Servants’ Hall Read Free Page A

thirty minutes. The dance finishes at ten o’clock so it’s not as though we’d have to leave while it’s in full swing. Course, it’s not like a proper dance hall; rough floor and just a piano and drums, but at least there’s nearly as many males as females so you don’t have to lay on the flattery knee deep to get a partner.’
    ‘Don’t expect any high-toned conversation,’ interrupted Rose. ‘The last time I was there, my partner talked all the time about muck-raking, horses and all the gory things that went on when cows calved.’
    She was right too, as I found on my first evening there. Most of the young men worked on farms and were wearing great clod-hopping boots. They reeked to high heaven of brilliantine which didn’t mix well with the farm odours. My perspiring partner – I made allowances for the perspiration as I was a bit hefty to propel around the floor – kept pigs. Although I like pigs in the abstract, an evening devoted to the idiosyncrasies of these animals was not my idea of conversation. When I, never loth to show off, murmured, ‘… and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings’, he looked blank. I added, impatiently, ‘You know, “through the looking-glass”.’ But if it were possible, he looked even more vacant. Once we were outside the hall, I was somewhat surprised when I found that his porcine preoccupation was the prelude to being held in a rock-hard embrace, with slobbery kisses and grunts that would have done credit to his charges. I hasten to add that not all the village swains were like him.
    Doris had to be up by six o’clock, and Mary, Rose and I at six-thirty. At first I wished Doris had slept in our room so that I could actually witness, from the warmth of my bed, somebody having to start work before me, who up to now had always been the first to rise. I’d never have wanted to be a between-maid; it’s a hard job having to help the cook in the early mornings and then, after breakfast, having to help the housemaid. My mother had three months at that job and she told me that forever the cook would be blowing the whistle for her to come down, and the housemaid blowing down for her to come up. Doris didn’t seem to mind, and neither Mrs Buller nor Annie were tyrants. Nevertheless, it meant she had two bosses.
    By the time I came down there was already a roaring fire in the kitchen-range so the bathwater was getting hot. I put a kettle on the gas stove and made tea for us under servants, then a fresh pot at seven o’clock for those august personages, the upper servants. I took a cup upstairs for the cook; Mary took one to Agnes, and Rose left one outside the butler’s bedroom. He’d have liked her to bring it in to his room, but Rose had told him her mother would never let her stay in a place where she had to enter a male servant’s bedroom. Presumably, as those above stairs were almost sacrosanct, it would have been all right to take a cup into the son’s room. At seven-thirty Annie took tea upstairs for Mr and Mrs Wardham, Miss Helen, the daughter, and Miss Sarah, the niece. The valet, Mr Burrows, did the same for the son.
    By seven-thirty I’d laid up the cook’s table with all the things she needed for cooking breakfast for us and upstairs, and Doris had laid the table in the servants’ hall. We had a good breakfast of porridge, which had been cooked overnight and left to keep warm on the stove, and bacon and eggs. Doris and I had to dish everything out on to the plates, so there wasn’t the same formality as there was for midday lunch, when the butler solemnly carved the joint and the vegetables were passed up and down the table in strict pecking order. Our official breakfast time was from eight o’clock until eight forty-five. Upstairs, it was at nine-fifteen. I was pleased to discover that the servants didn’t have to assemble upstairs for prayers. And later on, when I caught sight of Mr Wardham’s sour-looking face and heard his harsh and