Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (20 page)

‘Oh, Flo,’ I sighed,
throwing my arms round her. ‘You didn’t need to do
that.’

‘Oh, don’t
worry,’ she protested. ‘It’s just a little something.
I’ve been knitting them on my half-days off.’

‘But I haven’t got you
anything,’ I sighed.

‘You don’t need to worry
about that, I weren’t expecting nothing,’ she said.

‘Hang on,’ I laughed,
pulling out a package from under the bed and handing it to Flo.
‘What’s this?’

Flo unwrapped it to reveal a bar of milk
chocolate. Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

‘Tease,’ she
giggled.

‘I’m sorry,’ I
said. ‘I wanted to get you a bigger bar but that was all I could
afford.’

‘It’s the best present
I’ve ever had,’ she said. ‘In fact, you’re the
best friend I ever had. Even if you do make me shin down ladders from three floors
up.’ She smiled at me and I felt a sudden rush of warmth towards my friend.
Flo was so gentle, sweet and honest, it wasn’t true. She radiated sincerity
and kindness. She didn’t have a drop of bad blood in her body and in all the
time I’d known her I hadn’t heard a single nasty thing uttered from
her lips.

I wasn’t the least bit surprised
when she snapped the bar of chocolate in two and offered half to me. Giggling, I peeled
off one of my gloves and she slipped it on.

That cold and frosty Christmas morning in
1932 a
scullery maid and a kitchen maid sat on a bed in an old
servants’ quarters, nibbling on a bar of chocolate and wearing one green glove
each. I knew from that moment on we’d be friends for life.

Downstairs there was no tree or Christmas
music, but Flo and I, being young girls high on life, tried our hardest to inject some
Christmas cheer into the cold, dark kitchen that morning. Even Mrs Jones coming down and
grumbling about her varicose veins couldn’t suck the joy out of us.

‘Hark the herald angels
sing,’ I warbled as I piled up the stove with fresh coal.

‘I’ll give you hark the
herald angels if you don’t get that stove on and a kettle brewing, my
girl,’ she muttered.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for
mine and Flo’s singing you’d barely have known it was Christmas Day.
It was the same each year. Mr Orchard wafted about Woodhall without a hair out of place,
looking like he had a pole up his backside, and Mrs Jones was in one of her dark moods
as she prepared the boss’s breakfast. It was only the youngsters – myself,
Flo, Alan, John and the two housemaids – who seemed to even really care that it was
Christmas. There wasn’t a tree or sprig of holly about the place. I guessed
that with it being Mr Stocks on his own he didn’t reckon there was much
point.

But after Mrs Jones had retired to her
sitting room with Mr Stocks, she came out with news to finally instil everyone with a
bit of Christmas spirit.

‘Present from Mr
Stocks,’ she said, pressing half a crown into everyone’s hands.

Now, I have read of other servants having a
miserable
old time at Christmas and being forced to line up in order
of priority, with scullery maids at the bottom of the line and butlers at the top, to
receive a handout gift. ‘Gift’ being used in the loosest sense of
the word, as more often than not it would be a new apron or something they would have to
wear in service, which doesn’t strike me as much of a gift. So getting actual
money had to be a step up, surely?

‘Half a crown,’ sighed
Flo happily, staring at hers like it was made of rubies and pearls.
‘I’ve always been given a pair of scratchy old black lisle
stockings. He’s a proper gent, through and through.’

‘I told you so,’ sniffed
Mr Orchard as he swept past. ‘Who do you think spring-cleans this place or
Cadogan Square when we’re not there?’ he went on, warming to his
theme. ‘Not us. In most households you’d have to do it and for no
extra money, mind, but Mr Stocks pays the head gardener and his wife to spring-clean
Woodhall when we’re not here and there will be someone spring-cleaning Cadogan
Square before we go there for the season. Who do you think comes in here and
spring-cleans the place, the fairies?’

Flo and I found ourselves speechless for
once. I knew the work involved in a spring clean. What people do for a spring clean
today is what we did on a day-to-day basis. A spring clean in the 1930s involved no end
of work.

All of Woodhall’s Tudor chimneys
would be swept and the flues cleaned out. Every single room would be turned out and
scrubbed down. Every single piece of silver, china and every ornament would be brought
out and polished. Curtains would be taken down and beaten,
mattresses
aired. No nook or cranny in the vast house would be left untouched. Even the game room
would be scrubbed with carbolic soap and steaming hot water until the dark red pools of
dried blood were cleaned off. It was a major operation. So I supposed we should be
thankful.

The rest of the day was all about the
food.

Mrs Jones cooked an amazing roast Christmas
dinner. We had a beautiful big goose and a Norfolk turkey from the local farm. The
enormous turkey was stuffed with veal forcemeat. It was a Mrs Beeton recipe, so of
course Mrs Jones loved it.

‘The king of stuffin’,
this is,’ she said.

It would be enough to stuff anyone,
mind.

She’d taken a pound of veal and
minced it up so fine it was almost like a smooth pâté. Next, she’d pounded it
with beef suet and smoked bacon. Then Flo had taken over and passed the whole lot
through a wire sieve before mixing with onion, two eggs, mace, parsley, nutmeg and fine
breadcrumbs. The whole lot was stuffed in the cavity of the bird, coated in more bacon
and roasted in the range until it was golden brown. By, it looked tasty!

An even bigger goose was roasted next to it
and stuffed with a rich onion forcemeat. The smells that came from all that cooking meat
drove everyone near crazy, they were that delicious.

Alan and I hovered around the range like a
couple of excitable puppies.

‘A watched bird don’t
cook,’ Mrs Jones scolded. ‘Now can you all get away or
you’ll feel the toe of my boot somewhere in a minute.’

By the time it was lifted, sizzling, from
the range and
sent up with roasted potatoes, more stuffing, gravy,
apple sauce, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, sprouts with bacon and chestnuts and
parsnips, we were near delirious.

The boss had just two small slices off the
turkey and Alan brought the rest down.

‘Happy Christmas,
everyone!’ he cheered. ‘Boss says the rest is for us.’

The servants’ hall was alive with
laughter and chatter as we gorged ourselves on turkey and all the trimmings, followed by
Mrs Jones’s really excellent suet Christmas pudding drowned in some of the
local farmer’s extra-thick cream.

After I’d scraped my plate clean
and sat back with a tummy full of really good food, I closed my eyes, loosened my apron
strings and smiled dreamily. My limbs seemed to melt into the chair, I was that tired
and full. Alan took his chance to hover over me with a sprig of mistletoe and plant a
cheeky kiss on my cheek. I jumped out of my skin so high that even Mrs Jones and Mr
Orchard managed to raise a smile.

As the staff chattered and played cards and
the room was filled with a convivial buzz, my mind drifted to dear old Mr Stocks in his
dining room. He’d be up there now, eating alone in his dinner suit, in that
big old room. It seemed such a crying shame that he couldn’t come and eat in
here with us in the warmth of the servants’ hall and have some company. Our
laughter must have carried along the hall to his quarters. Did he ever long to join us –
have some company, a laugh and a joke with the people who devoted their entire lives to
caring for him? Who knew? But in any case, I wasn’t daft. The divide was
clearly marked between him and us. Even if he wanted to, he could no
more cross that class divide than he could walk to the moon. His dining room was on the
other side of the house, but it may as well have been 500 miles away, so apart were we.
We used different doors, we ate at separate tables, and yet we all lived under the same
roof. What a strange world we occupied.

Little did any of us know, but by the end of
the decade a dangerous evil would be busy breaking down the great British class
structure, throwing into chaos everything that the upper class held as sacred. World War
Two was a great social leveller. In six years of war, Hitler’s bombs were to
blow apart centuries of tradition and put Mr Stocks’s way of life into peril.
People would finally become just that – people. For the first time, as we fought to
overcome tyranny, the class divide would be put to one side. But, for now, the
upstairs/downstairs divide remained resolutely in place and that Christmas we dined in
blissful ignorance of the horrors that lay ahead.

Boxing Day was even more fun. After a
leftover lunch of devilled turkey legs and hashed turkey there was a big dance at the
village hall. Mrs Jones and Mr Orchard went to the whist drive and me, Flo, John and
Irene were allowed to let our hair down at the dance that followed.

‘You have to stay here and look
after Mr Stocks,’ Mr Orchard ordered Alan.

He had a face like thunder as we all cycled
off to the village dance.

Once there, Flo and I listened to other
servants from nearby grand homes moaning like mad about their bosses. They were full of
it. Who was having an affair with who,
who got the stingiest present.
Flo and I kept our traps shut, for once grateful we had nothing to say.

Later that evening, George took me outside
and kissed me in the snow. As the flakes fluttered down and settled on our eyelashes, he
wrapped me into his big warm wool coat and planted a gentle kiss on the top of my
head.

‘I think I’m falling for
you, Mollie,’ he sighed.

Magnificent Woodhall, a
beautiful listed Tudor home in the Norfolk countryside.

I said nothing, just snuggled down
into his warm embrace and tried to push an image of Louis out of my mind.

As winter thawed it gave way to a
countryside beautiful beyond comparison. The fields around Hilgay were blanketed in
bluebells, snowdrops pushed their way through the soil and wildflowers burst out the
hedgerows.

The sap was rising in Woodhall too.

Alan cornered me by the woodshed one
afternoon.

‘We’ll be heading back
up to London for the season soon enough, Mollie,’ he said, his eyes
glittering. ‘You’ll have to wave goodbye to that boyfriend of yours.
Then you’ll be able to get your hands on a real man.’

Angrily, I pushed my way past him. I
hadn’t really thought what would become of George and myself when we moved
back to London, but how could I court him when we were eighty miles apart? I
couldn’t ring him and I knew neither of us were letter writers.

‘He’ll wait for you,
I’m sure,’ soothed Flo when I spilled out my fears to her later.

‘But I’ll miss him
so,’ I sighed dramatically. ‘I’ve never really courted a
man before. What will become of us?’

It was May 1933 and as the day drew ever
nearer to us leaving and Mrs Jones began to pack up her beloved copper pots, a sense of
sadness settled in my heart. I liked George. He was kind, considerate and treated me
right.

‘Don’t worry,
Mollie,’ he said when we met briefly after lunch service.
‘I’ll wait for you. Old place won’t be the same without
your red hair bobbing through the fields.’ He smoothed down a stray hair.
‘Same colour as cherryade,’ he said softly. With that, he planted a
soft kiss on my lips. He smelt of fresh-cut grass and tasted as sweet as strawberry
jam.

I watched his strong lean body lope off back
along the fields to his father’s farmhouse and I sighed deeply. I
wasn’t only going to miss him but the country too – the fresh air, the space,
the lights of Woodhall spilling out
over the fields as Flo and I
cycled home for dinner service. Being here was like taking a warm bath: safe, closeted,
comforting.

But, as ever, in service your time is never
really your own and the London season and Cadogan Square beckoned.

The next day, as we boarded the train bound
for London, even Flo couldn’t raise a smile out of me and I was as low as a
snake’s belly by the time we reached Knightsbridge. Mabel sat and stared
gloomily out of the window, obviously reflecting on how much she was going to miss her
trysts behind the woodshed with the mysterious Frank. Only Mr Orchard looked pleased to
be returning to London.

Once back at Cadogan Square, Flo kept up her
mission to lift my spirits, as only a true friend does. ‘Look,’ she
said, triumphantly pointing to the servant’s toilet at the end of the landing
by our bedroom. ‘No more smelly old chamber pots. We get to use an actual
toilet.’

I shrugged.

‘Tell you what,’ smiled
Flo, putting an arm round me, ‘as a treat after lunch tomorrow, what say we go
to Pontings on Kensington High Street [now the site of House of Fraser] and
we’ll use that half a crown we got for Christmas to buy some flash material.
I’ll run you up a lovely dress, perhaps in emerald green. It’ll go a
treat with your red hair.’