Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (29 page)

‘And what, might I ask, were you
doing up there?’

For the love of God, Phyllis, don’t say.

‘Oh, we were meeting some
Blackshirts up there,’ she giggled. ‘Right handsome they were
too.’

Too late.

Mrs Jones whirled round and dropped her
whisk and Mr Orchard’s face was frozen in shock. When he recovered himself, he
glared at me.

‘Mollie, might I have a word with
you in the housekeeper’s sitting room?’ he said.

I had never seen him so angry in all the
years I’d been working there. Words were bandied around like bullets.
Totally unacceptable … shame … I forbid you … if the boss finds out …
On
and on he railed, growing angrier by the second. I’d had enough. As before,
when Mother tried to get me to work in that tiny shop or Mrs Jones banned me from the
dance or Alan used his aggressive tactics to try and control me, at the sound of Mr
Orchard lecturing me about who I could and couldn’t see, something inside me
just shut down.

I may have been a seventeen-year-old kitchen
maid, but I knew my own mind. I’d had it, simply had it, with people trying to
control my life.

I was saved from further scolding by the
servants’ bell tinkling in the hall. Mr Orchard shot to his feet.

‘I must tend to Mr Stocks now, but
do I make myself perfectly clear, Mollie?’ he asked.

Mr Orchard, the snooty butler
who kept a watchful eye on me and my shenanigans. He was always giving me a telling-off
but, looking back, I probably deserved it!

‘Perfectly,’ I
said, meeting his gaze. On the outside I was calm, but inside I was churned up.
Of
all the pompous … Why was I always the butt of his sour temper?

Word quickly got round the kitchen of mine and
Phyllis’s afternoon activities. For the rest of the day Mrs Jones and Mabel
clucked and shook their heads like a couple of hormonal hens.

‘Don’t you be leading
that Phyllis astray,’ said Mabel. ‘She’s a nice young
girl. Those Blackshirts are nothing but trouble.’

I bit my tongue. Listen to the old crone on
her high horse. I knew she’d been having her fun behind the woodshed, not that
she’d ever admit as much. How dare she sit in judgement on me!

Mrs Jones, who seemed convinced that most
men were the root of all evil, was hopping mad.

‘And I thought you seeing Alan was
bad enough,’ she raged, shaking her head. ‘Don’t you be
going getting yourselves in trouble, especially not with them.’

Phyllis and I kept our heads down and got on
with our jobs, but in our bedroom, after service that night, I was still seething.

‘They’re not telling me
how to run my life,’ I muttered to Phyllis. ‘I’m going
back there tomorrow, just see if I don’t.’

‘But Mr Orchard said
–’

‘I don’t care what he
says,’ I raged. ‘I’ve had it with people trying to control
me.’

That night I fell asleep with the roar of
the crowd and the policeman’s whistle ringing in my ears. The powerful events
of the day were to shape all our lives in ways I could not have foreseen or even
imagined, but trouble was brewing out there in the streets, back alleys and royal parks
of London. To me, though, it was all one big thrill,
a tantalizing
taste of the unknown and a brush with the dark side.

I knew Henry was trouble, of course I did.
But what’s more attractive to a young girl than a bit of danger …
a bad
boy
?

The next day after lunch I went alone back
to Speakers’ Corner. This time the sight that greeted me was even more bizarre
than the day before. There was handsome Henry, still in his uniform, but hopping about
beside him was someone truly astonishing.

I’d never seen a black man before,
much less a semi-naked one.

A tall and striking man wearing voluminous
purple pantaloons, embroidered African-coloured waistcoat, bare arms and bare feet, cut
a striking figure against the sea of Blackshirts. His flamboyant outfit was topped with
an elaborate headdress of red, white and blue ostrich feathers that seemed to reach high
into the sky.

He was letting Henry have it from both
barrels and his feathers quivered as he jumped from foot to foot in excitement. His
enormous feet were totally bare as he leapt around doing a sort of strange tribal dance,
while simultaneously wielding an umbrella.

It was like watching Mary Poppins on
drugs.

‘Each item and every colour I wear
symbolizes the brotherhood of man,’ he boomed. ‘Red, white and blue
stands for the British Empire, which comprises Jews, Muslims and Blacks.’

I was absolutely flabbergasted by this
strange character, not to mention his bizarre rantings, and stood rooted
to the spot. Henry, meanwhile, didn’t seem even remotely
fazed by the sight of a six-foot-tall black man in purple pantaloons and ostrich
feathers spouting off in his face.

London in 1934 was indeed a truly strange
place.

‘Get away, you old
crackpot!’ Henry yelled, dismissing him with a flick of his hand.

‘Crackpot am I?’ the man
yelled back. ‘Well, hear this. You know why the Germans hate the Jews, why you
hate the Jews?’

Henry and the assembled Blackshirts rolled
their eyes.

‘Because they are too much like
you,’ he went on.

‘You’re
crazy,’ spat one of the Blackshirts and then – somewhat viciously –
‘Get that boot polish off your face.’

‘It’s true,’
he persisted, swinging his umbrella about and ignoring their racist remarks.
‘Contrary to the shallow idea that racism is rooted in otherness, one can
truly only hate someone who is like oneself and whom one therefore
understands.’

This last speech was too much for them and
they pushed him away. I didn’t know it back then, but I was watching the most
famous black man in the country. Racing tipster Prince Monolulu was a familiar sight,
not just at Speakers’ Corner, but also on racecourses around the country. The
British at that time were fascinated by the exotic and had taken this colourful
character to their hearts. He appeared on racecourses between the wars in his eccentric
outfits where he drew huge crowds. The Prince sold tips in envelopes and engaged in
endless banter with people around him, his most famous call being ‘I gotta
horse!’

No newsreel of the Derby was complete without
a film of him shouting his catchphrase. He embroidered fantastical stories about being
descended from a remote royal tribe from Abyssinia and claimed to have been a model in
Germany, an opera singer in Moscow and a fortune teller in Rome. In actual fact his real
name was Peter McKay and he was from the West Indies.

Prince Monolulu met a rather sad end on
Valentine’s Day, 1965. He was being treated in Middlesex Hospital when a
friend visited him with a gift of a box of Black Magic chocolates and offered him a
strawberry cream, which he accepted and promptly choked to death on. Choked to death on
a strawberry cream? You couldn’t make it up, could you? Poor fella. Back then
I certainly enjoyed watching him giving the Blackshirts some flack.

Henry spotted me and waved me over.
‘Hello, my ravishing redhead,’ he said with a smile.
‘Wondered whether we’d see you again after all that trouble
yesterday.’

‘Who
was
that?’
I asked, staring after the man as his headdress disappeared off amongst the
hecklers.

‘Oh, him,’ Henry said
nonchalantly. ‘Just some silly old fool.’

He slung a powerful arm possessively round
my shoulder and fear nagged in my chest. I had come up here alone, no one knew where I
was and if they had known they would probably have imploded with anger. What if he tried
something? Thank God we were in broad daylight in London with no hedges to lean up
against or haystacks to hide behind. There’s no telling what a man like Henry
could get up to there!

Suddenly I felt way out of my depth.
Over-possessive
footmen were one thing, but bullyboy fascists were in
a league of their own. If Mr Orchard or Mrs Jones knew I was here I would be sent home
in utter disgrace.

Suddenly a vision of my dad’s face
swam into my mind. Exhausted, his poor lungs shrivelled from mustard gas, he had
sacrificed his health and his life to fight the Germans in the war. How would he feel if
he knew his daughter was cavorting with a fascist follower? And not just a follower but
a Blackshirt, paid to enforce his master’s beliefs? I had a feeling he
wouldn’t be right happy about it.

I stood feeling intimidated, wishing the
ground under Speakers’ Corner would swallow me up, as Henry and his fellow
Blackshirts discussed their boss’s next speech and spouted some truly terrible
opinions.

Something told me that on this occasion I
might just have crossed the line. Using an excuse to get away, I fled back to Cadogan
Square, my heart pounding around like a bouncing tennis ball in my chest.

For the rest of the day I put my head down
and worked hard, the heat from the kitchen providing the perfect place to escape my
troubled mind. Phyllis kept trying to catch my eye, but I ignored her and went about my
business. Suddenly I missed Flo desperately. She would have known just the right thing
to do or say.

The next day was a lovely hot
summer’s day and as I had a half-day I knew the perfect antidote.
I’d always loved swimming back in Norfolk as a child and every time
I’d passed the Serpentine in Hyde Park I’d looked longingly at the
cool strip of sparkling water and thought how much I’d love to bathe in
it.

The famous stretch of water, created in 1730,
was a magnet for pleasure-seekers and pleasure boats filled with people regularly
chugged up and down its long snake-like waters. Four years ago, in 1930, a rectangular
area had been opened up specifically for swimmers. Everyone was chatting about
Lansbury’s Lido, in fact it was the talk of the town, because for the first
time it had permitted mixed bathing. Imagine! Men and women in next to nothing, all
swimming in the same waters!

Mr Orchard had virtually spat out his
morning coffee when he’d read news of it in Mr Stocks’s
Times
, back when it had first opened.

‘I don’t believe it!
Mixed bathing in the Serpentine,’ he’d gasped. ‘Whatever
next?’ He was just as incensed when, two years later, they removed the
railings that separated a paid-for area from the hoi polloi. In many ways the removal of
those railings was a significant milestone. In marked the start of the breakdown of
boundaries between the classes, the gradual erosion of upstairs/downstairs. Little
wonder then that it put the wind up our butler and all that he held dear. If
he’d had his way there would have been railings all round Cadogan Square and
Knightsbridge, marking out the boundaries between the gentry and the commoners. Back
then, I couldn’t think why people were so obsessed with boundaries. To my mind
they were just there to be pushed anyway. As for the Serpentine’s new
mixed-sex pool, honestly, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The way
he talked about it, you’d think it was some hotbed of raunchy impropriety, not
just a swimming lake. But he wasn’t alone in his contempt for it.

While I was hurriedly stuffing my one-piece
bathing suit and a towel into a bag, an anonymous police superintendant was airing his
considerable disquiet about the pools and the conduct of its bathers. In a memo drafted
at Scotland Yard in the summer of 1934, the disgruntled superintendant wrote:

Women of doubtful character are
displaying themselves in flimsy bathing dresses. Vulgar men and boys are drawn to
the area and some female bathers have complained of their costumes being ripped off
by an over-excited male populace.

    The practice of many bathers on sunny days
of rolling the costume down to the waist can only be overcome by considerable
activity on the part of the constable on duty, in patrolling the area and directing
such bathers to wear the costume correctly. This direction is very often received
with bad grace and sometimes with opposition.

The Yard put much of the misbehaviour down
to the removal of the railings, which had had Mr Orchard’s knickers in a
twist. The aggrieved superintendant went on:

Hundreds of bathers, including men of
an undesirable type, are evading the charge by undressing in the free swimming area,
packing their clothes into an attaché case and walking to the paying zone.
Subsequent overcrowding has the effect of keeping away many decent-minded women who
strongly resent the vulgar gaze of men and boys.

Well, I wasn’t about to roll down my
one-piece and go topless, but I wasn’t averse to witnessing a bit of scandal
neither, so off I trotted in the direction of Hyde Park.

Unfortunately, English weather being what it
is, by the time I’d made it to the park the clear blue skies overhead had been
replaced by ominous-looking dark and angry clouds.

‘Storm clouds seem to follow me,
all right,’ I noted to myself with a wry grin.