Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (18 page)

I wrenched my arm away. ‘You
don’t own me,’ I snapped. ‘I can kiss who I
like.’ And I waltzed back into the kitchen with Alan glowering after me.

The dance had left us so buoyed up we spent
hours talking about the next one. Three months seemed like an
awful
long way away. But then, soon after, we got chatting to some lads from a neighbouring
village. We’d met them out cycling one afternoon and stopped to chat.

‘Dance is on Saturday
night,’ one said. ‘You coming?’

‘Course we are,’ I
lied.

‘See you there,’ they
smiled.

‘Not if we see you
first,’ I giggled back.

It wouldn’t be a problem to go,
right? Er, wrong, actually.

‘Out of the question!’
snapped Mrs Jones, back at Woodhall.

Sadly, our timing was right off and
we’d chosen the worst possible day to ask her. Mr Stocks’s
sister-in-law, Mrs Lavinia, was coming to stay, which meant extra work in the
kitchen.

‘You’re too
young,’ Mrs Jones went on. ‘I can’t have you gallivanting
all over the countryside. Whatever would your mother say? Someone has to keep an eye on
you young girls.’

Her tone of voice told us not to push it,
but after lunch during our time off we moaned like stink.

‘Who does she think she
is?’ grumbled Flo as we sat idly by the river, tossing stones in and watching
them sink to the bottom.

‘She’s not our
master,’ I agreed.

Just then, a white feather on the opposite
bank caught my eye. A cold breath of wind caught the feather and I watched it dance,
float and flutter higher into the air before it vanished into the cold autumn skies. It
was free to float wherever the wind took it.

Suddenly a seed of an idea took hold in my
head.

‘Who’s anyone to tell us
what to do and where we can and can’t go?’ I said.
‘She’s not our mother.’ Fired up with self-righteous
anger, I stood up. ‘We will go to the dance,’ I announced.

‘But Mrs Jones said …’
protested Flo, her voice fading away to nothing.

‘Come on, Flo,’ I
argued. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure? We can’t end up
an old maid left on the shelf like her. We’re never going to find boyfriends
at this rate.’ I could see I was getting through to Flo.

‘But sneak out?’ she
gasped.

‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Mrs Jones is snoring the minute her head hits the pillow.
She’ll never know. Remember that fire escape directly outside our room?
We’ll climb down that.’

She hesitated.

‘Do you want to end up an old maid
when you’re in your twenties and ancient?’

‘All right,’ she
sighed.

‘You won’t regret
it,’ I whooped, flinging my arms round my new partner in crime. I’d
known that ladder would come in handy when I spotted it!

As we cycled back to Woodhall I was brimming
over with confidence at my plan. Like Cinderella, we would go to the ball – well,
village dance.

After all, how hard could it possibly be to
sneak out?

Tips from a 1930s Kitchen
…
OLD-FASHIONED IRISH STEW

Eat like a lord of the manor! This is the Mrs Beeton recipe for Irish stew that I used to cook for my boss and all his landed friends after a hard morning’s shooting. Enjoy yours with a great hunk of crusty bread and a glass of red wine, perfect for chilly days.

3 lb (1.35 kg) neck mutton

4 lb (1.8 kg) potatoes

1 large onion

12 button onions

1½ pints (845 ml) stock

Salt and pepper

Finely chopped parsley

Cut the meat into medium pieces and trim off some of the fat. Wash, peel and slice the potatoes and the large onion. Blanch the button onions and peel them. Put a layer of potatoes at the bottom of a stewpot, cover these with a layer of meat, add slices of onion and a few button onions, and season well with salt and pepper. Repeat until all ingredients are used up. Make sure the top layer is potatoes.

Add the stock and bring to the boil, skimming off the fat as it bubbles to the surface. Cover the stewpot and gently cook in the oven for one and a half hours, or until the potatoes are thoroughly cooked and the stew loses its watery appearance.

Pile in the centre of a hot dish and sprinkle on a little chopped parsley before serving.

HOUSEHOLD TIP

Got some leftover stock, gravy or wine? Simply pour it into ice-cube trays, freeze and then pop out to add to stews or soups as and when you need it. Waste not, want not.

 

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of
life;

for there is in London all that life can
afford.

Samuel Johnson

Clinging to the fire escape three floors up
with the icy Norfolk wind whipping at my hair and face, I gulped hard and tried not to
look down.

‘R-remind me again why
we’re doing this,’ whimpered Flo in the darkness.
‘It’s perishing up here and I don’t know how much longer I
can hold on for.’ She clung to the ladder above me like a limpet, her knuckles
as white as a ghost and her blue eyes bulging with fear.

It was a fair-enough question under the
circumstances. Some girls will go to any lengths to get out, but this had to be our most
hare-brained plan yet. Ever since Mrs Jones had banned us from going to the dance three
villages along we’d silently seethed about it, until finally we’d
decided we were going to sneak out and go anyway.

When I’d first put forward the
idea, all swaggering bravado and cocksure confidence, it had seemed so easy.
Now it seemed, well, plain daft really. But it was too late to back
out now. Besides which, Flo’s foot was resting on my head, which made shinning
back up the slippery fire escape really quite difficult.

‘Come on,’ I hissed.
‘We’re nearly there.’ With that, I loosened my grip and
started to edge further down. Just then, my foot slipped off the ladder, knocking a clod
of moss and mud from the stone wall. I watched it plummet to the ground beneath and land
with a soft thud.

I heard someone stir inside.

‘Sshh,’ I hissed to
Flo.

Suddenly my hands seemed to lose all
strength and I whizzed down the slippery fire escape like I was on a helter-skelter.
Past Mrs Jones’s room I slid, faster and faster. Down I plummeted, gathering
speed, until I landed in an ungainly heap on the conservatory roof.

Oh crumbs. Please don’t break.

The Victorian conservatory at the back of
the building, which housed Mr Stocks’s rare collection of palms and orchids,
was his pride and joy. Goodness knows how old the sheets of glass in the roof were. But
the most important question was: would they take the combined weight of a scullery and
kitchen maid?

Flattening my body out, I slid myself over
the roof, commando style, breathlessly inching myself nearer to the edge.

‘The scrapes you get us into,
Mollie,’ muttered Flo behind me.

Hardly daring to breathe and half-expecting
to find myself crashing through the glass roof at any moment, I made my way to the edge
of the conservatory roof. So
relieved was I when I reached it intact,
I immediately swung one leg over the edge and slithered down the side, before landing in
a heap on the ground.

The air rushed out of my body and for a
minute I saw stars.

This is the back of Woodhall.
Can you see the fireescape ladder Flo and I used to sneak out of the servants’
quarters to go to the dance?

A strange gasping noise sounded above
and a second later Flo landed with a thump and a tangle of limbs next to me.

‘This dance better be worth it,
Mollie Browne,’ she groaned, shaking her head and clambering to her feet.

Once we’d brushed the mud off our
knees, we tiptoed to the stables and, quiet as church mice, pulled out our old
bikes. As we silently crept past the front of the house the stag
antlers loomed ominously from above the doorway, casting dark shadows on the driveway.
Mrs Jones would string us up on them if she caught us! Shivering, I pulled my old wool
coat more tightly round myself and went to say something to Flo, but suddenly found I
was too cold to talk.

We were soon rattling down the dark country
lanes. The wild weather swirled over the freezing Norfolk fields and thick fog rolled in
off the coast. It seemed to seep through my coat and into my very bones. Still, at least
it was clean fog, not like the mucky green fog that settled like a heavy blanket over
London.

Suddenly I thought longingly of my bed.

‘Think how much fun
we’ll have!’ I said in the most confident voice I could muster.
‘It’ll be worth it, right enough.’

Flo said nothing, just cycled stoically on
with her teeth chattering.

Finally we made it to the dance. It was the
usual do – a dusty village hall, a smattering of hormonal farmhands, tepid tea and
foxtrots. But once inside, did Flo and I enjoy ourselves as much as we had last time?
Not for a minute. The lads who’d invited us were nowhere to be seen and every
time someone looked at us I convinced myself it was a friend of Mrs Jones. After one
lacklustre foxtrot and a cup of tea, I was finished.

‘It’s no
good,’ I whispered to Flo. ‘I’m frightened to death.
I’m a bag of nerves.’

‘Me too,’ she said,
nodding. ‘What if someone recognizes us and splits on us? We’ll get
the sack. Why on earth did we dream this up?’

We cycled home in a state of abject terror.
How we made it back into our bedroom, to this day I will never know, but I do know that
incident showed us up for what we were. Timid girls. We could talk the talk, but really
we lived in terror of our bosses.

We weren’t really rebellious, just
high-spirited and desperate to get out and see and experience life. Working fifteen
hours a day in the kitchens under the stern and exacting eye of an all-controlling
butler and cook made life a bit claustrophobic at times. All we wanted was a little
harmless fun. I doubted very much they’d see it that way, mind. We had
deliberately defied Mrs Jones’s orders and in 1931 that was a crime punishable
by instant dismissal.

For weeks after that we crept around and
barely uttered a word. Even Mr Orchard noticed our new demure personalities.

‘Glad to see you girls applying
yourselves and not giving Mrs Jones cheek,’ he smiled smarmily one morning.
‘One learns more when one uses one’s ears first and mouth
second.’

I poked a tongue out at him as he retreated
from the room. But still, each and every morning we convinced ourselves that today would
be the day Mrs Jones would find out and we’d get the sack. And then what?
Without a good reference we’d never get another job and it would be straight
back to our villages and homes with our tails between our legs.

References were everything in them days.
Half the time I don’t think people even got much of an interview. You
wouldn’t get a job unless the cook or housekeeper said
you
were honest, straight, hard-working and from a good family. Imagine what Mrs Jones would
have said had she known we expressly disobeyed her orders. Not least risked our lives
scaling the side of the house! She’d have sent us packing and I daresay my
mother would have given me the birch, she’d have been that furious.
I’d have been packed off to work in Granny Esther’s shop with a flea
in my ear and no chance of escaping to London ever again.