside. Her white hair was caught in a ponytail, an old-fashioned style for a woman who must only be in her early forties, about the same age as May’s mother.
“Good afternoon, Miss Thomas, welcome to Cuckmere Park. I hope Mr. Hooch looked after you? Brought you in the Rolls, I expect, just so you could feel the movement?” she asked in the rolling accent that May had heard on the telephone the day before.
May followed the housekeeper into a stone-flagged hall where two deer-size dogs were lying asleep in the centre of the floor. The flags must have been laid centuries ago, May thought, wishing that Sam were here to show off his knowledge of history; he would love this old house. May stumbled slightly on the uneven stone as she hurried to keep up with Mrs. Cage.
“Isn’t January blooming awful?” Mrs. Cage said, her voice echoing around the high grey walls. “Mind you, Sussex in winter can be beautiful, and I’ve known some lovely ones over the past nine years,” she continued, the words flying up to the ceiling and returning in shadow form. “But I cannot help thinking about how nice it will be to be warm again.”
“I miss the warmth too,” May said, agreeing with her enthusiastically.
“Do you like swimming?” Mrs. Cage asked, turning to look at May.
“Yes, I love it. Is there a beach near here?”
“Yes, there is, in matter of fact, down at Cuckmere Haven. Florence and I sometimes go there even though it is a bit of a walk.”
“Florence?”
“Oh sorry! Florence is my daughter. She is nine, well, nearly ten, as she is constantly reminding me! She lives for the chance to swim in the sea!”
Mrs. Cage pushed open the panelled door at the end of the long corridor.
“Sir Philip has a telephone call or two to make so if you wait in here I am sure he will come and find you shortly. Shall I send you in a cup of coffee?”
May declined the offer and was left alone. She sat down in a chair in the far corner. A powerful smell, a combination of freshness and spiciness, puzzled her until she spotted a neat line of hedgehog-like balls placed along the windowsill. She recognised them from the linen cupboard at home. Every Christmas she and Sam had punctured the pitted skins of oranges with little clove heads and tied a ribbon around the fruit from which the perfumed ball would hang and scent the sheets.
Books were piled on every surface, their multicoloured spines displayed on the shelves stretching from ceiling to floor on three sides, while on the remaining wall of the room the brick red wallpaper was obscured by two fraying tapestries of ancient wooded hunting scenes. Curtains made of rich dulled gold silk had the fullness of Cinderella’s gown. May tried to work out how long it would take to read every book in the room. A week, maybe a month for each volume? A year for each shelf? She gave up, giddy with the calculation. Abandoning the improvised fortune-telling cup, she shoved the handkerchief back in her pocket, closed her eyes and wished she felt less nervous.
The sound of the door opening startled her. A tall young man in spectacles burst into the room and flung himself onto the burlap-covered armchair opposite her, spread-eagling his legs. Evidently he thought he was on his own. He opened a yellow-jacketed book on which the words “Left Book Club” were stamped on the cover. In case he unexpectedly caught sight of her and suspected she had been deliberately hiding, May felt she should say something.
“Hallo.”
The young man looked up at her from his book. His hair was almost white, the colour of thick honey. Putting his finger to his lips he motioned to her to be quiet.
“I am escaping from the dreaded sister,” he hissed. For a moment he studied her closely. “I must say, you look awfully smart sitting inside with your hat on.”
“Oh,” May said, suddenly unsure. “Do you think I should take it off?”
“Well, it depends what you are planning to do next. If you were staying for lunch, I would definitely take it off. But if you have a head cold and are here to study branch formation of Elizabethan oak trees in the garden, then I suggest you leave the hat where it is.”
“I’m waiting for Sir Philip,” she explained defensively. “I am hoping he will ask me to be his driver.”
“Oh I see,” said the young man, examining her a bit more closely. “What fun! You are nothing like Cropper, although I hope there isn’t a small flask of whisky hidden under that hat.”
May looked puzzled.
“Oh dear. Sorry. I must learn to be a bit more discreet. Joan has a phrase for it. ‘PD,’ she always says to me. Pas devant, meaning ‘not in front of.’ It’s the Blunts’ private alert for discretion in front of the servants. Awful outmoded way of talking, isn’t it? I can’t bear it. And anyway I think there’s far too much secrecy in this world. Always tell the truth is what I say, no matter whom it is you are talking to. Did Hooch collect you from the station?”
May nodded. “Poor man,” she said. “Poor face, I mean.”
“Yes, I know,” the young man agreed, his earlier expression of curiosity suddenly replaced by one of deep seriousness. “We all think it’s amazing that Hooch still wants to get behind a wheel. He got those injuries when a fragment of shell hit him as he was driving a tank somewhere in the Somme. That’s twenty years ago now but he’ll have the scars for the rest of his life. He’s an inspiration, really.”
At that moment the door opened again.
“Ah, Julian, I see you have already met Miss Thomas.” An older man holding a box of matches was standing at the door. “I’m afraid y
ou will have to continue your conversation another time. Miss Thomas is coming with me.”
And before May could say goodbye she was beckoned into the adjoining study. Just before the door closed behind her, a stage whisper floated through the open gap.
“I really hope you get the job.”
The older man turned round and smiled. He had heard the whisper too.
“How do you do,” he said to May, addressing her directly for the first time. “I’m Philip Blunt. Have you been offered some coffee? Good. Well, come in. And do take that hat off, you must be so hot under there!”
Sir Philip shook the box of matches in his hand but it was empty. Picking up a cigar that was lying half-smoked but extinguished in an ashtray on the desk, he tried unsuccessfully to blow it into life, pulled the Anglepoise lamp closer and ran a hand through surprisingly dense and unfashionably long hair that was the colour of a well-worn penny.
“Well, shall I kick off then?”
“Yes please,” May replied, trying not to squash Aunt Gladys’s hat as it lay in her lap.
Sir Philip outlined the responsibilities involved in the job with efficient economy. He explained that he was one of a handful of deputy chief whips in Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government. He had formerly been a lawyer and still occasionally gave advice in that capacity.
“It certainly makes for varied and interesting work, but I need to keep my wits about me, and that is why I could do with a first-class secretary and chauffeur.”
He needed someone to drive him from appointment to appointment during the weekdays in London and to take him up and down from town to the country. When he was tied up in daylong parliamentary sessions, he liked the car to be available for his wife, Lady Joan, and occasionally for their two adult children. The job advertised came with free board and lodging with Mrs. Cage in the housekeeper’s house in the village. For the occasional overnight stay, especially during late-night sittings in the House, a small room next to the butler’s pantry in St. John’s Wood was on offer.
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