Free Servants’ Hall by Margaret Powell Page A

kitchenmaid was somewhat inadequate when it came to doing everything. The first dish I came a cropper over was a very simple dish; you wouldn’t have thought that I could go wrong making it – well, I wouldn’t have if Lady Gibbons had had it made the way I’d seen cooks make it. The dish was a bread-and-butter pudding. I’d always seen cooks make it with nice thin slices of bread and butter, interspersed with currants and sugar, and a custard made with eggs poured over before baking the dish. But the first one I made for Lady Gibbons was on a Monday night, using all the crusts that had accumulated through the week, with a dab of margarine on, and a custard made with custard powder poured over before baking. I’d never made custard with powder before but, if I’d had the sense to realise that I shouldn’t have let it thicken before pouring it over the chunks of bread, it wouldn’t have been so bad. As it was, the thick custard never penetrated through the bread. Still, I can’t see that it was my fault and, if they suffered above stairs with my cooking, our life was pretty grim. The attic bedroom I shared with the parlourmaid was barely furnished; a cupboard each for our clothes, two wooden chairs, a strip of matting on the linoleum and one washstand for the two of us. There was no bathroom for the servants, only one of those old hip-baths.
    The new parlourmaid, named Olive, was a young girl of fifteen, though how she could be a fully-fledged parlourmaid at that age I couldn’t see, until I discovered that Lady Gibbons, despairing of getting an experienced parlourmaid, had decided to train a young girl. Olive came from a somewhat remote little village; I expect Lady Gibbons thought a country girl would be more malleable than a girl used to town life. Olive had a very sweet and amiable nature, and she was attractive too. It seemed to be my fate to be friendly with girls so much better-looking than me.
    About three weeks after leaving Redlands, Mary sent me a letter she’d had from Rose. The news was that she and Gerald were not yet married – I wondered if they were living in sin – but Gerald had been to Manchester to see Rose’s father. He’d made such a good impression on him that now her father had withdrawn his strong objections to the marriage, and Rose and Gerald would be married in two weeks’ time. They were to have a registry office marriage and Rose was so sorry that she couldn’t invite Mary and Margaret, but Gerald wanted to have a quiet wedding.
    I bet he does too, I thought. The last thing he’s likely to want is a reminder of his wife’s origins. I wondered what he’d thought of the ‘two up and downer’ that was Rose’s home. If he drove up in his bright red car, I bet the neighbours had an eyeful. I wouldn’t have minded betting that Rose’s ma had asked the street to make their doorsteps especially white for the occasion. She was the kind of woman who’d have the nerve to ask it.
    I told Olive about the good fortune of the under-parlourmaid I knew, and Olive, being a dreamy girl and prone to romantic fancies, immediately began to create an imaginary situation whereby the same thing happened to her – and I will say this: Olive had a much better voice than Rose. But even Olive’s vivid imagination couldn’t romanticise Lady Gibbons’s son. He was sandy-haired with a receding chin, about five foot nothing, and he took about as much notice of servants as he did of a beetle beneath his feet.
    Now that we had a parlourmaid we were without a housemaid, Jessica having left two or three weeks after I arrived. I did think of writing to Mary to suggest she come, but then realised that I wouldn’t want to inflict Lady Gibbons on a friend. In any case I’d have been too late as Mary had already agreed to be a single-handed housemaid with a family in Chelsea.
    She came to see me on her first free afternoon bringing a female whom she introduced as her cousin, Zena. This cousin was a