Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (34 page)

Alighting from the taxi outside Lord
Islington’s huge house opposite Hyde Park, I felt like Cinderella! I might not
have had Wallis Simpson’s life of luxury or the king and queen’s
wealth and privilege, but I was doing all right, just the same.

‘Well, Mollie,’ I
murmured as I snuggled dreamily down under my eiderdown up in the attic of the huge
house. ‘You
did
make it to the ball.’

The next day I could scarcely wipe the smile
off my face as I helped prepare the boss’s breakfast. I would dine out on this
night for years to come.

Spain and high-society balls! Life was
definitely looking up!

It was only a matter of weeks before my
fairytale life came crashing down around my ears.

I was just laying out Cook’s table
when Mrs Pickering
came into the kitchen and clapped her hands.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up expectantly.

‘I have some news,’ she
said in a tone of voice that instantly struck dread into my heart. ‘It is with
great regret that I have to inform you that Lord Islington died here at home last night
on the sixth of December 1936. It goes without saying that there will be no need to
continue packing for Spain.’

My whisk fell on to the stone floor with a
clatter. It may sound callous that my only thought was for myself, but my heart plunged
into my boots.
No. No. No … he can’t be dead.

And just like that, my dreams of Spain and
faraway adventures under a red-hot sun melted away to nothing.

Tips from a 1930s Kitchen
…
LEMONADE

Not being a terribly sophisticated girl, I drank lemonade when I went to the Chelsea Arts Ball. Truth be told, I preferred it to the taste of champagne. It’s easy to make your own and when served chilled on a hot summer’s day is absolutely delicious. It’s no secret that every cook of my era used Mrs Beeton’s recipes and the lemonade recipe in her
Book of Household Management
remains one of the best to this day.

Strain the juice of two lemons into a half pint (285 ml) of cold water and then sweeten to taste with 4 oz (110 g) of caster sugar. Next stir in a teaspoonful of bicarbonate soda, add plenty of ice and mint, and drink while cool. I sometimes adapt Mrs Beeton’s recipe by adding a grating of fresh ginger, which adds a nice zing.

HOUSEHOLD TIP

To get rid of greasy fingermarks and spills on polished wood, simply wipe with a cloth soaked in vinegar before polishing with wax.

 

I have always thought that there is no more
fruitful

source of family discontent than a
housewife’s

badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.

Mrs Beeton,

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management

Four days after Lord Islington’s
death, on 10 December 1936, Edward VIII abdicated. His reign had lasted 326 days. My own
ill-fated job had lasted just a few months.

I thought of that innocent young girl I had
witnessed from the top deck of the bus playing in her back garden in London. Now
Elizabeth would be ten and all too aware of the huge responsibilities facing her and her
family as they moved into Buckingham Palace and the harsh glare of intense public
scrutiny. But what about me? What new role did I have in life now that I was officially
out of a job?

Lord Islington’s body was still
warm when we all trooped back to Rushbrook Hall to start the tedious task of unpacking
all the boxes once bound for Spain. A
month later my job finished and
I was on a train back to Norfolk. As the train puffed its way across the fens, my dream
of a new life in Spain grew more distant with every mile passed. And by the time I
walked down the Lynn Road, a heavy January fog cloaking the fields in a grey drizzly
gloom, it had vanished.

With each weary, rain-sodden step I took,
fresh waves of humiliation and frustration washed over me. I had bragged to anyone who
would listen about my grand job. What’s more, I’d given up a
perfectly good job to join that household. I couldn’t just go back to Woodhall
and ask for my old job back. Old snooty knickers would have a field day. Besides which,
Phyllis had my job now.

What a daft fool I’d been to walk
away from that position. Castles in Spain? I really had been painting castles in the sky
if I thought I could ever actually live in one!

All along the way neighbours and friends
popped their heads out of their doors to call out a cheery greeting.

‘Ar ya reet, Mollie
love?’ cried my mother’s friend when she spotted me. ‘What
you doing here then? I thought you was off to Spain.’

Mortified, I mumbled the whole sorry story
about Lord Islington’s untimely death. By the time I made it home I must have
told that story a hundred times. Had I really boasted to that many people about my
future?

Once inside, the door slammed and I
collapsed on to a kitchen chair with an exaggerated groan. Mother, busy raking out the
coal fire, looked up and raised her eyebrows.

‘My life’s
over,’ I sighed dramatically. ‘Why did I tell all those people I was
off to Spain? I’m going to be a laughing
stock. There
won’t be a person in Downham who won’t know of my misfortune by
now.’

My head hit the wooden kitchen table with a
thud.

‘I know what they’ll be
saying,’ I mumbled. ‘That’ll larn her, old big mouth
Mollie with her fancy job.’

Mother simply smiled, wiped her hands on her
apron and came and sat next to me. Gently lifting my head up from the table, she cupped
my chin in her hands and gazed at me with her lovely soft hazel eyes.

‘Chin up, love,’ she
soothed. ‘You’re a clever girl with some decent experience under
your belt. You’ll get a new job in no time. You’ll see.
How’s about I see if I can’t rustle up a bit of steak and kidney
pudding for your supper tonight?’

Now that really is a sign of a wonderful
mother. She’d probably been up cleaning and washing since the crack of dawn
and, what’s more, my father’s health had deteriorated and he was
currently having a spell in a sanatorium, but instead of telling me to pull my socks up,
she simply offered me words of love, a hug and a big serving of steak and kidney pud.
Thank God a mother’s love is unconditional or else she’d have been
well within her rights to boot me up the bottom.

For the next few days I moped about the
place and even Mother’s home-cooked suet and apple pudding drowned in double
cream couldn’t put so much as a flicker of a smile on my sorry face. My
brother was irritating me, the relentless rain drumming on the window sills was boring
into my skull and all my old school friends were either married with babies or working
every hour God sent in apprenticeships.

I thought of Flo. How I longed to see her, but
she was working for her marquess at Hatfield House, which was too far to bike.

As always, my mother, quiet force that she
was, had the answer. Thanks to her Friday-morning market gossip she knew everyone and
everything that went on round our way. I came in from fetching in the eggs from the
garden one Friday morning to find one of Mother’s friends, Elsie Jackson, and
her husband, Tom, sitting warming their feet by the fire.

‘Hello, Mollie.’ Elsie
smiled brightly when I walked in. ‘Bumped into your mother at the market.
Happen I heard of your misfortune. What a shame. Spain’s supposed to be a
lovely place, so they say.’

My heart sank. Did everyone have to know
everyone’s business round these parts?

‘Tom here’s a chauffeur
up at Wallington Hall. They’re looking for a cook. If you’re
looking, that is.’

I frowned. ‘Cook? I’m
not sure I’m up to that just yet, Elsie,’ I said, putting the eggs
down carefully on the table. ‘Besides, I’m only twenty. I
can’t run a kitchen.’

‘Course you can,’ smiled
Mother. ‘I’ve seen your cooking. No one can make pastry like you and
you’re a grafter, all right.’

‘Besides,’ said Elsie,
‘they’re desperate. Their cook’s ill.’

Mother was sitting forward in her chair now.
‘Why not, Mollie?’ she urged. ‘Try it and if you
don’t like it, then leave.’

‘That’s settled
then,’ said Elsie. ‘Tom here’ll run you up there
directly.’

Tom up until now had done what most men do
in the
company of chattering women – he’d stopped listening
and dozed off. At the mention of having to leave his comfy fireside seat, his head
jerked up.

‘What, now?’ he
spluttered. ‘I was looking forward to one of them sausage rolls I can smell
cooking.’

Elsie booted him swiftly and, sighing, he
stood up. He knew when he was beat. The power of two strong Norfolk women when
they’ve set their mind to something is almost impossible to overcome.

‘Come on then, lass,’ he
sighed, reluctantly dragging himself away from the warmth of the flickering fireside.
‘Let’s see if we can’t make a cook of you.’

On the way I had a think about it. A
cook’s job at a country estate was a big job all right, and virtually unheard
of at my age, but what did I have to lose? I’d learnt a lot at Mrs
Jones’s side and cut my teeth on her apron strings, so to speak. And just like
that, with all the exuberance of youth, I bounced back from my Spanish setback and set
my sights on a bigger goal.

Wallington Hall was buried deep in the fens
around the River Great Ouse and only four-and-a-half miles from my mother’s.
As we drove, ancient villages with strange names like St John’s Fen End,
Barton Bendish, Wormegay and Marshland St James whizzed past.

‘Wallington’s a shooting
lodge set in six hundred acres of private grounds,’ said Tom.
‘Pheasants, duck, geese, woodcock, partridge, pigeon – you name it, they shoot
it. It was a shooting lodge for the Earls of Warwick, but it’s been in the
Luddington family for years now. It was built in 1525, mentioned in the Domesday Book,
so it was.’

‘Nearly as old as you then,
Tom,’ I joked.

‘Don’t you be showing
Mrs Luddington your saucy side,’ he warned.

We fell into a comfortable silence as we
drove through the estate’s grounds. The patchwork of fields, woodland, copses
and duck ponds was teeming with wildlife. Suddenly the car lurched off the road and
started to bump its way through a field. ‘Hang on tight,’ said Tom
as we ricocheted over mole hills. ‘No road up to the Hall.’

Through the drizzly January gloom I got my
first look at Wallington Hall.

‘I’ll be,’ I
gasped, quite spellbound.

Tom glanced sideways and chuckled when he
saw my face. ‘Quite something, ain’t it?’ he said.

Looming up out of the misty fields, the Hall
rose into the grey skies like something from a Gothic fantasy. Some parts looked to be
Tudor, some medieval and other parts eighteenth century. Least that’s what Tom
had told me. To my untrained eye it just looked big, impressive and dark. It was
definitely a house with a story to tell. You got the feeling that there was things,
inexplicable forces, watching you from behind the stepped gables and moulded
battlements.

‘It’s haunted, so they
say,’ nodded Tom.

‘Get away,’ I
laughed.

But he wasn’t laughing back.

‘No, really, Mollie,’ he
whispered. ‘That there facade hides a grizzly Elizabethan tale of tragedy,
betrayal, dark deeds and a slow and agonizing death. Rumour has it there’s
buried treasure in the parkland too.’

Gobsmacked, I was about to ask more when he
brought
the car to an abrupt stop. ‘Out you get
then,’ he said brightly. ‘You get this job and you’ll be
the youngest cook in history, I reckon.’

I gulped. At the mention of slow and
agonizing deaths my confidence suddenly seemed to vanish. By the time I knocked on the
vast porch door it had all but deserted me.

The door swung open and a butler stared back
at me.