Diamonds at Dinner (11 page)

‘When we arrive in London,' my mistress continued, ‘I will need you to go to the bank and draw out my jewels. Lady Suffield's chauffeur will accompany you and you must sign a paper to say you have received them. You will take care of them, won't you? They are terribly valuable.'

Needless to say, that got my heart beating faster all over again. I'd never been to the big city and, as far as I was concerned, all I knew about London came from newsreels and gangster movies. Yet here I was being trusted to withdraw goodness-knows-how valuable items. What if I got robbed? Or dropped something? It was one thing cleaning and polishing Milady's jewels here at Croome but at least they never left the four solid walls of her boudoir while I was responsible for them. It was quite a different matter to carry a King's ransom across London – and on the day of the Coronation itself to boot. ‘Hilda, my girl, this is quite a pickle you've got yourself into,' was the thought running through my mind. ‘But you're just going to have to get your chin up, put your best foot forward and not let anyone down.'

Just as the Countess had said, on the morning before the Coronation a big Black Bentley – much grander than the Coventry's Standard 20 – swept up the driveway to the front of the Court and the Earl, his wife and I were seated in the back. Somehow the succession of suitcases containing their clothes was stowed away in the boot and,
with a purr of its powerful engine, the car set off for London. I was terribly excited but it wouldn't have done to have shown this, so I sat demurely, speaking only when spoken to and generally trying to be as invisible as was possible in the confined space.

The 10th Earl had done away with the expense of maintaining a London address. But Lady Suffield was plainly less pressed financially, for her house turned out to be one of those great Georgian places in one of the nobbiest streets in London. As was usual, the servants' entrance was down a steep flight of steps underneath the main front door. I made my way down them, praying that I wouldn't come a cropper again, while struggling with my suitcase. A footman took the Earl and Countess's luggage: at least I didn't have to lug them inside as well.

I was a bit surprised to find that the room I was allocated was tiny and rather poky – the difference, I supposed, between living in the crowded terraces of London, rather than the space and grandeur that I had become used to. And I didn't find Her Ladyship's servants noticeably friendly. But nothing could spoil the tremendous thrill I felt at what was to happen on the morrow. I had been excused my normal morning duties of bringing tea and running my mistress's bath. Instead, I was instructed to be outside the servants' entrance at 9am sharp, respectably attired in hat, coat and gloves. At the
appointed hour I ensured my modest little hat was pinned to my hair and that the seams of my stockings were perfectly straight. On the dot of nine, Lady Suffield's chauffeur appeared at the wheel of the great Bentley. It felt very strange to be sat in the back just like one of the gentry, and there was a little glass window between the driver and me, which rather put paid to any conversation.

Off we went through the streets of the capital. On every pavement and at every corner the entire population of London seemed to have come out and be waiting for a glimpse of someone – anyone – who was part of the procession. I sunk down into my seat, not wanting anyone to think that inside the black Bentley there was a person to stare at and cheer.

I couldn't tell you where the bank was – or even what its name was. The chauffeur escorted me into a big open hall that seemed as hushed and as reverential as a church. I barely spoke – and when I did, it was in a whisper – as I signed the papers to collect the Countess's jewels. And when I saw what was written on the bottom of the document – the value of the items in my care was £20,000 (£2 million at today's prices) – I was so terrified I could barely breathe. I couldn't wait to get back to the sanctuary of the Bentley and I didn't dare move a muscle again until I had handed over the whole lot to my mistress.

As we laid them out, one by one, my eyes must have
opened wider and wider. These were not merely beautiful jewels – the like of which I had never seen – but they looked like something out of a storybook. There was even a slender diamond tiara sparkling in the morning light. I knew I would have a lot to tell Mum ad Dad in that day's letter home. It took nearly two full hours to prepare my mistress and, when we were finished and she joined His Lordship on the steps of Lady Suffield's house, I could have burst with pride. I had never seen anyone look so glamorous, so regal and so refined, and I felt truly privileged to have played my part.

Because the robes were so cumbersome and the risk of them being crushed or creased so great, I was to ride in the Bentley to Westminster Abbey with the Coventrys. Once again I drove through the streets of London and heard the cheers of the crowd, saw the sea of little paper flags being waved and had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. ‘This is a long way from Number 5, Vine Street, Stamford, Hilda Mary Mulley,' I thought. ‘A very long way indeed and no mistake.'

As the car pulled up at the Abbey, I jumped out, ready to assist Milady and catch the back of her robe as she stepped on to the pavement. And then she and His Lordship walked calmly past the wildly cheering throng and into the cool darkness of the historic building.

‘Hop back in sharpish, please, miss,' the chauffeur said.
‘We need to scarper from here before we block the place up solid. And if we get a bit of a move on, we can be back in time to watch the procession.' He was as good as his word: I got back to Lady Suffield's residence in time to join a crowd of her servants perching precariously on the edge of the house's top-floor windows and straining to catch a glimpse of the magnificent pageantry as it paraded past our very eyes.

‘Not many people get such a bird-eye's view of something so important,' I told myself. ‘You'll remember this for the rest of your life.' And I'm pleased to say that I was not wrong.

That evening all of the servants crowded round the wireless set to witness another first: King George VI was making an address to the nation on the BBC.

I was astonished as I sat there listening to the King. Not just because it felt like he was talking directly to me – or at least to the whole country, which included me – but because his speech seemed awfully slow and laboured. His
brother's abdication address hadn't sounded like this: maybe that's because he wasn't meant to be King and this, today, is what a real monarch sounds like. I couldn't have known then that King George had a terrible stammer and that just getting the words out past his lifelong speech impediment was a truly heroic battle for a man who was just as shy as me.

Well, at that we did cheer. Partly out of loyalty to our country and our King; partly out of gratitude that he had finally got the words out. And then he continued with two sentences that filled me – filled all of us – with a pride in being British, which, had we but known it, we would need to rely on before too many years had passed. ‘To many millions the Crown is a symbol of unity. By the grace of
God and by the will of the free peoples of the British Commonwealth, I have assumed that Crown.'

Because there were clouds gathering on the horizon that spring day in 1937. Clouds that would soon burst and wash away the last traces of the old, traditional British life. And with it, the life I had come to know.

1
938 began much in the same way as the previous year. The first dark shadow on my life appeared via the unusual event of a telephone call for me at Croome Court. The telephone in the servants' quarters was strictly under the control of Mr Latter. The ungainly, stick-like instrument sat outside his room in the long echoing corridor and all of us – whether head servant or housemaid – knew that only he could grant the privilege of making or receiving a call. Whether because of my station in the hierarchy or whether from his habitual kindness, knowing that unlike the rest of the staff I was a long way from home, Mr Latter did let me use the telephone to speak with Mum and Dad. Of course, they didn't possess one themselves but an arrangement had been reached whereby I would place a call to Aunt Beat at
the Crown Hotel and she would nip out to bring my parents to the receiver.

But an unscheduled phone call for me was distinctly rare and, from the moment Mr Latter came to find me, I knew that it couldn't be good news. Growing up in Stamford my best friend had been a girl called Mary Russell: we had gone to school together and played together and we were inseparable right up until the time I left to go into service. While I was away we would write to each other and she told me that she had a boyfriend who had asked for her hand in marriage. I was thrilled – she was the first person I knew and loved to be engaged.

It was my Dad on the phone. ‘Molly,' he said (like all my family, he still called me by my childhood nickname), ‘do you think Her Ladyship would give you leave to come home for a few days? There's been an accident.'

Even as I think about this now, my eyes fill with tears and my mind wonders at the appalling stroke of ill luck – quite literally as it turned out – which befell my closest friend. It's the sort of random accident that today might make headlines in your local paper or an item on the local news: Mary Russell had been electrocuted in the bath.

It seemed that she had been having a bath when a terrible and violent electrical storm landed right on top of Stamford. Amid ear-piercing peals of thunder, a bolt of lightning had
hit her house and had somehow ended up earthing itself on her bath water. She had been killed instantly.

I can't remember what I said to Dad, or even if I was capable of saying anything. Big sobbing tears seemed to belch out from my slight frame and I shook with the pain of them. Mr Latter must have wondered what this terrible news was and I think he took the phone from me, told Dad that he was see to it I placed a call back shortly and sat me down in his room. Winnie probably brought me a cup of tea – a big steaming cup of tea, stirred stiff with sugars was the ground state of first aid in those days – though I don't remember drinking it. And the more I thought about poor Mary, the more I sobbed and the more Mr Latter grew alarmed.

He must have slipped away and found the Countess at some point because a little while later he returned to tell me that I was to have a few days off immediately and that I must make arrangements to go home to Stamford so that I could be at the funeral and (just as importantly) so Mum and Dad could take care of me.

‘But what about Her Ladyship?' I asked. ‘What will she do and who will take care of her?'

‘Do not concern yourself with that, Miss Mulley,' Mr Latter told me kindly and calmly. ‘All will be taken care of, and the most important thing is to get you home directly.'

Well, I was taken aback: I'd never heard of any of the
servants at Croome being given time off. We weren't even given our birthdays off and, although we would have been allowed to attend a family funeral, Mary wasn't a relative, let alone a close one and, no matter how cut up I was, in the normal scheme of things I would have been expected to take it on the chin and carry on. As things turned out, I wasn't actually given time off: my mistress had merely agreed for me to take a few days of my one week's holiday a little early. Still, at least she let me go.

I was shaken by Mary's death: it was my first encounter with the passing of someone I knew and cared about and it hit me hard. Even when I returned to the Court I couldn't shake the feeling that we were somehow all living under a curse – or at least were going through a spell of truly rotten luck.

The misfortune carried on. My romance with Roland – or Roll as he was to me now that I knew him much better – had continued, although we had to be very careful about keeping it under the strictest of wraps, at least from the Countess. Mr Latter, of course, spotted the signs and was very good about keeping mum, but he did let me know that, if Her Ladyship found out, it would not go well for me.

‘You know the rules, Miss Mulley. Fraternisation between the servants is not permitted at Croome. And whilst you are young and I have no wish to be, as you might say, a wet blanket, you must know that, if the veil of
discretion ever slips and word reaches the Countess, I should not, I fear, be able to help you.'

But I was young and Roland and I were falling in love. I think our romance had really started during those times he drove me to Worcester for my hairdressing course and, the more we had got to know one another, the more it seemed silly to deny our feelings. We began not just to look forward to our Sunday lunches at his parents' home but to feel they were an essential part of our lives.

I suppose it was inevitable – even without the run of bad luck that seemed to have dogged the lives of everyone at the Court – that we would be found out sooner or later. But I don't think either of us could have imagined the dramatic way our secret would be exposed.

Our Sunday jaunts to Severn Stoke always followed the same routine. After church Roland would fetch his big leather coat and his motorcycle and wait for me a little way off from the house. We had grown used to meeting secretly in the Temple and the Rotunda (my early hopes for their romantic potential had been realised!) and it was easy to find a place to rendezvous in the vast Croome estate. At the start of the year Roland had bought a leather coat for me to wear while clutching on to him on the pillion. And, as it happened, it was a good job he did – though I wish we'd had helmets as well.

One Sunday just like any other we met up, set off and
were puttering along happily with nothing more on our minds than the prospect of a big nourishing lunch and an afternoon of walking hand in hand through the fields. The road that leads into Severn Stoke had – and has to this day – a very sharp hairpin bend, just beside the pub. As we turned the corner, rumbling along at a decent lick, we saw a beer lorry parked sideways across the entire width of the road. There was no chance of braking and no chance of going round it: without a shadow of doubt we were heading straight for its middle.

Somehow – I don't know to this day how he did it – Roland managed to slide the bike over and we slipped sidewise underneath the lorry and shot out the other side. But we didn't emerge unscathed: as the motorbike hit the ground, we were dragged along on our backs and sides, the rough road surface tearing into us with a vengeance. When we came to rest in a ditch on the other side our leather coats were in taters – and Roland had broken several bones.

People poured out of the surrounding cottages and rushed to our aid. The good news was that we were alive: the less good news was that many of those who were patching up our wounds worked at the Court. There was, we realised glumly, no chance of keeping our romance secret any longer.

Roland was more seriously injured than I and had to be excused his duties until he mended. As for me, it was time to face the music. The next morning I took Milady her
morning cup of tea, knowing that she couldn't fail to notice the very visible evidence of my accident.

‘Gracious, Mulley, what have you been up to? You look like you've been in the wars!'

I started to stammer out an explanation, involving Roland's parents, the Sunday lunch and the ill-fated motorbike journey. ‘Here it comes,' I thought. ‘You'll be on the next train to Stamford, Hilda Mulley, and serve you right.' But it didn't turn out like that at all. There was – I swear it – a twinkle in my mistress's eye.

‘Ah, yes – the dashing chauffeur. Someone rather close to your heart, I think, Mulley. Well, do tell him to be a little more careful with you next time, please. I should not like to lose you now that you are so good at your duties.'

I couldn't believe my ears: the Countess had known all along that I was being romanced by the family chauffeur! And what's more, she didn't seem to mind – or, at least, didn't mind as long as it didn't stop me attending to her. I wasn't going to get the sack after all. Neither, by the sound of it, was Roland. I couldn't wait to tell him what a lucky escape we'd had all round!

When I look back at this – and at other aspects of life at Croome – I realise that, in many ways, the Earl and the Countess were very modern in their thinking. This was to be seen in little things – the fact that Roland didn't have to wear a traditional chauffeur's uniform or the care with
which they ensured that we were kept warm in the depths of winter at the Court – as well as the much more surprising moments, such as Milady's acceptance of the love affair between two of her servants. When I compare this to the accounts of life at other great houses – which I would hear from visiting staff or when we, in turn, went to stay in the mansion's of other gentry – I realise how fortunate we were. The 10th Earl had plainly decided to take up where his grandfather had left off and to win the affection of those who served the family by mixing firmness with kindness.

But then, too, I wonder if there wasn't also a bit of the cold blasts of a wind from the world outside that had crept into Croome Court and which the master and my mistress had heeded. For, as 1938 wore on, the clouds began to darken over England and perhaps the aristocracy knew that their time was coming to an end.

As the months of 1938 wore on, the news coming from Europe grew ever more disturbing. We read it every day in the newspapers: His Lordship took
The Times
and every morning Mr Latter would iron this carefully so as to ensure that the Earl had a pristine paper, with no folds or creases, to open after his breakfast. By the end of the day this, along with any other newspapers which the household might have ordered, had made its way down to the servants' quarters. And each day the news seemed worse and the clouds of war that had hung in the air for so long grew darker.

In March Hitler had marched German troops – Nazi troops, as we had learned to call them – into neighbouring Austria. Five months later came the first official confirmation that he was intent on persecuting all Jews living inside the greater German borders, ordering that they must now add a Jewish first name to their existing names – for ‘ease of identification', it was said.

Opinion in England was divided and the servants' quarters were no different to anywhere else in the country. Some said that Hitler was only restoring pride in the German nation after the harsh conditions imposed on it at the end of the Great War. Others saw in him a dark and dangerous figure who was slowly dragging the world towards a new war. But there was also a strain of thought that this was all happening a long way away and that, anyway, Hitler looked a funny little man, what with his comic toothbrush moustache and all that swaggering about in absurd uniforms.

Perhaps its seems odd now, with the benefit of knowing what followed and the terrible carnage the Nazis wreaked on their own people, on the Jews and on the world, but England had its fascists too – and people turned out to listen to them. The most prominent was Sir Oswald Mosley and he was as aristocratic as the Coventrys. He was the sixth baronet Mosley – a baronet, for those of you who haven't been immersed in the various layers of the gentry as I was at Croome, is the holder of an hereditary peerage awarded by
the King himself. Mosley was young, good looking and as haughty and imperious as any aristocrat could be. His father was a cousin (once removed) of the new Queen and he had been in and out of governments of various political hues by the time he formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932.

Mosley's followers were – to my mind and that of many of my fellow servants – a pretty bad lot: they were a motley crew of the worst type of aristocrat and groups of violent thugs, who wore a black uniform and had a nasty habit of beating up anyone who didn't conform to their idea of what Englishmen should be. If you've seen the series of
Upstairs Downstairs
set in the 1930s, you will have seen that the chauffeur was an active blackshirt. Well, I can tell you that nothing would have persuaded our chauffeur – or ‘my Roland' as I now thought of him – to be part of anything so obviously nasty as Mosley's fascists. And if truth be told, I don't think the Earl would have allowed it: politics wasn't exactly forbidden at Croome and, provided our opinions and loyalties – whatever they might be – stayed below stairs and didn't disturb the smooth running of the Coventrys' lives, we were pretty much free to think what we liked. But I'm as sure as I can be that, had one of the male servants started marching about in a silly black uniform on his days off, Mr Latter would have come down on him like a ton of bricks.

Mosley himself stomped up and down the country holding melodramatic mass meetings in a pale imitation of
his hero, Adolf Hitler. He turned up in Worcester several times in the years that I was at Croome, holding big – and well-attended – events, in which he shouted and postured and his bully boys in black kept order in the most brutal of ways. Not a single one of the staff at Croome went to hear him, I'm proud to say. And whilst it would have been common in earlier years for a baronet like Mosley to stay at the house of one of his fellow aristocrats, he never crossed the threshold at Croome. I'm not sure that we would have been able to hold our tongues if he had!