Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (8 page)

A young, good-looking lad opposite me must
have clocked my expression, because he laughed. ‘You’ll not starve
in this house,’ he said with a grin. ‘Always beef on a
Sunday, never any different. The boss has two slices off the fillet
then he sends down the sirloin to us.’

Without saying a word, I loaded my plate up,
smothered it all in a lake of piping hot gravy and tucked in.

If it looked mouth-watering, it tasted
beyond heaven. I’d never tasted meat quite like it afore. The meat was so
tender it melted like ice cream in your mouth and the sizzling hot potatoes were fluffy
and light as clouds, but with a wonderful chewy skin from being roasted in duck fat. The
flavour was out of this world.

My father tried his hardest, but the odd dry
pigeon and poached pheasant couldn’t compete with this sirloin.

It was gone in a heartbeat and I mopped up
the last of the unctuous gravy juices with a hunk of bread and sat back happily in my
chair. Everyone chattered about their business and ignored me, but I guess as the new
scullery maid I was pretty invisible.

Next came the puddings. Peach tart, laced
with a generous jug of double cream, and spotted dick groaning with big fat currants and
smothered in vanilla custard. I had landed on my feet here all right. How lucky could I
possibly be? I stifled a smile. All them doomsayers telling me how hard domestic service
was, what did they know?

The fella opposite me, who I later learnt
was Alan, the footman, winked at me as he spooned in a mouthful of pudding.

‘I love a tart,’ he
winked. ‘Don’t you?’

I grinned back. I could deal with a cheeky
sort like him, no trouble.

A thin older man next to him shot him a sour
look from over his wire-rimmed spectacles.

Swallowing back the last of my spotted dick, I
started to feel warm, comfortably full and a little drowsy. I was just stifling a yawn
when suddenly the room was full of the sound of scraping chairs and everyone leapt to
their feet. Lunch was over.

‘Get your uniform on and report
for duty,’ barked Mrs Jones. ‘Servants’ bedrooms are that
way,’ she said, gesturing to a separate stairway that led off from the
kitchen. ‘Never ever use front stairs, boss don’t want to see you
climbing ’em. Back steps are for us.’

I climbed the linoleum steps, and climbed,
and climbed – the roast beef and pudding sloshing about in my tummy as I dragged myself
to the very top of the cavernous house.

‘I’ve never been up so
many steps,’ I huffed.

‘Just keep on and stop your
yakking,’ Mrs Jones puffed behind me. By the time we reached the top she was
the colour of beetroot. ‘That’s your room. You’ll share it
with the new kitchen maid who’s starting soon,’ she wheezed.

The tiny room was in the attic and was
stifling hot. Throwing open the window, I could just about see over the jumbled rooftops
of West London. The room was bare apart from a single iron bed, a chair and a small
chest of drawers for my clothes. The walls smelt of distemper (a kind of paint mixed
with glue) and were bare of any pictures.

‘Bathroom and toilet’s
at the end of the hall,’ barked Mrs Jones. ‘Make the most of it, as
when we go back to Norfolk there’s no such luxury and you’ll have to
use a chamber pot and hip bath in your room.’

I daresay the room might have looked sparse
and the
idea of doing your bodily functions in a pot back in Norfolk
depressing to some, but I was used to a basic way of life so to me it was just fine.

‘Come on then,’ said Mrs
Jones impatiently as she bustled out of the room. ‘Get yourself dressed.
Chop-chop!’

Changing into my outfit, I smoothed down the
apron and teased my red curls into the mop cap. ‘Don’t you look the
bee’s knees,’ I murmured to myself. Even at fourteen I had a
cracking figure. A big bum and breasts but a tiny waist accentuated by the cut of the
waist of my apron.

Scurrying downstairs, I presented myself to
the cook, who was making a big meal of sitting down with a heavy sigh.

‘Right, my girl,’ she
said, glaring at me suspiciously. ‘You can start by tucking that hair
back.’

A stray red curl was defiantly poking out
from under my mop cap and I swiftly tucked it in.

She fixed her beady eyes on me. ‘I
know what you young girls are like,’ she snapped. ‘Boys, dresses and
dancing is all that fills your little heads. But while you’re in my kitchen
you follow my rules, you hear. Your day starts at six thirty a.m. You come downstairs,
blacklead the grate, polish the hearth and light the range fire. Woe betide if
it’s not done to my standards.’ She paused. ‘Put the
kettles on for staff teas and bring me a nice cup. Strong, brown and sweet’s
how I like it.

‘Then you clean the steel fender
and the fire irons, clean the brass on the front door and scrub the front steps. We
ain’t got one here, but in the country you’ll need to clean out the
fireplace. Then you’ll need to scrub and polish the kitchen floor and
passageways.

‘Then you and the kitchen maid need
to start on staff breakfasts and laying the table in servants’ hall so we can
eat at eight a.m. At eight I will come down and make the boss’s breakfast for
nine a.m.’

My head started to swim as she carried on. I
could see her mouth moving up and down but the words were starting to blur in my mind.
Fourteen-year-olds don’t have the biggest attention span in the world. Forcing
myself to listen, I tuned back in.

‘After breakfast, wash up and
clear down, then you need to scrub down and prepare my table.’

I glanced at the vast oak table that
dominated the entire room. It must have weighed a ton and was scrubbed to within an inch
of its life.

‘Then we start prepping the lunch
and there will be all the veggies for you to prepare …’

On and on she went, the rest of the
fifteen-hour day broken down into multitudes of repetitive and back-breaking tasks until
my day finally finished at nine thirty p.m.

‘You don’t date the
staff,’ she said, glaring at Alan as he passed by and winked. ‘That
way only leads to trouble and keeps your mind off your work. You don’t go into
parts of the house that aren’t your own. If you do see Mr Stocks or young
Captain Eric, don’t speak unless spoken to and always refer to them as
“sir”. The bosses are always “sir”. You treat
the upper servants with respect – in your case, that’s everybody. You get a
half-day off a week and every other Sunday. And remember,’ she added finally,
her eyes glittering dangerously as she leant back and crossed her beefy arms – they were
so muscly from years of beating,
whipping and stirring that they were
like legs of mutton and I could barely take me eyes off them, but eventually I forced
myself to meet her steely gaze – ‘remember that in this kitchen, Mollie, I am
queen. Now hop to that pile of washing-up.’

Queen? More like an old ogre.
But I
said nothing, just smiled sweetly.

I wasn’t smiling five minutes
later.

Stacked up in a vast stone sink in a cold,
airless scullery was the debris of everybody’s lunch. Filthy dirty plates
towered over every available surface. It was piled up in the sink and even in buckets on
the floor. There must have been nearly fifty plates and bowls, saucepans, jugs, pots and
pans, not to mention cutlery, all smeared with cold, greasy gravy and congealed
custard.

There was no washing-up liquid in them days.
I had to scrub each one with soft soap that you whisked up in the water, or soap
crystals, until it shone like a new pin. Each piece then had to be rinsed in an enormous
enamel bowl of hot water before being dried up and put away in the wooden racks above
the range. There were no gloves or barrier cream either. My lunch sat like lead in my
tummy and pretty soon my hands were red raw and numb.

Wiping back a curl that was by now plastered
to my forehead with sweat, I stifled a yawn. Oh well. No point moaning. Best crack
on.

And with that I was sucked into the regime
of a big upper-class house. That day marked the end of my childhood and the start of a
gruelling new decade of work that would see me work harder than I’d ever done
in my entire life.

When people think of domestic servants they
often think of butlers and housemaids and imagine it to be hard work. No one ever thinks
of the poor scullery maid. A scullery maid, otherwise known as a skivvy, was the lowest
position possible in a house. The very lowest of the low. You’re the youngest,
the lowest paid, you work the longest hours and you spend the most time on your hands
and knees scrubbing. You’re even a skivvy for the servants. You are literally
the bottom of the heap and regarded as such by everyone else above you.

No one bothered to come and introduce
themselves to me, apart from Alan, the randy footman. As a scullery maid I
wasn’t really worth the effort. I had to learn who was who and what was what
as I went along.

But I was young and nothing if not
optimistic.

I wasn’t daft either and I had my
wits about me. I knew, even at fourteen, that I had the worst possible job in the house,
I would have to work harder than anyone else and wait on the servants. But with all the
arrogance of youth I knew I’d rise through the ranks – saw it as my right
almost. As I finally got to the bottom of the mountain of dirty dishes, my spirit
remained as intact as ever. When you’re at the bottom, the only way to go is
up, after all!

I muttered to myself as I cleaned and
stacked the dishes:
I’ll have the best job in the house one day. You wait
and see. I’ll make cook. I’ll show ’em all.

Next morning I was downstairs by six thirty
a.m. I’d only had a brief wash – no point any more, I’d be wringing
with sweat and dirt before the day was out anyhow. Granny’s words rang in my
head:
You’ll be a skivvy, my girl.

First I had to light the monstrosity of a
stove, which was a job in itself.

‘Come on, you wretched
thing,’ I muttered.

You needed just the right amount of kindling
and to have the knack of pulling the drawers out to give enough draught to get it to
catch light. I didn’t know Mrs Jones well, but I knew enough to know that
surly old trout would be down on me like a ton of bricks if she didn’t get her
morning cup of tea.

Next I had to blacklead the grate with
blacklead from a tin with zebra stripes on it. By the time I’d finished
painting it on with a brush and then polished it until it gleamed the colour of the
boss’s black Daimler, I had hands like a black man. But there was no time to
worry about that. The clock on the kitchen wall said seven and I hadn’t even
started on the steps.

Rushing up the area steps, I gratefully
gulped in the spring air.

At that time of the morning I’d
half-expected it to be like a mausoleum outside, but the smart square was a hive of
activity. Not with the gentry. Oh no. They’d still be fast asleep upstairs in
their starched cotton sheets, heavy velvet curtains blocking out the intrusive morning
light. No, it was full of kitchen maids shaking out dusters and scullery maids like me
scrubbing the front steps. Errand boys whistled as they cycled round on bikes loaded up
with goods to drop at the back of the house. Paperboys dropped off thick bundles of
papers at each house and chimney sweeps cycled past, laden down with brushes.

Everyone was cheerful, whistling as they
worked or exchanging a fruity joke. Maids flirted with errand boys
and
shrieked with laughter at their ribaldry. When you get a load of youngsters together who
don’t mind being up with the sparrows it’s inevitable
they’re going to lark about together.

‘Morning,’ I said,
smiling at the scullery maid on her hands and knees on the next set of steps along from
me. She didn’t look much older than me.

‘Morning,’ she grinned
back. ‘You new, ainch ya? My boss has guests today so I daresay I’ll
be back here before the day is out. Bloomin’ bane of my life these things
are.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Wouldn’t mind,
but her upstairs sees dirt where they ain’t none. She’s still fast
asleep now, mind you, she won’t raise her
pretty head off the
pillow for a good couple of hours, lazy cow. We gotta do these chores and get
’em out the way before they see us. They must think the cleaning fairies fly
over Cadogan Square each morning at dawn.’

A very desirable postcode – all
the gentry had a London house for the season.

I smiled to show I was one of them
but, ever mindful of Mrs Jones, I got on with the task in hand. I scrubbed away with my
hearthstone until my arms were aching and numb. I started at the bottom and worked my
way up but quickly realized that was pointless as I was only making each step dirty
again by treading on it. No, I’d have to start at the top and work me way
down. Unfortunately this made my bum poke further out into the square and I was aware of
it jiggling as I scrubbed heartily.