Her Ladyship's Girl Read online

  Bart was a trainee gardener. He was seventeen and from Leeds and a likely looker. Then there was Kathleen the parlourmaid, who I already knew – she was a shy type and only said a few words. Mona was a lady’s maid and spent most of her time upstairs; she was twenty-one and snooty as a sow’s ear. Lilly, the nanny, was about thirty-five; she was a teacher-type and plain in comparison to Mona. She ate with the two children of the house: Lucinda aged seven and Jonathan aged five. I didn’t see much of her the whole time I was there because she was always with the kids. The two kitchen maids were Nora, who was nineteen, and Biddy, who was eighteen, and you could tell they liked to have a bit of fun with the boys. There was another upstairs parlourmaid called Fanny, short for Frances, who was in her late twenties and might have been married. She went home in the evenings as well. There was the gardener and general handyman, who was Bart’s boss, but over it all was the head butler, who opened the front door to me that first day, then slammed it in my face. His name was Mr Ayres and he looked like Uriah Heep from David Copperfield. He always wore an impeccably pressed dark suit, with a white shirt and black tie. He was clean-shaven and spoke like he had a hot potato in his mouth. Mr Ayres was the king of this castle and a man who was not to be messed about with.

  We sat talking. Most of the other girls were human enough and I asked if there was any chicken left over from earlier in the day.

  ‘You don’t want to touch that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The kitchen maids smirked and said they saw Cook put the arse-end of the chicken over a mantel and let the gas go inside like stuffing. Then she lit it and it flared up like a firework and after that she washed and cooked it. I didn’t know what they were talking about and I thought that must be how the London entrepreneurial classes liked to have their poultry prepared.

  ‘It was smelly and slimy.’

  ‘That’s why she filled it with gas.’

  ‘To get rid of the pong.’

  Which struck me as strange, but I didn’t want to show my ignorance by asking stupid questions. So I just took their advice and stayed away from the chicken.

  It was pleasant enough having a bit of a chinwag with the other maids and they all mucked in to help me finish my jobs so we could go to bed at the same time. It was gone half past eight when my head hit the pillow and I was spark out for the counting.

  The Brat woke me at five every morning. I wasn’t sure if he lived in like us maids, or went home every evening with the others. I heard his tap-tapping on the door, like a little bubble of morning memory that rose up and burst on the roof of my brain.

  ‘It’s Bart, Anwyn.’

  ‘I know who it is.’

  I was so tired and stiff from the few days before that I could hardly move. I washed in tepid water again and went downstairs to start the new day. I was hungry after cleaning and lighting the stove, so I pinched an egg and boiled it and ate it with a cup of tea, before anyone else got out of bed. After doing all the early routine jobs and not seeing a soul, I came back down to the kitchen to help with the breakfasts and I could hear Cook questioning the two kitchen maids about the missing egg. I just kept my head down and stayed out of the way until the dragon went to her lair.

  ‘What’s all the fuss about, Nora?’

  ‘She’s missing an egg.’

  ‘What? All that trafferthu1 over an egg?’

  ‘It’s one less she’ll be able to steal.’

  Nora told me that Cook had a coat with deep inside pockets on both sides and every evening she stuffed them with food before going home. She said Cook came from a dodgy London family who were mixed up with toughs and criminal types and it would be dangerous for anyone to dob her in.

  After breakfast, I made sure I red-polished the front step before scrubbing the hall floor – it was long and wide and tiled black and white and, while I was doing it, I noticed someone standing over me. I looked up and saw this well-dressed woman of about thirty-five or so. She was small and nervous-looking and wearing clothes that I’d only seen in magazines.

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘Anwyn, Madam.’

  She gave me a funny kind of look, like she wasn’t sure if I was really a girl, or some nanny goat that had wandered in from the garden. Then she nodded and walked away.

  I got on with my scrubbing.

  Back downstairs, I put the copper on and made sure not to overfill it this time. Biddy came over to me.

  ‘Listen, anything you want to half-inch, do it before Cook makes her count.’

  ‘When does she do that?’

  ‘Just before she goes home.’

  I had my toast and another cup of tea before tackling the rest of the day. There seemed to be even more washing today than yesterday and, even with the wooden dolly, my hands were hurting from the hot steam. Cook came over to me with a frown on her face like a wet Sunday in Llandudno.

  ‘When you’re asked, your name is Moyle, not Anwyn.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because skivvies like you don’t have first names.’

  I was going to tell her I was just as good as she was but then, I was in a strange city, and she might get her dodgy relations to come round and garrotte me with piano wire in the middle of the dark and desperate night.

  I decided to keep my eye out for Cook and keep out of her way as much as possible for as long as I was to be the lowest of the lowly in that house.

  Later in the day I noticed she was soaking a big boiling ham in vinegar, so I asked Nora what she was up to.

  ‘Apart from when there’s a party, she buys meat that’s on the turn cheap in the market, then she washes it in vinegar to take the smell out.’

  ‘Why don’t she buy fresh meat?’

  ‘God, you are naive, aren’t you, Annie!’

  Nora laughed. I’d have to be careful what I ate – if the others didn’t touch it, then neither would I. I was skinny enough as it was, but I thought to myself I’d fade away to a farthing here. But I didn’t want to get sick because I’d been sick before and it wasn’t something I wanted to go through again and, as much as I hated the job, I didn’t want to be sacked and sent back home, humiliated. I was surprised them upstairs didn’t all die from galloping gut-rot, but maybe the rich had better constitutions than the poor.

  Cook had all sorts of tricks for fiddling the people she worked for, but it was none of my business and I’d only get shot by a soldier of Diamond Jack Sloane or some other gangster if I didn’t keep my nose out. So I did.

  Once the washing was on, I helped prepare the vegetables and then it was on to the ironing. My mother’s iron at home had to be heated on the fire and it had to be just right – if it was too hot, it would burn through the covering cloth and if it wasn’t hot enough, it wouldn’t get the wrinkles out. But the one I used here was the latest in electric flat-irons and much easier to use, though it took me a while to get used to it. I saw Bart in the yard later, when I was hanging out the washing.

  ‘Where’s your room, Bart?’

  ‘In the basement.’

  ‘And you come all the way up to the top to wake me at five?’ He gave me a wink and I wondered what that meant. You see, despite the fact that I thought of myself as an intellectual, I was really just a wet-behind-the-ears Welsh valley girl with a hankering for fine clothes and didn’t know the difference between a nod and a wink. But I soon would.

  Other than finding out I didn’t have a Christian name any more, the rest of the day went well enough and I now had four friends. I asked the kitchen girls if we could go out for a walk after we finished in the evening.

  ‘If you have the strength left for it, Annie.’

  That’s what they called me, short for Anwyn. When the day’s work was finally done and Cook was gone off home with her coat full of cheese and crusty bread, I was sitting in the kitchen having a little chat with the others. I noticed the Brat paying a lot of attention to Biddy and I knew she had a room close to mine and Kathleen’s on the top floor. Nora showe
d me a hiding place where she and Biddy stored food before Cook did her count. There was bread and eggs and cheese and meat and cake and biscuits – and we could help ourselves if we got peckish before breakfast-time came round in the morning. She put a finger up to her lips and I thought, there’s some good people in this place after all.

  Like I said, I didn’t see much of Lilly the nanny or Mona the lady’s maid. Lilly was a jolly kind of woman but Mona was the toffee-nosed type and suited her nickname – Mona the moaner. She called me ‘Moyle’ like she was the lady of the house and knew I had no Christian name, even though she was a servant, just like me. She wore fashionable clothes and I wondered how she came by that job and I thought it was something I might like to be some day. But there was a long way to go before I got that far above my station.

  Kathleen and Nora were right: I was too tired after the long hard day to go walking and all I wanted to do was fall flat into my little thin bed. On the way there, I noticed Bart slipping into Nora’s room and the penny dropped – he paid attention to Biddy in the kitchen so nobody would make the connection between him and Nora. He was only a young dog, but already a sly one. Kathleen was in the room when I got there.

  ‘Listen, Annie, I should tell you . . . you’ll have to watch out for Mr Harding.’

  Harding was the name of the family who owned the house and Mr Harding was the head of that family. I’d not seen him so far.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He has no respect for women.’

  I wondered what she meant by that, but I didn’t worry too much about it because I was already asleep before my head even hit the pillow.

  I didn’t want to get up the next morning; my body felt like it had been beaten with a blackthorn bush. I was in pain from the bun on the top of my head to the nails on the toes of my feet. As time went on, Cook put more and more work my way and I came to realise that she was right: a scullery maid’s life was the lowest of the low. I had many bosses, not just the tyrant cook, and all the hardest and dirtiest jobs going – and only two shillings a week in wages, one of which I had to send home for the family. I was working sometimes sixteen hours a day and I only got one afternoon off, on a Sunday. If my mother could’ve seen me she’d have tut-tutted and rolled her eyes and bit her nails to know what I’d become.

  At sixteen, I was still the youngest member of staff and that meant doing what I was told, no matter who was doing the telling. The only good thing about it was that newfangled, labour-saving devices were coming out all the time and the Harding household was forward-looking enough to try them – things like a washer/wringer and the electric flat-iron and refrigerator and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. But there was still a lot of scrubbing and scraping and beating carpets over a line and polishing steps and, if anything went wrong, I got the blame and blather – whether it was my fault or not.

  Like when Lucinda spilled her watercolour on the stairs – it was supposed to be watercolour but I don’t know what else was in it, because it just wouldn’t come out. And I had to wet it and dry it and wet it and dry it until the stain was the same colour as the rest of the rug. It took me ages and I got behind with my other jobs and had Cook on my back the whole live-long day after that. It wasn’t my fault in the first place, but I got the blunt and badger of it. That kind of thing happened a lot in the house and being called nasty names by some of the staff made me feel bad. Many’s the time I wanted to run out the door and find my way back to my family in Wales. Many’s the time I would’ve cried into my pillow at night if I hadn’t been too tired for tears. But I decided not to let it drive me down into the dust, and I knew who I was to myself – even if I was only a skivvy to everyone else.

  Chapter Two

  Long before I became a skivvy, I was born in Llangynwyd, a mining village in the Llynfi Valley and part of the medieval cymwd of Tir Iarll2. Back in those olden times, the basic unit of land was a tref and a cymwd was about thirty or forty trefs. Even as a young child, I was always interested in the old ways and I read what little I could find about the things people believed in before the Christians came. My grandmother on my father’s side knew a lot of stuff that she learned from the elders when she was a young girl. She told me stories from the Mabinogion and the Dynion Mwyn3 and the Cymry Gwyddoniad4, and I always felt I had more in common with those old legends than I had with the chapel-goers.

  I was given the name Anwyn, which means ‘very fair’ – Annwn, with a double n and without the y was also the name for the Otherworld in Welsh mythology. It was a world of eternal youth with no disease and an abundance of everything and a far cry from little skinny-legged, black-faced me. The year was 1918, and more people were employed in the coal industry in Wales than ever before or since. We lived in a valley with hills and mountains all around and a tributary of the Nant y Gadlys running through a forest close by. Although the river wasn’t very big, it was sometimes fast-flowing as it hurried on its way to meet the Afon Llynfi. We climbed the mountains to get away from the choking coal dust and jumped the rocks in the river like gadding goats, and fell in more times than we got safely across. It was all a part of growing up in the dull, starless streets and the breathtaking highness of the hills.

  Llangynwyd was a small village back then and the only work was down the mines – everybody depended on ‘the coal’ for their bread and butter and beans and there were five or six working pits dotted around the area, all connected by a little railway. You could see the steam engines chuffing around the hillsides and the smell of slack and steam hung in the air and the dust covered the houses and the lower slopes. At the pithead, coal was brought up to the surface and loaded into drams. The drams were coupled together like big buckets on wheels and pulled steeply up along a ramp that eventually tipped them into the waiting railway trucks, to be taken away to keep the fires of industry burning around the whole of the United Kingdom and maybe further afield as well.

  All the miners were allotted a free allowance of coal and this was issued by the ton and dumped by a lorry outside the houses. Everyone in the street would come out with their buckets and tin baths and shovels and brooms and make short work of shifting the lot through the house and into the cwch at the back. Our house was small, with the barest bits of furniture and a lavatory down the end of the garden where the spiders wore striped jerseys. Water came from a tap on the side of the house and the cooking was done on an open fire that was part of the range. We had gaslight downstairs and candlelight upstairs and it was a place that some city people might call picturesque – but not them that had to live there.

  Sheep wandered anywhere they liked and did their droppings everywhere they liked and everyone knew everyone else’s business. There was no cinema or anything like that to entertain us kids, and television hadn’t been invented – at least not in Wales. So we amused ourselves with our own version of knock-down-ginger, where we tied a thin string at night to one door knocker and the other end to a knocker across the street. Then we’d knock on one of them and, when the person in the house opened the door, they’d pull the string which would raise the knocker on the other side and, when they closed the door, the knocker would fall and knock that door. The other house would then open the door and you can see what happened. Us kids would be hunkered down and hooting until the people realised what was happening and came chasing us down the dark road. Other games were bobby-kick-a-tin and skipping and us girls would knit squares to make blankets out of and the crocheted shawls of many colours that all the women wore. We’d go up the river to find birds’ nests and snakes and try to catch trout by tickling them under their bellies – but I never could get the hang of that and the coughing from the coal dust always frightened the fish away.

  The coughing was caused by what we called ‘black lung’ and it was dangerous if it developed into emphysema or bronchitis, which it often did. But I was lucky because my little lungs were healthy enough to cough up the coal dust and I left the village before something more serious than coughing took hold of me. I survived
, which was more than many other tumble-headed little smowt did back then.

  I was the first-born of four children – Walter came after me in 1920 and Gwyneth in 1922 and Bronwyn in 1924. Some people asked who made my mother pregnant with me, considering my father was a soldier at the time. But she said it was when he was home on leave and he was happy with that explanation – at least, he seemed to be. Whether he actually was on leave at the time or not, I’ll never know. My father’s name was Hugh and he was gassed during the Great War, but he never knew how bad it affected him until later, after he came home. He married my mother, Katherine, and went down the mines with the rest of the men, hewing coal in the dark and dangerous world underground. He’d come home covered in black dust from the pit and wash it all off in a big wooden bath in front of the fire – that was before he developed the broncho-pneumonia.

  It was when Katherine was having her fourth baby that he had the first attack. He said it was caused by the coal, but the bosses said it was caused by the gas he inhaled during the war. After that, he couldn’t work anymore, so my mother had to do it all instead – she did the washing for people who could afford it and painted their walls with distemper, and she had so much mother’s milk on Bronwyn that she breastfed babies for drier women and they paid her a few pennies for the protein. Us kids would fill old sacks with coal we found lying around and collect sheep dung from the roads and sell it for a ha’penny a bucket. People soaked it in water then poured the slurry over their vegetable plots – or they dried it out and burned it on the fires to make the coal go further. It was a hard enough life, but most were in the same boat and no doors were ever locked and neighbours would pop in and out during the daffodil days for a cuppa and a mouthful of Welshcake that some called bake-stones and others called griddle scones.

  As well as all the work she did, my mother would traipse into Maesteg once a week to get her ‘Lloyd George’ – which was the benefit of those days, brought into being in 1911 by David Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. It gave workers the first contributory system of insurance against illness and unemployment and took away the need for the stigmatised social welfare provided under the Poor Law. All workers who earned under £160 a year had to pay 4d a week into the scheme; the employers paid 3d and the government paid 2d – Lloyd George called it the ‘ninepence for fourpence’. Workers were paid ten shillings a week for the first thirteen weeks of sick leave and five shillings for the next thirteen weeks and they were also given free treatment for tuberculosis. My mother took me and my brother and sisters with her sometimes to collect the Lloyd George and do her shopping in Maesteg and we stayed close to her all the way through the dingles and dells, which were full of afancs5 and gwyllions6 and llamhigyn y dwrs,7 waiting to leap out at us children and drag us away to diawl.8