Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (6 page)

Downham Market Baptist Church
members on a day out in the 1920s. I’m in the middle, behind the boy in the
white shorts.

I was tall for my age and, after
years of cycling, running and roaming the countryside, I had a strapping physique. This
made me an excellent candidate for an apprenticeship. Nobody wanted to employ some
weakling who
couldn’t pull their weight and work hard, or was
forever fainting or calling in sick.

As my fourteenth birthday loomed into sight,
Mother came to a decision. ‘A girl like you’ll get work easy. Do you
want to work with your grandmother in the shop?’ she asked.

My stomach tightened. As much as I loved
Granny Esther I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working under
her.

‘Oh no, don’t make
me,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll forever be under her
control.’

I had my sights fixed further than a village
shop. My mind wandered back to the bustling streets of London where royals and high
society mixed. Why couldn’t I find work there?

‘All right, Miss Fussy, my friend
runs a dressmaker’s and a draper’s in Downham and she’s
looking for starting girls. I’ll go and talk to her.’

By the time she returned she was full of
it.

‘She’ll take you on,
Mollie,’ she beamed, pleased as punch with herself. ‘You can start
Monday. They’re charging five shillings for the apprenticeship, but
I’m sure your gran’ll foot the cost.’

I smiled weakly, but inside a feeling of
doom gathered and I couldn’t shake it all weekend.

On Monday morning at seven a.m. Mother
marched me to the dressmaker’s. The bell on the door clanged as we entered. It
was like the sound of a jailer’s key signalling the condemned man to go and
meet his fate.

The room was small, dark and smelt of
mothballs. A wizened old woman, who looked like a proper harridan,
sat
behind a wooden counter. Her shrew-like eyes sized me up.

‘Follow me,’ she
muttered, leading us to an even smaller room out the back.

I felt like a carthorse in the poky room.
The dark space was dominated by one big table covered in calico, cloth and ticking. I
thought longingly of the dazzling beauty of the V&A, of all the riches and
everything looking so fine and opulent. Then to this room, which was as dry and dusty as
its owner. The V&A was a place of intrigue and beauty. This was a place you came
to die.

A clock ticked slowly on the wall and as the
woman began to run through my hours and duties I wanted to run out of that shop and
never stop running. Panic and desperation pumped through my veins. I felt like a caged
animal.

Can you imagine? I couldn’t spend
my life sitting on a chair doing fiddly sewing in a dark, airless room with a stuffy
seamstress. Day after day, month after suffocating month. I would shrivel up and die. I
couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

The walls started to close in on me.
Suddenly even the air in the shop felt thin.

‘NO!’ I blurted out.
Mother and the seamstress stared at me in surprise. ‘I can’t stay
here. I won’t.’

I knew my outburst would earn me a proper
raggin’ but I didn’t care.

There had to be more to life than this,
surely. There
was
more to life than this …

Tips from a 1930s Kitchen
…
BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING

If my childhood could be summed up by a recipe, then bread and butter pudding would be it. Comforting, sweet and sticky. Try it out.

6 thin slices bread and butter

1 pint (570 ml) full fat milk

4 eggs

1 dessertspoonful each: sugar, sultanas,

currants and candied lemon

Cut off the crusts and divide each slice of bread into four squares, arrange them in layers in a well-buttered pie dish and sprinkle each layer with sultanas, currants and candied lemon. Beat the eggs, add the sugar, stir until dissolved, then mix in the milk and pour gently over the bread, which should only half fill the dish. Let it stand for an hour to let the bread soak up the milk then bake in a moderate oven, standing in a tin of water, for nearly an hour. If you’re feeling flash, serve with cream.

HOUSEHOLD TIP

Save a fortune on expensive leather-cleaning products. Simply run the inside of a banana skin over your bag or shoes then polish with a soft dry cloth. Sparkling in seconds.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us

are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

Back at home it was hard to say who was
more cross, Mother or Father.

‘What do you mean, Mollie, making
a fine show of me in front of my friend?’ Mother snapped. On and on she went
as I stared dully at the flickering flames dancing about in the grate.

‘
I go to all this trouble to
line you up work
…’

I wished I was a flame and could just dance
where the breeze took me.

‘…
and work you will, my girl,
make no mistake.
’

I didn’t mean to upset my mother,
really I didn’t. I took no joy from it. Girls of my generation always did what
our mothers told us. Their word was the law. But in this case I just couldn’t.
I couldn’t have gone to that shop and fossilized into the woman who worked
there.

For weeks I moped about like a wet Sunday in
Yarmouth.
Even the promise of bird’s-nesting didn’t
sound as enticing as usual. Everything felt tedious and flat and I was fed up with my
little brother needling me. It was all right for him. When he left school he had many
more choices open to him. He could learn any one of a dozen trades and more likely as
not be out in the fresh air at the same time.

One day I came home for lunch to find a
strange man sitting in the kitchen sipping at a mug of tea.

‘Aye,’ he chuckled as
his eyes roamed over my body. ‘She’s a strapping lass, reckon
she’ll do.’

I eyed him suspiciously.

‘They always prefer Norfolk
lasses,’ he went on. ‘Reckons they last longer and work harder, so
as they do.’

My eyes went out on stalks. Who were
they
and what did
they
want with me?

‘This is Mr Llewelyn,’
explained Mother. ‘He used to be a chauffeur for old Mr Stocks up at Woodhall.
He’s retired now, but he’s still in touch with Mr
Stocks.’

I’d heard of Mr Stocks. He was a
member of the gentry, a bona fide blue-blooded gentleman who owned a vast Tudor pile
called Woodhall in Hilgay, two miles from Downham.

‘Mr Stocks is looking for a
scullery maid to start immediately.’

I stared blankly and Mother shook her
head.

‘Do you want to be a scullery
maid, Mollie?’ she asked.

I paused. Me? Be a domestic servant?

‘You’ll have to start up
in London,’ said Mr Llewelyn, setting down his tea and eyeing up a tray of
Mother’s sausage rolls. ‘It’s the London season now and Mr
Stocks is up in ’is Knightsbridge home. Fine place it is too, the very last
word in grandeur, like.’ He placed much significance on the
word
grandeur
and smacked his lips as he said it, while reaching out to grab a
couple of sausage rolls.

London
.

With that one word it was like a light bulb
had pinged on in my head. I’d be free. I’d get to go to London! It
was impossibly perfect, as if all my dreams were slotting into place in an instant.

‘You’ll get five
shillings a week and all your food and keep,’ he said through mouthfuls.
‘Scullery maids work hard,’ he warned. ‘The bottom of the
heap. You’ll have to do everything the cook tells you. You’re not
afraid of hard work, are you, Mollie?’ he asked.

‘No, not at all,’ I
said, vigorously shaking my head.

‘Well then,’ he said,
heaving himself to his feet and brushing off the crumbs. ‘I’ll tell
Mr Stocks you’re suitable and get your train ticket sent in the
post.’

And just like that I had a job as a scullery
maid!

After he’d left, Mother had to
scrape me off the ceiling, I was that excited.

‘Are you sure you want to go to
London, Mollie?’ she asked. ‘You’re only fourteen.
It’s a big, dangerous place, you know.’

‘Oh, please!’ I said,
flicking my hand nonchalantly. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Father, when he heard, was just as
surprised.

‘You?’ he snorted.
‘Do as what others tell you to? That’ll be the day. Suppose
you’ll get all your food and lodgings free though.’

One less mouth to feed would be a blessing
to my parents.

Later on, lying in my bed, staring out of the
window at the thick blanket of stars that stretched across the dark Norfolk skies, I
could scarcely sleep for the excitement bubbling up in my chest. My parents may have
been worried, but I wasn’t. This was the beginning of the rest of my new life.
Old people, what do they know? I laugh now. My parents can only have been in their early
thirties, but when you’re young everyone seems ancient.

I suppose, looking back, the only reason my
parents let me go to London at such a young age was because they knew the chauffeur and
Mr Stocks had a good reputation locally. He wasn’t like some of these flighty
young aristos setting London alight. He was well into his seventies and looked upon with
a mixture of respect and sympathy. His wife had long since died, at the time leaving
just him and his two sons, Captain Eric and Captain Michael.

Years back, before the war, to celebrate
Michael’s twenty-first birthday, Mr Stocks had ordered mountains of meat from
a relative of ours who was a butcher at the time. They had an enormous bash by all
rights, with the wine flowing and enough roasted meat to sink a battleship. The music,
dancing and gaiety could be heard drifting over the Norfolk fields. Then a year to the
day after the party, in 1914, Michael was killed in the war at Zillebeke while serving
with the Grenadier Guards. Now it was just Mr Stocks and his youngest son, Captain Eric,
rattling around that big old house on their own. People felt for him like they would
their own, for the aristocracy lost a whole generation of sons just like the
working-class poor did. Mr Stocks was left heartbroken and Captain Eric, like Father,
was never the same again and suffered
with consumption, though
I’d heard tell that when he went to recuperate it was not to the sanatoriums
of Hastings but Switzerland!

Now I was to be their scullery maid.

It may seem odd that I got the job without
being interviewed, but in those days references were more important than anything. The
upper class didn’t want any old sort coming into their house and seeing where
all the family silver was. People were terrified that you might steal things or have a
boyfriend who worked in a gang. But Mr Llewelyn had been their Norfolk chauffeur for
years and they trusted him. If he said I was a good honest Norfolk girl from a decent
family then that was good enough for them. Besides, Norfolk girls were generally
considered to be hale, hearty, strapping and hard-working and what else did you need in
a scullery maid? Perhaps that’s why a lot of the servants I came across in the
next ten years were from Norfolk.

‘I don’t know why you
don’t wanna come and work with me in the shop,’ tutted Granny Esther
when she heard. ‘You’ll have to set an alarum clock you know. The
hours are long and they won’t care you’re just a nipper.
You’ll have to scrub everything in sight. You’ll be a skivvy.
Servants get treated awful.’

‘Oh, Granny,’ I sighed.
‘Maybe in the twenties, but not now. Times have changed. They’re
better looked after. Loads of young girls are doing it.’

It was true. I wouldn’t have been
alone. By 1930 there were countless young women leaving home for the first time in
search of work, money, food or just the chance to better themselves, and taking a job in
service was seen as a good way of doing this.

Most people think that the First World War was
the end of domestic service in the UK, but that’s not the case. From the end
of the nineteenth century to 1911, 13 per cent of the female working-age population in
England were employed as domestic servants. It’s true that the First World War
saw a steep decline in the numbers of servants, but there was a marked increase in the
numbers employed in domestic service during the 1920s. By 1931 the percentage had
dropped to 8 per cent. Despite this, domestic service remained the most common
entry-level job available to young women like myself.

I doubted there was a single girl more
excited than me in all the land. Granny Esther could have told me I’d have to
scrub all night long and I’d still have gone. It’s crazy,
isn’t it? You’d think I was going off to shop and party, not skivvy,
but like I say, back then nothing daunted me.

My head wasn’t going to be turned
by nothing and nobody.

So, in May 1931, on a sunny Sunday morning,
aged fourteen, I found myself bound for Cadogan Square in London’s
Knightsbridge. Mother had packed my bag with a few clothes, some clean underwear and
some ham sandwiches, and she and father walked me the three miles to Downham Station,
along the Lynn Road. There were only two buses a week so it wouldn’t do any
good to wait at the bus stop.