Her Ladyship's Girl

  Her Ladyship’s Girl

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS Company

  Copyright © 2014 by Anwyn Moyle and John F. McDonald

  This book is copyright under the Berne convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Anwyn Moyle and John F. McDonald to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-411-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-412-8

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and Bound in Great Britain by CPI Group UK Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  The big copper in the scullery was bubbling and boiling and steam-hot water was spilling out all over the floor. To make matters worse, the coalman had just delivered a couple of hundredweight of anthracite to the cellar and then gone and trod hump-backed through the overspill with dust-black boots and big size-twelve footprints into the kitchen for a thick slice of bread-and-dripping fresh from the frying pan.

  ‘Oh, God help us!’

  It was my first whole day as a scullery maid and I’d only gone and filled the copper up too far. Cook was shrieking with a face like a screaming hyena and I thought she was going to throw me into the big vat, along with the washing, and boil me alive. I was only sixteen and had never seen a copper before until yesterday and now it had turned on me like the wicked monster it was. Luckily for me, the London season, such as it was, had started and there was a dinner party upstairs that evening. Food and other flavoury stuff was arriving by bread-van and bicycle and dray-horse and handcart, so Cook didn’t have the time to nail me to the scullery door.

  ‘Get that water wiped up!’

  I turned off the copper and got down on my hands and knees to clean the water and the coal smears from the floor. People were fussing and flustering all round me, tutting as they wiped their boots and shoes – and I listened to all the voices floating above me. They hummed and buzzed around my head and flew into my ears and out again. Words twanged from the mouths of beefy men all a-bustle and fish-eyed boys fetching in meat and game and grayling – bakers with big hats and long loaves and round sodabreads and trifles and tipsy cakes; grocers with green vegetables and potatoes and fruit and fermented peel; milkmen rattling bottles; victuallers with port and brandy and liqueurs, and the butler bringing wines of different flush and blush up from the cellar, to let them breathe. The kitchen maids were here, there and everywhere and Cook had another part-time helper in from the outside world so she could get everything ready on time. The atmosphere in the kitchen was like bath night in Bedlam.

  Upstairs was just as jumpy – all a beehive of bluster, with parlourmaids dusting and polishing and the head butler barking orders and the smell of lavender drifting down and mingling with the odours of cooking and carbolic. Anyone would think it was 1834, not 1934 – apart from the fact that London was a much more modern place these days.

  But when I arrived yesterday afternoon, I never knew what I was letting myself in for. The slowness and small-village saunterings of home seemed another lifetime away now, even though only one day had passed. The dark sheep and smiling hills and gentle rain and narrow, winding days . . . I wanted to go back – to run back. But I couldn’t. My mother told me it would be like this in the beginning; that it would seem endless and heartbreaking and full of strangers shouting and clocks ticking and I’d want to cry. But she said I was a strong girl and well able to face the world and make it back down from its bullying. So I put away my silly self-pity and rolled up my sleeves and got on with it.

  I knew nothing about London or its society soirées. Food was short in the valleys, what with all the unemployment, and this kind of extravagance seemed sinful to me. They would start with soup of some kind and go on to soufflés and then fish and then meat with potatoes and vegetables and then pudding and then savouries like stuffed eggs and oysters and shrimps and sweetbreads and last of all the cheese and coffee. Then the men would go away for port and cigars and some serious conversation, while the women waffled on about what they were reading or the latest production in the West End or whatever scandal was doing the rounds of their social circles.

  After the disaster with the washing copper, I had to help the kitchen maids setting out the stuff Cook needed for the dinner party – sieves and spoons and forks and flour and salt and seasoning; saucepans and silver dishes and chopping boards and mixing bowls. When it was all set out on the big kitchen table, I mucked in with the maids and peeled potatoes and chopped carrots and washed the utensils as they were used and put them back in place to be used again, then washed them again and replaced them again, until it was all done and time to send the great guzzle of food upstairs to the waiting bigwigs and their wives.

  Anything perishable that was left over was put in the refrigerator, which was one of the new-fangled inventions that were available in London to those who could afford them. I wasn’t allowed a look upstairs to see the latest styles of the guests, although I would have loved to. I had to wash up the plates and pots that came back down from the banquet, some of it hardly touched after all the work that went into it.

  Cook put a lot of what came back into a bag to take home with her, but I managed to stuff a few delicacies into my mouth when she wasn’t looking. It was late when all the activity slowed down and the guests sloped off back to wherever they came from and the street outside fell silent – holding its breath.

  To say I was exhausted would be like calling the devil a dirty rascal.

  A few weeks earlier, after working in a hat shop in Maesteg for a year and walking my legs off to get there and back for 1s/6d a week wages, I decided I’d had enough of Wales and wearing out my shoes. I was sixteen and, after working in a few jobs since leaving school at fourteen, I felt all grown up like a woman of the world and not the gormless girl I really was. I’d heard stories about the bright lights of London from people who’d been down there and they told me about the West End and the East End and the North and South Ends too – and I wondered which End would suit a merch gweitio like me the most. I wouldn’t leave off about it until a friend of the family got me the job as a scullery maid, even though I didn’t know what a scullery maid was, and I couldn’t wait to get there and step out onto the Strand or the Piccadilly Circus or the Soho or the Serpentine. I could see myself shimmying through Berkeley Square with a slicked-back sweetheart on each arm and wearing an haute couture from Coco Chanel, or a cardigan jacket from Elsa Schiaparelli and a French beret by Madame V
ionnet on top of my permanent wave – styles I’d only seen in magazines on the occasional table in the Maesteg hat shop. And I knew I’d blend right in with the snazziness of it all.

  It was a long trip by train from Wales down to Paddington Station, and I had a set of written instructions how to get myself from there over to Hampstead in the high end of the city. When I emerged from the station, I was nearly knocked over by the size of everything – the sights and sounds and smells and the noise of the traffic and the thickness of the air and the movement coming from all quarters. I’d never seen anything like this before and I was all excited. There were street traders peddling fruit and vegetables and roasted chestnuts and baked potatoes and barrow boys and horse-drawn drays with barrels of beer and newspaper boys calling from street corners and trams and trolleys and big red buses and traffic tooting and people with banners and others with billboards all shouting about something or other.

  It was a new world, full of energy and colour and sunny skies and shop windows and nervousness and I thought it would swallow me up – that I’d sink down into the soft wonder of it and never be seen again.

  When I got my breath back, I found a red double-decker bus that took me through places with London-sounding names, like Marylebone and Maida Vale, and I got off at Hampstead and followed the written directions to a big house near the huge heath. It was a quiet street, after the madness of the earlier city, and I walked up and knocked on the front door. A snooty-looking man wearing a dark suit answered it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Anwyn, the new scullery maid.’

  ‘Downstairs.’

  Then he slammed the door in my face. I looked around and saw a flight of stone steps behind some black railings, leading down to a basement at the side of the house. I hesitated at the top, looking into the lowness of it, after all the earlier expectation. Then I set my foot on the first step and went down. It was half past three in the afternoon and I was ready for a cup of tea and a little lie-down and a chance to catch my breath. But who did I think I was, the Queen of Caerphilly?

  A maid in an apron answered the basement door and took me through to the kitchen to see the cook. She grunted some kind of greeting and I was put to work without even having a chance to get my coat off – immediately elbows-deep in a big sink full to overflowing with pots and pans and skillets and stewbowls. They must have been there waiting for me for a week or more because the crud was crusted to them and the water was barely lukewarm. Cook gave me a steel wool pad with some kind of soap inside and I had to scrub like a sailor to get all the utensils clean. My hands weren’t used to this kind of work and they were soon red raw. It was after seven when I finished and in all that time not a single person spoke a civil word to me. The cook came back in while I was sitting at the table and she sprawled herself across the chair opposite. She was a big, burly woman and her face looked like a well-slapped baboon’s behind.

  ‘Right! Now you’ve had an easy start, let’s get your work sorted out so you know what’s expected.’

  She gave me a uniform to wear – not a full uniform, just a grey dress and a white apron and lace cap to cover my hair – and a spare one of each.

  ‘You’ll have to wash them every other night to have them ready for the next day.’

  She then recited the litany of my duties as a scullery maid – cleaning the stove and raking the grates and doing the washing and helping in the kitchen and scrubbing floors and polishing the steps and beating the carpets. My head was going as numb as a mangle in a frozen field – where did she think we were, Bleak House? Didn’t she know those days were over? I stopped listening, because my eyes were closing in my head from the tiredness and I wondered if anyone else was expected to do any work in this place besides me. She gave me some bread and cheese and a cup of milk and then I was allowed to go to my bed. I would have preferred a cup of tea like a civilised person and the cheese and bread tasted like leftovers and I wondered if that’s all I’d ever be given to eat – like a lost dog.

  ‘Could I not have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Tea?’

  Her face looked even more baboon-like than before and she turned into Mister Bumble the Beadle from the orphanage in Oliver Twist.

  ‘What sort of an impudent girl are you?’

  ‘I’m not a girl, I’m nearly seventeen.’

  Apparently, scullery maids were normally no older than fourteen when they started and I was long-in-the-tooth at sixteen. But I was still a skivvy.

  ‘And don’t you forget it!’

  I could tell we weren’t going to get along.

  When I finally got to my room, which was up four flights of back stairs, right at the top of the house, I found out I was sharing with an Irish colleen called Kathleen. Like me, she was nearly seventeen and had been there for two years and it was her job I was taking over, on account of her being made up to be a parlourmaid. She was a pleasant enough girl and made me feel as welcome as was possible in the little room with two single beds and no heating. The mattresses were thin and thrown on top of iron-sprung beds and we were covered over with two blankets apiece. I couldn’t keep my eyes open to chat with Kathleen and find out more about the Bumble Beadle like I wanted to – and soon the soft little paws of sleep came creeping.

  I’d only been asleep for five minutes when I was woken again by a tap-tapping on the door. I got out of the thin bed and rubbed the sleep into my eyes and yawned so wide I nearly got lockjaw. There was a young lad of about my age outside and he said his name was Bart, which was short for Bartholomew – but everybody called him Brat. Kathleen was still asleep in the other bed and curled up like a child.

  ‘What time is it, Brat?’

  ‘Five o’clock.’

  ‘Is it that late?’

  ‘In the morning.’

  ‘Lord save us, it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘You don’t want to be late on your first day. It’s going to be a very busy one.’

  An early sun struck the windowpane a glancing blow and poured a gentle glow into the room through a gap in the curtains. It melted over the walls and crept like velvet-silk across the floor. I rinsed my face and under my arms in tepid water in the small washroom on our floor, got into one of the skivvy uniforms that Cook had given me, and made my way down the back stairs, the same way as I came up the night before. The basement was big, with rooms to the left and right of a long hall – the kitchen and the scullery and storerooms for food and coal and a cellar for wine. The gardener went home every day like Cook and none of the live-in maids were yet stirring. I was trying to remember what I was supposed to do first, because there was no one else up to ask and Brat had disappeared somewhere into thin air, like Ariel.

  All right, I said to myself, first rake out the range and light the fire ready for Cook. Put the kettle on and get the big copper going. That was a task in itself! I made myself a cup of tea when the water boiled and then went for a mooch around while everyone else was still snoring. There wasn’t much to see in the basement, so I sneaked upstairs. Mirrors and paintings lined the walls and there was a chandelier, the likes of which I’d never seen before, in the hallway. There were rooms here and there and everywhere and, I thought, surely they couldn’t fit so many into the one house? It didn’t look that big from the outside. I didn’t know what they were all used for, or why they were needed for only four people.

  The floors were covered with thick rich carpets and the windows hung with velvet curtains and the furniture looked like it had come from a prince’s palace. There were enough books to fill fifty libraries. I was fond of reading when I was at school – I liked Alexander Carmichael and D. H. Lawrence and the Brothers Grimm and Shakespeare – but I’d never seen as many books as this. I wondered if they’d all been read, or if they were just on the shelves for show.

  It was summertime, so they didn’t have that many fires burning in the house, but I came across Kathleen raking out and lighting a fire to take the morning chill off for the family when they
got out of their beds.

  ‘Morning, Kathleen.’

  ‘Anwyn, what are you doing up here?’

  ‘Mooching around.’

  ‘You better get back down before Cook catches you.’

  When I went back, the kitchen maids were there and I helped them with the breakfasts. I had a toasted bun and another cup of tea before Cook arrived – I didn’t dare ask her for anything again, in case the Beadle marched me off to the oakum room with a bowl of fly-infested gruel. She came in at about half past eight and soon had me on my knees scrubbing the floors and brushing the stairs and, despite her dour disposition, I stayed cheerful and the morning moved along before I had time to feel sorry for myself. I was in the scullery seeing if the copper was working and starting the wash, when Cook came and called me out in an angry voice. I’d only forgotten to red-polish the front steps and she gave me a shrieking that the whole house must have heard because there would be a lot of guests coming later that day and it wouldn’t do at all for the steps to be scruffy.

  ‘See to it straight away!’

  So I did.

  That’s when I went back downstairs and found the copper boiling over and I’ve already told you about the rest of that day.

  Next morning, Bart the Brat woke me at five o’clock again and got me out of the bed where I’d been so safe and sound. I didn’t see much of the other servants during that first day, because everything was so manic and full of mayhem. I didn’t know who was who or what they did, except for Irish Kathleen. Bart said it would be quieter today after having been thrown in at the deep end yesterday, and I’d be able to get my bearings a bit better and settle in to service as a skivvy. He called me the same as Cook did, but I don’t think he meant any insult by it like she did – it was what scullery maids were known as.

  The rest of the day passed without a boiling-over or a bungle on my part and I was starving half to death by dinner-time, which was at seven o’clock in the evening for us servants. Cook was gone home from half past six and it was the first chance I had to get to know the other inmates – that’s how it seemed to me, like we were prisoners in a private workhouse.