Her Ladyship's Girl Read online

  ‘Brynn! Where are you?’

  He struck a match and I could see his stupid face grinning at me. I took a swing at him with my handbag and the light went out. He lit another match.

  ‘Help me with the bike, Anwyn. I think it’s broke.’

  We got back out onto the road with a lot of difficulty and hair-snagging and skin-scratching through the hedge. The front wheel of the bicycle was buckled and the chain was broken. We had to walk the final mile to Tredegar House.

  By the time we got back it was getting on for midnight and I was cold and tired and, even though he apologised every step of the way and sniggered a bit when he looked at the state of me, I never wanted to set eyes on Brynn again. He only went and told his friends about the incident and that made them worse than ever. They were unmerciful in their teasing when I went out with the dog food, with comments like,‘Did you enjoy your flying lesson, Anwyn?’ and ‘Find any truffles when you were rooting in the dirt?’ and singing that song, ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’. Brynn kept pestering me to go out with him again and I was reaching the very limit of my patience when the London season opened up again and I was glad to leave Tredegar House.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Morgan family had a town house in Egerton Crescent, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which wasn’t far from Belgravia, and I travelled down there with some of the other servants at the beginning of April, after Cheltenham. But I was sick of being in service and wanted to do something else with my life. So, one day when I was sent out on an errand, I sneaked round to the tea shop to see how Lucy was. Hannah was behind the counter.

  ‘Lucy doesn’t work here no more, Anwyn.’

  ‘Oh no, what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. She got a job working in a pub, the pay was better and she needed it to help her family.’

  The pub was called the Duke’s Head and it was located in Tooley Street, near London Bridge. It was close to Bermondsey where Lucy’s family lived and easier and cheaper for her to travel to and fro. I had to get back to Egerton Crescent that day but, as soon as I got my first second Sunday off, I ventured down there.

  The pub was a spit-and-sawdust establishment, full of rough-looking dockers on that Sunday lunchtime when I walked in in my best frock and faithful green hat. There wasn’t another woman in the big circular bar and everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look at me. I couldn’t see Lucy anywhere, but there was a big-bosomed lady very busy behind the bar with her peroxide-blonde hair falling into her eyes from rushing about like a redshank.

  ‘Lookin’ for someone, love?’

  ‘Yes . . . Lucy.’

  ‘Lucy’s on this evening. Seven o’clock.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  I was about to leave when she called after me.

  ‘Wait!’

  I turned round.

  ‘You want to earn a couple of shillings, love?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Then get behind this bar with me.’

  Her name was Pearl and she managed the pub for the Ind Coope Brewery. She was short-staffed that Sunday because her regular barmaid hadn’t turned up and, even though I knew nothing about barwork, I was happy to try anything once. I collected and washed the glasses and tankards and jugs for her in a big steel sink, like I used to do when I had my first part-time job, and I saw to the few ladies who were hidden away in the little snug bar. I carried beer over to tables and swept up spillages and broken glass and opened bottles and even pulled a pint or two. The Sunday lunchtime shift was only from 12:00 noon till 2:30 p.m. and it was soon over. When Pearl called time and rang the bell, I helped her clear the pub by coaxing those who didn’t want to go instead of being belligerent. It worked with the men and, once the doors were locked, we cleared up and washed and dried the glasses. Then we sat at a table together and had a couple of glasses of sweet sherry.

  I told her I was in service as a kitchen maid, but wanted to get out and be more independent.

  ‘A kitchen maid . . . can you cook?’

  ‘As good as anyone.’

  Now, very few pubs in London sold hot food back in 1937. Most of them only did a few biscuits or a packet of Smith’s potato crisps with a pinch of salt in a twist of blue paper. Otherwise, the cockle-and-mussel man came round with his wicker basket on Sundays and that was your lot. But there were places in the West End that were originally coaching inns and taverns and they still served hot, gamey food to their customers. Trade was slow in the 1930s and Pearl wanted the Duke’s Head to imitate some of the posh places up West, to give her an edge over the competition. But she didn’t want to serve game pie or loin of venison; she thought more working-class grub like mashed spuds and mutton casserole would go down better in Bermondsey.

  ‘What d’you think about that idea, Anwyn?’

  ‘Will people have the money to spend on food?’

  ‘We’d do it cheap, cheaper than they could do it themselves. And we get a lot of tourists round here, being so close to Tower Bridge. Might as well take a bit of their money.’

  ‘We could advertise it outside . . . Traditional English Food.’

  ‘Good girl! You got the idea.’

  She offered me a job as a kitchen/barmaid, which meant I’d have to cook the food at peak times and help out behind the bar if I wasn’t busy. The pay was six shillings a week, which wasn’t as much as I had got as a lady’s maid, but it was better than the three shillings and sixpence I was getting in the kitchen.

  ‘I’d like to take the job, but I have nowhere to live.’

  Pearl looked me up and down for a few moments, probably sizing me up to see if I’d be trouble or not.

  ‘We have rooms upstairs that we rent out. You can have one of them and I’ll take a shilling a week from your wages for it.’

  That sounded fair to me. And Lucy worked here, so I’d have a friend to show me all the ropes and rituals and regulations.

  ‘When can you start, Anwyn?’

  ‘I’ll have to give a week’s notice.’

  And so it was arranged that I’d leave my life in service and enter the new world of barwork. Mrs Bowen was sad to see me go because she said I was a good worker and I’d be hard to replace. But on Monday 19 April 1937, I left Egerton Crescent with my suitcase and travelled east on the number 38 tram to London Bridge, then walked the rest of the way to the Duke’s Head in Tooley Street.

  Opening hours were 12:00 till 2:30 p.m. and then from 6:30 p.m. till 10:00 p.m. But I had to start preparing lunchtime food at 10:00 a.m. for it to be ready when the doors opened at noon. In the evening, not many of the local workers could afford to eat in the pub and I only had to cook if something was especially requested – otherwise, I served behind the bar with Lucy. Pearl preferred barmaids to barmen, because she said the mostly male customers were more amenable to them and they could calm a drunken argument without antagonising the antagonists. But she employed a big Irish cellarman called Kevin who could lay into them with a cudgel if things got too far out of hand.

  Lucy was delighted to see me again on that first Monday, and even more so when I told her I’d be working there and living upstairs.

  ‘We’ll have a right old time together, Anwyn.’

  The best thing about working in a pub was that I didn’t start till mid-morning and I got to have a lie-in every day, which was a luxury I’d never known before in my time-regulated life. The room upstairs was cosy enough and there was a small communal bathroom that was used by all the paying, staying guests, whether male or female, and I had to be careful and make sure the door was locked when doing my ablutions in the morning, for fear some man might walk in and catch me in the nippy nude. The other drawback of a shared bathroom was getting in there after some heavy drinker who’d had sixteen pints of Guinness the night before – you’d need to wear a gas mask after some of them and I was often convinced that something nasty had crawled up their bums and died inside their stomachs.

  Apart from that, it was a good
enough life. The cooking side wasn’t much because none of the working-class patrons could afford pub-grub, as Pearl called it, and we sold mainly to tourists who saw our sign and wandered in off the streets after visiting the Tower of London and thought Fagin and the Artful Dodger still frequented the cobbled streets south of the river. We sold traditional fare that was quick to prepare and didn’t take much cooking. Things like scalloped oysters from the Thames estuary and five-minute cabbage and boiled bacon and mashed potatoes and roast mutton and shepherd’s pie.

  We also tried to compete with the pie’n’ mash shops, offering eel pie, with eels from the Thames baked in a pastry crust, or minced beef and cold water pastry pie. Both served with cheap mashed potato spread round one side of the plate and eel liquor on the other, which was made from parsley and the water off the stewed eel. The parsley gave it its green colour and everybody loved it – especially the way I made it, with a sprinkle of cornflour for thickness – one of the little tricks I picked up in the big houses. We sold pickled beets and Campbell’s tinned soups and corned beef hash and sardines and sandwiches. For the ladies we had Macfarlane Lang rich tea biscuits and Granola digestives and the thinly sliced sautéed potato chips that I’d learned to cook at Tredegar, a bowl of which were quite a hit with a glass of Dubonnet and a Walters Medium Navy Cut cigarette.

  Behind the bar, we sold Martell brandy and Haig Scotch and Jameson Irish and Wood’s Old Navy Rum that looked and smelled like tar, and Beefeater London Dry Gin from the nearby Lambeth distillery. The beers included Manns Brown Ale and Bass Stout and Double Allbright Barley Wine and Courage Old English and Watney’s Pale and Guinness and Oatmeal Stout for the ladies and Rose’s Nut Brown and Brandon’s Rustic and Hammerton’s India Pale Ale. Some were on the pumps and others in bottles, depending on preference, and Kevin looked after the cellar and ran the pipes through and kept the lines clean and the ruffians in check with his cudgel. Part of my job as last girl in was to light the fires and keep them tended, which I was well used to. I had to clean the taps and the bar areas – both the big bar and the snug – wipe down the tables and polish the mirrors and the windows and keep everything spick and span. A cleaning woman came in every day to scrub the toilets and sweep and spread sawdust in the big bar and wash out the salt-slimy spittoons in a trough in the cobbled yard.

  The décor in the Duke’s Head was uncompromisingly Victorian, with grained woodwork and bareboard floors and ornamental mirrors behind the bar and tables covered in green linoleum. Coarse voices and columns of cigarette smoke mixed with the fumes of the beer and the chinking of the glasses and the rattle of the cash register. In the evenings, the men played bar billiards and darts and shove ha’penny and pitch penny. On a Sunday lunchtime there’d be the buzz of earnest conversation about things like the situation in Europe and the chances of another war, how the whole system needed a revolution to make it right and, on a Saturday night, there’d be singsongs and knees-ups and Pearl kept a piano in one of the corners for anyone who had the inclination to play it.

  Pearl was the perfect landlady – she welcomed each and every customer in the same big-busted way. She was quick-witted and flirty with the more frisky fellows and opinionated and knowledgeable with those who might want a debate. She could throw a dart as straight as any man and could sink six pints of best bitter in under an hour. She was good with the women too, able to handle all their moods and humours, from the poorest dockworker’s wife to the streetwalking strumpet or the airs-and-graces tourist with her department store furs and artificial pearls. She served an honest measure and, under the counter, she kept jugs of rough cider that came in from Essex, which she sold at thruppence a pint. A saucepan always stood by one of the fires for the old-timers to mull their ale, and there was always a wink and an extra measure for the visiting policeman or campaigning politician.

  Spring turned to summer and Lucy and I became the most inseparable of friends. On our days off, we’d go sightseeing round London – to the National Gallery and Madame Tussaud’s and the Serpentine and Oxford Street and Battersea Park. Whenever we could get the time off from the pub in the evenings, we went dancing at the Palais or the Astoria or the Bag o’ Nails in Soho. I sent my mother half-a-crown from the five shillings I had left every week after paying the rent and I was loving life as an approaching twenty-year-old. I got on well with Pearl and Kevin and the other barmaids I crossed paths with from time to time. The customers liked me and I liked them. They were plain people, not rarefied and rude like the toffs in their big houses and country estates – honest working people who came in the pub to take a little break from their hard and heavy lives. And I thought to myself, if the rich would only accept a little bit less, a bit they wouldn’t even miss, then these people could have a little bit more – a bit that would mean the difference between life and death to some of them. But I was young back then, and still full of naive vitality and joie de vivre.

  As 1937 went on, the mood in the pub became more sombre. Now all the talk was about Europe and what Germany was doing. The Civil War was still raging in Spain and more and more people were convinced there was going to be another Great War as well. And I thought, oh no, not so soon after the last one! Scarcely twenty years later and the country still hadn’t recovered, and now they were rattling the bayonets again. As well read as I was, I didn’t really understand everything that was going on. I listened to the talk about the terrible hardship that was caused by the first Great War, and the Wall Street crash had rippled itself across the Atlantic and every country in Europe was feeling the effects – though not so severely here in Britain, because we didn’t experience the full belt of the roaring twenties boom that went before it. I heard the men talking in the pub, saying how democracy was being undermined by dictators who promised the people a better way of life, and Germany, Italy and Russia had gone in for systems of government that violently put down all opposition. Some were communists who supported Stalin, but others said Russian peasants were dying in the streets, and the arguments could get heated, until Kevin came with his cudgel and calmed them down. Germany, worst hit by the depression because of the reparations it had to pay for the Great War, fell into the hands of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Italy was being run by the Fascists, led by Mussolini and, along with Germany, re-arming in a big way and many people were afraid that war would be inevitable. But others said it was all blather and the Bosche wouldn’t start up again for fear they’d get another pasting, like the last time.

  This was the kind of conversation I’d hear every day in the Duke’s Head and, although I listened to that talk, which swung from brooding despondency to careless self-deception, life in London was still gay for a girl like me. I went dancing with Lucy and exploring the sights and sounds of the city and kept myself at arm’s length from the men who came mooching round, looking for what they could get.

  It was September when the fight happened – a Saturday night. The pub was crowded when a group of Oswald Mosley’s men came in. Like I said, many of the dockers were Communists and a heated argument started about Spain and what was going to happen here when the Fascists took over. It wasn’t long before the first punch was thrown and it all quickly descended into chaos and violent confusion after that. Kevin wasn’t able to control things with his cudgel and bottles and glasses soon started flying in all directions. I was out collecting empties at the time and Lucy screamed at me to get back behind the bar. I tripped as I ran towards the hatch and lost my left shoe in the confusion. After I got back on my feet, I stepped on a broken glass that had landed base down with a long shard sticking up, and it sliced open my foot.

  The police came and cleared the pub, but I was losing a lot of blood and they allowed someone to drive me to one of the hospitals in south-east London. Nobody was able to come with me because Lucy and Pearl and all the others had to stay behind to give statements to the police. I can’t remember who drove me, but it was in the cab of a lorry and the blood was coming through the rag tied round my foot. They left me j
ust inside the hospital door and drove away. The health service before the NHS was ramshackle and chaotic and everybody was afraid of falling ill, unless you could afford it. A nurse came and found me a wheelchair and tried to stop the bleeding so she could see what damage had been done. I was getting weak and thought I was going to faint, but the nurse kept shaking me and telling me to stay awake. I finally lapsed into unconsciousness, despite the nurse shaking me and slapping my face.

  When I woke up again, it was a day and a half later and I was in a room with a lot of other injured people. My left foot was heavily bandaged and set in a pointed position, but at least the bleeding had stopped. After a few hours, a nurse came to see me.

  ‘You’re a lucky girl, the doctor managed to stop the bleeding.’

  ‘Can I go home?’

  ‘Can you pay?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to go home. But you mustn’t stand on that foot.’

  ‘I have to work.’

  ‘Out of the question!’

  Then she walked away and left me in the room full of baleful moans and the sickly smell of anaesthetic.

  Lucy turned up in the afternoon and I asked her to try and find out what the extent of the damage was. She went away and came back with a young doctor sporting an aloof and superior manner.

  ‘Your name is Anwyn Moyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I understand you have no means?’

  ‘No means?’

  ‘To pay for your treatment.’