Below Stairs (21 page)

I stayed at the vicarage job for some time, and then one day I was chatting to a friend who was also doing domestic work and she told me she was getting is 1
s
3
d
an hour; the rate had gone up fivepence an hour in a comparatively short time. Well, there’s only one reason for doing that kind of work, money, so I started to look round for another job.

The first thing that amazed me was the difference that I found after so many years. Large houses that were once opulently furnished and had had a large staff were now reduced to no staff at all; just someone coming in for a few hours daily. Much of their lovely stuff had gone; they had had to sell it to pay their income tax.

Most of these ladies were very elderly and they accepted this change in their status with fortitude. Some of them used to talk to me about their changed circumstances and their vanished possessions. I remember one house where I worked, I used to go there two mornings a week. All they had left of their silver was a large tray, one of those which a whole tea set is carried on, and one day when I was polishing this, Mrs Jackson, a very elderly lady, said to me, ‘Ah, Margaret, when the silver service stood on that tray, and when the butler carried it into the drawing-room, it used to look a picture of safety and security,’ she said. ‘We never thought that our way of life would change.’

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them, even though judged by my income they were still fairly well off. It’s much harder to be poor, isn’t it, when for years you’ve had money rolling in, than if you’ve never had money at all; and then to come down to doing such a lot of their own work at their age. It’s easy to turn to when you’re young, you’re resilient.

Mind you, the funny part was that even though now they could only afford dailies, some of them still retained their old autocratic ways. They used bitterly to complain about the sordidness of life, they were very fond of saying that, that everything was ‘sordid’. And their favourite was, ‘The working class are aping their betters’, the betters being them of course, and ‘The country is being run by a collection of nobodies and is going down the drain’.

One of the ladies I worked for was a Mrs Rutherford-Smith. One day she said to me, ‘Margaret, you’re a very good worker, and I like you, but you’ve got one failing and I hope you won’t be offended when I tell you what that failing is. You never call me “Madam”.’ And then she added, ‘You know, Margaret, if I was talking to the Queen I should say “Madam” to her.’ I wanted to reply, ‘Well, there’s only one Queen but there’s thousands of Mrs Smiths!’

Mrs Rutherford-Smith and those like her missed all those little attentions that used to be their prerogative, the hat-raising, the deference from tradesmen, and the being waited on by well-trained servants.

Many of the people for whom I was a daily were old and lonely, and I was the only person who provided them with contact with life outside. This seemed strange because many of them lived in flats, and you’d think that living in a block of flats you’d be in a sort of microcosm of life. But it just isn’t so. I’ve worked in half a dozen such blocks and I’ve never met a person either going in or coming out. Everyone seemed to be isolated in their own little cell. They needed to live in them as they were easy to run. But it was a very lonely life for them.

Some who had adopted a philosophical view talked to you as though you were one of themselves, but others felt that they were really doing a great kindness in sitting down with you and being on equal terms with you. They thought it was very odd that a daily should show any signs of intelligence.

There was a Mrs Swob that I worked for. I shouldn’t really call her name ‘Swob’ – it was spelt Schwab, and she pronounced it ‘Swayb’; that’s how she liked it pronounced, but much to her fury most people pronounced it Swob.

This Mrs Schwab’s house was filled with antiques, terrible old dust-collectors, especially some round mirrors that she had, with convoluted gilt frames, and she showed no signs of pleasure when I knocked one of the knobs off one of these frames. ‘You must treat things better, Margaret,’ she said. ‘Don’t you love good objects?’ ‘No, I don’t, Mrs Schwab,’ I said. ‘To me they’re just material things; I have an affinity with G. K. Chesterton who wrote about the malignity of inanimate objects,’ I said, ‘and I think they are malign because they take up so much of my time, dusting, polishing, and cleaning them. Look at that vase,’ I said, ‘that you say is worth a hundred pounds, if that was to drop on the floor and break it would just be three or four worthless bits of china.’ That set her back on her heels for a few seconds. ‘I didn’t know you read, Margaret,’ she said. ‘I read a lot of course.’ She was one of those, whatever you did, she did it, only ten times more.

I was talking about films once. ‘Oh yes, I could have been a film star,’ she said, ‘I wanted to be but at that time I was going out with the man who is now my husband. He wouldn’t let me. Everyone was most disappointed.’ You’d be amazed all the rubbish I had to listen to, they ladled it all out, and you had to look suitably impressed. You’re working for them and you want your money, and if it wasn’t them it would be somebody else. They employ you to be a captive audience. Still, while you’re listening you’re not working.

This Mrs Schwab had one of the most infuriating habits; every time I went she used to say to me, ‘When you scrub the bathroom, Margaret, don’t forget the corners.’ This gained her less than nothing. From then on I never used the scrubbing-brush, I just threw the soap round the floor.

The last straw there was when I was sweeping the balcony. One morning she said to me, ‘Oh’ don’t sweep the dust that way, sweep it the other way.’ Well, did you ever hear such drivel? I collected my wages. I hadn’t got the nerve to tell her I wasn’t coming any more because instinctively I felt she would let loose a flood of invective, she looked that type to me. I wrote a very posh letter, I thought it was, anyway, to the effect that ‘it must be as irritating to her to feel that she had to keep telling me how to do things, as it was galling for me to have to listen to her’.

You didn’t have to worry about references on a daily job. You just said you’d never been out before, or that the people you last worked for had died. As a matter of fact the last people I worked for had all died. I don’t know whether there is any sinister connexion, but they have.

I can’t help thinking that people who were once wealthy and now have to live on a fixed income are worse off than ordinary working-class people, working-class people’s incomes do rise to meet the cost of living. They can ask for a rise, and go on strike if they don’t get it, or they get a cost-of-living bonus. But people who are living on fixed incomes like these old ladies have got to keep on trying to keep up some sort of show. A place like Hove is full of these decayed gentlewomen who are struggling to make ends meet. And in spite of the kind of idiosyncrasies I’ve mentioned, they do a marvellous job, because they’re trying to cope with a way of life that their upbringing gave them no preparation for at all. I’ve been amazed at the resilience and zest for life of some of these old ladies.

29

I
T WAS
when my youngest son was going to grammar school and my eldest was preparing for the university that I realized we had nothing in common to talk about except the weather. They would come home and discuss history, astronomy, French, and all those kind of things, some of which meant nothing to me. I’d never tried to keep up with the Joneses, but I determined to have a shot at keeping up with the boys.

First of all I thought about taking a correspondence course. But apart from the expense, you’re on your own doing a correspondence course; if you don’t feel like working there’s no one to urge you on, you’re not in rivalry with anyone and it doesn’t matter how long you take.

Then one of my boys’ history masters told me about a course of lectures given by Professor Bruce, Extra-Mural Professor from Oxford. They weren’t expensive, I think it was only a shilling a time, or cheaper if you took the whole lot, twenty-four of them. I took the lot.

It was fascinating to me this course of lectures. He must have been a brilliant teacher because the lessons were in the evening from half past seven to half past nine, with a break in between for a cup of coffee, but often with the discussion that used to go on afterwards it was eleven o’clock before I got away, and eleven thirty before I got home. My husband used to say, ‘I don’t know what kind of education you’re getting that keeps you out till half past eleven.’

But it was a real eye-opener for me, I’d always thought history was a dry thing, a succession of dates and things like that.

Then I started going to evening classes in philosophy, history, and literature. The only thing that really beat me was this metaphysical philosophy. You know when you first start anything, you want to be all high-hat. You don’t want to go to the same things that everyone else goes to, you want to come out with some high-falutin’ name, so I signed on for metaphysical philosophy.

I never knew what it was all about. All I could understand was it was something to do with being a hedonist, or some such thing. After six evenings I decided that it wasn’t for me. But that was the only subject where I didn’t stick the course out.

Where has it all taken me? Well, I passed my ‘O’ levels at the age of fifty-eight, and I’m now taking the Advance levels which I hope to get before I’m sixty. People say to me, ‘I can’t understand you doing it.’

I think it springs from the beginnings. All life is bound up together, isn’t it? I liked school, I won a scholarship which I couldn’t afford to take; I went into domestic service. I was dissatisfied and all this dissatisfaction was worked out in my attitudes to the environments of domestic service. If I’d been something else I should have been militant against that life, I expect.

When I got married, I had the boys and became a mother pure and simple. Then when they were off my hands it came out again.

People say, ‘I suppose you got bored with life’, but it wasn’t as sudden as that. The seeds are in you and although it may take ten, twenty, or forty years, eventually you can do what you wanted to do at the beginning.

Would I have been happier if I’d been able to do what I wanted when I was young? I might have been. I’m not one of those who pretend that because you’re poor there’s something wonderful about it. I’d love to be rich. There’s nothing particularly beautiful about being poor, having the wrong sort of clothes, and not being able to go to the right sort of places. I don’t particularly envy rich people but I don’t blame them. They try and hang on to their money, and if I had it I’d hang on to it too. Those people who say the rich should share what they’ve got are talking a lot of my eye and Betty Martin; it’s only because they haven’t got it they think that way. I wouldn’t reckon to share mine around.

Looking back on what I’ve said it may seem as if I was very embittered with my life in domestic service. Bitterness does come to the fore because it was the strong feeling I had; and the experiences are the ones that stay in my mind now.

I know it’s all dead and gone. Things like that don’t happen now. But I think it’s worth not forgetting that they did happen.

But we did have happy times and I did enjoy life. Remember, I’d never been used to a lot of freedom.

Domestic service does give an insight and perhaps an inspiration for a better kind of life. You do think about the way they lived and maybe unbeknown to yourself you try to emulate it. The social graces may not mean very much but they do help you to ease your way through life.

So despite what it may sound like, I’m not embittered about having had to go into domestic service. I do often wonder what would have happened if I could have realized my ambition and been a teacher, but I’m happy now, and as my knowledge increases and my reading widens, I look forward to a happy future.

Margaret Powell
was born in 1907 in Hove, and left school at the age of 13 to start working. At 14, she got a job in a hotel laundry room, and a year later went into service as a kitchen maid, eventually progressing to the position of cook, before marrying a milkman called Albert. In 1968 the first volume of her memoirs,
Below Stairs
, was published to instant success and turned her into a celebrity. She followed this up with
Climbing the Stairs, The Treasure Upstairs
and
The Margaret Powell Cookery Book
. She also co-authored three novels, tie-ins to the television series
Beryl’s Lot,
which was based on her life story. She died in 1984.

First published 1968 by Peter Davies Ltd.

First published in paperback 1970 by Pan Books

This edition published 2011 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2011 by Pan Books
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