Her Ladyship's Girl Read online

  ‘Have you seen Ayres?’

  I didn’t know whether I should bow or curtsey, so I kind of genuflected like when I was in church.

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Anwyn, Sir. No, sorry, Moyle, Sir.’

  ‘Which is it, Anwyn or Moyle?’

  ‘Both, Sir.’

  He shot a hint of a smile in my direction and walked over very close to me. He looked down and I looked up and the room seemed to become enveloped in a sensual shade of purple and a strange and scandalous thrill tingled through my body. Then the girls came back from their break and the spell was broken. He turned and walked away.

  ‘If you see Ayres, tell him to come and find me.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Nora and Biddy giggled to themselves, as if they were sharing a joke that I was excluded from. I didn’t ask them what they were sniggering at because I was behind with my work and wanted to get on with it before Cook came back and tried to belt me round the lughole again. So I put my head down and got on with what I was doing, but the sense of danger stayed with me for the rest of the day – the perception of menace that wasn’t altogether unpleasant and tingled inside my stomach like a buzzing bee.

  It was part of my job to make sure everything in the basement was cleaned regularly and I don’t suppose the family even noticed because they rarely came down there. But Cook did. She was a stickler for what she called ‘hygiene’ and I thought that was rich, considering what she did with the cheap meat she bought. Nobody said it, but I got the impression she pocketed the money she saved by buying this dodgy food. So, she must have been on a budget of some sorts and I wondered if Mr Ayres was in on the fiddle too? Or was he above and oblivious to this kind of crookery? It seemed ironic to me, because the rich people who lived in those big houses were particular about who they hired. They didn’t trot down to the labour exchange to hire staff; you had to be recommended and have a reference – even a lowly skivvy like me, and they wouldn’t have taken me on if the friend of the family hadn’t vouched for me. They’d be afraid I might make off with the silver or slit their throats in the middle of the night.

  I wondered who’d vouched for Cook?

  As the year wore on, and I was gradually getting on top of the routine of my working day, different seasons brought different duties for me to perform. The game bird season got pheasants and partridges and plovers and red-legged grouse sent down specially from the country to grace the tables of Hampstead and Hendon and Harrow, and the Harding household got its share. Although they weren’t aristocrats from a titled family or anything, I think they liked to pretend this was the case when they were entertaining, and they liked to show off what their new money could buy. It couldn’t buy them a way into the very top circles of society, but the professional people were establishing their own propriety and weren’t all that bothered about the declining nobility. Anyway, it was my job to gut and pluck the birds that came into the kitchen.

  Now, I’m sure everybody knows that game should be well hung – sometimes for weeks, until the meat is almost rotten. By then, these birds were infested with maggots and gutting them was disgusting, even to a hardy Welsh girl like me who’d seen many disgusting things in her short life to date. The birds were kept in a small room well away from everything else and the smell in there was overwhelming and made me retch in the beginning. Biddy, the kitchen maid, gave me a piece of cloth tinted with rose water and told me to tie it over my nose. It didn’t make a lot of difference, but just enough to stop me from being sick and it helped me long enough to get used to the stink and the texture of guts and putrid gore between my fingers. Then, just when I was beginning to breathe normally again, the game bird season was over and we were back to bacon and beef and black pudding.

  By the time my first Christmas as a skivvy came round, I was well used to the hard work and hassle and was starting to take it all in my stride. I missed my family back in Wales though and wondered when I’d ever get to see them again. For once, Cook spared no expense and the Christmas dinner was a joy to behold. An enormous goose was cooked, along with a matching turkey stuffed with chestnuts and apricots and mushrooms and onion and herbs. The aroma was mouth-watering and could have been bottled and sold to starving children as dream-mist. The goose was stuffed with small potatoes in their jackets, along with apples and parsley and cloves and prunes. The golden birds went upstairs with roast potatoes and parsnips and sprouts and mashed swede – accompanied by dishes of apple sauce and bread sauce and cranberry sauce and sausages wrapped in streaky bacon. The family and guests up there in the big dining room were treated to smoked salmon pâté starters and canapés and stuffed mushrooms before the main course, then Christmas cake and mince pies and plum duff served with brandy and eggnog and sloe gin for afters.

  As with all the upstairs soirées, a lot of the food was left untouched and it came back down to us. We were allowed to feast on what was left after Mr Ayres and Mona and Lilly had their fill – and Cook loaded up her bag to take some home to her villains and vandals. Once she was gone home and the staying guests had retired to their rooms, the rest of us pulled home-made crackers and drank home-made ale and sang home-made songs and danced in a little home-made circle. The men chased the girls with mistletoe and the kitchen was alive with laughter – until the tiredness took hold of me and I headed off to dream of Christmases to come.

  Next morning was Boxing Day and my head was killing me from the glasses of strong ale I’d drunk the night before. I still had my duties to perform, but Nora cheered me up and gave me something to look forward to.

  ‘There’s a dance down Cricklewood tonight.’

  ‘A dance?’

  ‘You know . . . with boys, Annie.’

  I blushed a little, remembering the encounter with Mr Harding all those months ago.

  ‘You coming?’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘If you want to.’

  ‘What about my work?’

  ‘It’s Christmas, Annie, forget about work for once.’

  I had a bit of money put away from my shilling a week that I wasn’t able to spend because I never went anywhere, so I thought, ‘Why not!’

  The other girls helped me finish my work early and as soon as Cook went home we were free. The Harding family had left to visit relatives for a few days and this gave Mona and Lilly an opportunity to take a little holiday and be with their families for a while. Mr Ayres had no family to go home to, so he stayed to look after the house. I often wondered about him, alone in his room, trapped between two worlds – not one of them and refusing to be one of us. I wondered what he thought about at night, what he dreamed about when he slept, if he’d ever been in love, what he wanted to be when he was a boy. I couldn’t believe that any boy would want to be a butler – maybe a fireman or a soldier or a miner or a farmer, but never a butler. But, back then, people went into service because it ran in the family. If someone’s mother was a cook, they might follow in her footsteps. Or if their father was a butler, they might take the mantle from his shoulders when he had no forelock left to tug. Like I said, the rich liked to know who was living in their houses, and what better way than to have the servants bred specially for the role.

  Anyway, we escaped from the house that had seemed to be my shroud for the past seven months – me and Nora and Biddy and Kathleen and Bart the Brat. The dancehall was Irish and Kathleen felt immediately at home. There was a lot of tough-looking builder types drinking and trying to throw their legs in the air to a hornpipe or a reel or a double-jig – I couldn’t tell the difference. There was also a lot of other servants from the big houses to the east of Cricklewood. Gossip was rife and some of it was about Mr Harding. Apparently, he had a reputation with a lot of the high-class ladies of London – and some low-class ones as well. But I put all that out of my mind as I was grabbed by a young Irishman and dragged out into the whirling mass of bodies moving round in a mad circle. His name was Jack and he was from a place called Athlon
e and that’s all I could hear above the noise and knockabout of the melee.

  But the Irish boys, in their best brogues and shirt studs and hair slicked down in some places but sticking up in others, were paying a lot of attention to Nora, and Bart didn’t like it.

  ‘She’s a handsome little colleen, ain’t she, boys?’

  ‘Leave her alone!’

  ‘And who would you be?’

  ‘I’m her boyfriend.’

  They all laughed and formed a circle round Bart, pushing him from one to the other and asking him what he was going to do about it. Me and Biddy and Kathleen were dancing and didn’t notice what was going on, because the music was loud and we were in a crowd and it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before – all the swinging and flinging and jigging and whirly-gigging. Until Nora came bursting in on our shrieking and hoolying.

  ‘Bart’s in lumber.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It’s my fault.’

  She pointed across to where the circle of Irish boys were ragging Bart and it was getting a bit too rough for comfort. But what could we do? We were four young girls in amongst a mass of strangers who might turn on us at any minute and then we’d be in real trouble.

  ‘Leave this to me!’

  Kathleen took out to stride across the dance floor and pushed her way into the threatening circle and stood there, hands on her intimidating hips. The Irish boys stopped passing Bart around like a parcel and studied her up and down.

  ‘And who might this be?’

  Kathleen fixed a fierce eye on the ringleader and he took a step away from her baleful frown. Now, like I said before, all the time she was my roommate I’d always seen Kathleen as a shy, quiet little mouse of a girl, with nothing to say for herself. But now she was showing another side that we didn’t know was there.

  ‘You boys should be ashamed of yourselves.’

  ‘Should we now?’

  ‘Behaving like bullies and making a holy show of us good Irish people.’

  Some of the younger lads started to look a bit shamed round their red faces and their heads sank. But the ringleader was a brash fella of about eighteen and he stepped forward again after getting over the initial surprise of being challenged by a slip of a girl.

  ‘Don’t tell us what we should and shouldn’t be ashamed of.’

  ‘Your mammy should have smacked your arse when you were a babby!’

  Everybody laughed. The bully looked round for support, but his mates had deserted him. He was embarrassed, and that made him even more dangerous. No one likes to be laughed at in front of their friends. He had a point to prove and he raised his fist. We all screamed – but before he could swing it, the punch was grabbed from behind by a big man wearing a grey tweed suit and a flat cap. He was the bouncer. And before the bully could say another word, he was caught by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his trousers and slung out into the street. The big bouncer came back, smacking his hands together as if he was cleaning some dirt off them.

  But the incident had a sobering effect on us and we couldn’t settle after that. We were worried that the bully might be waiting outside for us when we left. But he wasn’t. We peered out the door and up and down the street, then made a run for it to catch the last bus back to Hampstead. When we were safely on board, we lightened up and laughed about the adventure and chattered and chirruped in an excited manner, the way people do when their nerves are a bit on edge and they don’t want to show it. But Kathleen’s display of courage was to influence me and stand me in good stead as an example to follow when I was later threatened by men.

  I was tired that night by the time I got to the top of the house. Kathleen fell asleep in the other bed and never mentioned the confrontation in the dancehall. It was an incident that broke into the monotony of daily life in the house and it reminded me that there was a big world out there, full of all sorts, and that one day I’d be out there too, not stuck in a scullery skivvying.

  Chapter Four

  You have to understand that I wasn’t an ignorant girl – not by any manner or means. I started school on All Hallows’ Eve. I should’ve started in September with all the other kids, but I was ill with whooping cough, a disorder that caused me to make a sound like a constipated owl when I was rasping and rattling. My mother made me drink a mixture of pine-needle tea with cherry bark and honey and that finally cured the coughing. I wondered if the date was significant in some way – Halloween, the old-time festival of Samhain, when spiritual journeys could be made – and my spiritual journey was to school.

  The sky was lead-grey and winter was well on the way, with its ice and snow and snivelling and snotting. My mother took me there on that first morning. It was still dark and our words floated in front of our faces in the silver moonlight. The moonlight was cold, even though my mother’s hand was warm, as she held on to mine to stop me from being spirited away by the Coblynau.11 Morning was just emerging from behind the mountains. It moved in slow motion and enveloped the land and made it come alive. The silveryness gradually grew more gilded as the sun came up and drove all the demons away.

  The schoolhouse was big and looked down on little me with a frown and I didn’t want to stay there when my mother left me. I wanted to run after her and tell her to take me home because I was afraid of all the words I didn’t understand and everything was a jumble – a stumbling fumbling bumble in my brain. The other kids laughed at my apprehension and I had no older sisters or brothers to keep them at bay. But once I got used to it and the bullies found more frightened kids to pick on, I actually liked school – particularly reading. Which seems strange, considering there wasn’t much to read in our house at any time. But I took the books home whenever I could and I went from looking at the pictures to being able to understand the printed words and I read them in the gaslight downstairs and the candlelight upstairs and later by the light of the stolen electricity, until I was as good with the English language as anyone in the village.

  I was six and going to school for a while when my sister Bronwyn was born and my mother sold her milk to make ends meet. Gwyneth and Walter were already in the world, and, as we got older, we climbed up the black hills and down the deep glyns and in between the coeden in the wild ffridds12, calling to one another so as not to get lost and eaten by the Dreigiau.13

  Maesteg was a big town to us, with lots of shops, and we’d go there to spend some of the money we made from selling the sheep-droppings. We bought hardboiled sweets and fudge and humbugs and marzipan and butterwelsh, even though we were told not to. And the young years were all much alike, in the shadow of the slag heaps and the steeply sloping streets and the small, back-to-back terraced houses and the occasional patch of blue in an otherwise slate-grey sky. And the low mumble of adult voices of an evening in their lilting, swaying accents, as if they were going to break into a song at any second. And the pale sun in summer and the pale snow in winter and the shortness of the seasons in between.

  All the days rolled away from us children – some took a long time to go and others disappeared in seconds. They looked back at us before dissolving into the coal-dust sky and shook their heads, as if to say a time will come when you’ll regret the wishing of us away. School holidays were the favourites of most of the village children and they’d gad about like spring lambs, so happy to be free from the restriction of the stone school-walls. But sometimes they made me sad – they were too long if I was working to help bring in some money for my poor mother and too short if I was reading the books the school allowed me to take home with me. The last page always came long before the holidays were over and I’d read them again – and again. Dickens, with his eccentric characters with equally eccentric names, and Emily Brontë with her dark-hearted, handsome hero, and Barrie with his enchanted children, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess who reminded me of myself and Alice’s wonderfully satirical adventures – and many, many more. They took me to other worlds, where I could be someone else, not Anwyn Moyle, the winsome waif of South Wales
.

  At chapel on Sundays, the preacher led us all in prayer and hymns and warned us about the practice of witchcraft that was widespread in Cymru and that we should always be on our guard against it. I thought he was talking about the Mari Lwyd and I wondered why he wasn’t able to stop the grey mare from coming round every January and causing chaos. The witches, he said, could use spells and the evil eye to seduce us children away from our god-fearing parents and I would imagine the glass-green eyes in the white skull as it hacked around the houses.

  The minister’s voice fell to a whisper when he told us the witches would make puppets in our images and stick needles into their hearts to harm us and then we’d be doomed for all eternity. The adults hung horseshoe amulets outside the houses to ward off such evil, but they didn’t stop the Mari Lwyd or the Merryman or Punch and Siwan, and maybe it’s just as well. Personally, I preferred what my grandmother told me about – the old collaboration between a female god and a male one, who both followed the natural seasons and celebrated them – to a vengeful Christian god who killed and burned and tortured to have his way. But I was only very young, so what did I know about anything?

  Worse than any witch were the feral cats that plagued the village. They brought them to the mines to kill rats to begin with, but the buggers bred and bred and bred and there were hundreds of them all over the place. They’d kill everything in sight, birds and bees and rabbits and fleas, and my father would try to shoot them through his coughing convulsions if they came into our garden. Us children would chase them with sticks and stones and catapults and snowballs in winter and chestnuts in autumn, but they were clever, with springs for legs and rubbery bodies that could fall backwards from a twenty-foot wall and still land on their feet. They spat and snarled at us and threatened us with unsheathed claws and even the dogs wouldn’t go too near them, for fear of losing an eye or suffering a split nose.