Climbing the Stairs (19 page)

When my mother was a girl, the workhouse was at the end of their garden and the children from there used to go to the same school. They used to be known as the workhouse brats, with their grey
woollen dresses in the winter and grey cotton dresses in the summer. In the area where Mum lived whole families used to go into the workhouse in the winter and in the summer when there was more
work about they’d come out again. But while they were in they would be separated, the women from the husbands and the children from both. The shadow of the workhouse hung over every
working-class family.

My mother went into domestic service in 1895. The people she worked for had acquired their wealth in trade as so many middle-class people had at that time. They had sold their town house and
bought a big one in the country, filling it with the latest in Victoriana.

She got ten pounds a year there, paid quarterly as it was too small an amount to be paid oftener. Out of this she had to buy herself one new dress a year. She wore the same dresses summer and
winter. But then of course you couldn’t buy anything ready-made. She’s told me it took seven yards of serge material and seven yards of lining and of course not only did she have to buy
the material, she had to pay to have it made as well. So she had very little money left out of her ten pounds.

In this particular job, the under-servants were expected when they went out to wear a black bonnet provided by the employers. Mother simply hated wearing this bonnet. She was always a bit on the
militant side. To her that bonnet was a sign of servitude and she thought it should be resisted. So one day she went out in her own hat and she was seen from the drawing-room. When she came in she
was called for and she got a severe telling off. She didn’t dare do it again but she looked for and got another job.

At the next place she got twelve pounds a year, paid monthly, with a Lord Jisson, VC. He lived outside Chichester at a place called Bosham. It was a much larger grander place, and he kept a pack
of hounds. But it was run on military lines and everybody’s task was allotted to them. There was a housekeeper there who kept tabs on the women and a butler who kept tabs on the menservants,
and for everyone a list of duties was laid down. Whereas in the other places she was at the beck and call of all and sundry, here she had to stick rigorously to the duties. And the housekeeper saw
to the standing orders.

All the servants had beer supplied twice a day, even the under-servants. Mother didn’t drink hers, she used to save it for the organ-grinder. Apparently an organ-grinder used to come twice
a week with his monkey and this monkey had developed a taste for beer. So the organ-grinder used to drink what he could and give the rest to the monkey. After which, Mother said, that monkey used
to cut the most unusual capers and this would be a talking point and an enjoyment for the servants for days.

Of course today it sounds trite and shows a lack of education. But those were the kind of events that you had to look forward to. Some form of variety to relieve from the humdrum. You had no
education and little hope of advancement in position or in money, and no security at all of course.

As for the advanced education, that was still a pipe-dream. And it wasn’t until the poor did get an advanced education that they were able to speak up for themselves, that they became, as
you might say, powerful advocates for their own class. Left to the upper class nothing was going to be done. Why should they kill the goose that laid their golden eggs.

But things were improving even then, compared to my grandmother’s days, because when my grandmother was in service there was a sort of feudal system.

She worked in a large manor house and the man who owned it owned the entire village; all the land for miles around and every cottage were owned by him too and he was very particular indeed about
how they were kept. Nobody from outside could come and live in his village. He made sure that nothing and nobody changed. As Grandmother said, this system had its advantages because when the
villagers were ill, medicines and food were sent down from the big house. But, she said, even so the villagers weren’t grateful. They used to detest having to doff their caps to the squire
who they felt was rude and arrogant to them. Still Grandmother reckoned that the villagers then had a better life than when things became freer for the working class. Because then nobody really
cared at all.

This was always a point of disagreement between my mother and grandmother. Mother was a stickler for her rights, not women’s rights but her rights, and as far as she could she fought for
them. Of course she couldn’t break the system, but occasionally she bent it.

One thing she couldn’t bend however was the business of waking up in the morning. It always had been a servant’s nightmare. At one place, though, she came to a good arrangement with
one of the gardeners. Every night she would tie a piece of string to her big toe and throw the string out of the window. When the gardener used to come round at five o’clock in the morning
he’d give it a mighty yank and so wake Mother up. Apparently she was never late, though on more than one occasion she hobbled round her work for the rest of the day.

The saying ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’ I’ve always thought a stupid one. Yet there must be something in it since at any rate for
much of our lives my mother, Albert and I have had to get up very early. It hasn’t made us wealthy or necessarily wise but we’ve certainly been healthy. Albert and I are both now
drawing the old-age pension. So I suppose that proves something.

19

W
HEN
I
SEE
the words Retirement and Old Age I ask myself why are the two coupled together? Why does retirement suddenly and automatically mean old age?
Retirement shouldn’t make a radical change in life. But it does, especially for men. When they retire their life changes completely but a woman’s doesn’t because she still goes on
doing more or less the same things, particularly if she’s a woman who hasn’t gone out to work. She still does the housework, the shopping, the cooking, and the laundry.

Before a man retires he should start thinking what it’s going to mean. But he doesn’t so when the time comes the conditions take him unawares and he’s not able to adapt himself
to them. What he often mistakenly thinks is that when he retires it’s going to be a marvellous existence. All the things he’s not had time to do when he was working he’s going to
be able to do then. Perhaps he’s got a hobby. Perhaps he likes to make things at home or collect things or look after the garden. But what he doesn’t realize is that these things that
fitted in nicely in his spare time are nothing like sufficient as full-time occupations.

I think men become so apathetic and that’s why life seems to hold so much less happiness for them in retirement than it does for a woman. I’m going by the old people where I live and
where my mother lives. I do quite a bit for them and there’s hardly any men left there now. Amongst all the families, in about forty houses, there can’t be more than six men. And
it’s not because the women were so much younger than the men, it’s just that the men didn’t adapt themselves to a life of leisure, didn’t know what to do with themselves and
so like the old soldiers in the song they just faded away. Men are not as resourceful as women, nor do they adapt to new circumstances.

A man leaves school, he gets his job and he plods along till he’s sixty, sixty-five, or seventy and when work ends he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He feels he’s got no
place; he’s in limbo. The wife doesn’t want him at home. She loves her husband, of course she does, but she loves him to go off to work at eight or nine in the morning and come home at
five or six at night. She doesn’t want him under her feet all day long. She likes her life, a life whereby he’s not in the home all day and she can go out and visit her cronies and do
her shopping. All of a sudden he wants to join in with these things, he wants to go shopping with her; he wants to know where she’s been and what she’s been talking about, and very soon
acrimonious discussions start between people who have lived as Darby and Joan all their lives. It’s only because the man doesn’t think and doesn’t try to make a place for himself
in the world of retirement. Mind you, the wife can help. Together they can plan his life – make some sort of timetable. They don’t have to stick to it religiously but it will give them
something to go by until the man has worked out a definite way of life for himself.

I often think it’s a great pity that a man can’t retire gradually, doing half a day for a time while he sorts himself out. The trouble is he believes that all the week life will be
just like it was at weekends. And while he’s enjoyed his weekends when he was working all the week, he hasn’t realized that it’s because he’s working that he enjoyed them.
He doesn’t understand that it was the change he enjoyed and that there’s no longer going to be any change.

Another thing, most councils like ours run courses on retirement but they don’t get the people they should. They don’t get the working-class person, the man who has done a physical
job and is going to find it harder to use time than a person whose work has employed his brain. A man who does a hard physical job all week doesn’t come home at night and pick up a book and
read, he probably just turns the telly on. He doesn’t think about using his brains. He probably thinks he hasn’t got any. I’ve heard many old men say, ‘Oh no, I’ve
never done anything like that and I’m too old to start now.’ But they’re not too old. It’s the middle class who go to these courses but the others need them even more. And
the things that you can learn to do now! Every occupation, every hobby is covered so you don’t have to be intellectual if you don’t want to. This is something to think about and to do
that will make for a happy life in retirement.

But no, these men don’t. Then I hear them say they’ve got time to go and visit their children, and see more of them. They don’t realize that their children have got a life of
their own by now, a life in which their parents have not played a part before; and you can’t expect them and their families automatically to alter their way of life because you have leisure
time on your hands. Married children have got their own work and their own friends and they haven’t much place for you in their life and there’s no reason why they should have, because
if they’re relying on the companionship of their aged parents, their own lives must be very barren, indeed. But the parents won’t realize this. They get disgruntled and say, ‘Ah,
there you are. You get old and even your own children don’t want you. You might as well be on the scrap heap.’

I don’t see why you should expect your children to devote their lives to you. When your family get married you’ve given them up. You’ve done your duty in life. You’ve
brought them into the world, you’ve fed them, clothed them and educated them to the best of your ability. Let them lead their own lives, I say. Don’t make them feel that their mother
and father are sitting stewing over in their minds about what they do or don’t do for them. Everybody should be complete in themselves and you shouldn’t have to rely on other people to
provide a purpose or to make you feel that you’re important in life.

I think nowadays that old people are lucky. There’s never been so much done and thought about for them as there is today, but they must help as well.

Those I feel really sorry for are the ones who live on their own and who have no one to visit them or care for them. Perhaps they’ve driven people away by their cantankerousness but to be
old, poor, and cantankerous is the last word in a lonely existence.

Another sad thing to see is those people who’ve lived in council houses and who have to move to a small flat. You can’t blame the council because they’ve got a long waiting
list of young people with families who need houses. Obviously it’s only right that one or perhaps two people living in a three-bedroomed house should move out but they’re taken away
from everyone that they know. Some of the council flats for old people in Brighton for instance are sited in a road where they are isolated. No one goes up that road unless they live there or
unless they have to deliver there. So sometimes from morning to night the old people, particularly those who can’t get out, never see anything of life at all. It’s a terrible existence
for them, a kind of apartheid. Then they start to realize that they’re in a kind of a special category. They’re a race apart. They’re no longer Mr and Mrs Smith, a couple with a
grown-up family, but two people who’ve joined the ranks of the drop-outs, the problem people, the ‘senior citizens’ as they choose to call them. But the old people don’t
call themselves the senior citizens – they call themselves the second-class citizens.

How can they be other than second-class citizens surrounded as they are by people all like themselves, all old, all living in the same road or block and all with the same problems and the same
incomes? How much better it would be if the old were mixed up with the young. Most neighbours feel kindly towards elderly people, especially elderly people who are not capable of getting out
themselves. They’d help in so many small ways. Carry coal, do a bit of shopping and explain the forms that they get sent and that simply plague them.

Another thing that neighbours could do is to persuade some of those who are living on a pittance to accept social security. It’s amazing the number of old people that won’t take
social security. They look on it as their parents looked on the old parish relief. My mother remembers it well – when the authority used to come round, open all your cupboards to see how much
food you had and tell you what they thought you could do without. Then any furniture that they didn’t consider you needed they told you to sell it before you asked for money. It isn’t
anything like that now. They help old people as unobtrusively as they can. They make you feel that it’s not a charity but a right.

Another type of old person I feel particularly sorry for is what I think they call ‘distressed gentlefolk’. Mind you, I suffered at the hands of gentlefolk when I was in service, but
that’s forgotten now. One of these ladies said to me, ‘It’s the cold winters I worry about – you see I can’t afford much coal and it makes all the difference to being
up and around or staying in bed all the time.’ When I asked her what she missed most from the comfortable life that she used to have she said, ‘Most of all I miss not being able to
afford a private doctor.’ And I felt a fellow feeling with her because that is one of the things I would like. She said, ‘I never go to the doctor now unless I’ve really got to.
There’s four doctors in a group practice where I am registered and I hardly ever get the same one twice so I’ve got to explain my symptoms each time I go. While I’m doing this
he’s writing on a pad and when I’ve finished he just hands me a prescription without a word and out I go. I’m sure all the doctors in that group favour contraceptives for the
unmarried, abortions for the married and euthanasia for the unwanted like me.’