Her Ladyship's Girl Read Free Page B

and if it wasn’t hot enough, it wouldn’t get the wrinkles out. But the one I used here was the latest in electric flat-irons and
much easier to use, though it took me a while to get used to it. I saw Bart in the yard later, when I was hanging out the washing.
    ‘Where’s your room, Bart?’
    ‘In the basement.’
    ‘And you come all the way up to the top to wake me at five?’ He gave me a wink and I wondered what that meant. You see, despite the fact that I thought of myself as an intellectual,
I was really just a wet-behind-the-ears Welsh valley girl with a hankering for fine clothes and didn’t know the difference between a nod and a wink. But I soon would.
    Other than finding out I didn’t have a Christian name any more, the rest of the day went well enough and I now had four friends. I asked the kitchen girls if we could go out for a walk
after we finished in the evening.
    ‘If you have the strength left for it, Annie.’
    That’s what they called me, short for Anwyn. When the day’s work was finally done and Cook was gone off home with her coat full of cheese and crusty bread, I was sitting in the
kitchen having a little chat with the others. I noticed the Brat paying a lot of attention to Biddy and I knew she had a room close to mine and Kathleen’s on the top floor. Nora showed me a
hiding place where she and Biddy stored food before Cook did her count. There was bread and eggs and cheese and meat and cake and biscuits – and we could help ourselves if we got peckish
before breakfast-time came round in the morning. She put a finger up to her lips and I thought, there’s some good people in this place after all.
    Like I said, I didn’t see much of Lilly the nanny or Mona the lady’s maid. Lilly was a jolly kind of woman but Mona was the toffee-nosed type and suited her nickname – Mona the
moaner. She called me ‘Moyle’ like she was the lady of the house and knew I had no Christian name, even though she was a servant, just like me. She wore fashionable clothes and I
wondered how she came by that job and I thought it was something I might like to be some day. But there was a long way to go before I got that far above my station.
    Kathleen and Nora were right: I was too tired after the long hard day to go walking and all I wanted to do was fall flat into my little thin bed. On the way there, I noticed Bart slipping into
Nora’s room and the penny dropped – he paid attention to Biddy in the kitchen so nobody would make the connection between him and Nora. He was only a young dog, but already a sly one.
Kathleen was in the room when I got there.
    ‘Listen, Annie, I should tell you . . . you’ll have to watch out for Mr Harding.’
    Harding was the name of the family who owned the house and Mr Harding was the head of that family. I’d not seen him so far.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He has no respect for women.’
    I wondered what she meant by that, but I didn’t worry too much about it because I was already asleep before my head even hit the pillow.
    I didn’t want to get up the next morning; my body felt like it had been beaten with a blackthorn bush. I was in pain from the bun on the top of my head to the nails on the toes of my feet.
As time went on, Cook put more and more work my way and I came to realise that she was right: a scullery maid’s life was the lowest of the low. I had many bosses, not just the tyrant cook,
and all the hardest and dirtiest jobs going – and only two shillings a week in wages, one of which I had to send home for the family. I was working sometimes sixteen hours a day and I only
got one afternoon off, on a Sunday. If my mother could’ve seen me she’d have tut-tutted and rolled her eyes and bit her nails to know what I’d become.
    At sixteen, I was still the youngest member of staff and that meant doing what I was told, no matter who was doing the telling. The only good thing about it was that newfangled, labour-saving
devices were coming out all the time