The Great Silence (32 page)

Meanwhile the enterprising Douglas and Drusilla had noticed that the main road between Brighton and Eastbourne was becoming busier. When a disused bone mill came up for sale, sitting in twenty acres of empty land and only a stone’s throw from the busy main road, they bought it. They had a hunch that the new hobby of taking the car out for a run would create demand for a tea shop and the energetic Anns were determined they would have the most popular tea shop in the county.

They took out an advertisement in the
Lady
, offering training (still at the bargain price of two guineas a head) in the baking and management skills necessary for opening a small tea shop. The response to the advertisement was tremendous and soon the Anns had their pick of a fully qualified staff. Douglas named the new establishment after Drusilla. He would not have dared choose any other name, given the fierce temperament of the woman who was
his partner in business and life. Only on Douglas’s regular escapes down to the river to fish, or when chatting with the handsome girls under his tutelage, did he ever really feel free of Drusilla’s never-ending and exhausting demands.

Within a short time ‘Drusilla’s’ was providing the local villagers with much needed employment working in the kitchens and the tea shop and caring for the beautiful grounds. The tea shop, swiftly acknowledged to be one of the best in the Home Counties, served its visitors delicious cakes, eaten, on fine days, in large wicker seats down by the lake while looking at the glorious views of the South Downs. Soon ‘Drusilla’s’ became a popular meeting place for motorists from all over Sussex. Archie from Eastbourne and his cloche-hatted wife Ethel would drive over in the lovingly polished Bentley for a rendezvous with their friends Harry and Maude, his new sweetheart. Harry had motored over to meet them from the opposite direction at Hove in his shiny new Lagonda and they would join all the other couples delighting in a day out in the countryside while showing off their new cars.

The Anns’ commercial hunch proved correct. Soon a poster advertising ‘Drusilla’s’ boasted that the car park was ‘The Motor Show of the South’. Occasionally a demobbed sailor would visit the tea shop, bringing with him a brilliantly feathered and chatty parrot or a tiny shivery monkey, picked up in some exotic place during his wartime service. The Anns were happy to house these animals as they gave such pleasure to the children of their visitors. Some of the locals were amused and charmed to see the place turning into a miniature zoo.

Doris Scovell had worked in kitchens since the age of 14. She had left school just a few years short of the Education Act of 1918 when the number of teenagers remaining at school beyond that age rose from 30,000 to 600,000. But Doris was growing up in a different environment. In a manner of speaking, she was almost married to the cooking profession, having fallen in love just before the war with Will Titley, the under-footman in the smart household where she worked in Piccadilly, one door away from the Rothschild house.

Doris was born eighteen months after the death of Queen Victoria, making her just twelve years old when the war began. She
had spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in High Wycombe, some thirty-nine miles from London and, for a young child, an impressive full day’s walk from her home in Kensington. Accompanied on her way by her father, Doris would let her mother know of her progress by sending three postcards during the journey that, with the excellent pre-war postal service, would be delivered to London at intervals within the same day.

Granny Scovell was a naturally gifted cook and during Doris’s visits to High Wycombe she acquired something of her grandmother’s skill. Later on, wartime shortages of food led to a whole series of expressions related to quantities, all familiar to Doris and her grandmother as they talked of’a lick of marge’, ‘a screw of sugar’ and ‘a marsel of cheese’. Ingenious ways to serve eggs had become a competitive habit, including infinite variations of scrambling. The dish came with anchovy essence, with grated cheese, sometimes with peas or tomatoes, with minced ham, diced sheep kidney, chopped mushrooms and sometimes nestled in a circle of spinach.

Food had been a major preoccupation during the war years. The Government’s advice was to ‘use as little as you can’, and butchers, usually open for only one day a week, were often implored for any bit of offal that was going. A pound of meat a week was the average allocation, with perhaps a rasher or two of fatty bacon. Every flower bed and window box had been given over to growing vegetables. Only in gentlemen’s eating establishments was the impact of rationing absent. At White’s Oyster Shop at the top of Chancery Lane the oysters when
in
season were plentiful but on bookseller David Garnett’s visits he would have a good lunch even
out
of season, with a choice of either lobster or crab, accompanied by brown bread and butter and a delicious chilled hock. After a plate of fine cheddar and a glass or two of port, he would continue puffing on a substantial cigar as he weaved his way back to the bookshop. Other city dwellers, however, without access to a gentleman’s club or a plentiful rural estate, suffered. But country people like Doris’s grandmother were endlessly resourceful. Rabbit was a staple and cooked in every possible way, in casseroles, pies, as pâtés and roasts.

In the early years of the war the stylish Marchioness of Tweeddale, who wore enormous hats even inside the house, took Doris
on as a tweenie maid, and soon she was dashing between the upstairs and downstairs floors of the large house. She would help the cook with the vegetable preparation, tear upstairs to help the parlour maid with the bedmaking and dusting, scrub the floors and corridors and carry messages from the cook to the Marchioness with all speed. The other staff, the cook, the two parlour maids and the housemaids, all used to joke among themselves that the Marchioness didn’t even know where the kitchen was! At least the Marchioness did not ask her maids to hold her knickers for her as she stepped into them, as some grand ladies were said to do.

One afternoon in February 1918, a few months after the introduction of wartime rationing of meat, butter and margarine, the cook’s mother suddenly fell ill and the cook was called away to her bedside. The Marchioness was having an important lunch party for six ladies the following day and a semi-hysterical parlour maid came to Doris in the servants’ hall, clutching a closely wrapped brown paper parcel. ‘You will have to cook this,’ the maid shrieked at Doris, shoving the package at the young girl, ‘because I haven’t an idea of what to do with it, to save my life.’

Scarcity such as was known in her grandmother’s kitchen was not generally met with in the basement of the Marchioness’s house; there was, it seemed, almost always plenty to go round. But on this particular day Doris was taken aback at the quality of the raw ingredients. Unwrapping the layers of newspaper, she found herself looking at a whiskery face in need of a haircut. The insolent-looking eyes stared out of the complete head of a calf, daring Doris to reject it. But there was no question about it. Remembering the lessons she had learned from her grandmother, Doris was determined the lunch should go ahead.

Putting on her hat and coat she took the number 22 bus up to
The Times
bookshop in Wigmore Street, behind Selfridges department store. One of the new cookery writers, Agnes Jekyll, had a constructive way of dealing with shortages. In her recipe ‘For the Too Fat’ she suggested a meat jelly that would reduce the disadvantages of being overweight, a state which she considered ‘unbecoming, fatiguing and [which] impairs efficiency’.

But there on a high shelf was a copy of the condensed edition
of the famous book that Doris was looking for, by the cookery writer she had heard her grandmother mention. In the index to Mrs Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
Doris found the recipe for Boiled Calf’s Head. The price of the book was marked at half a crown, a week’s wages. She took it back to Hill Street, and after carefully consulting the instructions, began to prepare the dish.

Into the pot went the head, water, a handful of breadcrumbs, a large bunch of parsley, a knob of butter, pepper and salt, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne pepper. After four minutes of hard boiling, Doris grabbed the foam-flecked ear and heaved it from the pan before dismantling the warm head, chopping out the tongue, spooning out the eyes, ‘the worst part of it’, and snipping off all the whiskers before finally removing all the fine bones, until the head looked, Doris thought, ‘as if it had been run over’. After returning it to the pot for three further hours of cooking, Doris skilfully put the baggy thing together again, puffing out the cheeks with whole boiled onions and carrots and cooking the tongue separately as a side dish. Would that it had been so easy to restore a facially damaged soldier with a few vegetables and a little culinary care.

The lunch was judged to be a triumph, and made the more so by the exquisite taste of the calf’s head. Doris was launched on a career as a cook and the Marchioness was hardly able to believe her good fortune. The new cook began to develop her own instinct for recipe excellence and six rabbits were sent down every week from the Marchioness’s Scottish estate so that the household could enjoy ‘Rabbit Doris’, a dish soon famed throughout smart London dining rooms.

Doris’s career was on the ascendant and before long she had left the Marchioness for a new job at 146 Piccadilly, where she wore a cotton dress and a huge white apron, the required uniform for her job as assistant cook to the grumpy but talented French chef. Doris, known for her irrepressible laugh that continued to ring out long after everyone else had stopped, developed a formidable air of authority for one so young. She was proud to tell her family that she was never asked to wear the cap, the lowly headgear reserved for menial staff. Doris was going up in the world. And best of all she spent all her working days and most of the others with the dashing footman, Will Titley.

For the remainder of the war there was no shortage of food at number 146. The large country estates owned by the family continued to provide all the fruit, vegetables, game and meat that they needed. After the war Doris had remained at 146 even though the French chef gave her and Will a difficult time, believing romance should be kept out of the workplace. But Doris held her own, feeling that ‘everything was going well for women when Nancy Astor was elected’ and that a French chef should not interfere. They had watched the fireworks together on Victory Day when a usually cheerful Doris had whispered to Will, ‘I won’t let myself cry. If I started crying I might never stop.’ Her uncle, her mother’s adored brother, had been killed by a sniper on his way to the trenches in September 1914. To cheer themselves up they went to the movies at Hyde Park Corner.

Movies were affordable to all and Charlie Chaplin remained universally adored, long after cardboard cutouts of his bowler-hatted figure had been hauled up to the front by soldiers. Half the population of 1919 went twice weekly to the cinema where the doorman might be dressed to match the main feature. A vampire, a gladiator or a cowboy might offer a warm handshake of greeting. Inside, the steady crunch of peanuts combined with the noise of sucked oranges added to the other sound effects provided by the pianist who sat beneath the screen. In the big theatres a full orchestra accompanied the screenings. The programme was satisfyingly varied, catering to all tastes, and included a newsreel, a slapstick comedy and a travel feature before the main film itself. In the less sophisticated theatres with only one projector there was a slight delay between reel changes but no one minded the wait.

Doris and Will, the courting couple, considered Chaplin a bit ‘past it’ in 1919 but had enjoyed
Broken Blossoms
, one of the most popular films that winter, directed by D. W. Griffith and starring the much-loved actress, Lillian Gish. The lyrically affecting story of the relationship between a beautiful young girl and a Chinaman living in poverty in London’s Limehouse district was playing to packed theatres. The innovative close-ups of Lillian Gish, filmed through gauze, revealed ‘a child with a tear-aged face’. A rare note of contemporary realism was injected into scenes in which policemen were seen reading newspapers with headlines telling of ‘only 40,000
casualties’ as they remarked to each other that the casualty figures were ‘better than last week’.

Griffith introduced elaborate colour tints, and for further depth the screen itself was washed with coloured lights. The subtitles alerted the viewer to the condition of the Chinaman as he walked through Limehouse ‘with perhaps a whiff of the lillied pipe still in his brain’, an atmospheric druggy haze drifting over the scene. Usherettes in Chinese dress guided the moviegoers to their seats and caged birds were suspended from the cinema’s proscenium arch. Lillian Gish became so popular that her name was adopted into the shorthand of cockney rhyming slang, and Billingsgate market resounded to cries of ‘Would you like a nice bit of Lillian for your supper?’

Doris and Will were huge cinema fans and had heard that synchronised words were soon going to be tied in to the silent pictures. But their favourite days were the ones when they left London for the clean air of the countryside. One morning they took a train down to Brighton and spent an unforgettable day out at the seaside. Their picnic included a smart blue tin of transparent crispy slivers of fried potato, a new product sold by a grocer, Frank Smith, who masterminded the frying from his Cricklewood garage. There were other new conveniences. Food in tins included exotic fruit from California and fillets of violently pink salmon. In the kitchen of 146 Piccadilly there was ‘real artificial cream’ in a pot that proved very convenient when the fresh supply from Scotland failed to arrive.

In March 1920 at the
Daily Mail
Ideal Home Exhibition the size of the ideal kitchen on display had been reduced and a new servant-free machine that washed dishes with its own in-built plumbing was introduced. The most astonishing exhibit was the All-Electric House with an electric towelrail heater and a heated pot for shaving water in the bathroom, a hair dryer, curling tongs, a milk steriliser for the baby and a massaging vibrator for tired arms for mothers exhausted by carrying the child round all day as a result of the shortage of nursemaids. In the scullery there was a washing machine with a basket that allowed the clothes to spin around while draining, while in the parlour an electric cigar lighter and a sewing machine that spun at the touch of a switch all drew admiring crowds.