Free Servants’ Hall by Margaret Powell

way round.’
    Ignoring this, beyond glaring at the interrupter, Mr Hall went on to say that, man and boy, he’d never known the like. It was all owing to Gerald being in Rhodesia and coming back with all those mad ideas that white people shouldn’t be servants. And what, Mr Hall demanded to known, would happen to all of us; what other work could we do? Mark his words, Rose would live to regret it.
    ‘I think that it will be Mr Gerald who will regret it,’ said young Fred.
    ‘Ah!’ sneered Mr Burrows, ‘You would say that, you were sweet on Rose yourself.’
    ‘Sweet on Rose, I never was, I always thought that apart from being extremely pretty, there was nothing to her. She’d no conversation, never read a book, took no interest in politics or the world around her. I reckon that unless she gets herself an education, learns to speak well, can discuss the theatre and the arts, Mr Gerald will get bored with just gazing at a pretty face.’
    Hearing this, Mary and I, not having pretty faces, endeavoured to appear as intelligent as possible, while Doris looking at us just giggled; then, receiving a severe look and a rebuke from Mr Hall, she burst into tears.
    Mrs Buller who, although she sometimes reprimanded poor Doris, never allowed anybody else to do so, gave the butler a hard look and said, ‘Mr Hall, I’ll thank you not to exceed your obligations by assuming responsibility for my staff – in the absence of your own.’
    That just about did it. Mr Burrows tittered and young Fred burst out laughing – old Fred being deaf hadn’t heard a word. Mr Hall slowly rose from the table, the very embodiment of outraged dignity – though being fat and balding the effect wasn’t all that impressive – and left the room. In the normal way, Mrs Buller wouldn’t have made such a sarcastic remark; but for the time being the whole discipline of below stairs was suspended. Events were too much out of this world. Rose and Gerald gone, and Mr Wardham raging and venting his spite and anger on poor Madam and Miss Helen. Why, according to Mr Hall, the Master had turned on Miss Helen and said that nobody was likely to run away with her in the night.
    I wasn’t sorry when my time was up and I left Redlands. Mrs Wardham, kind as ever, gave me an extra £5, and Cook even kissed me goodbye. Mary too would soon be leaving to become a housemaid, she reckoned she’d done her time as an ‘under’.

 
    11
    My first place as a cook was in Kensington, and it was certainly a contrast to working at Redlands. For one thing, there were only three servants; cook, housemaid and parlourmaid. And for another, my employer, a Lady Gibbons, was a very different type of person from Mrs Wardham. Lady Gibbons was harsh and tyrannical; so much so that there was a constant procession of housemaids and parlourmaids who found her impossible to work for. As a cook, I saw her only in the mornings when she came down to give the orders for the day. I was dismayed to find that I had to cook on a kitchen range. Many houses, especially in London, were doing away with these coal-consuming objects and using gas stoves for the cooking and coke boilers for a constant supply of hot water. I know that some people can cook to perfection on a kitchen range, but I never could. Either it would be roaring like a furnace, or not hot enough. There was a small gas stove but it was only allowed to be used to boil kettles for early morning tea and for filling the hot-water bottles at night. Such was Lady Gibbons’s distrust of servants that she seemed to have developed a sixth sense about them. If I’d let the fire get low and used that gas stove, sure enough she’d come to the top of the basement stairs and call down, ‘Cook, can I smell gas?’ I’d make out that a tap had inadvertently got turned on.
    Mind you, Lady Gibbons had plenty to put up with from me for I was by no means a good cook. I thought I could cook when I got the job, but I found that the amount I knew as a