Below Stairs (18 page)

Still after all, this was mild stuff compared with what he was putting up with from Mrs Bishop. He turned a blind eye to that too. I heard that twice she had tried to commit suicide or staged a suicide by taking too many pills or something, and that one of the sons was a ‘ticket of leave man’ in Australia, as they called them: he was sent two pounds a week to keep him out there. I think he’d forged his father’s name to a cheque. So he’d had his troubles in his time and wasn’t looking for any more. They weren’t of course what you could call the gentry.

But it was lively, you see. Every now and again when she had some Italian friends Mrs Bishop would come down to the kitchen and say, did I mind if they came down and made some special Italian dishes? I didn’t mind because they were nearly always young people. Mind you, they made a hell of a mess and used to leave the kitchen in a filthy state; it didn’t occur to them to do the washing-up. But I used to watch them and get all the pointers that I could. So although I couldn’t say I was working for the ‘quality’, I couldn’t care less. I got my money, had a gay, amusing life, and that was all that mattered to me.

One of these young men who was her favourite longer than anyone else was one of these Italians. Proper ice-cream man. He used to walk round with a little monkey on his shoulder, I used to be terrified. Mrs Bishop provided him with money; he was what you call a gigolo. He wasn’t a day over twenty-five, and with her being sixty she probably didn’t provide him with much else. So if he could find one of the young maids to have a little interlude with, he would. He’d come down to the kitchen with his foul monkey on his shoulder and he’d try to get you in conversation. He’d start off about food and that kind of thing, and go on to, ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ I don’t know why they ask you that. Then he’d edge round the table towards you, and I would keep edging farther and farther away, because I knew perfectly well that whatever his intentions were, they certainly weren’t honourable. He never got anywhere with me. It just wasn’t worth your while wasting your time on impossibles, all your efforts were needed to allure the possibles, the ones who might have good intentions.

I read in the paper the other day that the surplus of young men to girls in England today between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one is fifty-six thousand. It makes me see red. Because then in Brighton, there were five girls to every young man, so you can just imagine what a fight you had to have to get one and keep him. And we never had a free weekend, which was the only time a young man had got any money. By the time we met them they were dead broke, anyway. And if you said you were in domestic service it was still the same old story, you could see their faces change. The less polite ones used to say, ‘Oh, skivvies!’ and clear off, and leave you cold.

I remember one night Hilda, the parlourmaid, and I went to a dance. Hilda used to stuff her young men up with the idea that she was a secretary. This particular night we collected two naval officers. Of all the snooty fellows in the world, officers from the Royal Navy are the snootiest. I don’t know what rank they were, probably the lowest that they could be, consistent with being officers. They were mean as well as snooty because they brought us back on the bus; no taxis. I never pretended to be anything else but the cook because it was always my fate to get a bit of supper for them. I thought that perhaps my way to a man was through his stomach. We used to take them in to the kitchen, you see; we weren’t supposed to, but you’ve got to make up for not having weekends off. Just after we got in Hilda went upstairs to the lavatory and her officer came up to me and said, ‘She’s not a secretary.’ I said, ‘Well, she’s whatever she says she is,’ to cover up for her. ‘Well, she’s certainly not a secretary, she’s the parlourmaid.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘I took her into that place where there’s a sink’ (he meant the butler’s pantry) ‘and before she’d let me lay a finger on her she washed up the silver.’ You see, she didn’t think, she was so used to never letting the silver lie around dirty she had to wash it up. Well, no secretary would have done that, of course. Mind you no officer and a gentleman would have mentioned it. Poor Hilda never joined that branch of the Navy.

Still she had aspirations.

Anyway, life wasn’t too hard there for me, there was an odd-job man to do the boiler and the front steps and the boots and shoes. The kitchen floor there was very good, it was paved with smooth red tiles and all you had to do was just wipe them over with a damp cloth. The usual enormous dresser that we always had was fitted with glass cupboards so that nothing got dusty. And there was a telephone in the kitchen.

After that previous place with Mrs Hunter-Jones, it was a great pleasure to be able to cook things like salmon steaks, and jugged hare, and to make real mayonnaise, instead of white sauce. We had things like sirloins and saddles, and I had the opportunity to practise and to learn cooking.

Although I was now quite expert, it was a good job I had never taken up any other part of domestic service like being a parlourmaid and waiting at table. I only had one experience of it and that was enough. One evening Mrs Bishop was giving a dinner party and Hilda was taken ill and couldn’t wait at table. Mrs Bishop came rushing down to me to ask if I could come in between the courses and help hand things round. The housemaid was to do the silver serving, and I was to hand the vegetables round. I knew I would suffer agonies of embarrassment. You can just imagine coming up from the heat of the kitchen with a face like a peony and wearing a print dress into the bargain. When I arrived in the dining-room Mrs Bishop announced to the company at large, ‘This is my cook.’ Well, of course, everybody gaped at me, which didn’t help, I felt like exhibit A. One of the vegetables was tiny little new potatoes, they looked very attractive in the dish on the silver salver, with mint and butter sauce – piping hot they were too. The first guest I had to serve was an attractive Frenchwoman. Well, I was so nervous my hand started shaking like a leaf – the dish shot down the salver and all these marble-sized new potatoes shot all down her front and her lap. She jumped up and let out a stream of French words I couldn’t understand. Then I saw that one of the potatoes had got lodged in her cleavage – so I tried to get it out with the serving spoon. The silly thing didn’t keep still – it must have been burning her – anyway, instead of getting it out I squashed it against her breast. She flung the spoon out of my hand and screamed, ‘Coshon, coshon’ about half a dozen times. Talk about Oliver Twist, but she didn’t ask for more. I fled downstairs.

About a week later when I thought the excitement had died down, I asked Mrs Bishop what this word ‘coshon’ meant. I thought it must have been something terrible. She said, ‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘it’s just a French word that means the same as damn does in English.’ It was some years later that I looked it up in a French dictionary, it was spelt C.O.C.H.O.N., I found, and it means you’re a pig or a swine. I didn’t mind – she got the potatoes. I didn’t.

Occasionally during the week Mr Bishop would come down from London. He had a girlfriend I think, in Brighton somewhere, we never saw her but we always assumed that was what he came for. He would always telephone to let us know that he was on his way so that he never caught us in any embarrassing situations. If he ever wanted dinner we never had to worry, he always had the same thing; giblet soup, we always had giblets because there were always chickens in the house; grilled sprats; and stewed pig’s trotters. He used to pick up the old trotter and suck away at it. It was the same meal every time, that’s what he liked, didn’t want anything else.

If we were going dancing we didn’t have to give it up, because this was supposed to be our free time. We used to arrange his dinner between us, the housemaid, the parlourmaid, and me. One of us would get on with his dinner while the other one would be getting ready for the dance, so sometimes he got a different person serving each course. Hilda would take in the giblet soup, then she rushed to change, so then the housemaid would go in with the grilled sprats, and then she would tear off, and I would rush up with the trotters. He never seemed to mind.

It was after I had been there some months I discovered that he had a most peculiar aberration. If he came down to the house on his own, he’d always ring the bell in his bedroom at about half past eleven at night, after we’d gone to bed. It rang upstairs on the landing outside the bedrooms, and Hilda or Iris, the housemaid, would slip on a dressing- gown and go down to his room. Then he’d ask them to bring him a whisky and soda, or a jug of water, or even a book that he’d left in the library. I said to Hilda one night, ‘Why does he always wait until we’ve all got in bed before he rings that bell?’ So she said, ‘It’s because he likes to see us in hair curlers.’ I said, astonished, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘He likes to see us in hair curlers.’ People in those days didn’t have hair rollers like nowadays, they were all those dinky steel curlers, and we did our hair up every night in them because it was the fashion to have a mass of frizz, and the bigger you could make it stick out the better it was, you see. So I said, ‘You’re joking.’ ‘No, it’s the truth,’ she said. I said, ‘Well, what does he do then when you go in wearing these curlers?’ So she said, ‘Well, he doesn’t really do anything much. He asks us to take off our hair nets and then he fingers the curlers in our hair, you see.’ I just couldn’t believe it, it seemed pointless, stupid. I said, ‘Is that all? He feels your hair curlers?’ She said, ‘Yes, that’s all he does. And he’s always happy and pleased when he does it,’ she said. She just sat on the edge of his bed and he just felt her hair curlers, and that’s all. Well, it struck me then, and it does now, as a most peculiar way of getting pleasure. It just didn’t make sense, I mean whoever heard of anyone wanting to see anyone in hair curlers, never mind about feeling them? But Hilda and Iris did quite well from this peculiarity of his, because they used to get cosmetics or boxes of chocolates or stockings each time.

I could have got them as well if I liked. He wouldn’t have cared who answered the bell at all so long as you went in your dressing-gown and your hair curlers, but I would never go. Not that I cared whether or not he saw me in hair curlers; I wouldn’t let a young man see me, it would be absolute death to a romance and a possible home-provider, but it wouldn’t have mattered about him. No, the reason I wouldn’t go was because it was yet another demonstration of servants’ inferiority. You see he wouldn’t have dreamt of asking guests in the house if he could feel their hair curlers. But servants, they should be quite happy in his view because they got presents for doing it. But Hilda and Iris wouldn’t agree with me over this; they said, ‘Well, what does it matter, it doesn’t do us any harm and we get something out of it.’ I tried to make them see this, because they had aspirations, not that that got them anywhere. But Iris said, ‘So we
are
servants, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘And anything we can get given us for doing nothing at all is so much to the good.’ And Hilda she said, ‘I get quite a kick out of it, and when I’m waiting at table,’ she said, ‘and when Mr Bishop is sitting there talking so high-falutin’ to his guests,’ she said, ‘I often feel like slipping a hair curler on his plate!’ But I never heard of such a peculiar aberration in my life as hair curlers. I wonder what was the cause of it? Something tied up with his youth I expect, perhaps his mother had them or something.

25

A
BOUT THIS
time I thought I’d managed to snaffle a permanent young man; as you must have gathered, it was no easy task at all with so few opportunities around. This particular one was a window cleaner. When he used to come to clean the windows I’d ask him down to the kitchen and give him tea and cakes made by me, do myself up, and try my hardest to make an impression. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but believe me, it’s mighty hard going at times, some of them have got pretty tough stomachs.

Anyway, this fellow, George his name was, had been taking me out for three months. Three whole months. It seemed a lifetime to me, quite long enough for me to consider him as a possible husband. But he had his faults and his worst fault was his meanness. Oh, he was a shocker for being mean!

When we went to the pictures he’d buy a quarter pound of chocolates, supposedly for me to eat in the cinema, then he’d hold them in his hand or on his lap, and proceed to gobble them up himself. I soon learned. Directly we sat down our arms used to swing like pendulums and within three minutes the chocolates had gone, the bag thrown under the seat, and we’d settle down to watch the picture.

Another mean streak was the way he passed all the pubs. That was the biggest failing of the lot. Pubs in those days were places you couldn’t go into on your own, or even with another girl. If you did, even if you went in with another girl, you got a bad reputation. Everyone felt that you were easy meat, and they treated you that way too. The fact that you’d rather have a drink than a cup of tea was nothing to do with it. It just wasn’t done. My mother and father used to like to go out at night and have a drink. They didn’t drink much, perhaps they’d have two half-pints of beer or bitter each. It was strong then, and much cheaper because it was stronger. If you had two half-pints you felt the effects; now you can drink enough to blow you out like a balloon and you get home feeling flat as a pancake. If my mother and father wanted to go to the pub they took me with them. You weren’t supposed to go in at fourteen, which was when I first started, but then I was always an enormous size and looked well over my age. I drank lemonade at first, then I progressed to shandy, and from there to bitter, and I got used to going in the pub. It wasn’t so much for the drink, it was for the life.

Pubs in those days had life. A pub now is only one degree removed from a morgue, isn’t it? Nobody speaks to anyone, there’s no life or gaiety. Especially now that they’re all made into cocktail-lounge type of places. The other day we went into a pub and there was a man humming to himself. He’d had a few drinks, but he was doing no harm, just being happy. Twice the manager came round and told him to stop, and the third time they ejected him. You mustn’t enjoy pubs. I used to go into one on a Saturday night with my Mum and Dad before I even went into service. It would be crammed with people, you’d stand there holding your glass right up close to your chest, but you felt happy and it was lively, it was life. That’s how I started drinking. I liked the life of the pubs, and I still do. I’d rather go in a pub and have a drink than go anywhere. Luckily, my husband feels the same. (Yes, I got one in the end.) So if we’ve got any money we whoop it up, if not we just have a couple of beers.