Servants’ Hall (6 page)

Young Fred said that at least Ramsay MacDonald had tried to prevent a future war by helping to draft the Geneva Protocol. Mr Hall had never heard of it – and to be honest neither had I. Young Fred and I were discussing the moral principles of war when the valet interrupted our conversation by asking, what could I know about the war, I was only eighteen now. It couldn’t have made any difference to me. Only those people who’d actually fought had any idea what war was really like. To which point of view the butler nodded his head and proceeded to tell us a long and boring story about some pal of his who’d got ‘trench feet’ and never recovered.

Young Fred who, being an outside worker, didn’t care two hoots about the butler’s opinions, just laughed, saying, ‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he? He can’t get himself another pair of feet. Anyway, Margaret does know about the war. She actually reads books, not lurid Limehouse dramas and the yellow press.’

I rather wished he hadn’t said that because I knew it would infuriate Mr Hall and I, unlike young Fred, couldn’t get away from him. Anyway, it wasn’t true that the First World War meant nothing to me. Although there were few civilian casualties, I remembered it in other ways: such as my father going to France, our greatly increased standard of living when we had three soldiers billeted on us, and the rushing from shop to shop when we heard that they’d found some margarine or fruit.

During last month I had, wonder of wonders, acquired a boyfriend. He was the young man who brought us eggs from a farm. Lovely eggs they were too, so new-laid they were often still warm. As this young man, Bob by name, came three times a week, he didn’t have time to forget me inbetween. As I said to Mary, ‘I grow on people.’

‘Yes, like a wart,’ she replied cynically, but I put that down to pique because she hadn’t heard from her sailor boyfriend for some months.

Of course, this Bob’s liking for me could have been helped on by the slice of fruit cake I gave him every time he called. Invariably I have found that a man’s stomach is of equal importance to him as the affairs of his heart, if not more so. I’m sure if they feel sick for want of food, however lovesick they are, it’s the former that takes priority. Cook was now letting me make the cakes for the servants’ tea; and as none of them complained they must have been all right.

Gladys, the under-housemaid where I’d been a kitchenmaid in Thurloe Square, used to say to me when we were trying to snaffle two young men, ‘All you have to do, Margaret, is find ’em and feed ’em.’

Nowadays there’s another four letter word you need to keep them, but it wasn’t so then. Oh, a young man would try it on, but when you refused to do anything but kiss him it didn’t automatically mean that was the last you’d see of him.

As this Bob wasn’t bad-looking, and a good dancer, I promptly gave up going to the village dances; for nothing is more humiliating than being a wallflower, while the boy who has taken you to the dance is gaily cavorting round the floor with some other girl. You go to the dance with your partner, fully determined not to be annoyed or jealous if he dances with somebody else; then, just because you’ve been lucky enough to actually have a male take you to the affair, you are perhaps besieged by other males, all wanting to dance with you; and they are regardless of the fact that such a longed-for event has never happened to you in your life before. Nor is it ever likely to happen again, considering you’re no raving beauty, and when you dance you always seem to have one foot too many. Don’t ask me why one has these wild imaginings, one just does; or anyway, I did.

Like the first Sunday afternoon Bob arranged to take me out to tea. Immediately he told me, I had visions of a lovely tea-room with soft lights and sweet music. With my delicate hands – well, perhaps delicate is the wrong word, it’s difficult to have ‘pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar’ when one is a kitchenmaid – I’d pour him dainty cups of tea and we’d have buttered scones and cream cakes, while at the same time I’d intimate that these concoctions, though edible, weren’t nearly as good as I could make myself.

But the reality, on a Sunday afternoon in Southampton when all the shops were closed, was a bleak cafe with pink-washed walls, brown linoleum and marble-topped tables, stained with tea and fly-spotted. Alone with me, Bob seemed to have little to say, which perhaps was just as well as I was too distracted by the flying fauna of wasps and flies to pay heed to any conversation. And I thought, as indeed I had often thought, how difficult it is for the poor to be romantic. They have nowhere to go for privacy. If you take a boyfriend home, your family, having only the one sitting-room, are always there. So it’s 10p at the pictures, fish and chips in a newspaper, and kissing as far away from a street lamp as possible. It’s easy for the rich to have a ‘grande passion’; they can dine, drink and dance to induce the mood, and have somewhere to retire for the privacy and pleasure.

About four to five weeks after the sewing-on of a button episode, Rose told Mary and me, in the strictest secrecy, that Mr Gerald wanted to marry her. We immediately felt envious. We knew that she’d been meeting him from time to time; though in fact we’d warned her that he couldn’t possibly have honourable intentions. We cited cases, real and imaginary, of girls we’d known in service who’d been seduced by one of the sons or nephews of those upstairs. We painted a harrowing picture of what happened to such girls if they had a baby: they were dismissed instantly without a reference and refused a home by their parents. I even quoted from the
Vicar of Wakefield:

‘When lovely woman stoops to folly

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can soothe her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?.’

But Rose stoutly averred that she would never be seduced; it was marriage or nothing.

‘What about that Len your Mum wants you to marry, what’s going to happen to him?’ asked Mary.

‘That’s just it, I’m scared to death to tell my ma and pa. Ma’s ever so strait-laced and she’d never want one of the gentry for a son-in-law. And as for Pa, he’s ever such a Labour man and believes that the workers will never get a living wage until everybody’s in a trade union. He says it’s people like those we work for that grind the faces of the poor. Can you imagine our dear Madam grinding our faces?’

‘Perhaps not, but certainly I can see that old brute her husband doing it,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he looks upon us as barely literate.’

‘Margaret,’ broke in Rose, ‘it’s my day off next week and you haven’t had your second day yet. Will you come to my home to back me up when I tell Ma and Pa? I’d be ever so grateful, I really would. I’d let them know that you were coming with me.’

‘What! all the way to Manchester? We’d never do it in a day.’

But Rose said that if we started early we’d have a few hours there; long enough to break the news to her parents.

Although Mary and I continued to point out the hazards of life with one above stairs, we were honest enough to admit that had it happened to us we’d have married him like a shot. I don’t believe that Rose was really in love, but was dazzled by the prospect of living a life of affluence and becoming one of them above stairs. She couldn’t see that she’d never really be one of them; she’d never be able to keep up conversation at a dinner for she never read, not even novels, and knew absolutely nothing about politics or the arts.

9

My boyfriend, Bob, was annoyed that my day off was going to be spent with Rose. When I told him I was going to Manchester, he was incredulous; you’d have thought Manchester was in the Arctic Circle. But then Bob had never in his life been further than London, and there only on rare occasions. What made it worse was that I couldn’t tell him the real reason for going with Rose.

‘What d’you want to see her parents for? You don’t know them. Besides, I was going to take you to my home, my mum said to bring you in for a bit of supper, she wants to see you.’

Here we go again, I thought. Another mum wanting to give me the once-over. I’d had that before when I knew Percy and met his gorgon of a mother. It needed some female with stronger nerves than mine to wrest that Perce from the loving arms of his mum – in spite of his being thirty years old. Still, perhaps all mothers were the same. I remember my mum, on the rare occasions I brought a boy to Sunday tea, would say the next day, ‘Oh yes, Nell. He’s all right, but…’ and it was always in that ‘but’ that one sensed disapproval.

Rose and I were catching a train from Southampton at six o’clock, and what a very nice man was old Jack, the chauffeur. He got up early to drive us to the station. Fellow travellers stared at us getting out of a lovely car and then entering a third-class carriage.

I’m afraid that Rose didn’t enjoy the journey, she was too nervous. I couldn’t see why her parents should object to Mr Gerald; after all he wanted to marry their daughter, not set her up in a flat as his mistress. Manchester was a revelation to me; I’d not realised it was so big, or so dirty. The huge Victorian Town Hall was very impressive, but the filth and squalor in some of the streets was appalling. Rose’s parents lived in a street slightly better than some we had walked through, inasmuch as most of the houses had proper lace curtains at the windows instead of half-way short net ones, and every doorstep had been whitened with hearthstone. When we reached her home we could see the shadow of her mother through the curtains. Rose had said that her mother wouldn’t be waiting on the doorstep for us, it wasn’t the done thing, and to pull the lace curtains aside was even worse, it was spying on one’s neighbours and only low-class people did that. These working-class social distinctions amazed me; perhaps they were indigenous to the North. Her mother was a tall upright woman with a rather dour expression and I could see that Rose was somewhat in awe of her. The house was a ‘two up and down one’; no bathroom, of course, and the lavatory, as usual, in the small yard outside. We were taken into an obviously rarely used sitting-room, and sat down on green plush-covered, straight-backed chairs arranged stiffly around the walls. The over-mantel, draped in green plush, was crowded with china dogs, a matching three-piece set of bright blue china vases and clock, and a photograph in a green velvet frame of Rose as a baby with her ma and pa. He looked a very handsome man and I could see that Rose took after him.

When Rose asked her ma why we couldn’t sit in the kitchen, she was told it wasn’t the place for guests and, in any case, her father would soon be home from the mill and we’d have dinner there. She turned to me and said that she hoped I liked meat pudding, she didn’t hold with all that made-up stuff they ate down in the South. One look at her face and I didn’t hold with it either. She added that she was not like some she could name, who never cooked their man a decent meal but sent the kids to the fish and chip shop. And, as for the family that had moved into No 14, she did her step only once a week and it was a disgrace. I reckoned that if I was living in the neighbourhood I’d have given up trying to keep a doorstep white at all.

When her father came in I saw that he’d aged considerably since that photo on the over-mantel. He too was rather dour and silent, and I understood why Rose was nervous. I felt that she had never experienced much overt parental affection; but perhaps that too was indigenous to the North, where working conditions and climate were harder than in the South.

Rose was supposed to tell her father the news while we were having dinner because we’d have to leave before he finished for the day. Her mother asked Rose about Madam; was Madam well and was Madam’s husband still as ill-tempered as he used to be, and she’d had a letter from her dear Madam and – suddenly Rose’s father broke in angrily:

‘For God’s sake, enough of your everlasting madaming. The woman’s name is Mrs Wardham. She’s not God Almighty.’

‘Joe Lawton,’ answered his wife, ‘However you talk in the mill, in this house I’ll thank you not to take the name of the Lord in vain.’

Rose remarked timidly that Mrs Wardham was a very nice lady to work for.

‘Nice! Don’t talk to me about nice. What do those kind of people care about the likes of us. They’d let us starve before they went without a bit of their fat profit. What about your Uncle Fred and his five kids. It’s not enough that he’s sweating and slaving on his back in the mines every day; now the stinking mine owners want to cut his wages down and do away with the National Wage agreement that the miners had last year. You mark my words, there’ll be another strike and it won’t be just the miners. Next time the workers will stick together. We’ve got solidarity. They’ll not grind us down for ever.’

Well, after that diatribe, poor Rose hadn’t the courage to tell her father that one of the ‘grinders’ wanted to marry her. I’d have not had the nerve either. After he’d gone back to work and once again we were sitting on those green plush chairs, Rose told her mother the news. At first it was difficult to make her mother understand and, as by this time Rose was almost weeping, I explained it to her as clearly as possible myself.

Her mother sat there looking stunned. Then she said to Rose; ‘Never, it can never be. It’s not right. What would the likes of us be doing with them upstairs. They’re not our kind of people, they don’t know the way we live.’

You’re right there, I thought. I couldn’t see Mr Gerald feeling at home in this street, or being very chummy with Rose’s father.

‘Besides,’ her mother went on, ‘whatever shall I say to my madam. How can I tell her such a thing?’

I couldn’t see that it mattered in the least what her old Mrs Paine thought about it. And if Mrs Lawton had been my mother, I’d have told her so; but Rose kept silent.

‘Your father will never have it, Rose. He’s got so bitter lately. They’re always having meetings down at the club and he and that Jack Brown and your Uncle John and a few others are always on about a union and a strike, and this time it won’t be the same as it was four years ago. They hate the bosses now. No, Rose, your pa had sooner see you struck dead than have one of the rich in his home.’

On the way back to Southampton, Rose was very depressed. I tried to cheer her by saying that her parents, after they’d thought about it, would change their minds, but Rose only moaned that I didn’t know her pa. He was as stubborn as a mule and her ma wasn’t sympathetic because she thought no good would come of Rose marrying out of her station. Why couldn’t Rose be satisfied with a nice hard-working young man like Len, he’d make a good husband.