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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
For fans of Call the Midwife, a unique autobiography of a 1930s London childhood. Enid Elliot Linder was the daughter of a butler and a lady's maid in service in some of England's grandest country houses. Evoking the lost world of a childhood 'below stairs', Linder's touching memoir describes how her life changed as Britain headed towards war. After the family moved to a Marylebone tenement, her father sought work in London restaurants whilst battling personal demons. Meanwhile Linder's aunt was nanny to a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists as they grew in influence. In a photorealistic and immensely charming narrative reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton, Linder evokes the sights and smells of prewar London - and of lonely Cornwall, to where she was unhappily evacuated - in a way that will appeal to fans of Downton Abbey. A unique personal account of a tumultuous time.
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Seitenzahl: 422
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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iii
We Learnt About Hitler at the Mickey Mouse Club
A Childhood on the Eve of War
ENID ELLIOTT LINDER
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
All illustrations are originals by Enid Elliott Linder, drawn for this book
1. Mother’s apron strings and Father’s coat tails would fly out into the air.
2. Our parents worked in rich and elegant surroundings.
3. Behind the green baize door.
4. Dancing to the gramophone.
5. At the cinema.
6. We learnt about Hitler at the Mickey Mouse Club.
7. Coming home from school through a noon-day ‘pea-souper’ fog.
8. Nippies at the Lyons Corner House.
9. Gas masks.
10. Waiting to be chosen.
11. Nearly a stone lighter.
viii
1
A Message from India
In the summer of 1932 most people in Great Britain had never heard of Adolf Hitler. The sun was still shining brightly on the British Empire and the days seemed long and golden, especially to a four-year-old child like me. My two-year-old sister and I lived below stairs with our parents in the servants’ quarters of an ancient riverside mansion in Richmond. Our father was the butler there and our mother was the cook.
Memories of that time and place still come echoing down through all the years to haunt my mind. I see once more the forbidden garden and hear again the droning of bees in the tall roses, the sound of water splashing from a bronze fountain and the laughter of two exotic children who had come to stay in that imposing residence by the river, quite unaware that there were two other children living below them in the deepest and most hidden part of the house. 2
Queensberry House, which has long since been pulled down, stood with its feet almost in the water beside the River Thames, just a few hundred yards downstream from Richmond Bridge. Our bedroom was in the many-corridored, gaslit, stone basement, where daunting shadows lurked in every corner. It was a place just made for ghosts, particularly when white mists wreathed in from the river, turning the lofty trees, the wooden boathouse, and even the old coach houses tucked away by the courtyard into vague and eerie shapes. Images or reality; the line between them is flimsy like a veil.
Something happened there, in Richmond, that summer, that was to change the course of our lives. A strange sequence of events played out under the bluest of skies, in an England that has gone and can never return.
Our father was a tall man with a good figure and bearing. His hair was almost as dark as our mother’s but was wavy at the front. He had blue eyes and the sort of smile which made you feel warm and important. When he was not on duty upstairs he played with my sister and me a great deal and made up funny stories for our delight. From our earliest days he regaled us with rambling tales of his own youth and boyhood – it was almost as though he was surprised to find himself grown-up, and was still wondering how he had come to be changed from a jolly country boy into a mannerly and dignified butler. Coming down through the 3service lobby dressed in his tails and with his ‘upstairs’ face still in place, he was a different man altogether.
Our mother did not look at all like a cook, even when she was dressed in her highly starched white coat-overall and apron, handling her ladles and wooden spoons with expertise. Her eyes were dark and thoughtful, her skin was pale and cool, and she wore her glossy dark hair cut in a fashionable bob. She was gentle and petite. She was also quietly studious, teaching me to read at an early age and taking time to answer my innumerable questions. Like my father, she had been a farmer’s child, but had been orphaned early in life. She had been put into private service by the orphanage when she was fourteen, despite the fact that her bright intelligence had earned her the chance to become a pupil teacher.
My sister, Joan, spent quite a lot of her time when she was young corralled in a wooden playpen in a corner of the huge basement kitchen. There in the rosy shadows between the gleaming fire range and the tall wooden dressers, she would amuse herself for hours with her wooden alphabet bricks, a sawdust-filled doll with orange hair, and a chewed cardboard book full of yellow lions and tigers and people waving union jack flags. She had velvety brown eyes, honey-coloured hair which went curly in the rain, and dimples. The kitchen maids, and even the smart-as-a-pin housemaids were always picking her up and cuddling her, risking their starchy caps being pushed askew and their stiff white collars being dribbled on in the process of receiving one of Joan’s soft baby kisses. 4
I had green eyes and freckles and very dark straight hair which never did anything interesting. I had long legs like Father, long eyelashes like Mother and, whenever I was thinking deep thoughts, an expression on my face which caused maids to remark: ‘be careful now – if the wind changes you’ll get stuck like that!’
In the early days I sometimes heard our mother say to people: ‘what a blessing Joan has always been such a good baby. Heaven knows what we would have done otherwise.’ I would feel a little put out on hearing this, for nobody ever remarked on my goodness. To a child who was bursting with curiosity, living below stairs in a world peopled almost entirely by busy servants, and where there were numerous forbidden doors and secret stairways, the achievement of staying good always required a great deal of self-restraint on my part.
My mother would sometimes let Joan play with a wooden spoon and two or three of the jelly moulds made of shining copper, which were shaped like fish or rabbits or castles. They normally lived on one of the dresser shelves. In that big, busy room the noise my sister made with them could hardly be heard: it seemed to drift to the top of the arched stone ceiling and get lost up there. The ceiling stones near to the fireplace end were all blackened. My mother thought the stain had probably been caused by rising smoke and fatty steam from days, long gone, when sides of meat had been cooked there on a roasting spit. A number of curious pieces of black metal and little wheels were still fixed in place in the wide chimney and on the chimney breast. 5
Each of the high wooden dressers could hold a full dinner service on the lower shelves. The drawers and cupboards below stored all the cooking crockery, baking equipment and other large utensils. On rainy days I was sometimes allowed to ‘tidy out’ the dresser drawers, or, at least, the shallow ones. A space would be cleared for me in a quiet corner of the scrubbed stone floor and I would lay out, in order, all the jumbled-up bits and pieces that were so necessary to the running of the kitchen but were difficult to keep tidy: things like piping-bags, corks, string for trussing birds and rolls of meat, metal meat skewers, wax candles and pudding cloths. In other drawers were bunches of keys, tradesmen’s order books, indelible pencils, bills and invoices and a box of white chalks. The chalks were used for writing on the flagstones near the fire, the times when certain pots should be removed from the boiling end and drawn aside to simmer. Sometimes there would be chalked messages saying things like ‘DO NOT BANG,’ when there were soufflés in the oven.
But my favourite indoor occupation was to sit perched up on a high stool, with a cushion on it, at a corner of the long, scrubbed kitchen table, and either draw pictures of what I saw, or just watch my mother cooking.
One morning, when I was doing this, I became aware that an unusually large number of staff and other people were gathering together in the kitchen. Even the housemaids, who usually spent so much of their time looking after the mysterious kingdom upstairs, were down in the kitchen with us. The kitchen maids were present, naturally, 6because they belonged there. One of them, with floury forearms, was carrying on making pastry while the other was turning the handle of the mincer with her right hand and pushing a cold saddle of mutton into it with her left. I knew that later on three big mutton pies for the servants’ hall would emerge from the oven. Then I saw the scullery maid emerge from her steamy den with her red hands hidden under the brown sack-cloth of her outer apron. Thomas and William, the footmen, were there in their shirtsleeves and aprons, having just come from washing glasses in the pantry. The chauffeur, also in his shirtsleeves, had come in from hosing down cars in the cobbled courtyard. His wet wellingtons stood side by side on the kitchen doorstep and beside them in a neat row, stood several pairs of gardeners’ boots: the head gardener and his men had come into the kitchen in their socks. There were even two tradesmen standing over by the fire range. They wore loose, fawn, linen coats over their black three-piece suits. They had come to enquire about orders and stayed to drink tea. Their bowler hats hung on the coat rack behind the door.
Everyone was gulping down hot tea, poured for them by one of the kitchen maids. They all seemed to be talking at once and all the voices were more highly pitched than was normal. It seemed that some very special people were coming to stay at Queensberry House and for lack, as yet, of adequate information; the atmosphere in the kitchen was a frenzy of speculation. ‘They’re very important indeed,’ one of the footmen said knowingly, ‘he’s a sultan 7and his wife’s a sultana.’ Everybody burst into laughter. Even Joan in her playpen over in the corner, caught the mood. She jumped up and down and threw back her head and laughed out loud, showing off all her pearly milk teeth and her dimples.
During all the jollity our father entered the kitchen, followed by Mr Parsons. It seemed to me that the old pantry-man’s eyes were rolling slightly. Father accepted a cup of tea in his own special cup, and then informed everyone that it was not a sultan and a sultana, who were coming, but an Indian Maharaja and his wife, the Maharanee. They would be staying for at least three months as house guests and were already on a ship bound for England. Also coming with them, he added, was an entourage of about two dozen other people, consisting of relatives, companions and personal servants.
At this last piece of information, everybody’s eyes started to roll, just like Mr Parsons’s. Father told them then that as far as he knew no extra staff were being taken on. At this point he reminded everyone that they had a good and thoughtful employer, prodding their memories about the ‘special arrangements’ made every year so that they could have a good Christmas. Now it was their turn to do well by their employer. There would of course be a ‘present’ for each of them at the end of it. He finished by saying that it was just as well they all had a little time ahead of them before the arrival of the Indian royal party, because a great deal of preparation lay in front of everyone. I saw his quizzical glance at our mother and wondered what it meant. 8
After this, everything seemed to go back to normal for a while, except that everybody was extraordinarily busy and I had to be extra careful not to annoy anyone or get in their way.
At night the wind coming off the River Thames moaned along the vaulted stone corridors outside our bedroom and whistled under the door. The gaslights on the corridor walls created welcome little islands of light, but they were surrounded by wide lakes of darkness. I found it a very scary thing to go along to the lavatory at night. Not only might I bump into William or Thomas, the footmen, in their pyjamas, but I might even see old Mr Parsons creeping around in his long white nightshirt.
The indoor menservants slept down with us in the basement. The housemaids and kitchen maids slept up in the attics. I did not know where the attics were because I was not allowed upstairs. But late one evening, when, unable to sleep, I had wandered into the kitchen in search of my parents, I had found them sitting before the fire drinking tea. The fire in the long range had been banked up for the night. The two kitchen maids and the scullery maid, all with lighted candles in saucer-shaped candlesticks, were saying goodnight. They then went through a door in the service-lobby wall, which was referred to as ‘the back stairs’. I saw their candle flames flare and flicker as if they had walked into a draught. The sounds of their soft-soled 9shoes became fainter as they mounted many stairs within the wall. Then everything was silent except for the slow ticking of the mantelpiece clock and the sound of the coals shifting as they settled. I wondered why the maids had to sleep so far away from the rest of us, and mount those creaking stairs at night, all alone.
The gardeners and chauffeur slept in little rooms over the coach houses. To reach the entrances they had to ascend a flight of rickety wooden steps on the outside of the long building. At one end was an old hay loft in which were stored a blue-covered ottoman chest and several tea chests. They contained most of our personal possessions, apart from the few things that were kept in our enormous bare bedroom, such as Father’s trouser press, Mother’s hat boxes and our most prized possession of all, the gramophone. There was a tiny moss-grown window high up in our bedroom wall, through which a greenish light filtered if it was a sunny day. Whenever our father lifted us up we could see, at eye level, the long kitchen gardens where we were allowed to play, provided we did not annoy the gardeners. They were all-powerful in the kingdom of the gardens.
The kitchen-garden walls were built of mellowed rosy bricks which seemed to soak up and hold the sunshine. In one of them there was a small green door with a dented and tarnished brass knob and a big keyhole. On the occasions when the door was unlocked, I would run to it and gaze through the archway at the beautiful, but forbidden, garden on the other side. In it was a small, round, wooden 10summerhouse with a grey thatched roof, and a big shady tree with a circular wooden seat built around its trunk. There was also a fountain, with water droplets that blew sideways if there was a breeze. Smooth lawns swept gently past beds of roses, to a barrier of dark railings silhouetted at the river’s edge.
Sometimes, in the distance, I would see people in summer clothes walking along a path on the other side of the railings. If the weather was very hot many of the women would carry gaily coloured parasols and the men would carry their jackets over one shoulder and tilt their hats forward. From the river there often came the hoot of pleasure steamers. They had rows of white circles on the sides and grey smoke would stream out behind their tall funnels. Sometimes a band would be playing on one of the decks and there would be singing and laughter, made soft and echoey by the water and the trees. Now and then the sound of gramophone music would drift across the silver river as punts or rowing boats glided past the trailing willows.
Quite often, I would recognise snatches of melodies, like ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ or ‘You Forgot Your Gloves.’ I had heard them before on the occasions when all the daytime meals had been served and cleared up and all the other servants had, for one reason or another, gone out for a while. Then our parents would carry our gramophone into the long servants’ hall and, after winding it up, and with us watching from the end where the piano stood, they would slip into each other’s arms and quickstep, or 11foxtrot, all around the wide parquet floor. These happy times together were always brief. Our parents would still be in their working clothes. Mother’s apron strings and Father’s coat tails would fly out into the air as round and round they whirled. And their eyes would shine.
1. Mother’s apron strings and Father’s coat tails would fly out into the air.
Our father’s domain included the butler’s pantry, which had barred windows, a wooden-lined sink with rubber-tipped taps, and in the centre stood a baize-topped table and four chairs. In the corner was a big metal safe, and two entire walls shone with a dazzling array of silver, all locked away behind plate glass: shining silver chafing dishes, tea and coffee services, galley trays, candelabra, 12cutlery, salvers, cake baskets, jugs, dishes, soup tureens, wine coolers, there was even a silver samovar for making tea.
Even though he had the two footmen to clean the silver, Father often hung his day coat on a hanger behind the pantry door and, donning a green baize apron to protect his outer clothes, he would roll up his sleeves and dedicatedly polish the loveliest or most intricate pieces himself. After brushing out the dried pink paste with the softest of brushes, he would then rub in the shine by applying a steady, warm, circular pressure through the polishing cloth, with the padded parts of his thumbs. ‘It’s love that makes silver stay beautiful,’ he would say, holding up the precious object for his inspection, with the light behind him.
My father told me that the samovar was used at breakfast times. Then the people upstairs would serve themselves without the aid of servants, he said. At around half past seven in the mornings I had seen the footmen carry large trays of burnished silver up the service stairs. Father said that these were taken into the breakfast room and laid out on long buffet tables which were draped with starched white linen cloths.
I was surprised to learn that the family and any guests could come down to breakfast at any time up to half past ten, and, provided they looked respectable, could appear in their dressing gowns if they chose. During this meal, no footman or other servant was allowed in the room. Apparently, this was customary in many large 13establishments of the gentry. So once Thomas and William had set out all the food on the side tables, they had only to sit or stand outside the door in case they were needed. Usually they were hidden behind a screen. The idea, so my father explained, was that if some people didn’t feel very well in the morning they may not want to be seen by servants or to be fussed over.
It was common knowledge too, that the upstairs people ate their breakfasts sitting at a long refectory table, after helping themselves to what they fancied to eat. The display was always the same: prunes, green figs and porridge to the left, beside freshly squeezed orange juice, tea, coffee, jugs of milk and cream, racks of toast, dishes piled with freshly made butter pats, and baskets of hot rolls that had been specially made for breakfast. Keeping hot in the silver chafing dishes would be scrambled eggs, bacon, kidneys, mushrooms, sausages, sautéed potatoes, fried tomatoes and, always, a good supply of fried bread, made succulently golden and crispy in the same big iron frying pan that had been used for the bacon, but with a bit of beef dripping added.
In other closed silver dishes would be pairs of plump kippers and fillets of smoked haddock, poached in milk and butter. Beside them, in a special high-domed dish, would be a great mound of kedgeree. To the right of the display would be a cold ham that had been freshly boiled and prepared the previous day. Hams were always sent up whole, never partly carved away. Every morning what was left over from breakfast was devoured in the servants’ 14hall, between pieces of homemade buttered bread, by more than a dozen indoor and outdoor servants, who always seemed to be ravenous for their snack by eleven o’clock or thereabouts. Their own breakfast had been at around six o’clock and a lot of hard physical work had been performed since then.
Queensberry House was almost an entire little world unto itself where food was concerned, so much was produced in its own garden or kitchen. Upstairs at breakfast there would be bowls of fresh fruit including, when in season, bunches of grapes straight from the warm, moist, atmosphere of the many-scented greenhouses. As a final touch, from the kitchen, a big, rich, Dundee cake would be set upon a doilied silver stand beside the cheeses. This, too, was a traditional item that must be provided every morning at breakfast.
When I asked my father why all the people didn’t end up with tummy ache, he laughed and said that they worked a lot of it off playing tennis, golf and polo at places nearby like Richmond Park, Roehampton, Hurlingham and Windsor. I had no idea what he meant then, but most things we talked about when I was small, he spoke of again a great many times throughout my childhood, so that I almost knew them off by heart.
He told me that most of the big houses of the gentry, where those big breakfasts were an accepted way of life, were right out in the country where there was also hunting and shooting in season, the care of farms and woodlands to be overseen, and many other country pursuits and 15responsibilities to be undertaken. ‘They work quite hard in their own ways,’ he explained, ‘and their worries are different to ours.’ He told me, with feeling, that we should never envy or resent people like them, because they provided work and security for hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise be unemployed, or else working in ugly factories or living in squalid surroundings.
Having spent my entire life until then in the cloistered and protected world of private service and having rarely been taken beyond the high walls of a Big House or private estate, I could not imagine what an ugly factory or squalid surroundings might look like. But seeing the look on my father’s face as he said the words, I gathered that they were something very different to Queensberry House.16
2
Behind the Green Baize Door
Our father was not always the stately and dignified person we saw when he mounted the gaslit service stairs to go on duty in the great house above us. When no other servants were near and he was alone with just our mother and us, he was loving and playful and full of fun. Among the many stories he told my sister and me, as we grew older, our favourites were nearly always about his boyhood. He told us that he was a Shropshire lad, born and brought up in the deep, still countryside near a place called Whitchurch. All through his boyhood he had quite expected that when he grew up he would become a farmer, like his father and grandfathers before him, at Allport Farm. His stories reflected many of the things and people he saw all about him in that Shropshire landscape at the turn of the century.
Whenever he could make the stories funny, he did so, and we listened to many tales about mischievous tramps, 18rascally poachers, irate farmers and supercilious squires. But he also told us about how he and his seven brothers and sisters worked in the fields when they were not at school, often, it seemed, falling out of apple trees, sliding down haystacks or being fished out of ponds. Hay-making, stone picking, crow scaring, cleaning or making corn stooks by day, at night they would tumble, exhausted but happy, into two huge beds where they slept top-to-toe under the sloping upper ceilings of the farmhouse. As they settled down, the rustlings and scratchings of the mice and birds who lived under the cosy thatch above them, would set them all whispering and thinking about ghosts and hobgoblins until, sufficiently scared and thankful for all the company they had in bed with them, they would fall asleep as peacefully as the farm animals in their straw.
But in 1916, he told us, his country-boy existence had come to a sudden end. He was fourteen years old then. Advertisements had begun to appear in the country newspapers asking for personable youths, well below the age of military service, to be trained as hall boys and then as footmen in some of England’s big country houses and stately homes. The reason there was a shortage of footmen, he explained, was that Great Britain was at war with Germany and most of the footmen had gone away to fight in the Great War, on something he called the Western Front.
The money being offered for the trainee hall boys and footmen was good. His parents’ farm had been going through a lean season. His mother had several other children still at home to be provided for. Almost before he 19knew what was happening to him, he found himself bundled onto a steam train with a small tin trunk beside him, bound for a place he had never heard of. The label on the trunk was addressed simply Keele Hall, Staffordshire.
The top-hatted coachman, who met him at Keele Station, told him that the country house he was being taken to belonged to a relative of Tsar Nicholas II, the reigning monarch of ‘all the Russias’, and also that high-ranking members of the aristocracy came frequently to Keele Hall as visitors or house guests.
In all his boyhood he had rarely been further from the farm than the nearest village where he went to school. Only occasionally had he accompanied his mother to the market town of Whitchurch: sitting in the rumbling horse-drawn cart beside mounds of vegetables, rattling churns and covered baskets of dairy produce, eggs and honey, had seemed to him then like a great adventure. So when he was first shown around Keele Hall he was overwhelmed and intimidated by its size and grandeur: ‘huge hanging lamps, each one glittering like a thousand icicles, marble pillars and floors, silken carpets on the walls, vast shimmering mirrors, banks of chrysanthemums everywhere, each flower with petals as stiff and white as frozen snow’.
Our eyes would grow round with wonder as vivid pictures formed in our minds from the words he uttered, and when he told us that the grandeur had frightened him so much that he would have run away if he had been able to, we nodded our heads in agreement. 20
His employers had provided him with the first complete new outfit of clothes that he had ever possessed; a Norfolk jacket and knickerbocker trousers of dark grey worsted cloth, worn with black woollen stockings, black leather boots, a white cotton shirt and grey woollen tie. As a hall boy one of his many tasks was to hurry along corridors the length and breadth of the vast building, carrying messages from one department to another. He also helped the other boys clean all the boots and shoes of the family and their guests; the flat silky bootlaces were first removed and then pressed with a hot flatiron before rethreading. He also ironed out the creases in the daily newspapers before they were carried upstairs on a silver tray by one of the footmen. Brown paper under the hot irons would have absorbed the newsprint’s inkiness, so that his employer’s hands stayed clean.
Gradually he was taught to wait at tables, upon upper servants in the stewards’ room and, a bit later, was shown how to brush, sponge and press the butler’s various suits of working clothes. He was told that these humble tasks were all part of the training of those who aspired to become top footmen, valets and butlers, fit to work in or take charge of English upper-class homes, or even those of the aristocracy. The trainee boys were reminded that if they rose high enough, through diligence, they might one day be able to travel with their employers and see something of the world. Then, instead of remaining country boys all their lives, tipping their caps in awe at local squires, they would have made something of themselves. 21
Our father was nearly sixteen when he was promoted to third footman. He received two suits of splendid livery for dress wear, plus another set of clothes which resembled the brocaded and ruffled uniforms worn by 18th-century flunkeys. These, he was told, were for use on special occasions such as grand dinners and balls and he was instructed in the art of caring for and powdering the silver wig which completed the outfit. Lastly, he was given a rise in wages, which meant that he could increase the amount of money that he sent home to his mother every month by postal order. It was only in 1920, when he met our mother, then fifteen, at a servants’ ball, that he began to think about saving for his future.
Our mother usually only told us things in ‘snippets’ when she spoke about her life as a child, and later as a young woman. But gradually over the years a picture emerged. It was a very different one from that painted by our father, about his happy youth. She told us that her name had once been Mary-Jane Hartley and that she had been born in 1905 in a chill stone farmhouse, high on the border between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The house was known as Lower Dean Head Farm, a place of cold stone floors and a wind which blew continuously over the wide, bleak moor, moaning in the chimney tops and whistling through the jagged holes in the dry-stone walling that surrounded the farm. 22
The only memory she had of her mother was from a sepia photograph in an oval frame which hung on the parlour wall; a gentle-faced young woman with big, dark eyes, like her own, and dark hair parted in the middle. Her grandmother, who looked after her and her older brother, Richard, on the farm, told her that her mother had died from a broken heart when the children’s father had deserted them all. Before long, the grandmother also died and the children had no one else to turn to. The last she saw of the farm was from a pony trap that took them, joltingly, along the stony road that led down from the moor. It was driven by strangers. They told the children that, because they were not real orphans, they could not be taken to an orphanage. Richard was a strong boy, they said, and a place had been found for him. But nobody wanted a five-year-old girl, so she must be taken to the workhouse. She never saw or heard from her brother again.
She might have stayed in the workhouse a long time, but one day a widowed lady who was looking for a suitable child to take home as a companion chose her from a row of other little children brought forward for inspection. She was taken to a house near Burnley, where she had four happy years of warmth and security. She was also dressed prettily by the lady, who she called ‘Aunty Polly’, and was coached in her lessons and taught good speech and manners. Aunty Polly, who was a Roman Catholic, made an arrangement with the nuns of a Catholic orphanage that if she should die or become ill, then little Mary-Jane, even though she had been christened a Protestant, should 23be taken into their care and protection: and that is what happened.
The orphanage had been so in need of money that when she was twelve, during the Great War, she had become one of the many female orphans sent out to work part-time in the cotton mills. But she enjoyed the work and still thrived at school, she said, going early to the top of the class and soon helping to teach the little ones in classrooms bereft of teachers by the war. Her headmaster hoped she could become a pupil teacher, but in 1919, when she was fourteen and legally old enough to work full-time, the nuns informed her that a man calling himself Robert Hartley had traced her to the orphanage and was downstairs asking for her. He was now set up in business as a clog-maker, he had told them, and as Mary-Jane belonged to him legally until she was 21, he was now claiming her back so that she could come and live with him and work for him. But, on seeing the look of bitter hatred that came into Mary-Jane’s dark eyes, not to mention the fear, the nuns said they could help her to ‘disappear’, if she chose, to a place where her father would never be able to find her. She quickly agreed and it was soon arranged for her to be taken into private service in the adjoining county of Cheshire. The nuns told her that, as it was important for a young girl to have a secure roof over her head, she should direct her intelligence to climbing as high as she could within private service. If she could become a housekeeper or cook she would never want for anything, even if she never married. 24
The rung of the ladder from which she began her climb saw her as a mob-capped scrubbing maid in the laundry wing of a big country mansion in Cheshire. But, she consoled herself, situated as it was in the depths of a large private estate and with the gates guarded by the lodge-keeper and his wife, there was very little chance of her father finding her again. As an added precaution she was no longer even Mary-Jane: she had given herself the fashionable name of Mabel instead.
By the time she married our father she had become a lady’s maid to a titled lady, after gradually ‘bettering’ herself in a series of grand houses, and even a castle. He, by that time, had become a polished first footman and valet to a Cheshire lord. They were good-looking, healthy and very much in love. They had splendid references and great hopes and ambitions for their future life together, working jointly as a butler and a lady’s maid.
It was as such that they had, apparently, obtained a very superior position in central London, quite soon after their marriage. Their London employer was the favourite daughter of a multi-millionaire. She had lost her first-born son in infancy shortly before our parents went to work for her. He was the only child she could have. Being a gifted musician, she sought to assuage her grief in music, in travel, and by becoming a minor society hostess, particularly to celebrities from the world of theatre. Her home was a small Georgian house just a few yards from Harrods on the one side and Hyde Park on the other. She was a very generous and thoughtful employer to our parents, who then 25became her personal servants. She liked them so much that she had planned to take them with her on a world cruise that would last six months. First class berths aboard the Liner had already been booked for the autumn of 1927, and our mother was already accompanying her mistress on a giddy round of shopping and beginning the packing of cabin trunks.
2. Our parents worked in rich and elegant surroundings.
By the July of that year, however, our mother was not feeling well. One day she visited a doctor, and then walked back across Hyde Park to the house. Several times she had to sit down on a park bench because she was feeling so 26faint. Back at home, and in some agitation, she immediately sought out our father. He was in the drawing room, where their mistress was sitting at the grand piano, with a young man called Noël Coward alongside, helping to produce some songs for the forthcoming Charlot’s Revue.
Father stopped his collecting up of music scores, which were scattered all over the room, and followed our mother below stairs. There she told him that she was expecting a baby. ‘A baby! What on earth is a lady’s maid supposed to do with a baby?’ So often was the tale retold throughout my childhood, that her exclamation of despair became lodged in a compartment of my brain normally reserved for other fateful historic sayings, such as ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’
Their employer, on being informed that I was ‘expected’, had excitedly offered to become my godmother as soon as I arrived, and to pay for my education and all my childhood needs. But, as with all good fairy godmothers, there was a condition attached. Her suggestion was that she should put off the cruise until the following year. In that way they would still be able to accompany her. But in order to do this they, in turn should put their child out to be fostered as soon as practicable after the birth. In that way they could all have the cruise, as promised, the child would have a good life with all that money could reasonably buy, and our parents could go on enjoying one of the best positions in London.
Our mother later told us that after much anguished soul-searching, she felt that she could never desert her 27child as her father had done to her (for that was how she saw it). At the same time, she knew that her refusal to have her baby fostered, a practice that was not uncommon among upper-class servants, would mean the end of her husband’s plans to better himself still further in London.
She also knew that the only employment available to a married butler with children was in the country, the place her husband had struggled so hard to gradually advance himself away from. His heart was by then firmly in London. He had fallen under its spell when, as first footman to the Cheshire lord, he had spent several London seasons at his employer’s town residence in the elegant Carlton House Terrace beside the Mall.
It was a paradox. Her husband loved children yet did not relish the idea of sacrificing a good career for one of them. She herself was not, at that time, all that fond of children, yet she could not bear the thought that one day a child of hers might think bitterly of her. She had admitted to herself that she not only hated her father for deserting her, but also felt a deep anger towards her mother for being so weak as to die of a broken heart, leaving her children deserted for a second time: ‘She should have stayed alive and fought for us,’ she once said with surprising passion. It was one of the rare moments when she did not have her feelings under firm control.
So our parents reluctantly gave their notice to their London employer and a way of life came to an end. I was born the following February in one of a pair of small tied cottages in the middle of some wide Warwickshire 28fields, during a blizzard. Several days of swirling snow had almost buried the hedgerows, and the small country lane which led from the cottages to the Elizabethan manor house where our father now worked. Through the small iced-up panes of the two adjoining cottages it was almost impossible to see the glowing oil lamps of the people who lived within, and who had been up half the night. Our father, afraid for his wife, who was having difficulties with the birth, finally wrapped himself around the head and shoulders with a horse-blanket and, with a lantern held on high, struggled through the waist-deep fallen snow and the flying snowflakes, across three fields and over two submerged stiles, in order to take the short cut to the only telephone in the district, which was at the manor. Conditions were obviously too bad for the doctor to come by car from the nearby village of Hatton, or even on foot, but over a crackly line he said he would try to make the journey on horseback.
When our father, back at the cottage again, finally saw the doctor through the window, ‘looking like a snow-man on a snow-horse’, I had already been safely born; delivered by the wife of the groom who lived next door, with the groom standing at the bottom of the twisting wooden stairs shouting up instructions. ‘Three guineas that little trip from the doctor cost me,’ our father would joke, ‘and our Enid already born.’ It was not the last time that he was to call me ‘cussed’.
Our mother often reminisced that, looking very incongruous in the firelight and shadows of that rustic bedroom, 29was the beautiful treasure-cot, draped in ruffled lace, which now contained her first-born child. It had once belonged to the little boy of their erstwhile employer in London. She had given it to them as a parting gift.
Nobody ever told us what our father’s reaction had been to our mother’s decision to keep her child. He himself never mentioned the incident – not at any time during the hundreds of family stories he related over the years. It was from our mother we learnt that she had only turned herself into a cook working alongside her husband after some mysterious trouble had come their way after my sister Joan was born.
Even at Queensberry House I was still too young to understand that it was because of our parents’ outstandingly good references from past employers, plus certain information relayed along the ‘golden grapevine’ of upper-class employers, that they were being allowed the most unusual practice, and favour, of bringing up a family below stairs. The condition had been that their children must be kept in order and out of sight and hearing.
At Queensberry House, temptation was all around me. On those days when the gardeners unlocked the door in the kitchen-garden wall and, carrying their various gardening implements, plodded into the forbidden, private garden through the arched opening, I would experience an almost irresistible desire to creep in unseen behind them and hide. 30Standing on the barrier of the threshold, I would watch the men slip away into the shrubberies or the rose garden. Sometimes they would disappear behind the summerhouse or the trees, or even, if still in view, become transformed into black shadows as, silently engrossed in their work and standing as still as statues, they were silhouetted against the shining silver band of the river.
When the sun was at its highest they would troop back to the servants’ hall for their midday meal. Occasionally they would forget about locking the door and leave it standing open. It was at these times, especially, that the deserted garden did its best to lure me inside with its heady perfume of roses, its tall shimmering trees full of whispering leaves, its droning bees and splashing fountain. I would stand there as if under a spell, mesmerised by beauty, wanting only to lose myself in its enchantment. Not knowing why I was not allowed inside the garden, I would turn away and go back to the semi-underground work-regions of the great house, where I belonged.
Underneath our basement bedroom was an even deeper realm, a network of cellars, where the wine was stored. When my father first took me down there I saw hundreds of dusty bottles, lying in wooden racks. Some were festooned with ancient cobwebs, their labels mottled or blackened with age. Others lay in padlocked metal cages. There were no gas lights down there and Father had to do his selecting, testing and decanting, plus many other jobs, by candlelight. He carried matches, tapers and two lighted candles in candlesticks, whenever we went down. 31At the bottom of the stone steps I would watch while he lit at least a dozen other candles that stood in wax-dribbled niches in the arched brick walls. When they were all alight, their flames burning tall and bright in the cold motionless air, the wine cellar would seem to me like a fairy grotto. It was one of my favourite parts of the house. Even Father sometimes seemed jollier than usual when we came up again from the cellar.
At the end of one of the north corridors was a huge, chilly larder. It had draughty mesh windows, a stone floor and black slate shelves. Every bit of food that had to be kept cold was stored in there, under domed fly covers made of muslin, wire mesh or glass. There were always two or three wooden mouse traps on the floor with either Cheddar cheese or dead mice in them. I felt sorry for the mice, just as I did for the dead furry hares that hung upside down from ceiling hooks in another cold larder next door. They had blood-streaked enamel cups strapped over their faces. Rabbits hung in there too and, in season, all sorts of pretty game birds: pheasants and woodcocks, partridges and snipes.
Between the butler’s pantry and the huge kitchen was the large, square service lobby, on the wall of which hung a row of numbered bells on springs. Too often they rang several at a time, or even all at once, or so the two footmen used to grumble. Although I am sure that I would have noticed if they ever really had rung ‘all at once’.
What really fascinated me, though, was the flight of plain wooden stairs that ran from the lobby to a short, 32gaslit landing, where there was a green baize door. The footmen, dressed in their green livery with silver buttons, and usually carrying laden silver trays, used that door a lot. Watching them from the semi-gloom of the basement quarters, I noticed that whenever they mounted the stairs with their trays and, half-turning, pushed upon that green baize door with their shoulders, a very different sort of light could be seen. It would flash brightly for a moment and then vanish as the door closed again.
I wished very much that I could go up and find out what was causing that unearthly light. But the green baize door was an area that was very strictly forbidden to me. There again, I did not know why, but the very vehemence of the prohibition made it seem one of the most exciting parts of the house. All I knew about upstairs was that some mysterious people lived up there, who devoured mountains of food and were still ever-hungry for more. There was also somebody up there, who was referred to below stairs as ‘His Lordship’.
In the kitchen the maids looked fresh as forget-me-nots in their blue cotton dresses and white caps and aprons. Unlike the kitchen maids, our mother wore no headdress. Her dark hair held back by a brown tortoiseshell slide, and her black strapped shoes and black stockings, made an interesting contrast to the dazzling whiteness of her crisply starched coach-overall and bibbed apron. Backwards and forwards she would go between the preparation table and the hot fire ovens, with the broad stiff bow at the back of her apron strings following her around like a big white 33butterfly. In her overall pocket she always carried a sweet-smelling swan’s-down powder puff wrapped in a square of pink chiffon. I often sat on my high, cushioned stool by the table and just gazed at her, thinking how pretty she was.
Early each morning at Queensberry House, an earthy green smell came into the kitchen when the gardeners brought in large baskets of fruit and vegetables for the maids to prepare and Mother to cook. Our mother used a little red book called Menus Made Easy. She liked to experiment and I often saw it propped upon a dresser. All the necessary ingredients were prepared by the kitchen maids before the actual cooking began. I would sit fascinated as things were pounded and chopped, peeled, skinned, de-pipped, ground, grated, mashed, whisked, beaten and sieved, slices shelled, shredded or crushed or, possibly, minced or whipped. All such preparation was done from start to finish by hand, and that was just the beginning.
The cooking range stood in an opening under the chimney of the old original fireplace and was about eight feet wide, at least. The fire never went out, even at night, and when meals were being prepared it was coaxed into full red roaring life by means of a complicated and ingenious arrangement of flues and dampers in the chimney and ovens. When the gaslights had not yet been lit by the tapers in the early morning, it would be so dark and shadowy in that basement kitchen that the range appeared like a long black dragon, sleeping against the end wall. With his 34big, red, fiery eye that never closed, he would watch us cross the flagstones. Only the gaslights could destroy the dragon’s power.
