Below Stairs (12 page)

But to come back to the chauffeurs – it may seem a nasty kind of conversation for them to have had, but it was the same with all the upper servants. Their own lives were so devoid of excitement that they had to find all their life vicariously. Sexual life, social life, every sort of life.

Employers constantly, by the things they talked about in front of servants, left themselves open to blackmail. But we would never have known how to set about it. That sort of thing has come with more education, with the greater freedom of the press. We had the feeling that what they upstairs did, although it was a subject of scandal and gossip and laughter, was their privilege. Not because they were better than us, but because they had money and it was no good having money if you couldn’t deviate from the norm.

It was shortly after I had agreed to stay on with Mrs Cutler that something happened which still stands out in my mind like a scene from a Victorian melodrama. It was discovered that Agnes, the under-parlourmaid, was going to have a baby.

Nowadays it’s all so vastly different; so much do they want you now in domestic service that I’m sure that if your employers found you were going to have a baby they’d say,‘Yes, well bad luck. But you’ll be sure and come back when you’ve had it, won’t you?’ You see them advertising, saying one child not objected to. They’re as good as saying all right, you’ve got an illegitimate baby, we’re quite prepared to accept the child as well.

In those days it was slam the door, dismissal with no money, your own home probably closed to you, nothing left but the streets or the workhouse.

Gladys and I shared a bedroom with Agnes and although I’d seen her being sick as soon as she got out of bed, I didn’t realize that it was one of the symptoms of having a baby. I just thought she had sudden bilious attacks. It did seem strange that as soon as she got on her feet it happened, and that she was all right during the day, but that’s what I put it down to.

Eventually Gladys, who was far more versed in all these things than I was, asked her outright if she was pregnant. It sounded a terrible word that ‘pregnant’. Agnes admitted that she was and implored us to keep it a secret. It hadn’t gone very long and it didn’t show yet.

But clothes in those days weren’t designed to conceal your tummy. You had a waistline with a belt and it was very difficult indeed. I wished with all my heart that I could help Agnes but I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. It was Gladys who knew a bit, and she did try.

She bought bottles of pennyroyal pills which were supposed to be very good at getting rid of it, Beecham’s pills, and quinine. But all they did for Agnes was to make her spend half the day in the lavatory. Then on Gladys’ instructions we used to lug hot water up the stairs to fill the hip bath for her. Then we’d tip tins of mustard in it, until it was absolutely yellow. That was supposed to be another good thing, hot mustard baths. Maybe it would have been if Agnes could have got her waist in it, but she couldn’t. Then she tried carrying all the heavy weights she could, and when it was her day off she used to go in the park, climb on to the park benches and then keep jumping off. It sounds amusing, but it was a terrible thing for her. She tried shifting furniture. She would pick up a massive armchair, they were huge in those days, and move it from one part of the room to the other. But none of it did any good.

Eventually, of course, she couldn’t hide it from Mrs Cutler, and poor Agnes was told to leave at the end of week.

It’s impossible nowadays to imagine what it must have been like for her. Although Gladys and I were terribly sorry about it, it was like when you go into hospital and somebody’s dying of something, you’ve got that faint feeling of rejoicing that it isn’t you, and Gladys and I both felt that; above our sympathy we were thankful it wasn’t us that were in this predicament.

Although Madam told her to leave at the end of the week she did give her a month’s wages. But the very fact that she did this convinced me in my suspicions as to who the father was. Agnes would never tell. I didn’t expect her to tell Madam, but she wouldn’t tell Gladys and me who it was, and I knew she knew, because she wasn’t the sort of girl that would have gone with any Tom, Dick, and Harry; it just had to be one man and one man alone. I suspected it was a nephew of Mrs Cutler’s. He was very young, probably in his early twenties, and a very handsome man. He had such an attractive voice that even to hear him say good morning used to make you feel frivolous. It sent shivers all up and down you. I suspected him because on several occasions I discovered him on the back staircase, which was our staircase, a place where he certainly had no right to be at all. He used to say good morning or good afternoon to me in this marvellous, attractive voice of his. Some of the Americans have voices like that I have since discovered.

I think Mrs Cutler was worried, because I think she knew, or she was nearly certain it was this nephew. She questioned Gladys and me closely and though we said we didn’t know, she didn’t believe us.

Even though she thought it was her own flesh and blood that was responsible I had to listen to such a long lecture on the evils of such wanton behaviour. No nice young man would ever suggest such a thing to a girl he hoped to marry. Have you ever heard such drivel because that’s one of the things they always suggested. Whether they’re likely to marry you or not, they like to try their goods out first. I’ve never been out with a man that didn’t suggest it, believe me. And Mrs Cutler went on that no decent girl would ever let a man take advantage of her.

Well now, that’s another ridiculous remark, because the ratio of girls to young men was so high that if you had a young man and you cared about him and he suggested this, it seemed to be the only way to keep him. You had a hard job not to do it if you were not going to be stuck without a young man at all, and if you were dying to get out of domestic service, which most of us were. What did Mrs Cutler know about human nature in the basement? The only thing that kept me and those like me from straying off the straight and narrow was ignorance and fear. Ignorance of how not to have a baby, and fear of catching a disease. We were always told that you only had to go with a young man and you’d catch venereal disease. That’s why so many deviate now because those two fears have gone, haven’t they? The disease can be cured, and the baby can be taken care of, even if you have it. Now they encourage you to get rid of it before it gets to anything.

But Agnes wasn’t like Gladys or me; Gladys came from an enormous family, had a very hard life, and was a realist; I was just frightened of what might happen. And ignorant. I did know roughly what you had to do to have a baby, but I didn’t know what you could do and
not
have one. But Agnes was a soft girl, very sentimental, starry-eyed, and when she went to the films she would come back with all dreams and things.

I remember she used to have a crush on Cesar Romero. Gladys and I got turned out of the cinema when we went to see Cesar Romero because I said to Gladys, ‘Hasn’t he got lovely teeth?’ and she said, ‘Yes, and I bet he’s got another set at home.’ And we laughed so much they made us leave. But to poor Agnes, Cesar Romero was a god.

So you can imagine if it was Mrs Cutler’s nephew with that marvellous voice of his, he would know how to treat a girl, and make her feel she was really something, not just an under-parlourmaid with no money and no position. And Agnes was a pretty girl too, and her prettiness was natural, she never used any artificial aids. I can quite see how she was overcome. And he bought her presents, I know because she had some silk underwear. She said it came from her home, but I don’t think it could have.

All right, it may not have been him, but I have a very strong suspicion that it was, and Mrs Cutler did too. Anyway what was he doing on our back stairs? They didn’t lead anywhere except to the maids’ bedrooms.

But going back to ignorance, fear, and straying off the straight and narrow, the whole idea of lovemaking was tied up with the idea it was sinful and revolting. Even the married relationship was often ruined because of this way of thinking.

I remember about a year after I was married I chanced to meet a girl I’d known in service and we went into a tea shop to talk about old times. She told me she’d been married for five years, and when I made an inquiry into whether she had any family she burst out, ‘Oh, I hate all that side of married life. I can’t bear George even to kiss me because I know he’s leading up to “that”.’ She would never put it into words, it was ‘that’. Well, I remarked that her mother couldn’t have felt like that, she’d had twelve children, the mother had. She said, ‘Oh, it was my Dad, he’d never leave her alone. Even when she was hanging the washing on the line he would creep up behind her, and in the daylight too!’ I was thrown half-mast at this! Laugh? Her ‘in the daylight too’, it sounded so funny. And when I said to her, ‘Well, it was a blessed interlude on a wash day,’ she was so incensed that she stalked out and I had to finish my tea on my own. But I couldn’t help bursting out, could I? It was a pleasant interlude.

Although much of what I have said may make you think I was envious of the lives of other people this wasn’t really the case. It was the inequality and the unfairness that struck me so much of the time. But there was one person of whom I was both jealous and envious: Miss Susan, the eldest of Mrs Cutler’s grandchildren. She was only two years younger than I was, but what a different life hers was from mine! She was almost as tall as I was, and she had the same sort of hair colouring, but there the resemblance finished completely, because Miss Susan was and had everything that I wasn’t and hadn’t. She had masses of clothes, a horse to ride, a tennis court to play on. She could speak French, play the piano, sing well; I was envious of her life, envious of all her accomplishments. Not all the time. But when she came down into the kitchen to ask for something and I was at the sink, you know, immersed in bowls of greasy water, washing saucepans, my hair straight as pump water, clad in a sacking apron, and there she was, only two years younger than me, tripping in, dressed up to the nines, and with her cultivated voice asking for something which I would immediately have to rush to get for her, I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t felt envious. Everything was done for her, the under-nurse used to brush her hair, her bath was got ready, even the toothpaste used to be laid on the brush ready for her.

Sometimes she came with a message for the cook, and Mrs Bowchard would be all smiles for Miss Susan. It would be, ‘Oh yes, Miss Susan’, ‘No, Miss Susan’, ‘Certainly, Miss Susan’. And when she had gone Mrs Bowchard would say to me, ‘Doesn’t she look a picture, she’s a sight for sore eyes, a ray of sunshine.’ It seemed to hurt. Once I had the temerity to say, ‘If only she’d had to work down here for a week she wouldn’t be such a ray of sunshine.’ Mrs Bowchard, she was furious with me. She said, ‘You’re just eaten up with jealousy because you could never hope to look like that, even if you had money you couldn’t look or behave like Miss Susan.’ I don’t think I really begrudged Miss Susan her place in life, it was just the contrast was so marked when she came into our kitchen. And you see she never spoke to me or even noticed me. You would have thought she would have done. I was another young girl of about her own age. So I thought she was stuck up, but it could have been she was being tactful, that she noticed the contrast between what I was and what she was, so I might have been doing her an injustice now that I look back on it.

19

C
HRISTMAS IN
domestic service was nothing like the Christmases we had at home. I remember the excitement there was at home even with little money, the excitement of waking up early, the rush into our parents’ room for the presents and stockings. We didn’t have turkeys or Christmas trees, but we had plenty of laughter and there was always enough food to eat.

Christmas in Mrs Cutler’s house was a very formal and elaborate affairs. There used to be a large tree in the dining-room which was decorated by the nanny.

On Christmas Day after breakfast all the servants had to line up in the hall. Being the lowest in status I was at the end of the line. Then we had to file into the dining-room where all the family, Mr and Mrs Cutler, and the daughter, and the grandchildren, were assembled complete with Christmas smiles, and social-welfare expressions. The children looked at us as though we were beings from another world. And I suppose to them we were really sub-beings from a sub-world. It used to remind me of those adverts with blacks all walking along. I used to keep kidding Gladys, trying to make her laugh. But you couldn’t really laugh, it was such a solemn occasion. Talk about Christmas! When we got to the Christmas tree we deferentially accepted the parcels that were handed to us by the children, and muttered, ‘Thank you, Master Charles, thank you, Miss Susan.’ Oh I hated it all.

Then we had to go to the Master and Madam and were given an envelope containing money; I used to have a pound and Mrs Bowchard had five pounds. The presents were always something useful; print dress lengths, aprons, black stockings, not silk, of course, they never gave you anything frivolous; black woollen stockings. How I longed for some of the things they had, silk underwear, perfume, jewellery, why couldn’t they have given us something like that? Why did we always have to have sensible things? I think that the reason they used to give us uniforms was because they knew we couldn’t buy them out of our measly wages. Besides if we were to have perfume or silk we would go astray. So I hated this parade of Christmas goodwill, and the pretence that we also had a good time at Christmas.

We had to work like trojans, coping with their dinner parties and the other entertaining that went on upstairs. All right, we had a Christmas tree in our servants’ hall that they’d bought, but they never put anything on it; we had to decorate it up with tinsel and bells and things, and they didn’t put their presents on it. We had to line up before them in Indian file accepting their alms. That was Christmas there.

It was a replica of all the Christmases I had in domestic service. Formal and elaborate, a lot of entertaining by them, but nothing much for us. I dare say in the very large establishments they would arrange a servants’ ball like they do at Buckingham Palace. But from what I know of that sort of thing it never took place at Christmas, it was always well afterwards.