Climbing the Stairs (11 page)

The way they talk now as though that’s why all babies are wonderful and that’s why there’s such a feeling of affinity between parents because the father was in the room when
the baby was born – it’s all rubbish. There was no psychology as far as Dad was concerned – it was sheer necessity – lack of money. And as soon as the baby was delivered Dad
did everything, the washing – and there’s a whole lot of washing after you’ve had a baby – and clearing up. He took over and the next day Mother would do as much as she
could from the bed. Like preparing the vegetables. Anything she could do with her hands.

So when Gladys and I saw all this paraphernalia of having a baby as though it was something out of the ordinary, we wanted to spit. People had kids like a bet on the Derby – once a year.
Well, why not if you can? And why was there all this fuss? It’s not as if having children was going to alter their lives. Where I was in service the mothers upstairs had nothing to do with
their children. They saw them once a day. They never had the pleasure of them.

Surely to have the pleasure of children is to be with them when they’re young and to give them the love and security that they can only get by knowing that their parents care about them.
It’s only then that you get something in return. It’s nothing to do with money. I don’t think these children were lucky – only in as much as they had all the food, the
clothes and the toys that they wanted. But they weren’t lucky in having the kind of things that we had in our home without money.

I often think, looking back, and because of the letters I’ve had since I wrote
Below Stairs
, that we were the fortunate ones. I’ve had letters from people who were children in
these opulent homes. They say, ‘We never had such a good time. You think because you were down there slaving away that you were the only ones that suffered, but you weren’t.’ One
person wrote and said that she only saw her parents once a day when she went in the drawing-room at five o’clock after tea and that she had a cruel nurse, but felt so divorced from her
parents that she was frightened to tell them how unkind she was, because she was sure that her parents wouldn’t have done anything about it except to tell the nurse what she’d said, and
that she would be even more ill-treated. So you see, she wasn’t any better off than children in an orphanage who are given every material comfort but haven’t got some one person who
really cares about them.

But the nurse where I was working – in spite of the fact that we didn’t like her – wasn’t like that. The children thought the world of her – so she must have been
kind to them and given them love. I could tell by the way they used to run after her and climb over her. So although to us she seemed stand-offish and snooty she couldn’t have been so
bad.

But what sort of life did she have to look forward to? They just lived for a time on borrowed affection. Then the children they had taken care of went away to boarding schools and they’d
have to take another job and start all over again. What sort of existence was that? Although life below stairs was rough and ready, at least it was life. The rigid social divisions in any of the
houses I worked in were generally carefully defined. You knew your place and you kept in it. You worked and played within certain limits and under certain terms and rules and it was seldom that
these were ever broken.

I only remember one place where this happened. The goings-on there would have interested even Mr Sigmund Freud.

11

I
T WAS AFTER
I’d been in service in London for some years, I thought I’d like to be a bit nearer home for a change, so I came back to Hove
and I worked for a Mr and Mrs Bishop.

It was a very peculiar kind of house in many ways. No one could say that they belonged to the gentry.

Mrs Bishop was a woman of about sixty who made herself up to look about thirty-five to forty and she did it extremely well. She led her own life – at the weekends at any rate, which was
the only time they were in Hove. The house was filled with young men – young in comparison to her that is – and it was a very lively forty-eight hours indeed, though for most of the
time Mr Bishop wandered around looking like a lost soul. But then he had his own little bit of fun during the week.

He would come down on his own to satisfy his particular aberration. And that was to inveigle one of the maids into his bedroom late at night when they were wearing their hair curlers. Then
she’d sit on his bed while he fingered her curlers. That’s how he got his pleasure. He was what I believe they nowadays call kinky.

Another expression you hear today is ‘permissive society’ as though it’s something new. But the only difference from when I was young is that now this permissiveness applies to
everybody – not just the rich. There’s always been a permissive society for the well-to-do because if you’d got rank or wealth it excused a multitude of evils. Also rank and
wealth gave you the opportunities and the facilities to be permissive.

Take the kinky Mr Bishop. If he hadn’t had a house of his own and servants and hadn’t been able to come down and live alone with us in the week, he wouldn’t have been able to
indulge in his peculiar habit of wanting to feel the servants’ hair curlers.

The working classes couldn’t have done it. Well we didn’t have that peculiar taste. I suppose some of us had peculiar tastes but how, when, or where they could be satisfied is beyond
me.

And although the maids used to profit by this peculiarity of Mr Bishop’s by gifts of chocolates, stockings, and theatre tickets, we were contemptuous of him. We thought that somebody with
his money and education shouldn’t indulge in these footling pursuits. That they should be above such things. We weren’t to know, as people do now, that this kind of obsession
couldn’t be helped.

Among ourselves we used to make fun of him and, when Mrs Bishop wasn’t around, wouldn’t give him the respect that we would a normal employer. We never used to call him Sir and we
would grin like hyenas when we met him. Well, what more could he expect? But we liked him because he was pleasant, gentle, and kind.

Yet after I’d been there about six months something happened that made me change my opinion of him completely. And it will show you how much I respected him when I tell you I never said a
word of what I found out to another soul. And this at a time when precious little of interest or excitement came into our lives, so that we had to embroider the more mundane things to make them
dramatic.

It happened one night when I was coming home from a dance. I’d been with a boyfriend who didn’t bother to escort me home when he found that there wasn’t going to be anything on
the end of it. After an evening out I always believed in making the position clear. You might just as well be friends when all’s said and done because some of them used to get very annoyed
when they had taken me home and all they got for it was a goodnight kiss. I learnt this early on when one night I was being escorted back from another dance by a fellow. I didn’t take him
right to the door – fortunately. We stood in a turning parallel to it and he began to get extremely frisky. He was about twice my size too. Well, I got very nervous – matters were
getting out of hand — so I said to him I needed to go to the loo. So he said, ‘Where?’

‘I live the next turning to this. I won’t be long.’

He said, ‘You won’t come back.’

‘Won’t come back?’ I echoed, making as though I was simply dying to come back. ‘Of course I’ll come back.’ I said, ‘You’ll wait here for me,
won’t you?’

So I dashed to the house, bolted the door and got out of that awkward situation. The excuse of going to the loo has been very useful to me on occasions. Perhaps that’s why they called it a
convenience. That’s a bit of a deviation from my story but it accounts for me coming home from the dance alone.

As I was saying, I was walking by the Hotel Metropole on the seafront, when who should be coming out of the hotel but Mr Bishop and a woman. She looked about forty – nothing particular
about her – quite plain – and plainly dressed, too. It was all very embarrassing because I didn’t know what to do. I’d almost bumped into them. Mr Bishop said, ‘Good
evening,’ and she looked a bit odd. I muttered something and that was that.

But the strange part was that in the normal way when I’d got in I would have come out with it about seeing Mr Bishop with another woman. But I didn’t. I don’t know what
restrained me then because I was quite young and hadn’t got much sympathy for anyone who deviated from the norm.

I’d almost forgotten the episode when two or three days later I received a letter from a stranger and on reading it, it transpired it was from this woman. She asked me if I would go and
see her at her flat in Brighton. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it can’t do any harm to see her.’ So I went on my day out.

The first thing she asked me was, ‘Have you said anything about seeing me with Mr Bishop?’

I said, ‘No, I haven’t said a word. It’s strange really because we do talk about him.’

So she begged me not to either to the other maids or to Mrs Bishop. I told her of course that I wouldn’t. She didn’t have to implore me – I wasn’t going to say anything
anyway. Now of course I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to spoil things for other people. Then she went on to tell me a story that could have come straight out of a novelette.

Her name was Dora and she’d been a housemaid with Mr and Mrs Bishop many years ago. There was a son of the house who seduced her, got her into trouble and landed her with a baby. As soon
as Mrs Bishop heard of it, although she knew it was her son who was responsible, she dismissed Dora without a reference. So as well as the stigma of an illegitimate child, she had no money and no
chance to get another job. I asked her why she didn’t sue the son.

She said, ‘Well how could I? By the time I’d had the baby he’d been sent to Australia as a ticket of leave man for forging his father’s cheques. In any case it would only
have been my word against his and I wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

It was always the same then. It was always the girl’s fault if she got into trouble. Nobody ever blamed the man. It was considered natural for a man to pursue and to get everything he
could and if he could find a girl that was muggins enough to give it him – well, she deserved what she got.

She went on, ‘I knew he was a bit of a ne’er-do-well but he told me he was emigrating to Australia and that he’d take me with him. But it was the old story. He didn’t
care about me any more when I told him I was pregnant. And the next thing I knew was that he’d gone.’

So I said, ‘What did you do then?’

She’d written to Mrs Bishop asking her to help out with money but she never got a reply. She’d managed to borrow a bit but when the baby, a boy, was two months old she was at her
wits’ end. There seemed to be no hope at all. And then out of the blue Mr Bishop wrote to her and suggested that they meet.

She said, ‘He came to see me and was marvellous. He paid off my debts and set me up in this flat. And he’s looked after us both and paid for the child’s education. But the
reason you saw us together is that now my son is married and I’m on my own Mr Bishop comes to see me once a week on a Wednesday night.’

Well I couldn’t help grinning thinking about what might be happening.

So she laughed, too, this Dora, and she said, ‘I know what you’re laughing at.’

I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t really have asked you outright – but it’s the hair curlers.’

We both went off into fits of laughter about this.

Anyway it transpired that half of every Wednesday night was spent fixing and playing with hair curlers. They used them on each other – not only on their heads but in other places as
well.

‘Don’t you get fed up with that sort of queerness?’ I said. ‘After all, it’s hardly the kind of thing that you expect to find in normal society, is it?’

So she said, ‘Well, if normal society means that when you take a wrong step people treat you like dirt as I was treated, give me abnormality every time. Apart from this oddness Mr Bishop
has always been kind and generous to me. He knows I’ve got another man friend and he doesn’t mind in the least so long as he can come here Wednesday nights.

‘For him,’ she said, ‘it’s an oasis of quietness after the racketty life that his wife leads.’

I never saw her again after that, and although I never mentioned it to a soul I used to wake up at nights and roar with laughter thinking about an elderly man and a middle-aged woman
experimenting half the night with hair curlers.

But it showed, didn’t it, that it couldn’t really pay you to step outside your own social circle. If you did it was a near-certainty that you would be the one to get hurt.

Mind you, even flirting with the trades people could have its dangers as I was to find out.

12

W
HEN
I
WAS
in domestic service we didn’t have any supermarkets but we certainly had super service and super food. No
shopping had to be done by the cook. Occasionally if she went out in the afternoon she would look round the shops to see what new things were in. But she didn’t have to. The tradesmen called
every morning. By tradesmen I mean the owners or managers or their assistants. They would take the orders, talk about any special things they’d got in and then later the errand boys arrived
and delivered. The cook would make them come right into the kitchen and she’d examine what they’d brought and if it wasn’t right there would be no question of making do –
she sent it back. For instance if you ordered a particular slice of rump steak or fillet steak or fillet veal and the cook thought that it wasn’t up to standard, she wouldn’t keep it;
the errand boy would have to take it away and come back with something that she thought was.

Incidentally Albert my husband was a butcher boy at one time; he said that often when they took something back all the butcher did was chop a lump off the end and return it again and it was
always accepted.

When the tradesmen called all the under-servants, the under-housemaid, under-parlourmaid and me, we used to try to make ourselves look as nice as possible. I noticed that the under-housemaid and
under-parlourmaid always seemed to be below stairs at these times. The under-parlourmaid had a legitimate excuse to be down because of the butler’s pantry being there, but the
under-housemaid’s work was upstairs.