Climbing the Stairs Read Free

belly-full listening to George when I was kitchenmaid at my first place in Brighton.

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    G EORGE WAS THE chauffeur-gardener at the place where I first went into service in Hove and he was somewhat of a character. He hadn’t always been
in domestic service, which makes a difference because a man who’s been in domestic service all his life – say, from the time he was fourteen – starting off as a hall boy, boot
boy, page boy, or what have you and working his way up to under-footman and butler – is quite a different person from a man who’s done different work and then comes into domestic
service later.
    Men who’ve been in service all their life – I wouldn’t like to say they were effeminate – but they have a much quieter, gentler way of talking and they’re nicer in
their appearance and the way they do things. And I’m not using the word nice as a compliment here.
    This George, he’d spent years in Australia which in those days was probably a far rougher country than it is now. And not only that, he’d been in the Outback, on a sheep farm. Later
he was in Sydney but most of the time he was on this sheep farm, and he was always talking about the life out there. How it wasn’t riddled with class distinction, how out there Jack was as
good as his master. None of this ‘yes sir, no sir, very good sir’ and ‘bloody hell how are you today sir’ and bloody kow-towing just to earn a living.
    Sometimes Mr Wade the butler would say, ‘Well, why do you do it? If you don’t like it why don’t you leave and do something else?’ But George was getting on and it
wasn’t easy to get a job in those days. George ignored him anyway. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘my boss on the sheep farm, he could have bought this bloody Rev’ (meaning
the Reverend who we worked for) ‘he could have bought this bloody Rev up ten times over, and yet at mealtimes we all sat down at the same table – boss and workers on the farm –
and the boss’s wife and daughter waited on us and brought us our food round and everything. Can you imagine that kind of thing going on here?’
    Of course you couldn’t. But it was only money that made the boss different from George and the other men on the sheep farm. And working in the Outback I shouldn’t have thought that
there were any grades of service. They were just workers, even the boss himself.
    Maybe they had a nice home. According to George it was the last word in luxury but I can’t see that it could have all the refinements that you got here. The nearest neighbour was about
fifty miles away so they had to make their own life. There couldn’t have been dinner parties, balls, operas and the kind of things that the well-to-do had over here. So obviously they did all
mix together because otherwise it would be the boss and his wife isolated from everybody.
    But you couldn’t make George see that. He said we were all riddled with bloody class here. He’s like a lot of people who’ve lived abroad and come back. The places they’ve
left are always better. Everywhere’s marvellous where they’re not.
    Between George and Mr Wade, the butler, there was always a sort of a feud going on. I think it was partly jealousy because being the only two men in the house they vied for attention from the
servants.
    Mr Wade used to think that George’s manner and his speech were crude and vulgar while George thought that Mr Wade with his soft voice and his lily-white hands was no sort of a man at all.
He used to say, ‘Fancy having to bath and dress that old bugger upstairs. What kind of job is that for a man?’
    I’d defend Mr Wade. ‘Well, you drive him around don’t you?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s different.’ ‘And I’ve seen you tuck him in
the back like you were tucking up a baby.’ I couldn’t say too much as I was only a kitchenmaid.
    Then he’d say, ‘Wade’s no kind of a man at all. No wonder he never got married. He probably could never have performed if