Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (11 page)

‘And did they?’ I
asked.

‘No, the lady of the house
reckoned it was too much of a mouthful and too smart for just a scullery maid in any
case, so they called me Ena. Got me in no end of trouble as they kept calling me Ena and
me not being used to it thought they were talking to someone else and ignored them. They
must have thought me a proper ignoramus.’

My dear friend Flo Wadlow, the
kitchen maid I worked with at Woodhall and Cadogan Square, in her uniform in a previous
job. She was my partner in crime and a gentle, kind and loyal friend. We met in 1931 and
we’re still friends to this day.

I shook my head. ‘Well,
I’ll call you Flo if you don’t mind, and I’m
Mollie.’

‘I’d like that,
Mollie,’ she giggled.

‘Have you ever been to a dance
before, Flo?’ I whispered.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. I
could see her eyes shining in the dark. ‘In my last job the boss had a big
house in the countryside in Kent and I was allowed to go to the village dances. The
village boys loved girls from the big house so they taught me to dance. Not that I told
my mum, Mollie. You know what mothers are like. I mean, what wicked things you can get
up to at a dance.’

I nodded, even though in truth I had no
idea.

‘Will you teach me to
dance?’ I whispered.

‘Course,’ she said.
‘I’ll show you the Palais Glide if you like. It’s all the
rage, you know.’

‘Blimey,’ I laughed.
‘You’re a bit with it, aren’t ya?’

As our giggles filled the dark, I started to
feel a little less homesick. Life was looking up.

Flo quickly became my sidekick and, now
that I had a confidante, there was no looking back. With Flo to giggle and lark about
with, scrubbing the front steps didn’t seem half so bad. I could even handle
that old toad Mrs Jones now that I had Flo on my side. Every morning we went about our
business, humming and whistling, and we’d take bets on what mood Mrs Jones
would be in.

‘I reckon black this
morning,’ I said one day not long after Flo’s arrival.

‘Oh no,’ said Flo.
‘Her niece is visiting this morning so she may be all sweetness and
light.’

Soon after breakfast Mrs Jones came down and
a look at her face told me I’d won. She was red as a beetroot and
her chubby fingers were feverishly wringing a tea towel.
‘Boss has a dinner party tonight so you silly girls had better stop your
tittering and pull your fingers out,’ she shot.

One wink from Flo and we both dissolved into
fits of giggles.

‘I mean it,’ she
blustered, slamming her fist down on her trusty tome,
Mrs Beeton’s Book of
Household Management
. ‘It’s Mrs Lavinia so it’s
got to be just right. No mucking about today.’

Poor Mrs Jones. She dreaded dinner
parties.

Every day at ten a.m., after breakfast, Mr
Stocks would come down. As soon as Mrs Jones heard the heavy thudding of his boots down
the staff passage, her mouth would tighten and she’d disappear off into the
housekeeper’s sitting room with him to go through the day’s menus.
If she came out smiling and a normal colour it meant he was dining out and we were saved
a job. If she came back the colour she was this morning, it meant only one thing: all
hands on deck.

Usually the boss just had lunch parties –
probably preferred it at his age – but every so often his late wife’s sister,
Mrs Lavinia, would come to stay so she could do the London season, and everything had to
be just so.

Personally, I loved it when he had lunch and
dinner parties as the atmosphere in the kitchen would become charged with electricity,
but I daresay to Mrs Jones it made the day a whole lot harder. Dinner parties in those
days weren’t like dinners now. There was none of this casual cooking in front
of your guests and pouring your own wine. The moment Mr Stocks’s
guests’ cars pulled
up in Cadogan Square, the footman, Alan,
would appear, on his best behaviour, and with a lightness of hand and deferential
manner, show them through to the drawing room for cocktails served by Mr Orchard at his
most obsequious.

That morning, as I’d finished
scrubbing the steps, I’d sneaked a peek up the large entrance hall. It was a
hive of activity as the housemaids scrubbed, dusted and polished. Even the outfits above
stairs were smarter as housemaids wore black frocks and little white aprons and the
hallboy, footman and butler wore smart black livery and coats with tails and silver
buttons.

The parquet flooring gleamed as fresh as
morning dew and the smell of lavender polish and carbolic soap lingered sweetly in the
air. Big gilt mirrors and oil paintings lined the walls and a vast glittering chandelier
dominated the hallway. Opulent-looking rooms filled with antiques, rich-coloured carpets
and Turkish rugs led off the hallway. Velvet curtains framed the vast rooms that looked
out on Cadogan Square, and massive armchairs, so big you could curl up and sleep on
them, were dotted about in every room. And there were books, beautiful leather books
everywhere.

I sighed. It wasn’t much like the
servants’ hall down below. Plain wooden furniture, no curtains, just small
windows covered in bars that looked out on to a sparse well between the houses and a
bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. And as for books? Forget it. We didn’t
have time to read, unless you counted
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household
Management
. What reading material we did have below stairs was either the
Home Companion
magazine or the
News of the World
,
sold for tuppence an issue. The
News of the World
was beloved by the working
classes like my father, but not by the gentry, who wouldn’t dare be seen with
it upstairs. Just as well, as when I appeared in the
News of the World
a few
years on, I wouldn’t have wanted Mr Stocks to see me in all my half-naked
glory (but more of this later!).

The scandal rags were best left below stairs
in rooms that smelt not of lavender but of damp and distemper. Everything up here in
this scandal-free room spoke of money, comfort and ease.

This evening Mr Stocks’s guests
would be sinking their well-padded derrières into these plush chairs while Mr Orchard
served them flutes of ice-cold champagne. Restrained laughter would tinkle around the
room as the men gathered on one side to talk business and the ladies would talk about
whatever it is posh ladies talked about. Dull as dishwater.

‘Oh well, Mollie,’ I
said to myself. ‘Back to the kitchen before Mrs Jones blows a
gasket.’

The gentry thought nothing of having six
courses, all with matching wines, and believe you me it took all day to prepare them.
Flo and I were braced and ready. It was our job to act as a support staff to Mrs Jones.
The minute she’d used a pan or a piece of equipment, I had to whisk it out
from under her nose, wash it and have it back in a jiffy, gleaming for her. And while
Mrs Jones flicked through her bible,
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household
Management
, and began writing out the menus, we would have to lay up her
table.

That in itself was a task. You think about
the equipment needed to prepare a six-course menu from scratch.
You
can’t even imagine. We would have to lay out two chopping boards, one big and
one small, two graters, several sieves including a hair sieve and wire sieve, at least
five mixing bowls and a bewildering range of knives, spoons, forks and whisks. Then
there was the seasoning. A flour canister, caster sugar, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper,
paprika pepper, oil and vinegar all had to be ready and waiting.

At the end of the table we laid a pristine
white cloth on which to place the special silver serving dishes. It wouldn’t
do to send them upstairs scratched. All the utensils and kitchen equipment were kept on
an in-built shelf under the table, so all you had to do was reach under the table and
grab them. In many ways these items and the copper saucepans were as precious to Mrs
Jones as children. The copper saucepans were worth a fortune and had been in the family
for years. Mrs Jones travelled with them and took them with her when she moved between
Norfolk and London.

‘With care, these pans outlive
us,’ she was fond of saying.

By the time we’d finished, the
whole table was completely covered. No wonder those tables had to be so
blinkin’ big. Back then there was no such thing as electric whisks, blenders,
microwaves or any of the labour-saving devices we take for granted nowadays. A cook was
a cook in the proper sense of the word, not someone who just assembles things.

From that moment, everyone was totally
switched on and the kitchen throbbed into life as we peeled, scrubbed, boiled, whisked,
sautéed, chopped, blended, marinated and mashed until we felt our arms would drop off.
Mrs
Jones, to give her her dues, ran that place like clockwork and she
was like a conductor commanding an orchestra. She had a lightness of hand that defied
her looks and she always knew just which bubbling pan contained what and what time each
piece of meat or fish had gone into the range.

All morning food was delivered via the back
stairs in a quantity that would seem extravagant by today’s standards. Even
when they weren’t entertaining, the food that arrived down them stairs was
mind-boggling. Whole saddles of lamb and mutton, sirloins as pink as a baby’s
cheeks and steaks as big as your head would all come streaming into the kitchen,
delivered on pallets by a whistling errand boy.

These things never arrived frozen – no one
from the butcher to the fishmonger did frozen – so the smells and tastes made your head
spin they were that good. And the flavour … oh, the flavour. Food never tasted as good
as it did back then. It makes me laugh when I hear Jamie Oliver talking about freezing
to lock in the flavour. I’m a huge fan of his but I don’t reckon
that bor knows what real flavour tastes like – I don’t suppose anyone does
nowadays. Nothing was ever freeze-dried, frozen, reduced or arrived hermetically sealed.
The food was eaten immediately after it was picked, slaughtered or fished.
That’s why people shopped or had food delivered every day. And everything was
cooked with butter or oil, never margarine or half-fat this or half-fat that.

I suppose in many ways we was lucky as Mrs
Jones had a wealth of ingredients at her fingertips and never had to limit herself much
in anything. Mind you, she was ever so
good at keeping her stores and
never over-ordered anything. She knew how much she had of everything, right down to the
last ounce of sugar. If she’d been wasteful she would quickly have been given
her marching orders. What meat we didn’t eat from the Sunday roast would be
served cold on a Monday and hashed up into stew on a Tuesday. Every bone, scrap and
vegetable peeling would be thrown in the stockpot and even the fish leftovers would be
boiled up for fish stock for soups and sauces.

Each morning the milkman would deliver vast
pats of glistening unsalted and salted butter, cream and milk. The milk
wouldn’t come in bottles but in great churns that the milkman would pour,
frothing, straight into our kitchen jugs. If you were to take a sip of that milk today
you wouldn’t even recognize it. It wasn’t until a few years after
the Second World War that legislation was passed that meant all milk had to be
pasteurized. Back then the milk was as fresh as it comes. The taste was just heavenly
and it had a head of cream on it four inches thick. Skimmed milk, so healthy today, back
then was regarded as the dregs and sold to the poor for a penny a pint.

Everything went into the pantry and larder,
which was down a few steps to keep it several degrees cooler. We had no fridges in them
days either, of course, so meat and fish was kept fresh in great big iceboxes in the
larder. It was huge and lined with lead and once a week the fishmonger would bring you
in a massive slab of ice. The old melted water would run off into a tray at the bottom
that I had to yank out and throw away.

You put the ice in the chest and you either
put things around, packed them in or placed them on top of the ice,
depending on how cold you wanted them to be. Fresh meat and fish would get packed in
and covered with a clean tea towel. It was my job to freeze my fingertips off getting
whatever fish or meat cook wanted. I also had to store away cooked meat and butter in
the larder on marble slabs. And I’d curl the butter into fancy twirls to put
in a butter dish for upstairs or plain pats for cooking.

With all this food and provision on regular
order, Mrs Jones would probably have got a kickback from some of the grand stores like
Coopers opposite Harrods and the butchers and fishmongers. She never told me, mind you,
but I know I did when I made cook years later. It was regarded as a perk of the job.

We never had to order any fruit and
vegetables as all that came fresh from Mr Stocks’s estate, Woodhall, back in
Norfolk, twice a week. I couldn’t believe my eyes the first time I saw Mr
Thornton bring a giant wicker basket down the stairs into the kitchen, big as a laundry
hamper, stuffed with every vegetable you can imagine. Fresh new potatoes, huge bundles
of asparagus, shiny broad beans, plump tomatoes, lettuces, raspberries, peaches wrapped
in paper, and anything else that was in season, was all neatly packed away in the
hamper.