Climbing the Stairs (20 page)

She herself believed in euthanasia.

She said, ‘I consider that when we become a misery to ourselves and our relations we should have the privilege of removing ourselves from life if we want to.’

I think I agree with her. Old age can be, and should be, a time of gracious living and companionship. But it can also be a time of loneliness and wretchedness. There’s precious little
dignity about coming into the world so let us at least leave it in the best possible way that we can.

20

D
IGNITY WAS SOMETHING
that in my early life the working classes were not supposed to be able to afford.

As a kitchenmaid I was at everyone’s beck and call and the kind of work I was doing meant that I always looked scruffy. So I felt what I was called, a skivvy, and feeling like this gave me
an inferiority complex, or what we call today a chip on my shoulder.

When I was going out I would make what I thought was the best of myself but that was only my opinion at the time, and looking back on it my opinion must often have been wrong. Of privacy we had
none. Working and sharing a bedroom as I did meant I was never alone; my life was what you would call an open book. I don’t think I resented this at the time – open book it might have
been but it wasn’t a very interesting one.

But dignity and privacy are two things that I have since thought go side by side. So when I saw how more and more country houses were being opened to the general public I wondered how their
owners felt about this invasion into their lives.

I knew of course that their education had prepared them to meet any situation but I wondered – if they showed any emotion – whether their feelings were the same as mine.

It was with a very strange sensation and a not altogether agreeable one that I went to Woburn Abbey to interview the Duke of Bedford for the BBC. Although during my years in domestic service
I’d never worked in such a grand establishment, nevertheless for me to go in at the front door instead of the basement and talk to the owner – well, it was something I never thought
would happen, not in my wildest dreams. In domestic service the only time you ever went in by the front door was when you went after the job, never for the rest of your time there did you ever
sully it except by cleaning it.

I had read about the Duke, how he was sociable and happy-go-lucky, but that didn’t mean a thing to me because people that are sociable and happy-go-lucky were, in my experience, only
sociable and happy-go-lucky to people of their own class. The sociability and affability got shed like a snake skin when they were dealing with what they designated the lower classes. So I thought,
maybe he is all they crack him up to be but if he knows what I was originally he won’t be the same to me. So I felt a bit nervous at the thought of the coming interview.

But I must say His Grace surprised me. He was not a bit like I expected. On the contrary he made me feel as though I was really welcome. He chatted me up over a glass of sherry. And his comments
on his ancestors were witty and often far from flattering. I mean describing some he said ‘the only sensible thing they’d ever done was to marry money’. And then he went on to
describe the things that some of the others had done which were unprintable. So I felt at my ease from the start instead of feeling that I’d got to be on the defensive all the time. By
defensive I mean I went there all tensed up, ready to be aggressive if I felt that he was going to talk down at me. I thought: ‘Never mind, just because I’ve been in domestic service,
I’m not working for him so I haven’t got to be feeling as though he’s “Sir” to me. Naturally I’ll give him his title. But he needn’t think that I’m
going to be subservient. Jack’s as good as his master.’ I know he isn’t really but then I always sort of build myself up with the fact that he is, you see.

But he took the wind right out of my sails and so did his house – it was absolutely wonderful. I still think about it now, that marvellous place. It was full of the most beautiful things,
and as he took me around I realized the deep feelings the Duke had in owning them. I’ve never felt any desire to own things, even valuable things, but I sensed that he looked at them as
something in trust from his family. He hadn’t actually bought them for himself and he was honouring that trust by his determination to keep them.

I began to realize more how one does feel towards really beautiful though inanimate things. We’ve got nothing in our house that the dustman would give us twopence for – it’s
all utility stuff, stuff you can’t really feel a pride in, and the house is just a place where we live and that’s all you can say about it. But that house was where other people had
lived and the things in it were things they’d used and loved and it needed very little imagination to visualize what it must have been like when they were used to the full, when it
wasn’t just a place where a small part was used by the family and the rest had to be thrown open for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who cared to fork out half a crown to come round and stare at.
I could visualize, having been in domestic service, the large parties and balls that were given there and the rank and nobility that attended them.

All right, they’d never done a stroke of work in their lives but I could forgive them that. I could see them under the chandeliers and walking down the staircases. And now these things
were just there for people to stare at. But it was good to feel they were all in use at one time, that they had to be kept clean by servants, that they weren’t always show pieces.

I thought what a retinue of servants they must have had below stairs to wait hand and foot on those people above. And I was glad that there were lovely houses like that even though I
didn’t admire them when I was working. I’m glad too that they are open to the public to see. It’s not the same thing reading about them as being able to visit them.

Nevertheless, I felt a kind of discomfort going round Woburn Abbey. It seemed an invasion of people’s privacy, that my strange eyes should peer at things that the Duke’s grandmothers
and great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers had 1oved, used, and handled. I was violating these things with my eyes. Maybe the Duke doesn’t feel like that but I did. That I really
shouldn’t be there – peering into private places because through force of circumstances or economic or political pressure they’re no longer able to be kept in peace. When I look
at lovely things, see them in a home and part of a home, they take on a far more personal and appealing appearance than they do in a museum. Museums are soulless places.

And then there’s the Duke of Bedford not only enjoying taking me round but talking about other visitors that he liked sharing his possessions with. He didn’t feel that fate had dealt
him a harsh blow in any way. He really seemed to enjoy the fact that he could share them and that it was by people’s half-crowns that he was able to keep the whole thing going. He thought,
it’s just one of those things and that all the stately-home owners were in the same boat and that it was far better than having to give them up altogether.

Although he spoke in a flippant way, too, about his ancestors, I don’t really think he felt flippant. Perhaps to people whom he must realize have got no ancestors they want to acknowledge
it’s just as well to be flippant, particularly about those you’ve got hanging on your walls, unless you want to hear some peculiar remarks. None of my ancestors would I ever want
hanging on walls, I can assure you. But then I don’t come from the line of stately homes.

Anyway during this personally conducted tour His Grace certainly was light-hearted. He wasn’t in any way condescending. Of course I was interested in the mechanics of throwing a stately
home open to the public – how it was kept clean? What kind of floor covering they had? And he described the kind of material which was the most hard wearing. Then he told me he had a dozen or
more people coming in from the village every day to dust – thank heaven I wasn’t one of them! I’d have been frightened to pick up anything, let alone put a duster around it.

And it isn’t only the house. The Duke of Bedford’s got a lot of outside attractions as well. You might say he’s an impresario; he believes in giving value for money. Some
owners consider they’re doing a great service by allowing the public to see how the wealthy live. For half a crown you see them in the lap of luxury then you can go back home and have a big
moan about bloated aristocrats. You’ve got ammunition for your gun, haven’t you?

At some of these stately homes you get a sort of potted history lesson while they take you round. I was glad the Duke didn’t because history as presented by people whose ancestors have
lived it on the upper level is not the same as the history you read. Give me the Industrial Revolution and the poor old down-trodden working class of the Victorian days, that’s the kind of
thing I like, not how well the wealthy lived.

Then you get other stately-home owners who lightheartedly say there’s nothing to being a lord. In fact if you read some of the remarks of the aristocracy you would think that they feel
that there’s a sort of special privilege in being a non-privileged person. It’s a kind of inverted snobbery. But the great British public love them, otherwise they’d get rid of
the House of Lords.

I think it’s an anomaly. One peer even had the nerve to say that the House of Lords was the last bulwark against democracy. What he meant by that I don’t know, but it sounds pretty
inflammatory. I reckon it’s the working class that need the aristocracy; we have got something to fight against. So keep them there and keep up the struggle. We must continue to fight for the
fact all men are equal regardless that some of course will always be more equal than others.

All the time I was going round Woburn Abbey these thoughts were going through my head. The interview went well, largely because His Grace made it all so easy. We talked in his private
sitting-room. Afterwards I happened to notice one of the oil paintings on the wall, a Rembrandt it was, the companion picture to one that had recently been auctioned and sold for three-quarters of
a million pounds.

When the Duke told me this I said, ‘And is that one worth that much?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I should think so – possibly a little more.’

So I said, ‘Well, why don’t you sell it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it looks rather cosy up there don’t you think?’

Cosy! I ask you. But after that remark I thought perhaps we’d better keep the House of Lords after all.

Then he delivered his
coup de grâce
which showed me that I’m the same sort of snob as all of them. As we got up to leave, to my amazement he said, ‘But surely
you’re staying for lunch?’ And to my absolute astonishment and fury the producer said, ‘I’m very sorry, we really haven’t time. We’ve got to get this tape to the
BBC. It goes out this evening.’

I nearly died with mortification when I heard him say this because to have been able to have gone back to my home and said to my neighbours in the course of conversation, ‘When I had lunch
with the Duke of Bedford,’ you can imagine what that would have done for me. It was no good saying, ‘The day the Duke of Bedford asked me to lunch.’ I mean, the idea that
I’d refuse! As we drove back home in silence, because I wasn’t speaking to the producer by then, I thought of the number of things that would have reminded me of the day I had lunch
with the Duke of Bedford. Then it struck me what the Duke had done for me. He showed me that in spite of all my talk about ‘them up there and us below stairs,’ if one can possibly
associate with them, one does so – which makes us all really snobs at heart, or perhaps just ordinary mortals.

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.

Praise for Margaret Powell

‘Anyone who enjoyed
Downton Abbey
or
Upstairs Downstairs
will relish this feisty memoir’

Dame Eileen Atkins

‘A nurse worked hard, but a skivvy worked harder – brought to life in this wonderful book’

Jennifer Worth, author of
Call the Midwife

‘Margaret Powell was the first person outside my family to introduce me to that world . . . where servants and their employers would live their vividly different lives
under one roof. Her memories, funny and poignant, angry and charming, haunted me until, many years later, I made my own attempts to capture those people for the camera. I certainly owe her a great
debt’

Julian Fellowes, creator of
Downton Abbey

Also by Margaret Powell