Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (35 page)

This is beautiful Wallington
Hall where I worked as a cook. The ancient shooting lodge, set in 600 acres of private
grounds, is mentioned in the Domesday Book. It even had its own resident ghost.

‘I’m here about
the cook’s job,’ I said, trembling.

He surveyed me coolly.

‘I have references,’ I
added.

‘This way,’ he said.
‘I’ll see if the lady of the house can see you now.’

I followed him through the servants’
quarters to the servants’ hall until eventually I was led through the baize
door and on to ‘their side of the house’.

I knew from my brief glimpses at Woodhall
and Cadogan Square that the other half liked to live opulently, but this was something
else. The fireplaces seemed as big as Mother’s cottage. Rich and ornate
tapestries hung from wood-panelled walls and hardly a spare inch of wall
wasn’t covered with the head of some poor deer, whose eyes followed me
malevolently as I scurried after the butler. Mahogany cupboards groaned with sparkling
crystal and family silver, no doubt heirlooms passed down through the generations.

Finally I was taken into the drawing room
and told to wait. Not since watching
Frankenstein
at the cinema had I felt this
unnerved. I half-expected a ghoul carrying his own head to walk into the room! A
grandfather clock ticked ominously in the corner and some poor stuffed stag stared down
at me from on high. Gripping my references tightly, I shifted uncomfortably in my
chair.

‘What are you looking
at?’ I muttered at the stag, half-wondering if I wouldn’t end up in
the same predicament myself.

The door swung open and in walked one of the
prettiest and most flustered ladies I’d seen in a long while. She smiled
warmly and I instantly relaxed.

‘Good morning,’ she
said, holding out a slender pale hand. ‘My name’s Nell Luddington
and you must be Mollie.’

She was as fragile as a fawn with kind brown
eyes smiling out from under arched eyebrows. She can’t have been
that much older than me. I later found out she was just twenty-six,
but her expensive silk blouse and tweed skirt, coupled with her impeccable manners, made
her seem much older.

‘My husband and I are in the most
dreadful predicament,’ she said, just as a young hallboy brought in a tray of
tea. I saw myself getting checked out by the boy and knew my ears would be burning the
minute he got back to his side of the house.

‘Our cook is quite ill with
pneumonia, poor lady,’ went on Mrs Luddington. Pouring the tea, she wrinkled
her perfect nose. ‘We don’t know when or if she’ll
return.’

I felt like saying,
More like she heard
of the ghost and took her leave.
Instead, I just smiled politely.

‘We are offering a wage of one
pound a week. Will you come and see how you get on, just in the short term?
We’re frightfully in need. I’m not really sure I know how
we’re surviving. The butler, bless him, is trying his best, but Mr Luddington
is missing his puddings.’

I hesitated.

‘We don’t go in for a
lot of fancy cooking,’ she added, pressing a teacup into my hand.

‘Well …’ I began.

The cup of tea was swiftly followed by a
ginger snap.

Her brown eyes took on a slight air of
desperation. I’ll admit it, there was a small part of me enjoying this.
Who’d have thought it? Little old Mollie being offered a cook’s job
at just twenty.

‘We’ve recently bought a
fridge,’ she said with a last roll of the dice.

A fridge! Well, that settled it. Nowhere I
had worked
had ever had the luxury of a fridge. In fact, no one I knew
had one. Wait until I told Mother about this.

‘I’ll take it, Mrs
Luddington,’ I said, standing up.

‘Oh, I am so pleased,’
she said with a smile. ‘You can start tomorrow, can’t
you?’

I was about to take my leave when she placed
a delicate hand on my arm. ‘Just one thing,’ she said.
‘You don’t mind ghosts, do you?’

I gulped and shook my head. Then, with my
head still spinning from the speed of my appointment, I stumbled outside to find Tom
Jackson leaning over a fence stroking a horse.

‘Meet the new cook of Wallington
Hall,’ I said.

‘Well done, Mollie
lass,’ he grinned. ‘I knew you’d do it.’

When I reported for duty the next day, Mrs
Luddington welcomed me warmly and gave me a tour of the house and kitchens.

Under a bright winter sun and clear, frosty
skies the house took on an altogether different appearance. It really was magnificent.
The Hall was surrounded by woodland, fields and lakes for as far as the eye could see.
Beautiful thoroughbred horses grazed in the paddocks that surrounded the house. Beyond
them, a low mist hung over the lakes and woods.

I honestly think the grounds were the most
beautiful I’d ever clapped eyes on. How lucky this woman was to own all this
land at just twenty-six.

‘If you want to meet my husband
you’ll usually find him out there, shooting,’ she said, gesturing
towards the misty woods and arching one perfectly groomed eyebrow.
‘Those woods resound to the sound of gunfire,’ she said.
‘We run a commercial shoot, so you’ll find yourself catering for a
vast number of shooting parties. That doesn’t intimidate you, does
it?’ she asked.

‘Oh no, Mrs Luddington,’
I reassured her. ‘I’m used to that.’

I knew through local gossip that they
charged for shooting parties, unlike Mr Stocks, who just used to open up his land to his
friends. Rumour had it she was the niece of an earl and from a very well-to-do family.
No doubt that meant she was from old family money, but probably not terribly well off,
hence the reason they needed to get an income from the shoot. Her husband, my new boss,
was one Major James Hilton Little Luddington (a right mouthful, but fortunately I only
had to call him ‘sir’) and Wallington Hall had been in his family
for generations. Mrs Luddington certainly looked like she had the breeding to match his
all right, as she turned on her heel and I scurried after her slender,
silk-stocking-clad ankles.

‘Follow me and I’ll show
you round the Hall,’ she called out.

As she swept down hallway after hallway,
rattling off conversation like gunfire, I struggled to keep up with her. My eye was
turned, you see, by the beautiful paintings and artefacts adorning the walls and
sideboards. Large oil paintings of stern-looking men with bushy moustaches astride
magnificent hunting horses stared down at me. This was better than the V&A.
Imagine living surrounded by all this splendour.

My eyes were drawn to a magnificent painting
of one of her husband’s ancestors as I bustled after her. I didn’t
notice that she had stopped and I smacked clean into her.

‘Sorry,’ I blustered.
‘Just gawping at all your beautiful things.’

‘You are up to the
cook’s job?’ she said, narrowing her brown eyes. ‘You are
awfully young, after all.’

Come on, Mollie. Get it together.

‘Of course I am, Mrs
Luddington,’ I said in my most businesslike tone. ‘You can count on
me.’

‘Good,’ she said
briskly, drawing herself up. ‘Now, as well as the shoots you will have to
cater for myself, my daughter Sarah, who’s five, Ted, who’s three,
and our new baby, Johnnie.’

Baby? This didn’t look like a
woman who’d just given birth. She was whippet thin. Then again, this was the
gentry. She had legions of staff and no end of time to recuperate. I doubted
she’d have got out of bed for at least two weeks. Makes me laugh. I was back
doing the housework the day after my first child was born. No such fate for Mrs
Luddington.

‘Besides us, you will need to
cater for our nanny, Connie, our under nanny, two housemaids, the butler, the footman
and a kitchen boy, who is there to help you, of course. Tom, our chauffeur, and his wife
live in one of our cottages on the estate, as do the groundsmen, gamekeeper and
gardeners, so you shan’t need to worry about them.’

I gulped and smiled as brightly as I could.
That was an awful lot of cooking by anyone’s standards.

‘You’ll find me here in
the day nursery most of the time,’ she said, gesturing to the door behind her.
‘Of
course, I will meet you each morning in my office to go
through the day’s menus at ten thirty prompt.’

I idly wondered what the nanny and under
nanny were like. I knew domestic staff could be a bit sniffy about nannies, as if,
because they lived on ‘their side’ of the house, they somehow
thought themselves above their station. Well, I didn’t give two hoots for all
that nonsense. I’d take them as I found them, as I did everyone.

As we marched back down the corridor I
suddenly felt the temperature plunge and I shivered.

‘Did you notice that?’
Mrs Luddington asked, pausing and placing one delicate hand on a thick wooden door.

‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why’s it so much colder here than anywhere else? I feel like a cold
chill’s just run down my back.’

‘Aah,’ said Mrs
Luddington, a little smile playing on her face. ‘I see I’m going to
have to explain all about our resident ghost, who unfortunately resides in the bedroom
right below yours.’

‘A ghost?’ I quaked.

‘Do you believe in ghosts,
Mollie?’ she went on, her brown eyes boring right into mine. Suddenly I found
myself shifting uncomfortably. ‘I’m rather afraid that most of the
servants do tend to believe in ours.’

‘I … well, yes, that is to say no
… maybe?’ I stuttered.

Unfazed by my obvious nerves, she went on:
‘In the mid-1500s a lady by the name of Elizabeth Coningsby inherited
Wallington and then married a rather unpleasant-sounding man by the name of Sir Francis
Gawdy.

‘Sir Francis was an infamous judge
who sat on the commission which tried Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringhay in 1586 and
was a member of the court which condemned
Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603.
I rather fear Elizabeth was a perpetual affliction to Sir Francis, who by a trick of the
law managed to possess himself of his wife’s estate.

‘He also destroyed a whole village
to make way for all our beautiful parkland and converted the local church to his dog
kennel. You can imagine this made him somewhat unpopular with the locals, so much so
that after his death he was refused burial and was eventually flung without ceremony
into the churchyard nearby and covered in a heap of stones. Before his death he was
rumoured to have buried his fortune somewhere in the grounds.’

‘Buried treasure?’ I
gasped, wide-eyed, suddenly remembering what Tom had told me. ‘And what about
his wife?’ I asked.

‘She met a tragic end in this
room,’ Mrs Luddington sighed. With that, she pushed open the heavy door to
reveal a small, chilly bedroom.

My heart leapt into my throat.
‘Urgh,’ I gasped, startled. There was just such a hideous presence.
Such a deep, festering feeling of misery that seemed to rise up from the floorboards in
waves.

‘After a local uprising she locked
herself in here to escape, but once the rioters dispersed she found herself too weak to
unbolt the door. Her own staff deserted her to join the rioters.

‘She perished miserably from
hunger and thirst right there on the floor. Apparently her ghost has been sighted
wandering in this part of the house – a small, grey and spiteful figure in Elizabethan
dress.’

I stood rooted to the spot in silence.
‘What a truly horrible story,’ I gasped eventually. ‘Poor
woman! Despised
by her husband and then left to rot and starve to
death in her own home. No wonder she can’t move on, poor wretched
soul.’

‘Yes, it is rather a sorry tale,
isn’t it?’ agreed Mrs Luddington. ‘Could have leapt from
the pages of a historical novel. Except, of course, it all actually happened right
here.’

Suddenly I felt quite depressed.

‘Still,’ smiled Mrs
Luddington brightly, ‘I’m sure you’ll be much happier here
than poor old Elizabeth Coningsby.’

I hoped so!

That night, as I drifted off to sleep with
a blanket over my head, the fact that for the first time ever I had my own bedroom was
totally lost on me. I was sleeping slap bang over a scorned ghost. The wind rushing
through the branches outside sounded eerily like the soft moaning of a dying woman. And
if I listened really hard, over the soft hooting of an owl that drifted through the
night sky, could I make out the faint sound of scratching?
A desperate woman clawing
at the locked wooden door below?

‘Get away, Mollie,’ I
scolded myself. ‘You’re daft as a brush. It’s just
mice.’

This was a strange old place with its
haunted bedrooms and buried treasure in the grounds! I’d never been anywhere
quite like this before.

I eventually drifted off, with disturbing
images of rioters and headless horses galloping through my dreams. The next morning I
was exhausted, but the sound of a small tap at the door woke me up.

‘Half past six,’ called
out a boy’s voice, followed by retreating footsteps.

I opened the door to find someone had left a
cup of tea for me, just as I always had for Mrs Jones.

‘I could get used to
this,’ I grinned blearily, picking up the steaming mug of tea.

After my tea and a bracing wash with
freezing cold water from a jug, I felt much better, almost ready to take on the day,
scorned ghosts and all. Carefully, I took my new uniform out from the wardrobe and held
it up like it was made of butterfly wings. Talk about proud! Mrs Luddington and I had
come to an agreement that instead of buying me a new cook’s uniform I could
use my cousin Kathleen’s old nursing uniform. I had three pure cotton
knee-length dresses, two in brown, one in mauve, and all with pristine starched white
aprons.

Aunt Kate had given them to me when her
daughter, my cousin, had dropped out of a nursing apprenticeship at Guy’s
because she’d been unable to cope with the workload. She might have been too
soft and let them go to waste, but I wasn’t about to. Mrs Luddington and I
both agreed that with a little alteration they’d make perfect cook’s
uniforms. I think she’d been secretly a bit pleased at not having to fork out
for a new one.